Another typical case was that of Mary Kane. The tenement in which I found her was like ninety-nine out of every hundred in New York City. Dark halls with crooked stairs and air foul for lack of ventilation and over-crowding.
“Stop cryin’, Mamie. Here’s a lady from Bellevue. Maybe she can get you to go to the country.” And her mother, haggard and overworked to the point of desperation, turns to me with a wan smile which, in her effort to make it gracious, becomes a ghastly grin.
When I reply that it is because the society sending convalescing children to the country had reported that Mary had not used the card entitling her to two weeks in their home that I have called, her grin becomes that of a beaten dog. Again it is lack of shoes and a few clothes. In this case the husband and father is not in Bellevue. He had stopped in the corner saloon on his way home with his wages.
Mary has a tendency to T. B. To spin her life out even a few months will require plenty of fresh air and the right kind of food.
Hospital social service is to supplement the work of the doctors and nurses of that particular hospital. Fortunately, Mary has been in Bellevue. I took her size and the number of her shoes, and promised to get them along with another card entitling her to another two weeks in the country.
Time passes and again we are notified that Mary has not used her card. On my return to the tenement practically the same scene confronted me. Only this time the mother had a black eye, the baby tugging at her breast was whimpering, and Mary seated near a window, the only window in the flat from which a glimpse of the sky may be had, looked more like a ghost than a living child.
Before I was well in the door the mother hustled me back again into the hall. In a neighbor’s flat, a trifle lighter than her own because there were two windows in the front room opening on the street, she started to tell me her story. Because I had known many tenement wives and mothers I recognized that she was lying and stopped her.
“Who was that snoring in your back room?” I asked her. And fact by fact I draw the story from her.
The husband and father of the family had stolen the shoes and clothes sent for Mary, had sold them and gotten drunk on the proceeds. So drunk that— Oh, she didn’t mind a black eye so much, she assured me. He didn’t really mean it, being a good man when not in liquor. What she regretted was that he had missed two days at work.
Then with a grin like a cringing beaten dog she admitted that since Saturday noon she and Mary had lived on tea, without either milk or sugar, and part of a loaf of bread given her by a neighbor. To-morrow? Maybe by to-morrow her husband would be sober enough to return to his job.