“I ain’t so dumb like I look on my face.” He nudged me confidentially. “I already found out from myself which picture means where the train goes. If it’s for Brooklyn Bridge, then the hooks go this way”—he clumsily drew in the air with his thick fingers—“and if it’s for the South Ferry, then the words twist the other way around.”
I marvelled at his frank revelation of himself.
“What is your work?” I asked, more and more drawn by some hidden power of this simple peasant.
“I’m a presser by pants.”
Now I understood the cause of the stooped, rounded shoulders. It must have come from pounding away with a heavy iron at an ironing board, day after day, year after year. But for all the ravages of poverty, of mean, soul-crushing drudgery that marked this man, something big and indomitable in him fascinated me. His was the strength knitted and knotted from the hardiest roots of the earth. Filled with awe, I looked up at him. Here was a man submerged in the darkness of illiteracy—of pinch and scraping and want—yet untouched—unspoiled, with the same simplicity of spirit that was his as a wide-eyed, dreamy youth in the green fields of Russia.
We had our first lesson, and, though I needed every cent I could earn, I felt like a thief taking his precious pennies. But he would pay. “It’s worth to me more than a quarter only to learn how to hold up the pencil,” he exulted as he gripped the pencil upright in his thick fist. All the yearning, the intense desire for education were in the big, bulging eyes that he raised towards me. “No wonder I could never make those little black hooks for words; I was always grabbing my pencil like a fork for sticking up meat.”
With what sublime absorption he studied me as I showed him how to shape the letters for his name! Eyes wide—mouth open—his huge, stoop-shouldered body leaning forward—quivering with hunger to grasp the secret turnings of “the little black hooks” that signified his name.
“M-o-i-s-h-e-h,” he repeated after me as I guided his pencil.
“Now do it alone,” I urged.
Moisheh rolled up his sleeve like one ready for a fray. The sweat dripped from his face as he struggled for the muscular control of his clumsy fingers.