“I got to cook Feivel’s dinner,” she gesticulated with doughy palms.
“And I got my Coney Island here,” said Moisheh.
To my great delight I saw he had been reading the life of Lincoln—the book I had left him the day I went away.
“My head is on fire thinking and dreaming from Lincoln. It shines before my face so real, I feel myself almost talking to him.”
Moisheh’s eyes were alive with light, and as I looked at him I felt for the first time a strange psychic resemblance between Moisheh and Lincoln. Could it be that the love for his hero had so transformed him as to make him almost resemble him?
“Lincoln started life as a nothing and a nobody,” Moisheh went on, dreamily, “and he made himself for the President from America—maybe there’s yet a chance for me to make something from myself?”
“Sure there is. Show only what’s in you and all America reaches out to help you.”
“I used to think that I’d die a presser by pants. But since I read from Lincoln, something happened in me. I feel I got something for America—only I don’t know how to give it out. I’m yet too much of a dummox——”
“What’s in us must come out. I feel America needs you and me as much as she needs her Rockefellers and Morgans. Rockefellers and Morgans only pile up mountains of money; we bring to America the dreams and desires of ages—the youth that never had a chance to be young—the choked lives that never had a chance to live.”
A shadow filmed Moisheh’s brooding eyes. “I can’t begin yet to think from myself for a few years. First comes my brothers. If only Feivel would work for himself up for a big doctor and Berel for a big writer then I’ll feel myself free to do something....