“Feivel, the golden heart!” The old mother’s eyes were misty with emotion.
“Ach! Didn’t I tell you even if my brother is high-educated, he won’t shame himself from us?” Moisheh faced me triumphantly. “I was so afraid since he moved himself into an uptown boarding-house that maybe we are losing him, even though he still kept up his office on Rutgers Street.” Moisheh’s eyes shone with delight.
“I’ll tell you a little secret,” said he, leaning forward confidentially. “I’m planning to give a surprise to Feivel. In another month I’ll pay myself out for the last of Feivel’s office things. And for days and nights I’m going around thinking and dreaming about buying him an electric sign. Already I made the price with the instalment man for it.” By this time his recital was ecstatic. “And think only—what mein doctor will say, when he’ll come one morning from his uptown boarding-house and find my grand surprise waiting for him over his office door!”
All the way to the theatre Moisheh and his mother drank in the glamour and the glitter of the electric signs of Broadway.
“Gottuniu! If I only had the money for such a sign for Feivel,” Moisheh sighed, pointing to the chewing-gum advertisement on the roof of a building near the Astor. “If I only had Rockefeller’s money, I’d light up America with Feivel’s doctor sign!”
When we reached the theatre, we found we had come almost an hour too early.
“Never mind—mammeniu!” Moisheh took his mother’s arm tenderly. “We’ll have time now to walk ourselves along and see the riches and lights from America.”
“I should live so,” he said, surveying his mother affectionately. “That red velvet waist and this new shawl over your head makes your face so shine, everybody stops to give a look on you.”
“Yeh—yeh! You’re always saying love words to every woman you see.”
“But this time it’s my mother, so I mean it from my heart.”