“What is with you the great joy? That you ain’t got a shirt on your back? That you ain’t got no shoes on your feet? Why are you with yourself so happy? Is it because the landlord sent the moving bill, and you’ll be laying in the street to-morrow, already?”
I had forgotten that we had received a notice of eviction, for unpaid rent, a few days before. A frenzy of fear had taken possession of my mother as she anticipated the horror of being thrown into the street. For hours at a time I would see her staring at the wall with the glassy stare of a madwoman.
“With what have you to be happy, I ask only?” she went on. “Have you got money laying in the bank? Let the rich people enjoy themselves. For them is the world like made to order. For them the music plays. They can have birthdays. But what’s the world to the poor man? Only one terrible, never-stopping fight with the groceryman and the butcher and the landlord.”
I gazed at my mother with old, solemn eyes, feeling helplessly sucked into her bitterness and gloom.
“What’s a poor man but a living dead one?” she pursued, talking more to herself than to me. “You ought to light a black candle on your birthday. You ought to lie on your face and cry and curse the day you was born!”
Crushed by her tirade, I went out silently. The fairy dream of the approaching birthday had been rudely shattered. Blinded with tears, I sat down on the edge of the gutter in front of our tenement.
“Look, these are the pink candles for the birthday cake!” A poke in the back from Becky startled me. “Aren’t they grand? And mamma will buy me a French doll, and papa said he’d give me a desk, and my aunt will give me a painting set, and every girl that comes will bring me something different.”
“But what’s the use?” I sobbed. “I ain’t got nothing for no present, and I can’t come—and my mother is so mean she got mad and hollered like hell because I only asked her about the birthday, and——”
A passionate fit of sobbing drowned my words.
In an instant Becky had her arms about me. “I want you to come without a present,” she said. “I will have a lot of presents, anyhow.”