“Oi weh! How it shines the beautifulness!” exulted Hanneh Hayyeh over her newly painted kitchen. She cast a glance full of worship and adoration at the picture of her son in uniform; eyes like her own, shining with eagerness, with joy of life, looked back at her.
“Aby will not have to shame himself to come back to his old home,” she rejoiced, clapping her hands—hands blistered from the paintbrush and calloused from rough toil. “Now he’ll be able to invite all the grandest friends he made in the army.”
The smell of the paint was suffocating, but she inhaled in it huge draughts of hidden beauty. For weeks she had dreamed of it and felt in each tin of paint she was able to buy, in each stroke of the brush, the ecstasy of loving service for the son she idolized.
Ever since she first began to wash the fine silks and linens for Mrs. Preston, years ago, it had been Hanneh Hayyeh’s ambition to have a white-painted kitchen exactly like that in the old Stuyvesant Square mansion. Now her own kitchen was a dream come true.
Hanneh Hayyeh ran in to her husband, a stoop-shouldered, care-crushed man who was leaning against the bed, his swollen feet outstretched, counting the pennies that totaled his day’s earnings.
“Jake Safransky!” she cried excitedly, “you got to come in and give a look on my painting before you go to sleep.”
“Oi, let me alone. Give me only a rest.”
Too intoxicated with the joy of achievement to take no for an answer, she dragged him into the doorway. “Nu? How do you like it? Do I know what beautiful is?”
“But how much money did you spend out on that paint?”
“It was my own money,” she said, wiping the perspiration off her face with a corner of her apron. “Every penny I earned myself from the extra washing.”