"Why, Milton Bauer, in the old country a man could be strung up for saying less than that!"
"That didn't get across. Try another. A Frenchman and his wife were traveling in Russia, and—"
"If—if you had an old mother like mine up-stairs, Milton, eating out her heart and her days and her weeks and her months over a husband's grave somewhere in Siberia and a son's grave somewhere in Kishinef, you wouldn't see the joke neither."
Mr. Bauer executed a self-administered pat sharply against the back of his hand.
"Keeper," he said, "put me in the brain ward. I—I'm sorry, Mrs. C., so help me! Didn't mean to. How is your mother, Mrs. C.? Seems to me, at the dance the other night, Selene said she was fine and dandy."
"Selene ain't the best judge of her poor old grandmother. It's hard for a young girl to have patience for old age sitting and chewing all day over the past. It's right pitiful the way her grandmother knows it, too, and makes herself talk English all the time to please the child and tries to perk up for her. Selene, thank God, 'ain't suffered, and can't sympathize!"
"What's ailing her, Mrs. C.? I kinda miss seeing the old lady sitting down here in the store."
"It's the last year or so, Milt. Just like all of a sudden a woman as active as mama always was, her health and—her mind kind of went off with a pop."
"Thu! Thu!"
"Doctor says with care she can live for years, but—but it seems terrible the way her—poor mind keeps skipping back. Past all these thirty years in America to—even weeks before I was born. The night they—took my father off to Siberia, with his bare feet in the snow—for distributing papers they found on him—papers that used the word 'svoboda'—'freedom.' And the time, ten years later—they shot down my brother right in front of her for—the same reason. She keeps living it over—living it over till I—could die."