On a bed, obviously dragged from its shadowy corner to a place beside the single window, and propped up so that her hair, so slickly banding her head in two plaits, sprang out against the coarsely white pillows, Mrs. Rosa Sopinsky Pelz, on an evening when the air rose sultry, stale, and even garbage-laden from a cat-and-can-infested courtyard, flashed her quick smile toward that opening door, her week-old infant suckling at her breast.
"You ought to seen, Roody; she laughed! Puckered herself up into the cutest little grin when mamma left just now."
Mr. Pelz wound his way through an overcrowded huddle of furniture that was gloomily, uglily utilitarian. A sideboard spread in pressed glass; a chest of drawers piled high with rough-dry family wash; a coal-range, and the smell and sound of simmering. A garland of garlic, caught up like smilax, and another of drying red peppers. On a shelf above the sink, cluttered there with all the pitiful unprivacy of poverty, a layout, to recite which will label me with the nigritude of the realist, but which is actually the nigritude of reality—a dish of brown-and-white blobs of soap; a coffee-cup with a great jag in its lip; a bottle of dried beans; a rubber nipple floating in a saucer of water; a glass tumbler containing one inverted tooth-brush; a medicine-bottle glued down in a dark-brown pool of its own substance; a propped-up bit of mirror, jagged of edge; a piece of comb; a rhinestone breastpin; a bunion-plaster; a fork; spoon; a sprouting onion. Yet all of this somehow lit by a fall of very coarse, very white, and very freshly starched lace curtains portière-fashion from the door, looped back in great curves from the single window, and even skirting stiffly and cleanly the bureau-front and bed-edge.
"How is my little mammela?" said Mr. Pelz, leaning over the bed to kiss Mrs. Pelz on the shining plaits, the light-tan column of throat and the little fist pressed so deeply into her bosom.
"Just ought to seen, Roody—honest, she laughed and nearly jerked off mamma's sheidel!" [Footnote: Black wig worn by orthodox Jewish women after marriage.]
"Red head!" he said, stroking down at the warm "bulge of blanket, so snugly enclosed in the crotch of mothering arm.
"It's redder than yours already, Roody."
"She's sure a grand little thing cuddled up there, ain't it so, mammela?"
She reached up to pat his blue shirt-sleeve.
"There's some herring on the table mamma brought over, and some raw meat and onions. That's some borshtsh on the stove Etta carried all the way over from Hester Street for your supper."