AT the close of a grilling summer that had sapped the life from the city as insidiously as fever runs through veins and licks them up—at the close of a day that had bleached the streets as dry as desert bones—Abe Ginsburg closed his store half an hour earlier than usual because his clerk, Miss Ruby Cohn, was enjoying a two days' vacation at the Long Island Recreation Farm, and because a staggering pain behind his eyes and zigzag down the back of his neck to his left shoulder-blade made the shelves of shoe-boxes appear as if they were wavering with the heat-dance of the atmosphere and ready to cast their neatly arranged stock in a hopeless fuddle on the center of the floor.
Up-stairs, on an exact level with the elevated trains that tore past the kitchen windows like speed monsters annihilating distance, Mrs. Ginsburg poised a pie-pan aloft on the tips of five fingers and waltzed a knife round the rim of the tin. A ragged ruffle of dough swung for a moment; she snipped it off, leaving the pie pat and sleek.
Then Mrs. Ginsburg smiled until a too perfect row of badly executed teeth showed their pink rubber gums, leaned over the delicate lid of the pie, and with a three-pronged fork pricked out the doughy inscription—Abe. Sarah baking cakes for Abraham's prophetic visitors had no more gracious zeal.
The waiting oven filled the kitchen with its gassy breath; a train hurtled by and rattled the chandeliers, a stack of plates on a shelf, and a blue-glass vase on the parlor mantel. A buzz-bell rang three staccato times. Mrs. Ginsburg placed the pie on the table-edge and hurried down a black aisle of hallway.
Book-agents, harbingers of a dozen-cabinet-photographs-colored-crayon-thrown-in, and their kin have all combined to make wary the gentle cliff-dweller. Mrs. Ginsburg opened her door just wide enough to insert a narrow pencil, placed the tip of her shoe in the aperture, and leaned her face against the jamb so that from without half an eye burned through the crack.
"Abie? It ain't you, is it, Abie?"
"Don't get excited, mamma!"
"It ain't six o'clock yet, Abie—something ain't right with you!"
"Don't get excited, mamma! I just closed early for the heat. For what should I keep open when a patent-leather shoe burns a hole in your hand?"
"Ach, such a scare as you give me! If I'd 'a' known it I could have had supper ready. It wouldn't hurt you to call up-stairs when you close early—no consideration that boy has got for his mother! Poor papa! If he so much as closed the store ten minutes earlier he used to call up for me to heat the things—no consideration that boy has got for his old mother!"