The happiest times were when it was dark and I had closed the store and could sit by my wife's bed with Casimir on my knee. Then we would talk over pleasant experiences, or I would tell them, who were both American-born, stories of Poland, of fairies, and sieges; or hum for them the tunes to which I had danced in my early youth. But oftenest my wife and I talked, for the child's benefit, of the wonderful city in whose slums we lived—upper central New York with its sables and its palaces. During our courtship and honeymoon we had made many excursions into those quarters of the city and the memory of them was dear. But if I remembered well and with happiness, my wife remembered photographically and with a kind of hectic eagerness in which, I fear, may have been bedded the roots of dissatisfaction. Details of wealth and luxury, and manners that had escaped me, even at the time, were as facile to her as terms of endearment to a lover. "And, oh—do you remember," she would say, "the ruby that the Fifth Avenue bride had at her throat, and how for many, many blocks we thought we could still hear the organ going? That was fun, Michael, wasn't it, when we stood in front of Sherry's and counted how many real sables went in and how many fakes, and noticed that the fake sables were as proudly carried as the real?"
One night she would not eat her supper. "Oh, Michael," she said, "I'm so bored with the same old soup—soup—soup, and the same old porridge—porridge—porridge, and I hate oranges, and apples, and please don't spend any more money on silly, silly, silly me."
"But you must eat," I said. "What would you like? Think of something. Think of something that tempts your appetite. You seem better to-night—almost well. Your cheeks are like cherries and you keep stirring restlessly as if you wanted to get up instead of lying still—still like a woman that has been drowned, all but her great, dear eyes…. Now, make some decision, and were it ambrosia I will get it for you if it is to be had in the city…. Else what are savings-banks for, and thrift, and a knowledge of furs?"
She answered me indirectly.
"Do you remember, Michael," she said, "the butcher shops uptown, the groceries, and the fruit stores, where the commonest articles, the chops, the preserved strawberries, the apples were perfect and beautiful, like works of art? In one window there was a great olive branch in a glass jar—do you remember? And in that fruit store near the Grand Central—do you remember?—we stood in the damp snow and looked in at great clean spaces flooded with white light—and there were baskets of strawberries—right there in January—and wonderful golden and red fruits that we did not know the names of, and many of the fruits peeped out from the bright-green leaves among which they had actually grown—"
"I remember the two prize bunches of grapes," I said.
And my wife said:
"I was coming to those … they must have been eighteen inches long, every grape great and perfect. I remember you said that such grapes looked immortal. It was impossible to believe they could ever rot—there was a kind of joyous frostiness—we went in and asked a little man what kind of grapes they were, and he answered like a phonograph, without looking or showing politeness: 'Black Hamburgs and White Muscats of Alexandria'—your old Sienkiewicz never said anything as beautiful as that, 'White Muscats of Alexandria—'"
"Dear little heart," I said. "Childkin, is it the memory of those white grapes that tempts your appetite?"
"Oh, Michael," she exclaimed, clasping her hands over those disappointed breasts into which the milk had not come in sufficiency. "Oh, Michael—they were two dollars and a half a pound—"