Aunt Jimmy's Will

by Mabel Osgood Wright

On the night of Bird’s arrival in New York Jack and Larry O’More were late for supper. In fact they did not come in until she had gone to bed on the “extension” lounge in the parlour, where she was lying with her teeth clenched in an effort to keep her eyes shut and to choke down the nervousness to which crying would have brought the quickest relief. If Bird could only have been alone in the dark and quiet for a few hours, it would have been much easier for her to have overcome her great disappointment. But in the corner of the family sitting room, amid a litter of sewing and the smell of pipe smoke, with the glare and noise of a busy street coming in the two small windows, sleep was impossible. Finally her aunt closed the lid of the sewing-machine with a bang, tossed her work into a heap in the corner, and, turning out the gas, went into the kitchen.

There were six rooms in the flat, all quite small. The sitting room in front and the kitchen in the rear had windows that opened out, above the three bedrooms clustered round an air-shaft that was like a great chimney having small windows let into it, through which even at noon only a gray, sunless light entered, and the air had no freshness but was full of odours and noises from the flats above and below.

Mr. and Mrs. O’More occupied the room next to the sitting room, Billy sleeping beside them on a small mattress that was propped up nightly upon two chairs; for when the bed was thus made, there was no room to move about. Jack and Larry slept in the middle room which had a door into the hallway, while the third room, opening out of the kitchen, had been used by the oldest boy, Tom, before he had taken wholly to wild ways and drifted off. Now it was more than a year since he had slept there and it was tightly packed with broken furniture, old boxes, and various kinds of trash that it had been easier to throw in there than to dispose of in any other way. A small bath-room at the end of the hall was littered up in much the same way, and it was evident that no one cared for bathing, as the tub was used as a cubby hole for pails, a mop, broom, and the wash boiler and board, for which there was no room on the overloaded fire-escape. Still Mrs. O’More felt the dignity of having a bath-room, for it stamped her home as a “flat,” tenements so called having no such luxuries.

Presently Bird gave up all idea of going to sleep or even of closing her eyes, and do her best she could not keep from hearing the conversation that passed between her aunt and uncle in the kitchen, for they made no effort to lower their voices, and she dared not close the door as the only breath of air that reached little Billy, who was tossing about and muttering in his sleep, came through the front windows.

After hearing herself thoroughly discussed until her cheeks burned, her uncle closed with the remark, “Well, of course Terry was all kinds of a helpless fool, but he shouldn’t be blamed for it, his mother was a lady out of our class, and his wife too, judging from the looks and ways of the kid, and don’t you forget it, and it must come rough to her to be shoved about, anyhow.”

Then a new resolve came to Bird from the rough but well-meaning words. Her grandmother and her mother had been ladies,—she would not forget that any more than she would forget her father’s wish that she should learn to paint and win the success that had been denied to him.

Presently the subject changed and she heard her aunt speak of Tom and say that it was three months since she had heard from him, and she feared he was dead.

“I hope it will be three months more, then,” O’More had cried with an oath that made Bird quiver and pull the pillow over her head, but she was obliged to take it off again because of the heat. “He never minds us unless he’s in a scrape, or there’s something to pay. But he’s not dead, if that’s any comfort, for he wrote to me two weeks gone, saying he must have fifty dollars or leave his job, and I wrote him that he’d leave it for all of me.”

“And you never told me! I could have sent him a trifle; God knows what he’s done by this,” and Mrs. O’More covered her red head with her apron and began to whimper.

“Look here, Rose O’More,” answered her husband, while Bird judged by the jar that he had brought his fist down on the table with a bang, “that scoundrel has bled you long enough; now we are saving up to have little Billy doctored, and I’ll not see you rob yourself and him for that other that we gave the best of everything, and he’s turned it to the worst, even if he is the eldest born. If I were you, I’d bank the bit o’ money that comes in from the sewin’ and not keep it about ye.”