They had a table at the front of the restaurant, near the violin. They glowed over soup and real meat and coffee. There were funny people at the next table—a man who made jokes. Something about the “Yiddisher gavotte,” and saying, “We been going to dances a lot, but last night the wife and I wanted to be quiet, so I bought me two front seats for Grant’s Tomb!” It was tremendous. Father and Mother couldn’t make many jokes, these days, but they listened and laughed. The waiter remembered them; they had always tipped him ten cents; he kept coming back to see if there was anything they wanted, as though they were important people. Father thanked her for the overcoat in what he blithely declared to be Cape Cod dialect, and toasted her in coffee. They were crammed with good cheer when Mother paid the check from a dollar she had left over, and they rose from the table.
Father stood perplexedly gazing at the hat-rack behind them. He gasped, “Why, where—Why, I hung it——”
He took down his old hat with a pathetic, bewildered hesitancy, and he whispered to Mother, “My overcoat is gone—it’s been stolen—my new overcoat. Now I can’t go out and get a job—”
They cried out, and demanded restitution of the waiter, the head-waiter, the manager. None of these officials could do more than listen and ask heavy questions in bad English and ejaculate, “Somebody stole it from right behind you there when you weren’t looking.”
One of the guests dramatically said that he had seen a man who looked suspicious, and for a moment every one paid attention to him, but that was all the information he had. The other guests gazed with apathetic interest, stirring their coffee and grunting one to another, “He ought to watched it.”
The manager pointed at one of the signs, “This restaurant is not responsible for the loss of hats, coats, or packages,” and he shouted, “I am very sorry, but we can do nuttin’. Somebody stole it from right behind you there—no one was looking. If you leaf your name and address—”
Father didn’t even hear him. He was muttering to himself, “And the seven dollars that I saved for Sarah was in it.”
He took Mother’s arm; he tried to walk straight as he turned his back on the storm of windy words from the manager.
Once they were away from spectators, on dark Fifteenth Street, Father threw up his hands and in a voice of utter agony he mourned, “I can’t do anything more. I’m clean beaten. I’ve tried, and I’ve looked for work, but now— Be better if I went and jumped in the river.”
She took his arm and led him along, as though he were a child and helpless. She comforted him as well as she could, but there was nothing very convincing to say. As she grew silent her thoughts grew noisy. They shouted separate, hard, brutal sentences, so loudly that she could not hear even the scraping feet of the stooped man beside her. They clamored: