Whom Then?

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

THERE were seven of them, on the ferry going home from Jersey Sunday night. They were the last ones on the boat, the last ones off the train, and all eyes stared at them. The mother sat down opposite with one twin baby in her arms and with the youngest walking little girl standing up behind her in the seat to look out the window. The father sat down by me with the other twin baby in his arms and with the two oldest children, Abie and Esther, four and three, or five and four, straggling in front of him along with the luggage. They had no bags, just three bundles — two in newspaper and one in a big soft-looking packing box from a grocery store.

They were an alien and self-sustaining group, as unexpected as something seen if the side of a house blew off in a strange city. Not that they were incredible in themselves — only incredible here on the Jersey ferry, pure unadulterated Ghetto which so seldom strays from home. Pushcarts, garbage gutters, horrible smells, arose like genii out of this bottle. They themselves were unconscious of the startled scrutiny. They remained a self-sustaining unit; wherever they were was the family, complete and self-absorbed.

The mother was young — such utter youth of eyes and forehead and hair; only her mouth, an ugly, sagging, tired mouth, looked old. She sat relaxed, sloppy, on the edge of the seat, alert to the children, unconscious of herself, in an old white dress with short sleeves, her legs and feet in dirty white stockings and run-over, bulging black strap pumps, thrust out before her. She was, in her black and white and her startling youth of brow, more clearly defined than the rest. The father with that beard might have been any age. He and the children were one indiscriminate mass of old clothes. They smelled of tenements.

The children were bundles of old petticoats, old coats, old coverings of any kind. In the feeling that there was nothing adequate to cover them with, they had been covered too lavishly, with everything in the house. There was no shape, there were no colors. The knitted pink of the father’s girl twin was hardly to be distinguished from the blue of the mother’s boy. Abie, the oldest little boy, had a cap which he must have worn as a baby. Now the lining had been slit so as to stand out for an inch around the circumference of the cloth to give greater surface: and still it was to his head as a postage stamp is to its letter. But his face under it was beautiful, the clear, serene face of a contemplative, blueeyed Jewish child. Abie in Hester Street, playing in those festering piles, would be a small, clear-colored flower in a bog. He looked about him with a mild, comprehending look while Esther, next oldest, dragged the soft-looking packing box out to the middle of the floor, knelt beside it, and laid her wild, hatless head down on it for rest.

The youngest walking child, about two and very tiny, got down from behind her mother and began to flop around. Her left foot turned in at a right angle from the ankle so that she had to run to get any distance before she fell down. She went like a circus seal. The boatload held its breath. Sometimes for a second or two she held a technique of throwing it entirely over the other foot, and then the other foot over it. So she flopped to her father and leaned up against him in great joy of reunion. Then she turned and laid her infinitesimal hand on my lap, rubbing it over my knees experimentally, as if the feel of texture, the quality of the goods, was fascinating to her.

‘Dumbbell,’ said the father in delight, looking at me for appreciation.

Abie came back then and stood before him, too — the old-clothes-man father seemed to be the magnet of the family — and began to collect and drag the luggage and apportion it for the exodus. Then the father got him right in front of him and began to talk to him in low tones in very careful, slow English. He must have gone to night school to get that English for talking to his children. There had been fragmentary mention of ice cream among them all the time; now they got down to cases.

‘When, Abie, we will the little boxes of ice cream have, and in each little box a little spoon, and when you, Abie, will be giving out the little boxes and spoons, whom will you give first?’

They had evidently rehearsed it before. Abie looked pleased and shy, up from under his eyelashes. He knew his part.

‘Mama,’ he murmured.

‘Whom then?’

‘Papa.’

‘Whom then?’

‘Esther.’

‘Whom then?’

‘Rachel.’

‘Whom then?’

‘Bennie and Beulah.’

This was a great joke, as the twins were too little for even little boxes, little spoons. They laughed.

‘And whom then?’

‘Abie.’

The father beamed with pride and delight in his boy. The two other walkers, Esther and Rachel the seal, gathered around, leaning heavily, to hear what it was their father was saying now. He it was who told them things, who made life interesting. What clothes, what filthy ragbags, what an unutterable smell! . . . But with it all this game, this intelligence about How children like things done, these ideas of careful speaking and courtesy and order and making little ceremonies out of life — this way of keeping life comprehensible anywhere by having at the heart of it this unit, their family.

They started off the boat, the mother carrying a bundle, the father a bundle, and Abie a bundle, the three who walked hanging to different parts of the father’s coat so that he looked like a ship with tugs, a moored balloon, or better still a Maypole ready to be wound, for at any minute the coat might rend to ribbons in their grasp. He looked back and down and laughed to see them, and the mother laughed to see them, and the father and mother looked at each other and laughed, and even the children, who were so serious, must laugh.

They went like refugees out into a foreign land — but laughing as they went. Watching them huddle a minute before launching across the confusing plaza, I wondered about Abie, little Father Abraham. What a job he had on his shoulders, with that catechism of ‘Whom Then?’ growing a question longer every year, with Abie always at the end of it. All his life he would be bringing up children. But still, he probably would like it. He got it from his father; from father to son they must have had it, back and back and back — the job of being patriarchs.