Miss Binswanger raised her harried eyes from her plate and smiled at her mother; she was like a dark red rose, trembling, titillating, and with dewy eyes.
"Don't stare so, mamma."
"Izzy, are you going to stay home to-night? One night it won't hurt you. Like you run around nights to dance-halls ain't nothing to be proud of."
"Now start something, mamma, so pa can jump on me again. If Pearlie and Max are going to use the front room this evening, what shall I do? Sit in a corner till he's gone and I can go to bed?"
"I should care if he goes to dance-halls or not. What I say, Becky, don't make no difference to my son. Take how I begged him to hold on his job!"
"If you're done your dessert wait till we get up-stairs, papa. The dining-room knows already enough of our business."
Miss Binswanger pushed back from the table to her feet. Tears rose in a sheer film across her eyes, but she smiled with her lips and led the procession of her family from the gabbling dining-room, her small, dark head held upward by the check-rein of scorched pride and the corner of her tear-dimmed glance for the remote table with the centerpiece of pink carnations.
By what seemed demoniac aforethought the Binswanger three-room suite was rigidly impervious to sunlight, air, and daylight. Its infinitesimal sitting-room, which the jerking backward of a couch-cover transformed into Mr. Isadore Binswanger's bedchamber, afforded a one-window view of a long, narrow shaft which rose ten stories from a square of asphalt courtyard, up from which the heterogeneous fumes of cookery wafted like smoke through a legitimate flue.
Mr. Binswanger dropped into a veteran arm-chair that had long since finished duty in the deluxe suite, and breathed onward through a beard as close-napped as Spanish moss.
He was suddenly old and as withered as an aspen leaf trembling on its rotten stem. Vermiculate cords of veins ran through the flesh like the chirography of pain written in the blue of an indelible pencil; yellow crow's-feet, which rayed outward from his eyes, were deep as claw-prints in damp clay.
"Becky, help me off with my shoes; heavy like lead they feel."
"Poil, unlace your papa's shoes. Since I got to dress for dinner I can't stoop no more."
Miss Binswanger tugged daintily at her father's boots, staggering backward at each pull.
"_Ach_, go way, Pearlie! Better than that I can do myself."
"See, mamma; nothing suits him."
Mrs. Binswanger regarded her husband's batrachian sallowness with anxious eyes; her large bosom heaved under its showy lace yoke, and her short, dimpled hands twirled at their rings.
"To-night, Julius, if you don't do like the doctor says I telephone him to come. That a man should be such a coward! It don't do you no good to take only one sleeping-tablet; two, he said, is what you need."
"Too much sleeping-powder is what killed old man Knauss."
"_Ach_, Julius, you heard yourself what Dr. Ellenburg said. Six of the little pink tablets he said it would take to kill a man. How can two of 'em hurt you? Already by the bed I got the box of 'em waiting, Julius, with an orange so they don't even taste."
"It ain't doctors and their _gedinks_, Becky, can do me good. Pink tablets can't make me sleep. I--_ach_, Becky, I'm tired--tired."
Isadore rose from the couch-bed and punched his head-print out of the cushion.
"Lay here, pa."
"Na, na, I go me to bed. Such a thing full of lumps don't rest me like a sofa at home. Na, I go me to bed, Becky."
Isadore relaxed to the couch once more, pillowed his head on interlaced hands, yawned to the ceiling, blew two columns of cigarette-smoke through his nostrils, and watched them curl upward.
"This ain't so worse, pa."
"I go me to bed."
"For a little while, Julius, can't you stay up? At nine o'clock comes Max to see Poil. I always say a young man thinks more of a young girl when her parents stay in the room a minute."
Isadore fitted his thumbs in his waistcoat armholes and flung one reclining limb over the other.
"What Max Teitlebaum thinks of Pearlie I already know. To-day he invited me to lunch with him."
"Izzy!"
"Izzy! Why you been so close-mouthed?"
Mrs. Binswanger threw her short, heavy arm full length across the table-top and leaned toward her son, so that the table-lamp lighted her face with its generous scallop of chin and exacerbated the concern in her eyes.
"You had lunch to-day with Max Teitlebaum, and about Poil you talked!"
"That's what I said."
Miss Binswanger leaned forward in her low rocker, suddenly pink as each word had been a fillip to her blood, and a faint terra-cotta ran under the olive of her skin, lighting it.
"Like--fun--you--did!"
"All right then, missy, I'm lyin', and won't say no more."
"I didn't mean it, Izzy!"
"Izzy, tell your sister what he said."
"Well, right to my face she contradicts me."
"Please, Izzy!"
"Well, he--he likes you, all righty--"
"Did he say that about me, honest, Izz?"
Her breath came sweet as thyme between her open lips, and her eyes could not meet her mother's gaze, which burned against her lids.
"See, Poil! Wake up a minute, papa, and listen. When I mentioned Max Teitlebaum, papa, you always said a grand boy like one of the Teitlebaum boys, with such prospects, ain't got no time for a goil like our Poil. Always I told you that you got to work up the appetite. See, papa, how things work out! See, Poil! What else did he have to say, Izzy--he likes her, eh?"
Isadore turned on his side and flecked a rim of ash off his cigarette with a manicured forefinger.
"Don't get excited too soon, ma. He didn't come out plain and say anything, but I guess a boy like Max Teitlebaum thinks we don't need a brick house to fall on us."
"What you mean, Izzy?"
"What I mean? Say, ain't it as plain as the nose on your face? You don't need two brick houses to fall on you, do you?"
Mrs. Binswanger admitted to a mental phthisis, and threw out her hands in a gesture of helplessness.
"Believe me, Izzy, maybe I am dumb. So bad my head works when your papa worries me, but what you mean I don't know."
"Me neither, Izzy!"
"Say, there ain't much to tell. He likes Pearlie--that much he wasn't bashful to me about. He likes Pearlie, and he wants to go in the general store and ladies' furnishing goods business. Just clothing like his father's store he hates. Why should he stay in a business, he says, that is already built up? His two married brothers, he says, is enough with his father in the one business."
"Such an ambitious boy always anxious to do for hisself. I wish, Izzy, you had some of his ambitions. You hear, Poil, in the same business as papa he wants to go?"
Mrs. Binswanger rocked complacently, a smile crawled across her lips, and she nodded rhythmically to the tilting of her rocking-chair, her eyes closed in the pleasant phantasmagoria of a dream.
Mr. Binswanger slumped lower in his chair.
"A good head for business that Max Teitlebaum has on him. Like your mamma says, Izzy, you should have one just half so good."
"There you go again, pa, pickin', pickin'! If you'd give a fellow a start and lend him a little capital--I'd have some ambition, too, and start for myself."
Mr. Binswanger leaped forward full stretch, as a jetty of flame shoots through a stream of oil.
"For yourself! On what? From where would I get it? Cut it out from my heart? Two months already I begged you to come out by me in the store and see if you can't help start something to get back the trade--How we need young blood in the store to get--"
"Aw, I--"
"Five thousand dollars I give you for to lose in the ladies' ready-to-wear. Another white elephant we need in the family yet. Not five thousand dollars outside my insurance I got to my name, and even if I did have it I wouldn't--"
"Julius!"
"I mean it, so help me! Even if I did have it, not a cent to a boy what don't listen to his old father."
"For God's sakes, pa, quit your hollering; if you ain't got it to your name I'm sorry for Pearlie."
"For me?"
"You think, pa, a boy like Max Teitlebaum, a boy that banker Finburg's daughter is crazy after, is getting married only because you got a nice daughter?"
"What do you mean, Izzy?"
"The woods are full of 'em just as nice. I didn't need no brick house to fall on me to-day at lunch. He didn't come right out and say nothing, but when he said he wanted to get in a business he could build up, right away I seen what he meant."
"What?"
"Sure I seen it. I guess his father gives him six or seven thousand dollars to get his start, and just so much he wants from the girl's side. He can get it easy, too. If--if you'd fork over, pa, I--him and I could start maybe together and--"
"You--you--"
"Your papa, Izzy, can do for his girl just like the best can do for theirs Julius, can't you?"
"_Gott in Himmel!_ I--I--you--you pack of wolfs, you!"
"Such names you can't call your wife, Julius! Just let me tell you that! Such names you can't call me!"
Anger trembled in Mrs. Binswanger's vocal cords like current running over a wire. But Mr. Binswanger sprang suddenly to his feet and crashed the white knuckles of his clenched fist down on the table with a force that broke the flesh. The red lights of anger lay mirrored in the pool of his eyes like danger lanterns on a dark bridge are reflected in black water.