Here they bury men in suits. Here a boy sixteen years old thinks just because he’s tall he can stay out all night. It isn’t right that children should come home so late.”
He sighed. “Look, Ma. Listen a minute, will you? People don’t buy shrouds here and you can’t grow food in a crack in the sidewalk. You know what I mean?” His voice rose involuntarily and he lowered it.
“Ma, we have to eat. You can’t sell your shrouds, and we have to eat. I brought money for you.” He pulled some bills from his pocket and held them out to her.
She closed her eyes and silently refused the money. “Where did you get it, Sigmund?”
He looked away. “I got it. What’s the difference where?”
She darted a look at him, and for an instant there was life again in her eyes. Then they were dull once more, dull and flat and tired. “You stole it,” she said. “You are a thief.”
He tightened his hands into fists and remained silent.
“My son is a thief. My son Sigmund stole money. A thief.” And then she too was silent…
The silence came over him like a dark woolly blanket, more accusing than anything she could say. He had to break it. “Ma,” he said at last, “don’t you understand? Don’t you?”
“I understand only that you are a thief.”
“We need the money to live. You won’t let me quit school and get a job…”
“A boy should go to school,” she said.
“And you won’t let me take a job on Saturdays…”
“No son of mine will work on the Sabbath.”
“And you won’t take the relief money…”
“Charity,” she broke in. “Charity I don’t want.”
“And you don’t have a job. So I have to steal, Ma. What else can I do?”
She didn’t seem to hear his question. “I would work,” she said slowly. “I would have a job. No one will hire me, not in this country.”
Her eyes closed then, and only her hands moved. It was the same argument, the same words that Sigmund had heard a hundred times in the past. Either he would be a thief or she would go hungry, it was that simple.
He stood up and walked quietly to the kitchen. He took the lid from the cookie jar and noted that only a handful of change remained. She could spend it well enough, even if she never took it directly from him or acknowledged the source of the money. He grinned sadly and placed the bills in the jar.
He slept well that night. There were dreams, unpleasant ones, but he was tired enough to sleep anyway and he didn’t hear the alarm clock in the morning. And once again he was almost an hour late for school.
SCHOOL ENDED, FINALLY. The classes were dull and the teachers were something of a nuisance, but Sigmund clenched his hands into fists and lived through it, just as he lived through the flight from Poland long ago. He would clench his hands into tight little fists, and sometimes lower his eyelids, and everything passed in time.
Lucci was waiting for him after school. Lucci was the same age but not as tall as Sigmund. But Lucci’s mother was dead and Lucci’s father drank red wine all day, so Lucci did not go to school.
“Tonight,” Lucci said. “We’ll go out tonight, okay?”
Sigmund hesitated. “It’s cold out. It’ll be cold as ice tonight.”
They were buddies, and they went to the small poolroom on Christie Street where the cigar smoke was thick and warm in the air. They played two games of eight-ball and one game of straight and one game of Chicago, and they each smoked two of Lucci’s cigarettes, and Lucci paid for all the games. Then it was time to go. They shook hands warmly because they were buddies and Sigmund walked home for his dinner. It was so cold on the street that he could see his breath in front of his eyes, hovering in the air like the cigar smoke in the poolroom. He shuddered.
When he opened the door he could smell food cooking on the stove, but otherwise he would not have known that his mother had moved at all since the previous night. She was sitting again in the red armchair, her fingers flying as they skillfully manipulated the slender needles.