Part 48 (2/2)

”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 Binsw.a.n.ger 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 Binsw.a.n.ger 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 Binsw.a.n.ger'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. Binsw.a.n.ger 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 Binsw.a.n.ger 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. Binsw.a.n.ger 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 _ged.i.n.ks_, 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 cus.h.i.+on.

”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.

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