“Oh my God,” said Ben, grasping his stomach. He leaned weakly across the sink and drank another glass of water.
“No. No.” Steve began again. “Stevie isn’t built—”
He would have continued indefinitely in this strain, but Helen checked him with weary finality.
“Well, forget about it,” she said, “all of you. Life’s too short.”
Life was. At these moments, after battle, after all the confusion, antagonism, and disorder of their lives had exploded in a moment of strife, they gained an hour of repose in which they saw themselves with sad tranquillity. They were like men who, driving forward desperately at some mirage, turn, for a moment, to see their footprints stretching interminably away across the waste land of the desert; or I should say, they were like those who have been mad, and who will be mad again, but who see themselves for a moment quietly, sanely, at morning, looking with sad untroubled eyes into a mirror.
Their faces were sad. There was great age in them. They felt suddenly the distance they had come and the amount they had lived. They had a moment of cohesion, a moment of tragic affection and union, which drew them together like small jets of flame against all the senseless nihilism of life.
Margaret came in fearfully. Her eyes were red, her broad German face white and tearful. A group of excited boarders whispered in the hall.
“I’ll lose them all now,” Eliza fretted. “The last time three left. Over twenty dollars a week and money so hard to get. I don’t know what’s to become of us all.” She wept again.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said Helen impatiently. “Forget about the boarders once in a while.”
Steve sank stupidly into a chair by the long table. From time to time he muttered sentimentally to himself. Luke, his face sensitive, hurt, ashamed around his mouth, stood by him attentively, spoke gently to him, and brought him a glass of water.
“Give him a cup of coffee, mama,” Helen cried irritably. “For heaven’s sake, you might do a little for him.”
“Why here, here,” said Eliza, rushing awkwardly to the gas range and lighting a burner. “I never thought—I’ll have some in a minute.”
