he had been a friend of her dead son, although he had never known him, the old woman began to wail, faintly and rhythmically, across the wire: “Jakie!… My Jakie!… Mein Sohn Jakie!… He is dead.”
A few days later Eugene had gone home with Abe for dinner: he lived with his mother, two brothers, and Jimmy, his sister’s illegitimate child, in a flat which occupied the second floor of an old four-storey red-brick house in Twelfth Street, near Second Avenue, on the East Side. The old woman had prepared a good meal for them: a thick rich soup, chopped chicken livers, chicken, cake, and a strong sweet wine: she served them but would not sit and eat with them: she came in briefly and shook hands shyly and awkwardly, mumbling incoherently a mangled jargon of Yiddish and English. Suddenly, however, as if she had briefly mastered herself by a strong effort, her old and sorrowful face was twisted by a convulsion of powerful and incurable grief, and a long, terrible, savagely wailing cry was torn from her throat: she turned blindly, and with a movement of natural and primitive sorrow, she suddenly seized the edges of her apron in her gnarled and worn hands and flung it up over her head and rushed toward the door at a blind, lunging, reeling step. She was like one demented by sorrow: the old woman began to beat her withered breasts and pull at her wispy grey hair, meanwhile running and stumbling blindly round her kitchen in a horrible and savage dementia and drunkenness of grief. Abe followed her out, and Eugene could hear his voice, low, urgent, and tender, as he spoke to her persuasively in Yiddish, and her long wailing cries subsided and he returned. His face was sad and weary-looking and in a moment he said: “Mama’s breaking up fast. She’s never been able to get over my brother’s death. She thinks about it all the time: she can’t get it off her mind.”
“How long has he been dead, Abe?”
“He died over a year ago,” Abe said. “But that doesn’t matter: I know her—she’ll never forget it now as long as she lives. She’ll always feel the same about it.”
This terrible and savage picture of grief was carved upon Eugene’s memory unforgettably: it became a tremendous and formidable fact, a fact as ancient, timeless, and savage as the earth, a fact which neither the stupefying oblivion of the city’s life, the furious chaos of the streets, nor the savage glare of ten thousand blind and dusty days could touch. The old
