woman’s grief was taller than their tallest towers, and more enduring than all their steel and stone: it would last for ever when all the city’s bones were dust, and it was like the grief of all the women who had ever beat their breasts and flung their aprons across their heads and run, wailing, with a demented and drunken step: it filled him with horror, anger, a sense of cruelty, disgust, and pity.
She was the fertile and enduring earth from which they sprang, and all of them, transformed so sharply and so curiously by the city’s tone and life, drew in to her with devotion and respect: Abe, with his dreary grey face of the man-swarm cipher; Sylvia, with her feverish, electric night-time glitter; all of the brothers and sisters, with all that was new, sharp, alien, flashy, trivial, or material in speech, dress, manner, and belief—all of them returned to her with love, loyalty, and reverence as to some great brood-hen of the earth. The old woman’s life was rooted in the soil of two devotions: the synagogue and the home, and all that happened beyond the limits of this devotion was phantom and remote: this soil was ageless, placeless, everlasting.
Abe loved his mother dearly: whenever he spoke of her, even casually, his voice was touched with a hush of respect and affection. But he disliked his father: the few times Eugene heard him mention him he spoke of him in a hard and bitter voice, referring to him as “that guy” or “that fellow,” as if he were a stranger. Eugene never saw the father: the children all felt bitterly towards him and had sent him away to live alone. Abe told Eugene that the man was a shoemaker, and apparently improvident and thriftless. He had never been able to earn enough to support his family, and in addition, Abe said, he was a petty family tyrant. Abe’s childhood had been scarred by memories of privation, tyranny and poverty—the mother and the children had had a bitter struggle for existence, and Abe had worked since his eighth year at a variety of hard, grey, shabby and joyless employments: he had been a newsboy, a grocer’s delivery boy, an office boy in a broker’s office, a typist in a collection agency endlessly writing out form letters, the office man and secretary for the head-professor of the architectural school, and one of these pallid, swarthy, greasily sweating youths of the fur and garment house districts who ceaselessly propel through swarming and kaleidoscopic streets of trade small wheel-trucks piled high with dresses, garments, furs, and clothes or with the thousand travelling varieties of all that horrible nondescript junk known under the indecisive name of “novelties.” Once, also, he had spent
