Free Poorhouse Fair by John Updike Page A

at the Home will be glad for this. She has nothing to do. She's grateful for anything. She has nothing of her own."
    "Joan doesn't think like that," Lucas explained.
    "Well she didn't think twice about wishing the parakeet on us. She bought it for her boy and the boy tired of it after a week, as you might expect. So, ship it off to Mom, and let her spend her pitiful little money on fancy seed of all sorts and cuttlebone. Let her clean the cage once a day. Let her worry with the bird's nails. They're more than a half-circle and still growing. It gets on its perch and tries to move off and beats its wings and wonders why it can't, poor thing. I thought I could take my sewing scissors and trim its nails myself; they're fragile-looking; you can see the little thread of blood in there. But evidently you can't. They'll bleed unless you know just where to cut. My daughter sent along a magazine, on how to take care of them. They'll bleed if you don't know just where you can cut. So we have to wait until he takes it into his head to go into town with the cage to the dog doctor in Andrews. It costs money, too. It's not free. They have free medicine for humans but for any little bit of animal care you have to pay, and they call this progress. I said, you know, if you tell them you're from the poorhouse, but no, he wants to pretend he isn't."
    The Lucases' companions at the table were homely Tommy Franklin, who made small baskets by filing peach-stones, and Elizabeth Heinemann, a blind lady he sometimes guided about and always escorted at meals. Tommy, fearing that the other woman's hurried talk would tire Elizabeth, and anyway feeling a need to put his voice before her, began softly, "Your talking about scissors reminds me. . . ." He was so shy of talking the Lucases fell silent, to hear him, and he had to proceed. "Last month I took the bus to Burlington, to see my brother, and I noticed when I got on this old woman talking to the driver. I didn't think about it any and always try to mind my business because you never know. . . . Though I was looking out the window darned if she didn't sit down right aside of me. I guess she figured, another old person. . . . Well, she had been a nurse, she said. And she goes into this long story about how years ago she was called in to care for an old rabbi who had pneumonia. The house was full of nice things, she said, very expensive and well-kept. The rabbi's daughter kept the house. But underneath this beard, which went down to here, according to their religion, was where this terrible mess connected with his disease was, she said. She said the first thing she did was to go to the store and buy scissors, and a razor, and shave him. The daughter, she said, howled something terrible. And when the doctor came he took one look at the old fella and his eyes popped and he said he would never have dared to do that." Somehow when the woman had told it, this sentence was more of an ending. Tommy glanced at Elizabeth; her eyes were brilliantly fixed on a spot past his shoulder. She had a long neck stretched tall by her perfect posture; at this moment her wide mouth was broadened further by a sweet smile of expectation. Confused and inadequate, he went on. "I asked her, didn't he try to stop you, and she said, he was very sick. I guess he was unconscious when she did it. So I had to sit there Listening to her tell this all the way to Burlington. Your mentioning scissors put me in mind of it." It had turned out wrong; when the woman had told the story, there had been a righteousness in her action and a kind of justice in the close. His way it sounded simply as if he were against the
    Jews, when he had no feelings toward them one way or another.
    "I guess she thought," Lucas said, "it being a Jew, it made no difference." He studied his food, boiled potato white on the white china on the white table-top. Potato, meatloaf and broccoli was the meal, big because this evening, if the fair were in full swing, there