Free Evergreen by Belva Plain

machine away he went to the synagogue. When he had said his prayers he went home. Tailor shop, synagogue and home, the triangle of his days. Why should such a pair brother to go to America? For what?
    Then came the burning and something galvanized the husband.
    “Your father came in,” his mother said. “The village was quiet. They had burned five houses, not ours, but it was an awful thing to see your neighbors, the women crying and the men just standing there, looking. So your father came in and he said, ‘We are going to America, Katie.’ Just like that he said it, and no more than that.”
    “Did you want to come? Were you scared?” Joseph used to ask.
    “It was all so fast, I didn’t have time to think. We got our tickets, I said good-by to my sisters, and we were at Castle Garden.”
    “And then what happened, Ma?”
    “What happened?” Her eyebrows went up, rising in a semicircle under her stiff and fading wig. “As you see, we opened a tailor shop. We ate, we lived. The only difference was that here everybody was all jumbled up, without grass, without trees.” For an instant there was slight regret in her voice. “Also no pogroms, no killing and burning.”
    “And that was all?” Joseph used to press, waiting for the next part, the important part.
    His mother played along. “Of course all! What else should there be?”
    “I mean, nothing else happened to you after you came here?”
    His mother would frown a moment, pretending to be puzzled. “Oh, yes, of course, one other thing! We werehere two years—a little more, actually—when you were born.”
    Joseph would stifle a smile of pleasure. When he was very young, at seven or eight, he liked to hear this part. Later, whenever the subject of his birth arose, he would frown and wince inside, would change the subject or leave the room. There was something ridiculous in such old people having their first, totally unexpected child. He was the only one of his friends who had parents like his; more like grandparents, they seemed. The other boys had thin agile fathers and mothers, who moved about the streets quickly, yelling and running after their children.
    His father, heavy and slow-moving, sat all day behind the sewing machine. When he stood up he was stiff, he moved awkwardly, grunting and shuffling to the back rooms where they ate and slept, and to the toilet in the yard. On Saturday he shuffled to the synagogue, came home and ate, lay down again on the cot in the kitchen and slept the afternoon away.
    “Shh!” Ma would admonish when Joseph banged the door, “Your father’s asleep!” And her warning finger would go to her lips.
    At night Pa would move from the cot to the bed where he slept with Ma. Where they would—? No, not decent to think about that. You couldn’t imagine him doing—He was so quiet. Except now and then when he fell into a terrible rage, always over some trivial thing. His face would flame, the cords stand out on his temples and in his neck. Ma said that someday he would kill himself like that, which was exactly what happened. Much later, of course.
    The house smelled of sleep, of dullness and poverty. There was no
life
in it, no future. You felt that what had already been done there was all that ever would be done. Joseph spent as few hours there as he could.
    “What, going out again?” Pa would ask, shaking his head. “You’re always out.”
    “A boy needs companions, Max.” His mother defendedhim. “And as long as we know he’s in good company—He only goes to play at the Baumgartens’ or over to your own cousin Solly.”
    Solly Levinson was a second or third cousin of Pa’s, only five years older than Joseph. Joseph could remember him in that first brief year after his arrival in this country at the age of twelve, that first and only year when he went to school, before he began to work in the garment trade. He had learned English astonishingly quickly; he was bright and timid, or perhaps only gentle and