Free Evergreen by Belva Plain Page A

hesitant. Strange how he metamorphosed after five children and fifteen years of working on pants! As different from what he had been as the caterpillar is from the butterfly. Strange and sad and wrong, Joseph thought, remembering Solly teaching him to dive in the East River, Solly playing stickball, wiry and fast. He had come from a very rural place in Europe, had swum in rivers, had known how to move and run. Such a brightness in him! And now all quenched.
    Anyway, Joseph had liked to go to Solly’s. The rest of the time he lived on the street.
    His father complained. The streets were dangerous, full of bad influences. He heard his parents talking, often in his presence, more often from behind the drawn curtain that separated his cot in the kitchen from their bed in the back room.
    “Bad influences,” his father said again. Gloom and foreboding. Joseph knew he was talking about the boys who had gone socialist and worse, the boys who stood in knots on the sidewalk, lounging on the synagogue steps to taunt the worshipers, even smoking on the Sabbath, while the old men with their derby hats and beards looked the other way.
    “Joseph is a good boy,” his mother said. “You don’t have to worry about him, Max.”
    “Show me a mother who doesn’t say her son is a good boy.”
    “Max! What does he ever do that’s bad? Be sensible!”
    “True, true.” Silence. And then he would hear, how many times had he not heard? “I wish we could do more for him.”
    Now Joseph understood, but even then when he was a child he had begun to understand, to pick up truths about his parents and the life around him. He knew that his father, like most of the fathers, was ashamed of doing even worse for his family in America than he had done in Europe. He was ashamed of not speaking the language, so that when the gas man came to ask a question about the meter, an eight-year-old son had to interpret. Ashamed of the meager food on the table toward the end of the month when the money was being scrimped together for the rent. Ashamed of the noise, the jumbled living in the midst of crowds and other people’s scandals. The Mandels upstairs, the terrible screaming fights and Mr. Mandel leaving, disappearing “uptown,” Mrs. Mandel’s bitter weeping and scolding. Why should a decent family be subjected to the indecencies of others? Yet there was no escape from it.
    The father was ashamed too of the dirt. He hated it. From him Joseph knew he had inherited his extreme love of cleanliness and order. For a man to love those things in a place where there was little cleanliness and no order!
    They used to go to the baths together once a week, Pa and Joseph. In a way the child dreaded it, the smell of the steam and the press of naked men. How ugly old bodies were! And yet, in another way, it was the only time they ever talked together, really talked, there in the steam and later on the five blocks’ walk home.
    Sometimes he was subjected to homilies: “Do right, Joseph. Every man knows what right is and he knows too when he has done something dishonest or unjust. He may tell others and himself that he doesn’t know, but he does know. Do right and life will reward you.”
    “But sometimes wicked people are rewarded too, aren’t they, Pa?”
    “Not really. It may seem so on the surface, but not really.”
    “What about the Czar? How cruel he is, and yet he lives in a palace!”
    “Ah, but he hasn’t lived his life out yet!”
    Joseph considered that doubtfully. His father said with firmness, “When you do wrong, you pay. Maybe not right away, but you always pay.” And then he said, “Would you like a banana? I’ve a penny here, and you can buy two at the corner. One for your mother.”
    “What about you, Pa?”
    “I don’t like bananas,” his father lied.
    When Joseph was ten Pa’s sight went bad. First he had to hold the paper very far away. Then after a while he wasn’t able to read it at all. Joseph’s mother had never learned to