eruption. He banged a fist on the table and a milk jug spilled over. ‘So what the bloody ’ell is it you do?’ he shouted.
My grandmother had swung round and fury came on her face when she saw the milk spilling all over the table. ‘Madman,’ she shouted. Perhaps she would have intervened in any event. But this may have given her the excuse she wanted. Her voice roared out, louder even than his. ‘Madman, who the hell do you think you are? You think this is your house? You can do anything you want here? Did you buy that milk? Did you buy the egg your wife is frying for you? Did you buy anything here? I took you and your whole family in and gave you food to eat because you had no other place to go, but I can kick you out just as easily, and you dare open your big mouth once more and knock over my milk again and that’s what will happen, out you’ll go!’
It was a storm that my mother had been dreading, had seen coming in the collisions the two had already had, and she looked up from the stove where she had been frying my father’s egg with horror on her face. It was what she had been fearing since the day we came here. She had been warning my father. If he kept on getting into arguments with her, she would throw us all out. And where would we go? Was this the moment she had been dreading?
Perhaps it would have been if my father had answered her. But he didn’t, strangely, and my mother’s warnings may have had some influence at that particular moment. He remained silent, and when my mother placed the fried egg in front of him on a plate together with some toast he wolfed it down, eating as he always did with head bent low over the plate and shovelling the food into his mouth fast with little grunts and noises, and the rest of the table remained silent, my grandmother too, and soon everyone got up and left, and my father strode out too, and we heard the front door bang after him, and that was almost like the days in England when he would be striding off to his pub. Except that now he did not have any money to buy drink and would have to go to Uncle Abe where there was plenty in the closet of what he wanted, and yes, perhaps needed badly.
In the days that followed my grandfather came and went, and we saw little of him. He was on the same mysterious business that took him to New York for long periods at a time and we still did not know what it was. The others knew, but there was obviously a conspiracy of silence among them to keep it from us. My father stopped asking. He was having trouble finding a job and he slogged his way around the city daily hunting for a tailoring job, the only kind of work he knew. Both my brother Saul and sister Rose were having the same sort of trouble, but Joe was beginning to learn the business of selling magazine subscriptions with Uncle Saul’s tutelage, the two going out together every morning and coming back in the evening, sometimes exhilarated with the luck they’d had, sometimes gloomy when they hadn’t made a single sale all day.
The little money that Joe earned he gave to my mother, who tucked it in the purse she kept on a string inside her dress, but it was still not enough for us to get a place of our own and that is what she wished for now more than anything else, for the threat of my grandmother hung over us constantly, and you could never tell when the next clash would take place between her and my father.
As for me, I kept on exploring the city of Chicago, always finding something new, another beach, another park, a zoo that I had never seen before, and for several days I kept the quarter I had been given in my trouser pocket, not allowing myself the toffee for which it had been intended by my grandfather. I did not quite know what to do with it, until suddenly it occurred to me that now I could afford a ride on an elevated train. I had always wanted to do that and now I had the means for it.
That morning, instead of setting out on another exploration trip on foot,
My grandmother had swung round and fury came on her face when she saw the milk spilling all over the table. ‘Madman,’ she shouted. Perhaps she would have intervened in any event. But this may have given her the excuse she wanted. Her voice roared out, louder even than his. ‘Madman, who the hell do you think you are? You think this is your house? You can do anything you want here? Did you buy that milk? Did you buy the egg your wife is frying for you? Did you buy anything here? I took you and your whole family in and gave you food to eat because you had no other place to go, but I can kick you out just as easily, and you dare open your big mouth once more and knock over my milk again and that’s what will happen, out you’ll go!’
It was a storm that my mother had been dreading, had seen coming in the collisions the two had already had, and she looked up from the stove where she had been frying my father’s egg with horror on her face. It was what she had been fearing since the day we came here. She had been warning my father. If he kept on getting into arguments with her, she would throw us all out. And where would we go? Was this the moment she had been dreading?
Perhaps it would have been if my father had answered her. But he didn’t, strangely, and my mother’s warnings may have had some influence at that particular moment. He remained silent, and when my mother placed the fried egg in front of him on a plate together with some toast he wolfed it down, eating as he always did with head bent low over the plate and shovelling the food into his mouth fast with little grunts and noises, and the rest of the table remained silent, my grandmother too, and soon everyone got up and left, and my father strode out too, and we heard the front door bang after him, and that was almost like the days in England when he would be striding off to his pub. Except that now he did not have any money to buy drink and would have to go to Uncle Abe where there was plenty in the closet of what he wanted, and yes, perhaps needed badly.
In the days that followed my grandfather came and went, and we saw little of him. He was on the same mysterious business that took him to New York for long periods at a time and we still did not know what it was. The others knew, but there was obviously a conspiracy of silence among them to keep it from us. My father stopped asking. He was having trouble finding a job and he slogged his way around the city daily hunting for a tailoring job, the only kind of work he knew. Both my brother Saul and sister Rose were having the same sort of trouble, but Joe was beginning to learn the business of selling magazine subscriptions with Uncle Saul’s tutelage, the two going out together every morning and coming back in the evening, sometimes exhilarated with the luck they’d had, sometimes gloomy when they hadn’t made a single sale all day.
The little money that Joe earned he gave to my mother, who tucked it in the purse she kept on a string inside her dress, but it was still not enough for us to get a place of our own and that is what she wished for now more than anything else, for the threat of my grandmother hung over us constantly, and you could never tell when the next clash would take place between her and my father.
As for me, I kept on exploring the city of Chicago, always finding something new, another beach, another park, a zoo that I had never seen before, and for several days I kept the quarter I had been given in my trouser pocket, not allowing myself the toffee for which it had been intended by my grandfather. I did not quite know what to do with it, until suddenly it occurred to me that now I could afford a ride on an elevated train. I had always wanted to do that and now I had the means for it.
That morning, instead of setting out on another exploration trip on foot,
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