“Liked what?”

“It.  The—­the stuff from the Chinese laundry.  Even after the Juvenile Court, when you thought it was all over after the whipping that night.  He’d snuff it up.  I found him twice on his bed after school.  All druggy-like—­half sleeping and half laughing.  The gang at school he was in with—­learned him—­”

“You mean—?”

“It ain’t so easy to undo with a day in Juvenile Court such a habit like that.  You thought the court was the finish.  My fight just began then!”

“Why, Sara!”

“You remember the time he broke his kneecap and how I fighted the doctors against the hypodermic and you got so mad because I wouldn’t let him have it to ease the pain.  I knew why it was better he should suffer than have it. I knew! It was a long fight I had with him alone, Mosher.  He liked that—­stuff.”

“That—­don’t—­seem possible.”

“And that wasn’t the only lead-pipe case that time, neither, Mosher.  Twice I had to lay out of my own pocket so you wouldn’t know, and talk to him ’til sometimes I thought I didn’t have any more tears left inside of me.  Between you and your business worries that year of the garment-workers’ strike—­and our boy—­I—­after all that I haven’t got the strength left.  Now that he’s come out of it big, I can’t begin over again.  I haven’t got what he would call the second wind for it.  If anything should keep him now from going straight ahead to make him count as a citizen, I wouldn’t have the strength left to fight it, Mosher.  Wouldn’t!”

And so Sara Turkletaub lay back with the ripple writing of stormy high tides crawling out in wrinkles all over her face and her head, that he had never seen low, wilting there against his breast.

He could not be done with soothing her, his own face suddenly as puckered as an old shoe, his chin like the toe curling up.

“Mamma, Mamma, I didn’t know!  God knows I never dreamt—­”

“I know you didn’t, Mosher.  I ain’t mad.  I’m only tired.  I ’ain’t got the struggle left in me.  This feeling won’t last in me, I’ll be all right, but I’m tired, Mosher—­so tired.”

“My poor Sara!”

“And frightened.  Such a blonde in a red hat.  Cabarets.  Taxicabs.  Night after night.  Mosher, hold me.  I’m frightened.”

Cheek to cheek in their dining room of too-carved oak, twin shadow-boxed paintings of Fruit and Fish, the cut-glass punch bowl with the hooked-on cups, the cotton palm, casually rigid velour drapes, the elusive floor bell, they huddled, these two, whose eyes were branded with the scars of what they had looked upon, and a slow, a vast anger began to rise in Mosher, as if the blood in his throat were choking him, and a surge of it, almost purple, rose out of his collar and stained his face.

“Loafer!  Low-life!  No-’count!  His whole body ain’t worth so much as your little finger.  I’ll learn him to be a worry to you with this all-night business.  By God!  I’ll learn my loafer of a son to—­”