Читать книгу A Child is Born - Charles Yale Harrison - Страница 4

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Red Hook. Saturday night. The slums are celebrating. Fumes of cheap Geneva gin deadening the slow-eating worm of poverty. Brawls. Drunken laughter of slum women.

A bedroom in a tenement house on Walker Street.

A woman lies awake beside her sleeping husband. It is a warm night and he sprawls diagonally across the bed crowding her close to the wall. He sleeps in his underwear which wrinkles at the elbows and knees so that he appears to be grotesquely formed.

The soiled bedclothes are pushed back.

A coarse nightdress covers the woman’s body which is big with child in the seventh month. She lies with her face to the white wall thinking.

She thinks of the man beside her, of the nearly-formed child within her, of the street noises which pour in through the open window, of her other children, two girls, who sleep together in the next room.

She lies thinking poverty-thoughts.

She passes her hand over her tightly-rounded body. Under her lower ribs she feels a slight stirring.

Another little one kicking its way into the world. Well, she would have no illusions about this one as when the other two were born.

Now she remembers the first time she felt that strange kicking within her. What thoughts! What plans! In this very room, too. What had become of the thoughts, the plans?

Under her left ribs the little embryonic foot shoots out and gives her body a tiny jerk. A little sickening the first time you felt it and yet a little pleasant.

Here she is, Margaret Smith—she smiles at her error. Of course, she was Mrs. Roberts now. Funny how at times she kept thinking of herself by her maiden name....

Up against her ribs—kick, kick....

She is a woman of about thirty years, with gray, sallow skin and iron-gray hair over her temples as though a little of the metallic quality of life had entered into her and had colored her face and hair.

Before she had met the man who now sleeps by her side she had worked in a bag factory and somehow or other after the manner in which these things happen she met him at a ball given by his union. He was a little drunk at the time and his black serious eyes sparkled as he whirled his partner around the room, or stood near the refreshment bar. When the dance was over they walked by the side of the smelly Gowanus Canal and he asked her to marry him. She thought he was joking.

But he wasn’t. The next night he called at her boarding house. She was nervous as she met him in the hallway and tremblingly led him into the parlor where the boarders took their “men friends.”

Although his back was turned to her now, as she lies thinking these thoughts she can see his face as it appeared to her that night in the boarding house—a hard face, long, with creases in it, unsmiling.

After the first baby, Miriam, came he stopped drinking because they couldn’t afford it and this sacrifice he charged to his wife.

“See,” he seemed to say, “see, I do not drink liquor although I like it, but I give it up because I have a child to support. I am that kind of a man....”

Kick, kick, go the feet up against her ribs, impatient feet kicking a way into Red Hook, feet which will swim in the Canal nearby. In the street outside the tawdry revelers seem to be celebrating the youngster’s impatience.

“Come on into the world, young mister Roberts,” their drunken shouts seem to say, “come on, there’s plenty of room for another in Red Hook.”

She knows it will be a boy for the young doctor at the clinic told her so. He said he could tell by the way it lay, and the size of the head. Kick, kick. Another mouth to feed, a red-ugly-little-thing that will need stockings and diapers.

The bed jerks with the movements of the unborn child. The figure in gray underwear stirs by the woman’s side. The long, wooden face grimaces in waking. Edward Roberts opens his eyes and looks in a startled manner at his wife:

“What’s that—what’s that ... ?”

A drunken pair sing in the street, under the window.

“It’s him,” she replies. She places her hand over her stomach. “Him!”

“Oh—him!” the husband says. “He shook the bed. He kicks like a pony, don’t he? The little son-of-a-gun ... ain’t he, now?” He smiles in his drowsiness.

He closes his eyes and rolls over.

Margaret Roberts turns and faces the white wall.