HOTEL BARSTOW
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hot forehead with their cold white fingers. When she told them that
her sickness had been brought on by a ruffian's spitefulness, they
exchanged a glance and, smiling benignly down on her, they said
perhaps God would call her to a convent.
All the officers were angry with Shura when she was· well and
went back to work, and as she served their dinners, they twisted her
arms or dug their nails into her hands or stepped on her feet, and
she was afraid to cry out lest she be discharged if the master learned
how much
his
clients hated her. Once, as she was going home to her
room a few streets away, a soldier followed and pushed her under the
wheels of a cab; she was not hurt badly, but her face was cut and
her whole body was one great bruise.
In her seventeenth year, she had saved enough money out of her
tips and wages to set forth into the world. It was on the boat which
brought .her to America that she met my father. A week after they
disembarked they were married. How great had been her hopes the
day she left Moscow!
1
Her fellow waitresses, clinging to her, sobbing
with envy, had sworn that she would be rich. Disentangling herself
and mounting the steps to the train she laughed and called to them
over her shoulder, "Your turn will come. Come to a picnic on my
island, my dears!" And how close to fulfillment had seemed those
hopes when the fair-haired German boy, tall, well-dressed, smelling
of expensive cologne, had promised her that fine house, that immense
wardrobe, those journeys to Paris and to Shanghai and to the Panama
Canal. Each night, as the old boat rocked and groaned through stormy
water, he shouted his promises over the racket of the wind and the
protesting timbers.
"What do I have?" she groaned. "Nothing. No dresses, nothing
but slops to eat. Ah, Hermann Marburg, I hate you from the bottom
of my soul!"
My father, now that the long, sad tale was done, had had
enough. He laughed at her, and that laugh, made up of all the scorn
of devils and all the resentment of the damned, made me half sick
to death with fright and I was glad for the darkness so that I could
not see
his
genial face askew and scarlet, for the sound could not help
corrupting what it issued from.
"Hush!" said my mother. "You'll wake up Sonia."
But he only laughed the harder, gasping and choking as though
this glee were a convulsion beyond his control. Then, quieted, in a
solemn, even voice, he said, "The child should never have been born."
His words concluded the scene. Worn out, they went to sleep.
Over and over, until my eyes closed, I imagined the day on which
