670
PARTISAN REVIEW
The shoemaker was struck dumb. After a time he managed to
say, "I pay wages in cash, Sobel," and again lapsed into silence.
Though he felt hot with excitement, his mind was cold and clear,
and he had to admit to himself he hap sensed all along that Sobel
felt this way. He had never so much as thought it consciously but he
had felt it and was afraid.
"Miriam knows?" he muttered hoarsely.
"She knows."
"You told her?"
"No."
"Then how does she know?"
"How does she know?" Sobel said, "because she knows. She
knows who I am and what
is
in my heart."
Feld had a sudden insight. In some devious way, with
his
books
and commentary, Sobel had given Miriam to understand that he
loved her. The shoemaker felt a terrible anger at
him
for
his
deceit.
"Sobel, you are crazy," he said bitterly. "She will never marry
a man so old and ugly like you."
Sobel turned red with rage. He cursed the shoemaker, but then,
though he trembled to hold it back,
his
eyes filled with tears and he
broke into long sobs. With
his
back to Feld, he stood at the window,
fists
clenched, and
his
shoulders shook with
his
choked sobbing.
Watching
him,
the shoemaker's anger diminished. His teeth rose
on edge with pity for the man and
his
eyes grew moist. How strange
and sad that a refugee, a grown man, bald and old with
his
miseries,
who had by the skin of his teeth escaped Hitler's incinerators, should
fall in love, when he had got to America, with a girl less than half
his age. Day after day, for five long years he had sat at his bench
cutting and hammering away, waiting for the girl to become a woman,
unable ever to ease
his
heart with speech, knowing no protest but
desperation.
"Ugly I didn't mean," he said half aloud.
Then he realized that what he had called ugly was not Sobel
but Miriam's life if she married him. He felt for his daughter a strange
and gripping sorrow, as
if
she were already Sobel's bride, the wife,
after all, of a shoemaker, and had in her life no more than her
mother. And ,all his dreams for her-why he had slaved and destroyed
