Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury
Local Color

Bateman came on slowly, with dragging feet, his arms and legs and head quivering in a violent palsy. He stared out of the window as he let himself down carefully into the ruined armchair. His first movement proved that he played a venerable, very decrepit man – a man near death from age and ailments; yet by his art he managed to project, through the fleshly and physical weaknesses of the character, a power of dignity, of dominance, and of mental authority. He rolled his head back weakly.

“‘My child,’” he said, addressing a make-believe shape before him, “‘I must help to receive our brave, victorious troops. See! I am fittingly dressed to do them honour.’”

His tones were pitched in the cracked cackle of senility. He paused, as though for an answer out of space. His inflection told as he, in turn, replied that this answer had been a remonstrance:

“‘No, no, no!’” he said almost fiercely. “‘You must not seek to dissuade me.’”

The words stung Verba’s memory, raising a welt of recollection there.

“I’ve got it!” he said exultantly, not forgetting, though, to keep his voice down. “Siege of Berlin, by that French fellow – what’s his name? – Daudet!”

“I remember the story,” answered Offutt.

“I remember the play,” said Verba. “Somebody dramatised it – Lord knows who – and Scudder put it on here as a curtain raiser. I saw it myself, Offutt – think of that! Sitting up yonder in the old peanut roost – a kid no bigger than that kid down there – I saw it. And now I’m seeing it again; seeing Burt Bateman play the part of the old paralytic – you know, the old French officer who was fooled by his doctor and his granddaughter into believing the French had licked the Germans, when all the time ’twas the other way and – ”

“Sh-h!” counselled Offutt.

After another little wait Bateman was going on with his scene:

“‘Listen! Listen!’” he cried, cupping a tremulous palm behind his ear. “‘Do you not hear them far away? – the trumpets – the trumpets of victorious France! Our forces have entered Berlin! Thank God! Thank God! All Paris will celebrate. I must greet them from the balcony.’”

With a mighty effort he reared himself to his feet, straightening his slanted shoulders, erecting his lolled head. His fingers fumbled at button and buttonhole, fastening his coat at the throat. He swung one arm imperiously, warding off imaginary hands.

“‘The trumpets! The trumpets! Hark! They come nearer and nearer! They sound for the victory of France – for a heroic army. I will go! Doctor or no doctor, I pay my homage this day to our glorious army. Stand back, ma chérie!’”

Offutt, fifty feet away, caught himself straining his ears to hear those trumpets too. A rat ran across his foot and Offutt never knew it.

“‘They come! They come! ’” chuckled Bateman.

He dragged himself up stage, mounted the two stairs to the balcony, and stood in the window, at attention, to salute the tri-coloured flag. Nor did he forget to keep his face half turned to the body of the house.

He smiled; and the two unseen spies, staring at that profiled head, saw the joy that was in the smile. Then, in the same moment, the expression changed. Dumb astonishment came first – an unbelieving astonishment; then blank stupefaction; then the shock of horrified understanding; then unutterable rage.

Offutt recalled the tale from which the playlet had been evolved, and Verba, for his part, recalled the playlet; but, had neither known what they knew, the both of them, guided and informed only by the quality of Bateman’s acting, still could have anticipated the climax now impending; and, lacking all prior acquaintance with the plot of it, yet would have read that the cripple, expecting to cheer his beloved French, saw advancing beneath the Arc de Triomphe the heads of the conquering Germans, and heard, above the calling bugles, not the Marseillaise, but the strains of a Teuton marching song. His back literally bristled with his hate. He spun about full face, a mortally stricken man. His clenched fists rose above his head in a command.

“‘To arms! To arms!’” he screamed impotently, with the rattle already in his throat. “‘The Prussians! The Prus – ’”

He choked, tottered down the steps, reeled forward and fell headlong out into the room, rolling in the death spasm behind the draped table; and as, ten seconds later, the curtain began to unroll from above and lengthen down, Offutt found himself saying over and over again, mechanically:

“Why, he’s gone, isn’t he?”

“He kept the table between him and the house and crawled out behind it – trust him not to spoil his picture!” explained Verba. “And trust him to know the tricks of his trade.” He tugged at Offutt’s elbow. “Come on, boy; I’ve seen enough and so have you, I guess. Let’s go sign him.”

He fumbled at the wall.

“Side passageway back to the stage ought to be round here somewhere. Here it is – that’s lucky!”

Guiding himself by the touching of his outstretched hands upon the walls of the opening, Verba felt his way behind the box, with Offutt stumbling along in his rear. So progressing, they came to an iron-sheathed door. Verba lifted its latch and they were in a place of rancid smells and cluttering stage duffel. Roaches fled in front of them. On their left a small wooden door stood partly ajar, and through the cranny they looked, as they passed, into a dressing room, where a pallet of old hangings covered half the floor space, and all manner of dingy stock costumings and stage trappings hung upon hooks.

“Here’s where he must sleep,” said Verba. “What a place for a white man to be living in!”

He felt for his handkerchief to wipe his soiled hands, and then together they saw Bateman advancing toward them from out of the extreme rear of the stage. Over his shoulders was thrown a robe of heavy ragged sacking and upon his face he had hung a long, false beard of white hair. He glared at them angrily. And Offutt, in instantaneous appraisal, interpreted most surely the look out of those staring big grey eyes.

Verba extended his hand and opened his mouth to speak; but Bateman was already speaking.

“What business have you here?” he demanded. “Strangers are not permitted here during performances. How came the stage doorkeeper to admit you? He has been here too long, that doorkeeper, and he grows careless. I shall have him discharged.”

“But, Mr. Bateman,” began Verba, half puzzled, half insistent, “I’m in the business myself. I want to – ”

“Stand aside!” ordered the old man almost violently. “You cannot have been long in the business, young sir, else you would be more mannerly than to interrupt an artist when his public calls for him. Out of my way, please!”

He strutted by them in stilted vanity and gripped the lifting ropes of the old curtain where they swung in the near angle of the wings, and pulled downward on them with an unexpected display of muscular force. The curtain rose; and as Blinky, still at his place, uplifted a little yell of approbation the old man, bending his shoulders, passed out into the centre of the French drawing-room set and, extending a quivering hand, uttered sonorously the command:

“‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!’”

“The mad scene from King Lear,” said Offutt.

“Sure – Shakspere!” agreed Verba. “Old Scudder was a bug on that Bard stuff. So was Bateman. He used to know it from cover to cover – Othello, Hamlet, Lear – the whole string. … Anyhow, Offutt, I’ve found the only man to do the grandfather’s part in that show of yours, haven’t I?”

“I’m sorry to say it, Verba, but you’re wrong,” stated Offutt.

“How do you mean – I’m wrong?” demanded Verba irritably. Out of the corner of his mouth he aimed the protest at his companion; but his eyes, through the gap of the first entrance, were fixed on Bateman as he strode back and forth, and his ears drank in the splendid full-lunged volume and thrill of Bateman’s voice as the player spoke snatches from the play. “He’s not too old – if that’s what you mean; he’s just about old enough. And he’s all there, even if he is old. Didn’t you see the strength he had when he hoisted up that heavy curtain?”

“I think I know where that strength came from,” said Offutt. “Just a minute, Verba – did you ever hear of the Great Auk?”

“He was in vaudeville, wasn’t he?” asked Verba, still staring at Bateman. “A trick juggler or something?”

Offutt forgot to smile.

“The Great Auk was a bird,” he said.

“Oh, I see; and I’ve been calling Bateman Old Bird,” said Verba. “I get you.”

“No, you don’t get me,” went on Offutt. “The Great Auk was a rare creature. It got rarer and rarer until they thought it had vanished. They sent an expedition to the Arctic Circle, or wherever it was the thing bred, to get one specimen for the museums; but they came back without it. And now the Great Auk is an extinct species.”

“What the devil are you driving at?” snapped Verba, swinging on him.

“Listen yonder!” bade the dramatist. “That old man out yonder is telling you, himself, in better words than I could tell you.”

He pointed a finger through the wings. Craning their necks, they heard the deep voice speak the lines:

 
“‘Pray, do not mock me:
I am a very foolish fond old man,
Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less;
And, to deal plainly,
I fear I am not in my perfect mind.’”
 

Verba hearkened and he understood. After a little he nodded in gloomy affirmation of the younger man’s belief.

“I guess you’re right, Offutt,” he said disappointedly. “I guess I’d have seen it, too, only I was so sort of carried away. Real acting does me that way – when I see it, which ain’t often.”

He paused a minute in uncertainty. Then resolution came to him.

“Well,” he said, “come on; there’s no use of our hanging round here any longer. I’ll give Blinky his quarter – he certainly earned it ten times over – and then we’ll go back uptown, and I’ll telephone Grainger he can have his seventy-five more a week.”

“But what are we going to do about – him?” Offutt indicated who he meant with a wave of his arm toward the stage.

It was Verba’s turn. Verba knew the stage and its people and its ways as Offutt would never know them. He had been an actor, Verba had, before he turned managing director for Cohalan & Hymen.

“What are we going to do about him?” he repeated; and then, as though surprised that the other should be asking the question: “Why, nothing! Offutt, every haunted house is entitled to its ghost. This is a haunted house if ever there was one; and there’s its ghost, standing out there. You mentioned an extinct species, didn’t you? Well, you were dead right, son. So take your good-by look now, before we go, at the last of a great breed. There’ll be no more like him, I’m thinking.”

“But we can’t leave him here like this!” said Offutt. “His mind is gone – you admit it yourself. They’ve got hospitals and asylums in this state – and homes too. It would be a mercy to take him with us.”

“Mercy? It would be the dam’dest cruelty on earth!” snapped Verba. “How long do you suppose he’d live in an asylum if we tore him up by the roots and dragged him away from this place? A week? I tell you, a week would be a blamed long time. No, sir; we leave him right here. And we’ll keep our mouths shut about this too. Come on!”

He tiptoed to the iron door and opened it softly. Then, with his hand on the latch, he halted.

Bateman was just finishing. He spoke the mad king’s mad tag-line and got himself off the stage. He unreeled the stay rope from its chock. The curtain rumbled down. Through it the insistent smacking of Blinky’s skinny paws could be heard.

Smiling proudly the old man listened to the sound. He forgot their presence behind him. He stood waiting. Blinky kept on applauding – Blinky was wise in his part too. Then, still smiling, Bateman stripped off his beard, and, putting forth a bony white hand, he plucked aside the flapping curtain and stepped forth once more.

Scrouging up behind him and holding the curtain agape, they saw him bow low to the pit where Blinky was, and to the empty boxes, and to the yawning emptiness of each balcony; and they knew that to him this was not a mangy cavern of dead memories and dead traditions and dead days, peopled only by gnawing rats and crawling vermin and one lone little one-eyed street boy, but a place of living grandeurs and living triumphs. And when he spoke, then they knew he spoke, not to one but to a worshipping, clamorous host.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, with a bearing of splendid conceit, “I thank you for the ovation you have given me. To an artist – to an artist who values his art – such moments as this are most precious – ”

“Come on, Offutt!” whispered Verba huskily. “Leave him taking his call.”

CHAPTER VII
FIRST CORINTHIANSCHAP. XIII., v. 4

Since this must deal in great part with the Finkelstein family and what charity did for them, I began the task by seeking in the pages of an invaluable book called Ten Thousand Familiar Quotations for a line that suitably might serve as the text to my chapter. Delving there I came upon abundant material, all of it more or less appropriate to our present purpose. There were revealed at least a half a dozen extracts from the works of writers of an established standing that might be made to apply. For instance, Wordsworth, an English poet of the Early Victorian Era, that period which gave so much of rhythmic thought to Britain and so much of antirhythmic furniture to us, is credited with having said:

 
The charities that soothe and heal and bless
Are scattered at the feet of man like flowers.
 

Now that passage, at first blush, appeared exactly to fit the Finkelsteins. Most certainly charities were scattered at their feet and likewise showered on their heads.

However, before making a definite choice, I went deeper into this handy volume. As a result, I exhumed an expression attributed to Pope – not one of the Roman Popes, but Pope, Alex. (b. 1688; d. 1744) – to the effect that

 
In faith and hope the world will disagree,
But all mankind’s concern is charity.
 

That statement likewise proved in a measure applicable. To the Finkelsteins it must have seemed that all mankind’s concern was charity, devised for their especial benefit.

Now Hood takes an opposite view. In that choppy style of versification so characteristic of this writer, Hood is discovered saying:

 
Alas for the rarity
Of Christian charity
Under the sun!
 

Speaking with particular reference to the case in hand I must respectfully but nevertheless firmly take issue with the late Hood. Assuredly the components of this particular household group had no cause to cavil concerning the rarity of Christian charity. Christian charity went miles out of its way to lavish rich treasures from a full heart upon them. Under the sun, too, under the rays of an ardent and a scorching sun, was some of it bestowed. But of that phase, more – as the fancy writers say – anon.

The Scriptures were found to abound in reference to this most precious of the human virtues. What does Peter say? Peter – First Epistle, fourth chapter and eighth verse – says: “Charity shall cover the multitude of sins.” Here, too, a point might be stretched without giving offence to any interested party. I cannot deny there were a multitude of Finkelsteins. That, there is no gainsaying.

Elsewhere in the Good Book it is set forth: “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal; … and” – furthermore – “though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.”

One of the most significant recollections of at least two members of the Finkelstein family in their experiences with the manifestations of charity was associated with mountains. And was not the occasion of the outing of the Evening Dispatch’s Fresh Air Fund made glad by the presence and the activities of Prof. Washington Carter’s All-Coloured Silver Cornet Band? If ever you heard this organisation you would know that, when it came to sounding brass and cymbals which tinkled when not engaged in clashing, no band had anything whatsoever on Prof. Washington Carter’s.

But it was hard by, in the Testaments, that I happened on the one verse which seemed best to sum up the situation in its more general aspects; and notably the first three words of the said verse. The text has been chosen, therefore, after much consideration of the subject and its merits.

To proceed: In Pike Street, approximately midway of a block that enjoys the dubious distinction of being a part of the most congested district of the globe, up four flights of stairs and thence back to the extreme rear, the Finkelstein family, at the time of its discovery, resided. There were many of them and their lot was very lowly. To begin at the top, there was Papa Finkelstein, a man bearded and small, shrinking, unobtrusive and diffident; fashioned with sloping shoulders and an indented chest as though in his extreme youth, when his bones were supple and yielding, a partly successful effort had been made to crowd him, head first, into a narrow-mouthed jar. His back was bent, for he was of the race that for more than nineteen centuries has borne, palfrey-like, upon its patient spines the persecutions of the world.

Next in order came Mamma Finkelstein, hiding her dark head beneath a wig of slick brown horsehair in accordance with the same ritual which ordained that her husband should touch not the corners of his beard. To attend to the business of multiplying and replenishing the earth with Finkelsteins was her chief mission in life. From the family stepladder of these two no rungs were missing. Indeed, about a third of the way down there was a double rung – to wit, twins. The married life of the pair extended over a period of less than eleven years and already there were eight little Finkelsteins, ranging from little to littler to littlest.

Papa Finkelstein was by profession an old-clo’ man. It was his custom to go into the favoured sections where people laid aside their weathered habiliments instead of continuing to wear them, and there watching on street corners to waylay pedestrians of an ample and prosperous aspect, and to inquire of them in his timid and twisted English, whether they had any old clothes to sell. A prospective seller being by this method interested, Papa Finkelstein would accompany the other to his apartment – follow him, rather – and when discarded garments had been fetched forth from closets and piled in a heap upon the floor he would gaze deprecatingly at the accumulation and then, with the air of one who courts ruin by his excessive generosity, tender one dollar and thirty-five cents for the entire lot.

So far so good, this course being in perfect accord with the ethics of the old-clo’ business. But if, as most generally, the owner of the raiment indignantly declined the first offer Papa Finkelstein was at a loss to proceed with the negotiations. The chaffering; the bargaining; the raising of the amount in ten-cent advances, each advance accompanied by agonised outcry; the pretended departure; the reluctant return from the door; the protest; the entreaty; the final gesture, betokening abject and complete surrender, with which the buyer came up to two dollars and fifteen cents – all this, so agreeable to the nature of the born old-clo’ man, was quite beyond him. Oftener than not, the trading ended in no trade.

Or if a bargain was arrived at, if he bore away his bundled purchases to the old-clothes mart on Bayard Street, just off the Bowery, where daily the specialist in sick hats, let us say, swaps decrepit odd trousers and enfeebled dress waistcoats for wares more suitable to his needs, still he tempted bankruptcy. Sharper wits than his, by sheer weight of dominance, bore him down and trafficked him, as the saying goes, out of his eyeteeth. He could have taken over a tannery and run it into a shoestring in no time at all. Many a day was there when he returned home at eventide with nothing to show for his day’s industry except lamentable memories and two tired flat feet.

Lacking the commercial instinct, he was a failure in trade; lacking, too, the artistic, neither would he have made headway with his coreligionists as a professional Schnorrer. By persistent and devoutful attendance upon synagogue services, by the constant exhibition of his poverty in public places, he might have enlisted the sympathies of the benevolent among his fellow worshippers. But he was a dilettante in the practice of piety, even as in the practice of the old-clo’ business. Except as the head of a family, he was what this world is pleased to call a failure.

From all this I would not have you jump at the conclusion that Papa and Mamma Finkelstein and their steadily accruing progeny constituted an unhappy group. Mere precarious existence and the companionship of one another spelled for them contentment. The swarming East Side satisfied them as an abiding place. To the adults it was a better home by far than the drear, dreadful land of pogroms and Black Hundreds from which they had fled; to the younger ones it was the only home they had ever known. They were used to its tormented sky lines, faced in on either side by tall tenements and blocked across by the structures of elevated roads and the stone loops of viaducts; they were used to its secondhand sunshine that filtered down to them through girders and spans. To them the high arch of the Bridge approach was an acceptable substitute for the rainbow; their idea of the profusion of Nature was a tiny square, containing many green benches, a circular band stand, and here and there a spindling tree.

Having nothing they craved for nothing. When there was food they ate thereof; kosher food preferably, though the food of the Goyim was not despised. When there was none they went without, feeding on the thought of past feasts and the hope of future ones. Being without knowledge of the commoner rule of hygiene, their days were neither enhanced by its advantages nor disturbed by its observances.

With the coming of the winter Mamma Finkelstein sewed up her offspring, all and sundry, in their heavy undergarments. Only one consideration ever interposed to prevent her from so doing – the occasional absence of any heavy undergarments in which to sew them up. To the pores, which always ye have with ye, she gave no heed. An interrupted duct more or less meant nothing to her, she being serenely unaware of the existence of such things as ducts, anyhow. In the springtime she cut the stitches and removed the garments, or such portions of them as had not been taken up by natural process of absorption, finding her young, as now newly revealed, to be pinkish, though soiled as to their skins, and in every regard hale, hearty and wholesome.

Thus abided the Finkelsteins in their dire and happy extremity at the time of their discovery. The manner of their being discovered came about as follows:

Christmastide impended. The spirit of it was every where reflected: in the price tags; in the swollen ankles and aching insteps of shop girls on their feet behind counters twelve to fifteen hours a day; in the harassed countenances and despairing eyes of shoppers; in the heaving sides and drooping heads of wearied delivery-wagon teams; in the thoughts of the children of the rich, dissatisfied because there was nothing Santa Claus could bring them they didn’t already have; in the thoughts of the children of the poor, happy as they pressed their cold little noses against the plate-glass fronts of toy shop windows and made discriminating selection of the treasures which they would like for Santa to bring them, but knowing at the same time he couldn’t because of his previous engagements among the best families.

This all-pervading spirit penetrated even into the newspaper offices, borne thither upon the flapping wings of the full-page display advertisements of our leading retail establishments. One of the papers – the Morning Advocate– compiled a symposium of paragraphed miseries under the title of the One Hundred Most Deserving Cases of Charity, and on the Monday before Christmas printed it with a view to enlisting the aid of the kindly disposed. The list was culled largely from the files of various philanthropic organisations. But it so befell that a reporter, who had been detailed on these assignments, was passing through Pike Street on his way back to the office from one of the settlement houses when he encountered Papa Finkelstein, homeward bound after a particularly disappointing business day uptown.

The reporter was impressed much by the despondent droop of the little man’s sloping shoulders and by the melancholy smoulder in his big, dark eyes; but more was he impressed by the costume of Papa Finkelstein. It was a part of Papa Finkelstein’s burden of affliction that he customarily wore winter clothes in the summertime and summer clothes in the wintertime. On this gusty, raw December day he wore somebody’s summer suit – a much larger somebody evidently – and a suit that in its youth had been of light-coloured, lightweight flannel. It was still lightweight.

Infolded within its voluminous breadths the present wearer shivered visibly and drew his chilled hands farther up into its flapping sleeve ends until he resembled the doubly mutilated victim of a planing-mill mishap. If his expression was woebegone, his shoe soles were more – they practically were all-begone. A battered derby hat – size about seven and five-eighths – threatened total extinguishment of his face, being prevented from doing so only by the circumstance of its brim resting and pressing upon the upper flanges of the owner’s ears. They were ears providentially designed for such employment. Broad, wide and droopy, they stood out from the sides of Papa Finkelstein’s head like the horns of the caribou.

This reporter was a good reporter. He knew a human-interest story when he met it walking in the road. He turned about and tagged Papa Finkelstein to his domicile and there, after briefly inspecting the Finkelstein household in all its wealth of picturesque destitution, he secured the names and the address from the head of it, who perhaps gave the desired information all the more readily because he had not the slightest idea of what use this inquiring stranger wished to make of it.

Half an hour later the reporter was saying to the irritable functionary in charge of the Advocate’s news desk:

“Oh, so-so; just fair to middling, most of them; about the usual run of shad. But, say, I’ve got one bird of a case. I dug it up myself – it’s not down on any of the records I got from the charity people. When it comes to being plumb down and out none of them has anything on the meek and lowly Finkelsteins.”

“Good!” said the news editor. “You might lead with it if you want to. No, I guess you’d better run ’em alphabetically – it won’t do to be playing favourites.”

Mark now, how a little flame may kindle a large blaze: The afternoon half sister of the Morning Advocate was the Evening Dispatch. Between the two papers, owned as they were by the same gentleman and issued from the same printshop, a bitter rivalry prevailed; it generally does in such instances.

On Tuesday morning the city editor of the Evening Dispatch ran an agile and practiced eye through the story the Advocate had printed. With his shears he chopped out the first column of it. With his pencil he ringed one paragraph in the scissored section and then he lifted his voice and called to him a young woman professionally known as Betty Gwin, who sat in the city room at a desk somewhat withdrawn from copy readers, rewriters and leg men. This distinction of comparative aloofness was hers by right, she being a special-feature writer, under yearly contract, and, therefore, belonging to the aristocracy of the craft.

After the custom of her sex Miss Betty Gwin – whose real name, I may state, in confidence, was Ferguson – first put a hand up to be sure that her hair was quite right and then put it behind her to be sure her belt made proper connection with her skirt at the back; and then she answered her superior’s call. Answering it, all about her betokened confidence and competence. And why shouldn’t it? As a pen-smith this young person acknowledged no superiors anywhere. Her troupe of trained performing adjectives was admitted to be the smartest in town. Moreover, she was artistically ambidextrous. Having written a story she would illustrate it with her own hand. Her drawings were replete with lithesome curves; so, too, was her literary style. None but a Betty Gwin could write what she wrote; none but a Betty Gwin properly illustrate it afterward.

“Fergy,” said the city editor, “here’s a beaut for you – right in your line. Full of that heart-throb junk nine ways from the jack. Those idiots upstairs gave it ten lines when it was worth six sticks all by itself – buried it when they should have played it up. You run down to this number and get a good, gummy, pathetic yarn. We’ll play it up for to-morrow, with a strong picture layout and a three-col. head. Might call it: ‘What Christmas Means for the Whatyoumaycall’em Family and What Christmas Might Mean for Them!’ Get me?”

He passed over the clipping. In a glance his star comprehended the pencilled passage.

“Judging from the name and the neighbourhood Christmas wouldn’t excite this family much, anyhow,” she said.

“What do you care?” said her chief crisply. “There’s a story there – go get it!”

Doubtlessly the Christmas spirit got into Betty Gwin’s typewriter keys. Certainly it got into her inkpot and deposited the real essence of the real sob stuff there. The story she wrote trickled pathos from every balanced paragraph; there was pity in the periods and sentiment in the semicolons. As for the exclamation-points, they simply were elongated tear drops. It was one of the best stories Betty Gwin ever wrote. She said so herself – openly. But the picture that went with the story was absolutely diademic; it crowned figures of speech with tiaras of the graphic art. It showed Mamma Finkelstein seated on an upended box, which once had contained pickled herrings, surrounded by the eight little Finkelsteins. The children looked like ragged cherubs.