Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury
Local Color

For the moment the scene must shift to Pike Street. The time is half an hour later. Partly by words, partly by wide-armed gesticulations, Papa Finkelstein explained his position in the matter, if not his private reasons.

“Is that so?” said the footman, whose name was Cassidy – Maurice J. Cassidy. He fixed a strong hand grippingly in the back of Papa Finkelstein’s collar. “Well, you listen to me, young fella! Wan way or another you’re goin’ – wit’ me, nice and peaceable or in an ambylance. You can make your own choice.”

The words possibly were confusing to the alien understanding, but the large knobby fist, which swayed to and fro an inch or so below the tip of the captive’s nose, spoke in a language that is understood of all men. Papa Finkelstein saw his way clear to accompanying Footman Cassidy. Aboard the street car, on the way uptown, several of his fellow passengers decided he must be a thief who had been caught red-handed, and said it served him right.

Arriving, he was ushered – perhaps I should say propelled – into the presence of Mrs. F. Fodderwood Bass. She greeted his appearance coosomely. Or is cooingly the right word? At any rate, she cooed her approval; she cooed beautifully, anyhow. With open pride she directed the attention of certain of her associate patronesses to the little huddled shape of Cassidy’s prisoner.

“Ah, there he is!” she said. “My Pet Charity! So improvident, so shiftless; but isn’t he just too picturesque!”

Levelling their lorgnettes on him, her friends agreed in chorus that he was very picturesque. They wondered, though, why he wriggled so.

“The dearest, gentlest little man!” continued Mrs. F. Fodderwood Bass in clear, sweet tones. “So diffident, but so grateful for everything – the poor, tattered dear! He never says a word to me when I talk to him; but by the look in his eyes I can tell he is fairly worshipping the ground I walk on.”

As if to prove the truth of what she said Papa Finkelstein’s gaze even now was directed upon the floor at her feet.

“Now, Cassidy,” went on his mistress, “you take him into one of the dressing rooms yonder and have him undress. It’s too bad nearly everything has been picked over; but we shall find something for him, I’m sure.”

Within a curtained recess Cassidy explained his meaning with threatening mien.

“Take off thim rags!” he commanded.

Rags they may have been, but Papa Finkelstein cherished them. Reluctantly he parted with them, filled with the melancholy conviction that he should see them never more. It was a true foreboding. But that was not the worst of it. Papa Finkelstein was in figure slight and of a contour difficult to drape garments upon. Moreover, it was as his benefactor had said – everything had been picked over so. Nevertheless, a selection agreeable to the lady’s ideals was finally made.

Fifteen minutes passed. At the end of those fifteen minutes Papa Finkelstein, under the menacing urgings of Footman Cassidy, made a diffident but spectacular reappearance before the Bundle Day audience. His head was bent apologetically low, so that his whiskers, spraying upon his bosom, helped to cover him. His two hands were spread flat upon his chest, hiding still more of his abashed shape. Nevertheless, it might be discerned that Papa Finkelstein wore the abandoned cream-coloured whipcords of somebody’s chauffeur – very abandoned and very cream-coloured, the whole constituting a livery, complete, from the visored cap upon his head to the leather puttees reefed about his bowed shanks.

“Now just look at him!” cried Mrs. F. Fodderwood Bass in an ecstasy. “How neat! How trim! How cosy!”

Papa Finkelstein didn’t want to be neat. He abhorred cosiness; likewise trimness. Moreover he shrunk mentally from the prospect of his homeward journey, foreseeing difficulties. There again was his intuition prophetically justified.

At the corner of Hester Street and the Bowery a skylarking group beheld him and greeted him with cries of an almost incredulous joy. By force they detained the little man, making mock of him in English and in Yiddish. The English passed over his head, but into his soul the Yiddish bit deep, leaving scars. He wrested himself free and fled to his home. His arrival there made a profound impression on Mamma Finkelstein – after she recognised him. So did his language.

Only the absolute necessity of gleaning rent money from the realms of trade drove him forth two days later from the comparative sanctuary of the inner room of his domicile. In the spirit he suffered, and in the flesh as well. Citizens en route to the Subway, on being hailed with inquiries touching on old clothes, from an undersized pedestrian attired as a chauffeur, in reduced circumstances, who had neglected to shave for a long time past, did not halt to listen. They halted to laugh and to gibe and to gird with derision. Until Papa Finkelstein had effected a trade with a compassionate but thrifty compatriot, with an utter disregard for intrinsic values exchanging what he wore for whatsoever the other might give, just so it sufficiently covered him, he felt himself to be a hissing and a byword in the highways – which he was.

And now into the tangling skeins of the Finkelstein family’s life in their relation to the charitable impulses enlisted upon their behalf – but without their consent or their approval – it is fitting to reintroduce Miss Betty Gwin. Springtime came and passed, its passage dappled for all the Finkelsteins with memory spots attesting the more or less intermittent attentions of Mrs. F. Fodderwood Bass, and the more or less constant ministrations of Miss Godiva Sleybells.

Summer came; and with the initial weeks of summer came also the time for the first of the series of annual outings conducted under the auspices of the Evening Dispatch’s Fresh Air Fund for the Children of the Poor. Yearly it was the habit of this enterprising sheet to give excursions to the beach, employing therefor a chartered steamboat and the contributions of the public.

The public mainly put up the money; the owner of the Evening Dispatch, Mr. Jason Q. Welldover, principally took the credit, for thereby, on flaunting banners and by word of speech, was his name and his fame made glorious throughout the land. As repeatedly pointed out in the editorial columns of his journal, the Little Ones of the slums were enabled, through the Generosity of This Paper, to breathe in the Life-giving Ozone of kindly Mother Ocean; to Play upon the sands; to Disport themselves in the very Lap Of Nature; returning home at eventide Rejuvenated and Happy – the phraseology and the capitalisation alike being direct quotations from the Evening Dispatch.

Since Miss Betty Gwin was on the staff of the Evening Dispatch, it was quite natural that she should take a personal pride as well as a professional interest in the success of the opening outing of the season. As suitable candidates for admission to its dragooned passenger list she thought of Miriam Finkelstein and Solly Finkelstein. She pledged herself to see that these two were included in the party. Nor did she forget it. Upon the morning of the appointed date she went personally to Pike Street, assumed custodianship of the favoured pair and, her own self, escorted them to the designated place of assemblage and transferred them into the keeping of Mr. Moe Blotch.

Mr. Blotch belonged in the Evening Dispatch’s Circulation Department. Against his will he had been drafted for service in connection with the Fresh Air Fund’s excursion. He was a rounded, heavy-set person, with the makings of a misanthrope in him. That day completed the job; after that he was a made and finished misanthrope.

While murder blazed in his eyes and kind words poured with malevolent bitterness from his lips, Mr. Blotch marshalled his small charges, to the number of several hundred, in a double file. To each he gave a small American flag, warning each, on peril of mutilation and death, to wave that flag and keep on waving it until further orders. Up at the head of the column, Prof. Washington Carter’s All-Coloured Silver Cornet Band struck up a clamorous march tune and the procession started, winding its way out of the familiar Lower East Side, across the tip of Manhattan Island, to the verge of the strange Lower West Side.

Well up in the line, side by side, marched Miriam and Solly, the twain whose fortunes we are following. Possibly from stress of joyous anticipation they shivered constantly. However, it was a damp and cloudy day, and, for early June, very raw. Even Mr. Moe Blotch, muffled as he was in a light overcoat, shivered.

The route of march led past the downtown offices of the Evening Dispatch, where, in a front window, the proprietor, Mr. Jason Q. Welldover, waited to review the parade. According to his instructions from a higher authority, Mr. Blotch now gave the signal for an outburst of appreciative cheering from the small marchers. Obeying the command, they lifted up their voices; but, doubtlessly through stage fright or lack of chorus drilling, the demonstration, considered for vocal volume, was not altogether a success. It was plaintive rather than enthusiastic. It resembled the pipings of despondent sandpipers upon a distant lea. Standing in the window, Mr. Welldover acknowledged the tribute by bowing, he then holding the pose until his staff photographers had caught him – once, twice, three times.

Half a mile more of trudging brought the little travellers to a dock above the Battery. Alongside the dock lay a steamboat so swathed in bunting and bannered inscriptions as to present the appearance of being surgically bandaged following a succession of major operations. The smokestack suggested a newly broken leg, enveloped in first-aid wrappings. The walking beam rose above a red-and-white-and-blue mass, like a sprained wrist escaping from its sling. The boiler deck was trussed from end to end; and everywhere recurred, in strikingly large letters, the names of Mr. Jason Q. Welldover and the Evening Dispatch.

Without loss of time, Mr. Blotch drove his excursionists aboard; and soon then, to the strains of martial music, the swaddled craft was moving gayly down the river. Or, anyhow, she moved as gayly as was possible, seeing that the river was of a rumpled, grayish aspect, abounding in large waves, and each wave flounced with a ruffle of dirty-white foam; and seeing, further, that an exceedingly keen wind blew dead against her, searching out the remotest and most sheltered recesses of her decks. Mr. Blotch remained in the engine room throughout the journey.

But all pleasant things must have an end; and eventually, although to some aboard it seemed even longer than that, the steamer reached Coney. Somewhere on this globe there may be a more dispiriting, more dismal spot than Coney is on a wet and cloudy day in the early part of June. I have heard Antarctic explorers speak with feeling of the sense of desolation inspired by contemplation of the scenery closely adjacent to the South Pole; but, never having been at or near the South Pole, I am still pledged to Coney Island.

A hot dog merchant there, hearing the strains of music and beholding the approach of a multitude, lit his fires and laid specimens of his wares upon the grid to brown and sizzle. A closer view of the massed crowd, advancing toward him from the pier, disillusioned him. As a regular subscriber to the Evening Dispatch he knew that these oncoming hosts were not to be considered, even remotely, as prospective patrons. For had it not been written and repeatedly written that they were to be regaled, ABSOLUTELY WITHOUT EXPENSE, at Stanchheimer’s Chowder Pavilion? Verily it had been so written. Uttering fluent maledictions in his sonorous native Greek, the hot dog man went inside his booth, pulled down the shades and turned off the gas.

On a wide and windswept shore, where pallid sands ran down to pallid sea, and sea in turn ran out and out to mingle, under shrouding fog banks, with lowering skies, the small Fresh-Air funders were turned loose and sternly ordered to enjoy themselves. Perversely, they persisted in huddling in close, tight clusters, as though drawn together by a gravitation of common discomfort. Their conductor was not to be thwarted. He had a duty to perform – a duty to them and to his employer – and scrupulously he meant to obey it if it cost forty lives. From group to group Mr. Moe Blotch ran, yanking its members out into the cheerless open.

“Play, consarn you! Play!” he blared at them. “Laugh and sing and dig in the sands! Breathe in the life-giving ozone or I’ll break every bone in your bodies!”

Little Miriam found herself alone and lonesome in the shadow of a depressingly pale-yellow dune. She thought of the warm and comfortable tenement hallway, crowded as it would be with gossiping little deputy mothers and crawling, babbling babies. She thought of the shifting panorama of Pike Street’s sidewalk life, spectacular and thrilling. She thought of her own two special charges – Izzy and Izzy – deprived now of their customary guardianship and no doubt pining for it.

These poignant memories overcame her. She lifted her face to the unresponsive vault of heaven, and she wept. Once she was at it, there was no false restraint in her weeping; she bemoaned her lot shrilly, copiously and damply. Moisture streamed from her eyes, her mouth, her nose. In her rendition there was a certain aquatic wholeheartedness that would have interested and startled a student of natural hydraulics. Practically this child had riparian rights.

To her side came running Solly, her brother, likewise weeping. His antlerlike ears, undefended and, as it were, defiantly outbranching to the edged breezes, were now two chilled disks, shot through their more membranous surfaces with bluish, pinkish, greenish tones, like mother-of-pearl. His nose, from tip to base, was one frigid and painful curve. And, to top all, Solly, venturing too near the beach edge, had been surprised by a quick, large wave. From his waist down he dripped sea water. His fortitude succumbed before this final misfortune. He mingled his tears with Miriam’s, substantially doubling the output.

Their sorrow might have touched a heart of stone; but Mr. Blotch, embarking on this mission of pleasure, had left his heart behind him, foreseeing that its presence might be inconvenient to a proper discharge of his philanthropic obligations. He charged down upon them, separated their entwined arms and, with terrible threats, required them to play and dig in the sand.

So they played and they dug in the sand. Choking back their sobs and burying their little, cold fingers in the cold, gritty sand, they played and dug through the long forenoon until dinnertime; and after dinner they dug and played some more, until the hour for departure arrived, cutting short all their blithesome misery.

Beyond question, Solly next day would have developed pneumonia, except that pneumonia was far too troublesome a luxury for any of the Finkelstein family to be having. Besides, at this juncture the weather providentially turned off to be warm and seasonable, and, scouting in East Broadway, he happened upon a large, empty crockery crate, which seemed to lack a friend. He up-ended it, crawled inside it and made off with it; and so completely hidden was he within its capsized depths that one observing the spectacle might have been excused for assuming that a crockery crate was out for a walk on its own account. In the joys of perilous adventures and treasure-findings Solly conquered his symptoms and forgot to fall ill.

The weather continued to be warm and warmer. By mid-July it was so warm that the interior of the tenements became insufferable, and the dwellers slept of nights on fire escapes and in doorways, and even in the little squares and out on the pavement gratings, stretched – whole rows of them – upon pallets and quilts. The hot spell afforded Miss Godiva Sleybells an opportunity to do something that was really worth while for the two older of the eight younger Finkelsteins. She came one simmering day and told them the splendid news. They were to have a week – a whole week – on a farm up in the Catskills.

With memories of Coney still vivid in their young brains, Miriam and Solly inwardly quailed at the prospect; but they went. There was nothing else for them to do; the determined dragoness in the double-lensed spectacles, who managed their mother and condemned them at intervals to trials by soap and water, had so ordained it.

I wish I might say the two children were wrong in their forebodings; I wish I might paint their week in the Catskills as a climactic success. Perhaps from Miss Godiva Sleybells’ viewpoint it was a success; but, remember, I am concerned with detailing not her impressions so much as the impressions of these small wards of hers.

Remember, too, that in saying what I must, as a truthful historian, say, I mean not to reflect upon the common aims or the general results of that splendid charity which each year sends thousands of poor children to the country, there for a spell to breathe in a better air than ever they have breathed, and to eat of better fare than ever they have eaten. In this instance I am afraid the trouble was that the city had trapped the small Finkelsteins too early. If they had not been born in its stone-and-steel cage, at any rate they could not remember a time when they had not lived in it. They were like birds, which, being freed, cannot use their wings because they have never used them, but only flutter about distractedly, seeking to return to the old confines within the bars of the prison and the familiar perches of its constricted bounds. Distance – free, limitless and far-extending – daunts those other birdlings as it daunted these two small human ones. It was so strange an experience to them to be thrust into the real out-of-doors. And to most of us whatever is strange is uncomfortable – until we get accustomed to it.

The journey mountainward frightened the small pair. They had never been on a train before. As they clung to each other, cowering low in their seat every time the locomotive hooted, they resolved that willingly they would never be on one again. Upon reaching their destination they were required to sleep in separate beds, which was an experience so very different from the agreeable and neighbourly congestion of sleeping four or five to a bed, as at home. Next morning they were given for breakfast country eggs and country milk – the one fresh-laid by the hen; the other fresh-drawn from the udder.

For Miriam and Solly it proved a most unsatisfactory meal. This milk came from a cow, whereas the milk they knew came from a milkman. It was so yellow, so annoyingly thick, so utterly lacking in the clear blue, almost translucent, aspect of East Side milk! The Catskill egg likewise proved disappointing. After the infrequent Pike Street egg, with its staunchness and pungency of flavour, it seemed but a weak, spiritless, flat-tasting thing.

When breakfast was over they went forth upon kindly compulsion from the farmhouse kitchen and, barefooted, were turned loose on a grassy mead. At once all Nature appeared in a conspiracy against them. The wide reaches of space disturbed them, whose horizon always had been fenced in with tall, close-racked buildings. The very earth was a pitfall, bearded with harsh saw-edged grass blades, drenched with chilly dews, and containing beneath the ambush of its green covering many rough and uneven depressions. The dew irritated Solly’s naked legs, making him long for the soothing contact of Pike Street’s mud-coated cobbles. Miriam stubbed her shrinking pink toes against hidden clods when she essayed a timorous step or two forward. So both of them stood still, then, very much at a loss to know what they should or could do next.

Somebody suggested to Miriam that she pick the wild flowers and the wild vine tendrils and weave them into garlands. Was it her fault that her very first selections should be a spray of poisoned sumac, first cousin to poison ivy, and that her second should be a handful of nettles? Somebody else undertook to induct Solly into the pleasures of tree climbing. Was it altogether his fault that he should promptly fall out of the first crotch and painfully sprain and bruise himself in several places?

And when, finally, they had been induced to quit the immediate proximity of the farmhouse, which at least provided a refuge and a shelter from suspected dangers, and had ventured over a fence and into a pasture, a most terrible thing occurred. Toward them there suddenly advanced an enormous red creature, tossing a huge head crowned with sharp horns, and emitting frightful, rumbling sounds from a great rubbery muzzle.

With shrieks of terror, they fled blindly into a patch of woodland that was perhaps two acres in extent; and, losing themselves in its – to them – vast and impenetrable depths, they remained there, crouching behind a tree until discovered, tearful, hungry and disconsolate, by a volunteer search party shortly before sunset. Miriam’s subsequent description of the monster that had menaced them, as detailed to her mother, gave Mamma Finkelstein a mental picture of something which might be likened to a cross between a raging rhinoceros and a hook-and-ladder motor truck. For it had been many a year since Mamma Finkelstein herself had seen a yearling heifer. And Miriam never had seen one before.

It was indeed a hard and an irksome week. The end of it saw the two small adventurers, both sun-blistered and peeling, both broken out as to hands and legs with strange, irritating rashes, and both with gladness in their little homesick souls, returning to the beloved perils and the customary pleasures of the torrid town.

After this the Finkelsteins for a while had a welcomed respite from kindness. They fairly revelled in it; but not for a great while, nor, in fact, for very long, did it endure. Following Labor Day, Mrs. F. Fodderwood Bass came back from her country place up Greenwich way and reopened her city place. It transpired that with her she had brought a perfectly splendid idea. She was going to establish the Finkelsteins on an abandoned farm. While motoring about over the country lanes in Connecticut she had found the very spot for them – an ideal spot, indeed – nine acres, and nine miles from a railroad, with a ruinous little cottage, all furnished, perched upon a rocky hillock in the centre of the nine acres.

It was upon this site she was resolved they should be domiciled. There – as she herself said – Papa Finkelstein might turn farmer and maybe make a fortune. There Mamma Finkelstein could rear her brood in peace and quiet, far aloof and remote from the teeming multitude. There the fresh, pure air of the country would restore the bloom of health to the cheeks of all the little Finkelsteins. What mattered it though the little Finkelsteins were already so healthy that if they had been any healthier than they were it might have been necessary to tap them for it? I am not detailing what was actually the case, but what Mrs. F. Fodderwood Bass, in the exuberance engendered by her generous impulses, said about it.

A scheme so large required cooperation. Mrs. F. Fodderwood Bass secured it from Miss Godiva Sleybells, whom she had met upon more than one occasion when the two of them chanced to happen in upon the Finkelsteins at the same time, and from Miss Betty Gwin, who frequently had been called upon to detail to a hungry reading public particulars concerning Mrs. F. Fodderwood Bass’ social and charitable endeavours.

Together these three constituted a committee on ways, means and publicity. Mrs. F. Fodderwood Bass provided the funds for leasing the nine acres and for transporting its ten future tenants to their future home. Miss Godiva Sleybells agreed, for her part, to insure that the prospective colonists, both big and little, were properly loaded and properly shipped to their destination. Miss Betty Gwin wrote a moving word picture two columns long about it, in which she mentioned the late Baron de Hirsch once and Mrs. F. Fodderwood Bass a great many times.

Actually the day preceding the day set for the removal of the Finkelsteins arrived before it occurred to the three conferees that they had entirely forgotten until that minute to take the Finkelsteins into their confidence – not that it very much mattered; this was but an incidental detail, which before now had been altogether overlooked. Miss Sleybells volunteered to go and tell them. She went and she did.

Reporting back to the principal factor in this kindly little conspiracy, Miss Sleybells said the Finkelstein family had been stunned – literally stunned into dumb silence by the grateful joy the tidings brought to them. She said surprise and gratitude had left them absolutely speechless. Naturally she had no way of knowing, when she broke the glad news, that Solly thought of Coney’s inhospitable sands and treacherous seas; that Miriam thought of the fearsome Catskill cow; that their mother, whose whole life had been bounded by two Ghettos – one in the Old World and one in the New, and who knew no other life – thought of a great variety of things; and that the children, ranging from the twins downward, would have done some thinking, too, had they been of suitable age thus to indulge their juvenile intellects.

She had no way of knowing that, when she was gone from among them, Papa Finkelstein stood erect and, elevating his two hands in passionate entreaty toward heaven, with solemn fervour uttered the only words which it is fated that we, in this recital, shall ever hear him utter. He spake them in the tongue with which he was most conversant. He said:

“Gott bei heit!”

September’s hurried twilight was folding in upon Pike Street. Against the curbing, surrounded by an admiring throng, stood Mrs. F. Fodderwood Bass’ third-best car. Hard by stood an express wagon, its driver ready to receive what puny freightage of household and personal belongings as might be consigned to his care. And upstairs, upon the top floor of a certain tenement, in the narrow hall outside the Finkelstein flat, stood Mrs. F. Fodderwood Bass, Miss Godiva Sleybells and Miss Betty Gwin. The first named of these three was come to witness the accomplishment of her beautiful purpose; the second, to lend her executive abilities to the details of the undertaking; the third, to write a piece about it.

In accord with her regular habit Miss Sleybells turned the knob. The knob turned part way, but the door did not open; so she rattled the knob and knocked with her knuckles on the panel. Mrs. F. Fodderwood Bass raised her flutelike voice in cooing accents.

“Open the door, my dear charities,” she said clearly. “It is I – your good angel.”

Miss Betty Gwin stooped and applied a squinted eye at the keyhole. Miss Sleybells knocked again – harder. There was no answer.

I shall tell you why there was no answer. The reason is a good and sufficient one. All day within their two rooms the Finkelstein family had bided, waiting, waiting; hoping against hope. With the sound of well-remembered footsteps in the hall without, with the sound of a well-known voice uplifted, the last faint remnant of hope expired.

In melancholy resignation Papa Finkelstein nodded to Mamma Finkelstein; and Mamma Finkelstein, stifling the plaint of the youngest baby in her shawl, nodded back to him in sorrowful confirmation of the worst. With gestures he imposed deep silence upon all present. He tiptoed into the rear room and his people followed, tiptoeing also. He climbed out of the back window and descended the fire-escape ladder to the fire-escape landing at the level of the next floor below. He balanced himself there and into his extended arms, Mamma Finkelstein passed down to him, one by one, their children; and he, in turn, passed them in at a window where Mrs. Esther Rabinowitz, a good-hearted neighbour, received them, and deposited them in a mute row upon her kitchen floor. At the last Mamma Finkelstein descended and joined him.

They assembled their progeny. They noiselessly emerged from Mrs. Rabinowitz’ hall door; and, noiselessly all, they fled down the stairs and out into the gathering twilight of Pike Street, which has a way of growing shabby and soiled-looking as it gathers. They had deserted all their small belongings; they knew not where that night they might lay their heads; they had no idea where they were going – but they were on their way.

Up on the top floor Miss Sleybells knocked and knocked again. Miss Gwin put her ear to the locked, barred door and listened and listened for betraying sounds within; and Mrs. F. Fodderwood Bass raised her coo to yet a flutier pitch. And while they were thus engaged the Finkelstein family, one and all, vanished into the cloaking, protecting dusk where Pike Street runs toward the river.

Did I say Finkelstein family? I was wrong there.

For purposes of better concealment Papa Finkelstein had changed the name. The inspiration had come to him even as he gripped the topmost round of the fire-escape ladder. Changing it, he had seen fit to honour, by virtue of self-adoption, a race of Irish kings, and notably a policeman of his acquaintance, a descendant of that kingly line. He changed it to Finnigan. Loss to the Finkelsteins would thenceforth be gain to the Finnigans.

So they vanished away – Papa Meyer Finnigan, Mamma Leah Finnigan – née Pincus – Miriam Finnigan, Solly Finnigan, the Finnigan twins, Izzy and Izzy; Benjamin Finnigan, Rebecca Finnigan, Lena Finnigan, and so on down to Baby Leopold Finnigan – and were gone!

For does it not stand written that – ? But see Corinthians – first, thirteenth and fourth – and notably the first three words of the same. Only it should have been written there, in amplification, that there is a limit.