Produced by Suzanne Shell, Josephine Paolucci
and PG Distributed Proofreaders
[Illustration: They walked, thus guided by an obsequious waiter, through alight confetti of tossed greetings.]
1918
[Dedication: To my mother and my father]
Much of the tragical lore of the infant mortality, the malnutrition, andthe five-in-a-room morality of the city's poor is written in statistics,and the statistical path to the heart is more figurative than literal.
It is difficult to write stylistically a per-annum report of 1,327curvatures of the spine, whereas the poor specific little vertebra of MamieO'Grady, daughter to Lou, your laundress, whose alcoholic husband onceinvaded your very own basement and attempted to strangle her in thecoal-bin, can instantly create an apron bazaar in the church vestry-rooms.
That is why it is possible to drink your morning coffee without nausea forit, over the head-lines of forty thousand casualties at Ypres, but topush back abruptly at a three-line notice of little Tony's, your cornerbootblack's, fatal dive before a street-car.
Gertie Slayback was statistically down as a woman wage-earner; a typhoidcase among the thousands of the Borough of Manhattan for 1901; and hertwice-a-day share in the Subway fares collected in the present year of ourLord.
She was a very atomic one of the city's four millions. But after all, whatare the kings and peasants, poets and draymen, but great, greater, orgreatest, less, lesser, or least atoms of us? If not of the least, GertieSlayback was of the very lesser. When she unlocked the front door to herrooming-house of evenings, there was no one to expect her, except onTuesdays, which evening it so happened her week was up. And when she leftof mornings with her breakfast crumblessly cleared up and the box ofbiscuit and condensed-milk can tucked unsuspectedly behind her camisole inthe top drawer there was no one to regret her.
There are some of us who call this freedom. Again there are those for whomone spark of home fire burning would light the world.
Gertie Slayback was one of these. Half a life-time of opening her door uponthis or that desert-aisle of hall bedroom had not taught her heart how notto sink or the feel of daily rising in one such room to seem less like adamp bathing-suit, donned at dawn.
The only picture—or call it atavism if you will—which adorned MissSlayback's dun-colored walls was a passe-partout snowscape, night closingin, and pink cottage windows peering out from under eaves. She couldvisualize that interior as if she had only to turn the frame for the smellof wood fire and the snap of pine logs and for the scene of two high-backchairs and the wooden crib between.
What a fragile, gracile thing is the mind that can leap thus from ninebargain basement hours of hairpins and darnin