The Family Moskat by Isaac Bashevis Singer

gulp. Abram let out a howl of laughter. "That's the stuff, my boy,"
    he shouted. "You'll be all right!"
    "Take a bite of something," Dacha urged him. "Give him a cookie, somebody."
    Hadassah left the table again and returned with some maca-roons.
    In the meanwhile Asa Heshel had managed to swallow a piece of bread. Tears stood out in his eyes; he wiped them away with his fingers.
    "You shouldn't have given it to him," Rosa Frumetl said accusingly. "He's delicate."
    "Abram's ideas," Dacha grumbled.
    "Tell me, young man," Nyunie broke in, "what do you have in mind to do in Warsaw?"
    The question came unexpectedly, like all of Nyunie's remarks. The others were silent. Asa Heshel began to answer, first so softly that he could hardly be heard, and then in a stronger voice. He told them about Tereshpol Minor; about his grandfather, his mother and sister, his father, who had disappeared, and about Jekuthiel Watchmaker. His face was pale; only his ears were flushed. His eyes shifted about uncertainly, now at Dacha, now at Hadassah. His words came in bursts of disconnected phrases. Hadassah blushed. Dacha turned a bewildered gaze on him. Without knowing the reason, Rosa Frumetl felt the tears starting to her eyes.
    "A fledgling,--away from the nest," she murmured. "A-ah, the pain of a mother!" She lifted her batiste handkerchief and blew her nose. She was overcome by a strange feeling, as though the boy were somehow her own flesh and blood.
    2
    After dinner they all went into the salon. Abram lit a cigar; Nyunie began to fidget, peer around, and grumble to himself, like a rooster before settling on its perch. Just as desperately hungry as he had been before, so desperately drowsy was he now. He left the room and went to his small study, stretched out on -48-a couch, and picked up a volume of Graetz History of the Jews , which he was reading unbeknown to his wife; Dacha, in common with all the pious, thought it a heretical work. In less than five minutes he was snoring soundly. Nyunie was the administrator of two of his father's houses, although it was his assistant, the hunchbacked Moishele, who collected the rents. Moishele turned over the money and gave an accounting to Koppel and every Thursday brought to Dacha the family's weekly allowance. Nyunie paid no attention to the administration of the real es-tate or of his own household economy. The wedding settlement he had received from his father-five thousand rubles--still lay untouched in the bank, and in the years that had passed, a lot of interest had been added to it. Now he lay on the couch, limbs relaxed, his mouth half open, his head resting on a small cushion, which he had had since childhood and which he had never allowed himself to be parted from, either at home in Warsaw or when he was traveling.
    For Dacha, too, the hour after the midday meal was always the most restful part of the day--especially when Abram was visiting.
    She would forget all her ills--the headaches, the rheu-matic pains, the stabbing darts in her side, the tightness in her joints. Nyunie would be asleep in his study, Hadassah would have gone to her own room, the maid would be visiting a neighbor. Dacha would wrap her shoulders in her silk shawl, embroidered with two peacocks, sink into a deep chair, put her feet on a hassock, and half close her eyes. The stove with its gilded eaves spread its heat through the room. The sunlight shining in through the window curtains was reflected in the oven tiles with all the colors of the rainbow. The noise of the street was shut out by the double windows, the sills and sashes stuffed with cotton padding. Abram would sit near her, his lips puffing out rings of cigar smoke, his fingers playing with the gold chain that stretched across his vest. At such times Dacha would half doze, half listen to the gossip and intrigue about her father-in-law, brothers-in-law, their wives and children, and the rest of the kin--
    the dozen and one families to whose fortunes she was