Chapter 15: Marking Time

Early in the autumn Birdie took flight from the alley, and Nance found herself hopelessly engulfed in domestic affairs. Mr. Snawdor, who had been doing the work during her long absence, took advantage of her return to have malarial fever. He had been trying to have it for months, but could never find the leisure hour in which to indulge in the preliminary chill. Once having tasted the joys of invalidism he was loathe to forego them, and insisted upon being regarded as a chronic convalescent. Nance might have managed Mr. Snawdor, however, had it not been for the grave problem of Fidy Yager.

“Ike Lavinski says she ought to be in a hospital some place,” she urged Mrs. Snawdor. “He says she never is going to be any better. He says it’s epilepsy.”

“Wel he ain’t tellin’ me anything’ I don’t know,” said Mrs. Snawdor, “but
I ain’t goin’ to put her away, not if she th’ows a fit a minute!”
It was not maternal solicitude alone that prompted this declaration. The State allowed seventy-live dollars a year to parents of epileptic children, and Mrs. Snawdor had found Fidy a valuable asset. Just what her being kept at home cost the other children was never reckoned.

“Well, I’ll take care of her on one condition,” stipulated Nance. “You got to keep Lobelia at school. It ain’t fair for her to have to stay home to nurse Fidy.”

“Well, if she goes to school, she’s got to work at night. You was doin’ your two hours at Lavinski’s long before you was her age.”

“I don’t care if I was. Lobelia ain’t strong like me. I tell you she ain’t goin’ to do home finishing, not while I’m here.”

“Well, somebody’s got to do it,” said Mrs. Snawdor. “You can settle it between you.”

Nance held out until the middle of January; then in desperation she went back to the Lavinskis. The rooms looked just as she had left them, and the whirring machines seemed never to have stopped. The acrid smell of hot cloth still mingled with the odor of pickled herrings, and Mr. Lavinski still came and went with his huge bundles of clothes.

Nance no longer sewed on buttons. She was promoted to a place under the swinging lamp where she was expected to make an old decrepit sewing-machine forget its ailments and run the same race it had run in the days of its youth. As she took her seat on the first night, she looked up curiously. A new sound coming regularly from the inner room made her pause.

“Is that a type-writer?” she asked incredulously.

Mr. Lavinski, pushing his derby from his shining brow, smiled proudly.

“Dat’s vat it is,” he said. “My Ike, he’s got a scholarship offen de high school. He’s vorking his vay through de medical college now. He’ll be a big doctor some day. He vill cure my Leah.”

Nance’s ambition took fire at the thought of that type-writer. It appealed to her far more than the sewing-machine.

“Say, Ike,” she said at her first opportunity, “I wish you’d teach me how to work it.”

“What’ll you give me?” asked Ike, gravely. He had grown into a tall, thin youth, with the spectacled eyes and stooped shoulders of a student.

“Want me to wash the dishes for your mother?” Nance suggested eagerly. “I could do it nights before I begin sewing.”

“Very well,” Ike agreed loftily. “We’ll begin next Sunday morning at nine o’clock. Mind you are on time!”

Knowledge to Ike was sacred, and the imparting of it almost a religious rite. He frowned down all flippancy on the part of his new pupil, and demanded of her the same diligence and perseverance he exacted of himself. He not only taught her to manipulate the type-writer, but put her through an elementary course of stenography as well.

“Certainly you can learn it,” he said sternly at her first sign of discouragement. “I got that far in my second lesson. Haven’t you got any brains?”

Nance by this time was not at all sure she had, but she was not going to let Ike know it. Stung by his smug superiority, she often sat up far into the night, wrestling with the arbitrary signs until Uncle Jed, seeing her light under the door, would pound on the wall for her to go to bed.