Maggie Cassidy Read Free Page A

enduring in the fog of the North, with brown lights in the kitchens, dim shadows, a vague sight of a religious calendar or an overcoat on a closet door, something sad and homely and useful and to the boys who knew nothing else the abode of very life. G.J.’s house sat, soared, looked over gigantic treetops of Riverside to the city a mile across the river; in his kitchen in blowing wild storms that would obscure vistas and clank the trees to hit the windows, Jack Frost cracking, raging to come in the door beneath the crack as old overshoes gleamed cold and wet in scuffly slush-halls, as people tried to stop a draft with a folded strip of newspaper . . . in great stormy days when there was no school, and no occasion like New Year’s Eve, G.J. with his long legs strode his mother’s linoleum swearing and cursing the day he was born as she an old Greek widow the death of whose husband fifteen years ago left her still in blackest mourning, sat in a rocking chair by the shivering window, with an old Greek bible on her lap, and grieved, and grieved, and grieved. . . . The sight of this house as G.J. rushed with the boys to joys tearing in his brain . . . “Is my mother up?” he wondered—Sometimes she just made long pitiful-to-hear lamentations about the darkness of her life, singing it, as the children heard every word and hung their heads in shame and misery. . . . “Is Reno still home? . . . is she gonna take her to that ga-dam woman for that visit. . . . Oh Lord in Heaven above sometimes I think I was born to worry for that unhappy old mother of mine till the day my boots sink in the ground and there wont be no damn saver to pull me out—the last of the Rigopoulakos, elas spiti Rigopoulakos . . . ka, re ,” he cursed and wrung inside his brain in Greek, squeezing his thighs inside his coat till they burned, taking his hands out of his pockets to spread fingers at the others, bringing his tongue out eloquently to clack his teeth, saying “Thou, thou, thou . . . you cant know!” He felt like howling across the snow and over the twenty-foot stone wall high to his house with its dark and tragic windows except for one brown light in the kitchen that said nothing, showed nothing but death, and but indicated that as ever his mother had begun her vigil with an oil lamp, now in the chair later on the little couch by the stove in the kitchen with a pitiful flimsy bedcover when all the time she had a whole bed in her own room. . . . “So dark that room,” grieved G.J., Gus, Yanni to his mother, Yanni sometimes when she chose to call him by his middle name and everybody in the neighborhood could hear her at sad red dusk calling him to pork-chop supper “Yanni . . . Yanni . . .” A Jack o Diamonds of other broken hearts. And Gus turned to his greatest and deepest friend whom he had named Zagg.
    â€œJack,” taking his arm, holding the gang up, “do you see that light burning in my mother’s kitchen window?”
    â€œâ€”I know, Gus—”
    â€œâ€”showing where an old woman this night as all nights when this poor blooder and fubbler tries to go out Zagg and get himself just a little bit of fun in the world”—his eyes tearing—“and not asking so much as that God, in his mercy, munifisessence, whatyoucallit Zagg, should only say ‘Gus, Gus, poor Gus, pray to the angels and to me and I shall see Gus that your poor old mother—”‘
    â€œâ€”Ah Brigash cass mi gass!” cried Zaza Vauriselle, suddenly weirdly apt so much so that Lauzon laughed his high wild giggle and everybody heard but paid no attention because listening to Gus make a real serious speech about his troubles.
    â€œâ€”that only for a moment my soul and heart could rest to see that my mother—Jack she’s just an old woman—your father isnt