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O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 by Various

V >> Various >> O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919




To enter Abrahm Kantor's--Brasses--was three steps down, so that his
casement show-window, at best filmed over with the constant rain of dust
ground down from the rails above, was obscure enough, but crammed with
the copied loot of khedive and of czar. The seven-branch candlestick so
Biblical and supplicating of arms. An urn, shaped like Rebecca's, of
brass all beaten over with little poks. Things: cups, trays, knockers,
ikons, gargoyles, bowls, and teapots. A symphony of bells in graduated
sizes. Jardinieres with fat sides. A pot-bellied samovar. A swinging
lamp for the dead, star-shaped. Against the door, an octave of tubular
chimes, prisms of voiceless harmony and of heatless light.

Opening this door, they rang gently, like melody heard through water
and behind glass. Another bell rang, too, in tilted singsong from a
pulley operating somewhere in the catacomb rear of this lambent vale of
things and things and things. In turn, this pulley set in toll still
another bell, two flights up in Abrahm Kantor's tenement, which
overlooked the front of whizzing rails and a rear wilderness of
gibbet-looking clothes-lines, dangling perpetual specters of flapping
union suits in a mid-air flaky with soot.

Often at lunch, or even the evening meal, this bell would ring in on
Abrahm Kantor's digestive well-being, and while he hurried down, napkin
often bib-fashion still about his neck, and into the smouldering lanes
of copper, would leave an eloquent void at the head of his
well-surrounded table.

This bell was ringing now, jingling in upon the slumber of a still newer
Kantor, snuggling peacefully enough within the ammoniac depths of a
cradle recently evacuated by Leon, heretofore impinged upon you.

On her knees before an oven that billowed forth hotly into her face,
Mrs. Kantor, fairly fat and not yet forty, and at the immemorial task of
plumbing a delicately swelling layer-cake with broom-straw, raised her
face, reddened and faintly moist.

"Isadore, run down and say your papa is out until six. If it's a
customer, remember the first asking-price is the two middle figures on
the tag, and the last asking-price is the two outside figures. See once,
with your papa out to buy your little brother his birthday present, and
your mother in a cake, if you can't make a sale for first price."

Isadore Kantor, aged eleven and hunched with a younger Kantor over an
oilcloth-covered table, hunched himself still deeper in barter for a
large crystal marble with a candy stripe down its center.

"Izzie, did you hear me?"

"Yes'm."

"Go down this minute--do you hear? Rudolph, stop always letting your big
brother get the best of you in marbles. Iz-zy!"

"In--a--minute."

"Don't let me have to ask you again, Isadore Kantor!"

"Aw, ma; I got some 'rithmetic to do. Let Esther go."

"Always Esther! Your sister stays right in the front room with her
spelling."

"Aw, ma; I got spelling, too."

"Every time I ask that boy he should do me one thing, right away he gets
lessons! With me, that lessons-talk don't go no more. Every time you get
put down in school, I'm surprised there's a place left lower where they
can put you. Working-papers for such a boy like you!"

"I'll woik--"

"How I worried myself! Violin lessons yet--thirty cents lesson out of
your papa's pants while he slept! That's how I wanted to have in the
family a profession--maybe a musician on the violin. Lessons for you out
of money I had to lie to your papa about! Honest, when I think of it--my
own husband--it's a wonder I don't potch you just for remembering it.
Rudolph, will you stop licking that cake-pan? It's saved for your little
brother Leon. Ain't you ashamed even on your little brother's birthday
to steal from him?"

"Ma, gimme the spoon?"

"I'll give you the spoon, Isadore Kantor, where you don't want it. If
you don't hurry down the way that bell is ringing, not one bite out of
your little brother's birthday-cake to-night!"

"I'm goin', ain't I?"

"Always on my children's birthdays a meanness sets into this house!
Ru-dolph, will you put down that bowl? Iz-zy--for the last time I ask
you--for the last time--"

Erect now, Mrs. Kantor lifted a portentous hand, letting it hover.

"I'm goin', ma; for golly sakes, I'm goin'!" said her recalcitrant one,
shuffling off toward the staircase, shuffling, shuffling.

Then Mrs. Kantor resumed her plumbing, and through the little apartment,
its middle and only bedroom of three beds and a crib lighted vicariously
by the front room and kitchen, began to wind the warm, the golden-brown
fragrance of cake in the rising.

By six o'clock, the shades were drawn against the dirty dusk of Allen
Street, and the oilcloth-covered table dragged out center and spread by
Esther Kantor, nine in years, in the sturdy little legs bulging over
shoe-tops, in the pink cheeks that sagged slightly of plumpness, and in
the utter roundness of face and gaze, but mysteriously older in the
little-mother lore of crib and knee-dandling ditties and in the ropy
length and thickness of the two brown plaits down her back.

There was an eloquence to that waiting, laid-out table, the print of the
family already gathered about it; the dynastic high chair, throne of
each succeeding Kantor; an armchair drawn up before the paternal
moustache-cup; the ordinary kitchen chair of Mannie Kantor, who spilled
things, an oilcloth sort of bib dangling from its back; the little chair
of Leon Kantor, cushioned in an old family album that raised his chin
above the table. Even in cutlery, the Kantor family was not lacking in
variety. Surrounding a centerpiece of thick Russian lace were Russian
spoons washed in washed-off gilt, forks of one, two, and three tines.
Steel knives with black handles. A hart's-horn carving-knife.
Thick-lipped china in stacks before the armchair. A round
four-pound-loaf of black bread waiting to be torn, and to-night, on the
festive mat of cotton lace, a cake of pinkly gleaming icing, encircled
with five pink little twisted candles.

At slightly after six, Abrahm Kantor returned, leading by a resisting
wrist Leon Kantor, his stemlike little legs, hit midship, as it were, by
not sufficiently cut-down trousers and so narrow and birdlike of face
that his eyes quite obliterated the remaining map of his features, like
those of a still wet nestling. All except his ears. They poised at the
sides of Leon's shaved head of black bristles, as if butterflies had
just lighted there, whispering, with very spread wings, their message,
and presently would fly off again. By some sort of muscular contraction,
he could wiggle these ears at will, and would do so for a penny, a
whistle, and upon one occasion for his brother Rudolph's dead rat, so
devised as to dangle from string and window before the unhappy
passer-by. They were quivering now, these ears, but because the entire
little face was twitching back tears and gulp of sobs.

"Abrahm--Leon--what is it?" Her hands and her forearms instantly out
from the business of kneading something meaty and floury, Mrs. Kantor
rushed forward, her glance quick from one to the other of them. "Abrahm,
what's wrong?"

"I'll feedle him! I'll feedle him!"

The little pulling wrist still in clutch, Mr. Kantor regarded his wife,
the lower half of his face, well covered with reddish bristles,
undershot, his free hand and even his eyes violently lifted. To those
who see in a man a perpetual kinship to that animal kingdom of which he
is supreme, there was something undeniably anthropoidal about Abrahm
Kantor, a certain simian width between the eyes and long, rather agile
hands with hairy backs.

"Hush it!" cried Mr. Kantor, his free hand raised in threat of descent
and cowering his small son to still more undersized proportions. "Hush
it, or, by golly, I'll--"

"Abrahm--Abrahm--what is it?"

Then Mr. Kantor gave vent in acridity of word and feature.

"_Schlemmil!_" he cried. "_Momser! Ganef! Nebich!_" By which Abrahm
Kantor, in smiting mother tongue, branded his offspring with attributes
of apostate and ne'er-do-well, of idiot and thief.

"Abrahm!"

"_Schlemmil!_" repeated Mr. Abrahm, swinging Leon so that he described a
large semi-circle that landed him into the meaty and waiting embrace of
his mother. "Take him! You should be proud of such a little _Momser_ for
a son! Take him--and here you got back his birthday dollar. A feedle!
Honest--when I think on it--a feedle!"

Such a rush of outrage seemed fairly to strangle Mr. Kantor that he
stood, hand still upraised, choking and inarticulate above the now
frankly howling huddle of his son.

"Abrahm you should just once touch this child! How he trembles!
Leon--mamma's baby--what is it--is this how you come back when papa
takes out to buy your birthday present? Ain't you ashamed?"

Mouth distended to a large and blackly hollow O, Leon between terrifying
spells of breath-holding, continued to howl.

"All the way to Naftel's toy store I drag him. A birthday present for a
dollar his mother wants he should have--all right, a birthday present! I
give you my word till I'm ashamed for Naftel, every toy on his shelves
is pulled down. Such a cow--that shakes with his head--"

"No--no--no!" This from young Leon, beating at his mother's skirts.

Again the upraised but never quite descending hand of his father.

"By golly, I'll 'no--no' you!"

"Abrahm--go way! Baby, what did papa do?"

Then Mr. Kantor broke into an actual tarantella of rage, his hands palms
up and dancing.

"'What did papa do?' she asks. She's got easy asking. 'What did papa
do?' The whole shop, I tell you. A sheep with a baa inside when you
squeeze on him--games--a horn so he can holler my head off--such a knife
like Izzy's with a scissors in it! 'Leon,' I said, ashamed for Naftel,
'that's a fine knife like Izzy's so you can cut up with.' 'All right
then'--when I see how he hollers--'such a box full of soldiers to have
war with.' 'Dollar seventy-five,' says Naftel. 'All right then,' I
says--when I seen how he keeps hollering--'give you a dollar fifteen for
'em.' I should make myself small for fifteen cents more. 'Dollar
fifteen,' I says--anything so he should shut up with his hollering for
what he seen in the window."

"He seen something in the window he wanted, Abrahm?"

"Didn't I tell you? A feedle! A four-dollar feedle! A moosiker, so we
should have another feedler in the family for some thirty-cents
lessons."

"Abrahm--you mean--he--our Leon--wanted a violin?"

"'Wanted,' she says. I could potch him again this minute for how he
wanted it! _Du_--you little bum you--_Chammer_--_Momser_--I'll feedle
you!"

Across Mrs. Kantor's face as she knelt there in the shapeless
cotton-stuff uniform of poverty, through the very tenement of her body,
a light had flashed up into her eyes. She drew her son closer, crushing
his puny cheek up against hers, cupping his bristly little head in her
by no means immaculate palms.

"He wanted a violin--it's come, Abrahm! The dream of all my life--it's
come! I knew it must be one of my children if I waited long enough--and
prayed enough. A musician! He wants a violin. He cried for a violin. My
baby! Why, darlink, mamma'll sell her clothes off her back to get you a
violin. He's a musician, Abrahm! I should have known it the way he's
fooling always around the chimes and the bells in the store!"

Then Mrs. Kantor took to rocking his head between her palms.

"_Oi--oi!_ The mother is crazier as her son. A moosican! A _Fresser_ you
mean. Such an eater, it's a wonder he ain't twice too big instead of
twice too little for his age."

"That's a sign, Abrahm; they all eat big. For all we know he's a genius.
I swear to you, Abrahm, all the months before he was born, I prayed for
it. Each one before they came, I prayed it should be the one. I thought
that time the way our Isadore ran after the organ-grinder he would be
the one. How could I know it was the monkey he wanted? When Isadore
wouldn't take it, I prayed my next one and then my next one should have
the talent. I've prayed for it, Abrahm. If he wants a violin, please, he
should have it."

"Not with my money."

"With mine! I've got enough saved, Abrahm. Them three extra dollars
right here inside my own waist, that I saved toward that cape down on
Grand Street. I wouldn't have it now the way they say the wind blows up
them--"

"I tell you the woman's crazy!"

"I feel it! I know he's got talent! I know my children so well. A--a
father don't understand. I'm so next to them. It's like I can tell
always everything that will happen to them--it's like a pain--somewheres
here--in back of my heart."

"A pain in the heart she gets!"

"For my own children I'm always a prophet, I tell you. You think I
didn't know that--that terrible night after the pogrom after we got out
of Kief to cross the border! You remember, Abrahm, how I predicted it to
you then--how our Mannie would be born too soon and--and not right from
my suffering? Did it happen on the ship to America just the way I said
it would? Did it happen just exactly how I predicted our Izzy would
break his leg that time playing on the fire-escape? I tell you, Abrahm,
I get a real pain here under my heart that tells me what comes to my
children. Didn't I tell you how Esther would be the first in her
confirmation-class and our baby Boris would be red-headed? At only five
years, our Leon all by himself cries for a fiddle--get it for him,
Abrahm--get it for him!"

"I tell you, Sarah, I got a crazy woman for a wife! It ain't enough we
celebrate eight birthdays a year with one-dollar presents each time and
copper goods every day higher. It ain't enough that right to-morrow I
got a fifty-dollar note over me from Sol Ginsberg--a four-dollar present
she wants for a child that don't even know the name of a feedle!"

"Leon baby, stop hollering--papa will go back and get the fiddle for you
now before supper. See--mamma's got money here in her waist--"

"Papa will go back for the feedle not--three dollars she's saved for
herself he can holler out of her for a feedle!"

"Abrahm, he's screaming so he--he'll have a fit."

"He should have two fits."

"Darlink--"

"I tell you the way you spoil your children it will some day come back
on us."

"It's his birthday night, Abrahm--five years since his little head
first lay on the pillow next to me."

"All right--all right--drive me crazy because he's got a birthday."

"Leon baby--if you don't stop hollering you'll make yourself sick.
Abrahm, I never saw him like this--he's green--"

"I'll green him. Where is that old feedle from Isadora--that
seventy-five-cents one?"

"I never thought of that! You broke it that time you got mad at
Isadore's lessons. I'll run down. Maybe it's with the junk behind the
store. I never thought of that fiddle, Leon darlink--wait--mamma'll run
down and look--wait, Leon, till mamma finds you a fiddle."

The raucous screams stopped then suddenly, and on their very lustiest
crest, leaving an echoing gash across silence. On willing feet of haste,
Mrs. Kantor wound down backward the high, ladderlike staircase that led
to the brass shop.

Meanwhile, to a gnawing consciousness of dinner-hour, had assembled the
house of Kantor. Attuned to the intimate atmosphere of the tenement
which is so constantly rent with cry of child, child-bearing, delirium,
delirium-tremens, Leon Kantor had howled no impression into the motley
din of things. Isadore, already astride his chair, well into
center-table, for first vociferous tear at the four-pound loaf; Esther
Kantor, old at chores, settled an infant into the high chair, careful of
tiny fingers in lowering the wooden bib.

"Papa, Izzy's eating first again."

"Put down that loaf and wait until your mother dishes up or you'll get a
potch you won't soon forget."

"Say, pop--"

"Don't 'say pop' me! I don't want no street-bum freshness from you!"

"I mean, papa, there was an uptown swell in, and she bought one of them
seventy-five-cent candlesticks for the first price,"

"_Schlemmil--Chammer!_" said Mr. Kantor, rinsing his hands at the sink.
"Didn't I always tell you it's the first price times two when you see
up-town business come in? Haven't I learned it to you often enough a
slummer must pay for her nosiness?"

There entered then, on poor shuffling feet, Mannie Kantor so marred in
the mysterious and ceramic process of life that the brain and the soul
had stayed back sooner than inhabit him. Seventeen in years, in the down
upon his face, and in growth unretarded by any great nervosity of
system, his vacuity of face was not that of childhood but rather as if
his light eyes were peering out from some hinterland and wanting so
terribly and so dumbly to communicate what they beheld to brain-cells
closed against himself.

At sight of Mannie, Leon Kantor, the tears still wetly and dirtily down
his cheeks, left off his black, fierce-eyed stare of waiting long enough
to smile, darkly, it is true, but sweetly.

"Giddy-ap!" he cried. "Giddy-ap!"

And then Mannie, true to habit, would scamper and scamper.

Up out of the traplike stair-opening came the head of Mrs. Kantor,
disheveled and a smudge of soot across her face, but beneath her arm,
triumphant, a violin of one string and a broken back.

"See, Leon--what mamma got! A violin! A fiddle! Look--the bow, too, I
found. It ain't much, baby, but it's a fiddle."

"Aw, ma--that's my old violin--gimme--I want it--where'd you find--"

"Hush up, Izzy! This ain't yours no more. See, Leon, what mamma brought
you! A violin!"

"Now, you little _Chammer_, you got a feedle, and if you ever let me
hear you holler again for a feedle, by golly if I don't--"

From his corner, Leon Kantor reached out, taking the instrument and
fitting it beneath his chin, the bow immediately feeling, surely and
lightly for string.

"Look, Abrahm! He knows how to hold it! What did I tell you? A child
that never in his life seen a fiddle, except a beggar's on the street!"

Little Esther suddenly cantered down-floor, clapping her chubby hands.

"Looky--looky--Leon!"

The baby ceased clattering his spoon against the wooden bib. A silence
seemed to shape itself.

So black and so bristly of head, his little clawlike hands hovering over
the bow, Leon Kantor withdrew a note, strangely round and given up
almost sobbingly from the single string. A note of warm twining quality,
like a baby's finger.

"Leon--darlink!"

Fumbling for string and for notes the instrument could not yield up to
him, the birdlike mouth began once more to open widely and terribly into
the orificial O.

It was then Abrahm Kantor came down with a large hollow resonance of
palm against the aperture, lifting his small son and depositing him plop
upon the family album.

"Take that! By golly, one more whimper out of you and if I don't make
you black-and-blue, birthday or no birthday! Dish up, Sarah, quick, or
I'll give him something to cry about."

The five pink candles had been lighted, burning pointedly and with
slender little smoke wisps. Regarding them owlishly, the tears dried on
Leon's face, his little tongue licking up at them.

"Look how solemn he is, like he was thinking of something a million
miles away except how lucky he is he should have a pink birthday-cake!
Uh--uh--uh! Don't you begin to holler again--Here, I'm putting the
feedle next to you--uh--uh--uh!"

To a meal plentifully ladled out directly from stove to table, the
Kantor family drew up, dipping first into the rich black soup of the
occasion. All except Mrs. Kantor.

"Esther, you dish up; I'm going somewhere. I'll be back in a minute."

"Where you going, Sarah? Won't it keep until--"

But even in the face of query, Sarah Kantor was two flights down and
well through the lambent aisles of the copper shop. Outside, she broke
into a run, through two blocks of the indescribable bazaar atmosphere of
Grand Street, then one block to the right.

Before Naftel's show-window, a jet of bright gas burned into a
jibberwock land of toys. There was that in Sarah Kantor's face that was
actually lyrical, as, fumbling at the bosom of her dress, she entered.

To Leon Kantor, by who knows what symphonic scheme of things, life was a
chromatic scale, yielding up to him through throbbing, living nerves of
sheep-gut, the sheerest semitones of man's emotions.

When he tucked his Stradivarius beneath his chin, the Book of Life
seemed suddenly translated to him in melody. Even Sarah Kantor, who
still brewed for him, on a small portable stove carried from city to
city and surreptitiously unpacked in hotel suites, the blackest of
soups, and, despite his protestation, would incase his ears of nights in
an old home-made device against their flightiness, would often times
bleed inwardly at this sense of his isolation.

There was a realm into which he went alone, leaving her as detached as
the merest ticket purchaser at the box-office.

At seventeen, Leon Kantor had played before the crowned heads of Europe,
the aching heads of American capital, and even the shaved head of a
South Sea prince. There was a layout of anecdotal gifts, from the molar
tooth of the South Sea prince set in a South Sea pearl to a
blue-enamelled snuff-box encrusted with the rearing-lion coat of arms of
a very royal house.

At eighteen, came the purchase of a king's Stradivarius for a king's
ransom, and acclaimed by Sunday supplements to repose of nights in an
ivory cradle.

At nineteen, under careful auspices of press-agent, the ten singing
digits of the son of Abrahm Kantor were insured at ten thousand dollars
the finger.

At twenty, he had emerged surely and safely from the perilous quicksands
which have sucked down whole Lilliputian worlds of infant prodigies.

At twenty-one, when Leon Kantor played a Sunday-night concert, there was
a human queue curling entirely around the square block of the
opera-house, waiting its one, two, even three and four hours for the
privilege of standing-room only.

Usually these were Leon Kantor's own people pouring up from the lowly
lands of the East Side to the white lands of Broadway, parched for
music, these burning brethren of his--old men in that line, frequently
carrying their own little folding camp-chairs, not against weariness of
the spirit but of the flesh; youth with Slavic eyes and cheek-bones.
These were the six-deep human phalanx which would presently slant down
at him from tiers of steepest balconies and stand frankly emotional and
jammed in the unreserved space behind the railing which shut them off
from the three-dollar seats of the reserved.

At a very special one of these concerts, dedicated to the meager purses
of just these, and held in New York's super-opera-house, the
Amphitheater, a great bowl of humanity, the metaphor made perfect by
tiers of seats placed upon the stage, rose from orchestra to dome. A
gigantic Colosseum of a cup, lined in stacks and stacks of faces. From
the door of his dressing-room, leaning out, Leon Kantor could see a
great segment of it, buzzing down into adjustment, orchestra twitting
and tuning into it.

In a bare little room, illuminated by a sheaf of roses just arrived,
Mrs. Kantor drew him back by the elbow.

"Leon, you're in a draft."

The amazing years had dealt kindly with Mrs. Kantor. Stouter, softer,
apparently even taller, she was full of small new authorities that could
shut out cranks, newspaper reporters, and autograph fiends. A
fitted-over-corsets black taffeta and a high comb in the greying hair
had done their best with her. Pride, too, had left its flush upon her
cheeks, like two round spots of fever.

"Leon, it's thirty minutes till your first number. Close that door. Do
you want to let your papa and his excitement in on you?"

The son of Sarah Kantor obeyed, leaning on his short, rather narrow form
in silhouette against the closed door. In spite of slimly dark evening
clothes worked out by an astute manager to the last detail in boyish
effects, there was that about him which defied long-haired precedent.
Slimly and straightly he had shot up into an unmannered, a short, even
a bristly-haired young manhood, disqualifying by a close shave for the
older school of hirsute virtuosity.

But his nerves did not spare him. On concert nights they seemed to
emerge almost to the surface of him and shriek their exposure.

"Just feel my hands, ma. Like ice."

She dived down into her large silk what-not of a reticule.

"I've got your fleece-lined gloves here, son."

"No--no. For God's--sake--not those things! No!"

He was back at the door again, opening it to a slit, peering through.

"They're bringing more seats on the stage. If they crowd me in I won't
go on. I can't play if I hear them breathe. Hi--out there--no more
chairs--pa--Hancock--"

"Leon, Leon, ain't you ashamed to get so worked up? Close that door.
Have you got a manager who is paid just to see to your comfort? When
papa comes, I'll have him go out and tell Hancock you don't want chairs
so close to you. Leon, will you mind mamma and sit down?"

"It's a bigger house than the royal concert in Madrid, ma. Why, I never
saw anything like it! It's a stampede. God, this is real--this is what
gets me, playing for my own! I should have given a concert like this
three years ago. I'll do it every year now. I'd rather play before them
than all the crowned heads on earth. It's the biggest night of my
life--they're rioting out there, ma--rioting to get in."