Shadowed Burdens and Unpaid Debts
With Edel working as a private tutor and earning enough to cover the rent, and with the money Karl earned covering the living expenses, the nights when his stomach gnawed with hunger finally disappeared.
It was one of those bitterly cold winter nights before he turned twelve, the kind where the sky seemed to press down with its own weight.
Karl paced the living room, waiting for Edel, who was almost always late. She had always arrived home by seven o’clock, but as nine o’clock slipped by, there was still no sign of her.
Recently, a newsboy he had come to know had been struck by a motorcar and killed. His spine shattered and his legs crushed, he had been rushed to the hospital and breathed his last only two days later.
Surely it wasn’t an accident.
His heart dropped like a stone. Karl shrugged into his coat and bolted out of the apartment.
At the entrance, he paused, remembering that Edel had mentioned the children she taught lived on Park Avenue at number thirty. He set off at a run. From a distance, a small figure approached through the swirling snow.
Karl narrowed his eyes, focusing. A tiny woman, coatless in this weather, staggered toward him, battered by the wind.
When she passed beneath the gas lamp, his eyes widened.
“Mother!”
Karl leaped forward and blocked her path.
The blouse at her chest had come undone and hung in tatters; the hem of her skirt was ragged. Her cheeks were swollen as though struck, and dried blood crusted her lips.
“Mother, what…?”
“…Karl?”
Edel slowly raised her head and whispered in a voice cracked like dry earth. Her eyes rolled upward beneath the lids, and she collapsed like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
“Mother!”
Startled, Karl caught her. Before he could even think that the shock made her feel like stone, he carried her up four flights of stairs and laid her on the bed.
From her chin something wet fell. He brushed it away with the back of his hand and found it was sweat.
Her legs were trembling now.
What could have happened to his mother? What was he to do? Should he call a doctor? But where could he find one at this hour…?
He was still wavering when a thin, broken moan escaped her.
“Mother, are you all right?”
Edel opened her eyes slightly. The moment she saw Karl she burst into tears. She curled around herself and shook violently, the sound of her sobs so desolate it drove knives into his heart.
Karl moved closer to the bed and placed a hand on her shoulder. She flinched and tried to pull away. Startled, he snatched his hand back.
Her shoulder was hurt too.
“Does it hurt a lot? We’ll go to the doctor together as soon as the sun comes up.”
“Sniff… no….”
“Why?”
She covered her face with her hands and wept, managing a few words between sobs.
“It was… only a fall down the stairs. Hic… I’m fine.”
Karl scanned her with a puzzled frown. No matter how he looked, she did not look like someone who had fallen and hurt herself.
But why would his mother lie to him?
Still hiding her face, Edel muttered, “Karl, could you bring me bathwater from the kitchen sink? I’d like to wash.”
In this situation, suddenly a bath?
It was a strange request.
Yet Karl nodded in silence. He filled the small wooden tub beside the kitchen sink and boiled water on the stove, mixing in cold water from the jug.
Even as he worked, Edel’s muffled sobs continued.
He knocked at her door with the bath ready.
“Mother, the bathwater is ready.”
The sobs stopped abruptly. Edel cleared her throat.
“Now you can come in. You have school tomorrow.”
“…Mother, are you really all right?”
“Don’t worry about me. Go in and sleep.”
“…Yes, Mother.”
Karl answered reluctantly and went to his room, listening to the sounds from the living room.
A little later, the creak of the wooden floorboards sounded. He heard the curtain being drawn open in front of the tub.
Edel bathed and began to sob again. The cries were so heart-wrenching that it sounded as though she was in terrible pain.
Karl lay awake, tormented by worry.
The next morning, as he rose to go to school and stepped into the living room, he found Edel sitting at the table with a dazed expression. She lifted her head.
“The tutoring… I can’t do it anymore.”
Her voice sounded hollow, as if she spoke from a great distance.
“Why?”
She never told him the reason.
What happened to Edel that day would become clear only later, after more time had passed.
***
For a long while, Edel neither ate nor slept properly. When Karl urged her to go to the hospital, she refused. She wept alone for two full months.
When spring arrived, the landlord’s rent was overdue. He came banging on the door, warning that if the back rent was not paid within a week, she would be thrown out.
Only then did Edel rise from her seat. She took a job at a nearby sewing factory, sewing. But the wages were far too little to cover even the twenty-eight dollars a month in rent.
Edel somehow borrowed money and paid the overdue rent. When the sewing job ended, she went to night school to learn typing and shorthand. Once she was skilled, she planned to find an office job and pay off her debts.
Karl put twenty cents every day into his mother’s little cash jar. On good days he put in thirty cents; on rainy or cold days, ten.
One day, the sewing factory where Edel worked caught fire. She had been sitting by the door and escaped unharmed, but she saw her co-workers’ clothes catch fire and drop from the windows. It left her shaken to the core.
With that opportunity, Edel decided to look for an office job. She sent out interview applications. Yet no place would hire a girl with no experience.
That was when Karl learned it was his mother’s birthday. He decided to prepare a gift for the weakened Edel.
That day, with the money he had earned, he spent five cents on a flower seller at Union Square and bought a bouquet of violets. He remembered vaguely that his mother had once loved purple flowers when she lived in France. At a candy shop he also bought ten-cent chocolate bars.
When he held out the flowers and chocolates, Edel took them with wide-eyed surprise.
“Happy birthday. It’s the purple flower you like.”
“My goodness, you remembered… violets?”
Edel hugged the bouquet to her chest and burst into tears.
“…That’s not…?”
She laughed through her tears and shook her head.
“It was irises. But violets are beautiful too. It’s my favorite color. Thank you, Karl.”
As expected, Edel buried her nose in the pretty flowers that had no special use, looking as though she had the whole world in her hands and was happier than she had ever been.
For their family, the bouquet was a great luxury. Yet the fact that she had been made to smile with the money he earned brought him a quiet satisfaction.
Perhaps that was the problem—feeling that things were finally going smoothly.
The very next day, the gang burst into the apartment.
Two men kicked the door open and prowled the living room. They overturned the table, smashing the cash jar on the floor.
“Gertrude Jackson’s debt is now… one hundred eighty dollars and thirty cents. We collected three dollars and twenty-one cents in cash today… Hey, Billy, what’s the rest?”
A revolver peeked from a loose waistband inside an open jacket.
The man called Billy counted on his fingers and gave an awkward laugh.
“I don’t know.”
Edel protested in a trembling voice.
“But I only borrowed fifty dollars. I even paid the interest. Why did it suddenly become one hundred eighty?”
“I don’t know either. We came only to collect the one hundred eighty dollars and thirty cents.”
The man sneered as he approached.
Karl slipped in front of his mother to shield her. The man’s yellow teeth flashed in a grin as he slapped Karl’s cheek.
“The boy’s brave. When I was little, if parents couldn’t pay their debts, La Mano Nera would come and cut the children’s wrists off. Chop, chop.”
He slashed the air toward Karl’s arm.
“If you still don’t pay, they’ll chop off your ankles too and stuff you into a sugar barrel, then pour sand on top and dump you into the East River!”
Edel grabbed Karl and pulled him close.
“I-I’ll pay!”
“Oh? How?”
“I’ll find a job somehow and start paying from next month! So please don’t touch my son.”
The man sneered.
“That’s not my concern. I’ve come to deliver a generous offer from the boss who runs the hotel restaurant: if you work as a waitress, we’ll reduce the debt by one dollar every day….”
He tossed a scrap of paper at Edel’s feet.
“If you want to keep your son’s hands and feet intact, be here tomorrow afternoon at six.”