PAGE 5
"The Origin Of Species"
by
“It is,” Rebecca admitted. And any one of the fifteen Einsteins or even any neighbor to the fourth or fifth house removed would have corroborated her.
“Und it’s got black hair,” Esther further objected.
“They all do when they ain’t redheaded,” retorted the now ruffled Rebecca. “Ain’t you got nothin’ to do on’y knockin’ other people’s babies? First off you says he’s yours, und now you says he’s too loud und too black. Well, he ain’t too loud or too black fer me. You wait till your own baby comes. Maybe you’ll get somethin’ worster, with fish’s faces, maybe. How will you like that? You can’t never tell what kind they’re goin’ to be, an’ you’ve got to keep ’em.”
This haphazard system–or the lack of it–rather alarmed Esther, though the desire for a baby of her own design and choosing was growing stronger every day. For her loneliness was growing, too. Jacob was hardly ever at home. He spent many of his days and all of his evenings in his fruitless, endless search. And Mrs. Moriarty had begun to help him through some subterranean first-cousin-twice-removed channel which connected her with a member of the police force. She was making a canvass of the women’s lodging-houses near the Bowery.
So Esther, having much time upon her hands, turned her thoughts again to the upbringing of a brother, and wrote again to the headquarters in Central Park, and impressed upon the authorities–in large round writing upon a sheet of pink paper with two turtle doves embossed upon it–that she was not in a hurry for her baby, and would prefer to wait until they found a really acceptable article. If possible, she would prefer from-gold hair, blue eyes, and a silent tongue. For such an infant her outgrown crib, a warm welcome, and comfortable home were waiting. No others need apply.
When this letter was despatched she felt greatly relieved, and set about the nursing of the lady mit the from-gold hair with renewed energy. And the lady needed her little friend and welcomed her always with a gentle smile, though a large and unwonted female was now regularly established in the room, from which she relentlessly barred more disturbing and autobiographical visitors.
All through her illness, indeed ever since her first coming into that house, she had kept the door open, and she lay so that she could watch the stairs. Whom she was waiting for she never told, but she was always listening. She knew the step of every fellow lodger, of the doctor, of any one who had ever once climbed those stairs. And at the approach of any new footstep she would sit up rigidly among her pillows, staring and listening so intently that when the new-comer appeared and brought disappointment, she would sink back gasping and exhausted.
“What does she says?” Esther once asked the imposing nurse, when a visitor for the Top Floor Front had precipitated one of these attacks. “What does she says when she cries?”
“She says,” interpreted the nurse, “‘He is dead. It must be that he is dead.’ Yet we know that her husband is dead. She still expects some one.”
“Maybe,” said Esther, arguing from her own state of mind to that of her friend, “maybe she expects a Stork mit babies.”
The woman caught Esther by the shoulders and peered down into her eyes. “So they have been talking to you,” she said with immense scorn. “Oh, those women!”
“Nobody ain’t told me nothings,” Esther answered. “I don’t know nothings. Only I thinks it in mine heart. And anyway, the first baby what comes here is mine. I writes on the Central Park a letter over it. It’s going to be a boy mit from-gold hair.”
“Well,” snorted the nurse with some professional pique, “it’s good you got that settled.”
Late that night Esther awoke in her little outgrown crib. A familiar series of sounds had disturbed her: the arrival of the doctor. So the lady mit the from-gold hair was presumably worse. The doctor’s steps mounted into the darkness and silence of the sleeping house, and the clock in Mrs. Moriarty’s room struck two. Esther lay wide-eyed in the dark and waited for the sound of the doctor’s return, but she heard nothing except the far-away clang and shriek of an occasional cable-car and the sound of stealthy, hurrying feet upon the sidewalk. She sat up, and in the dim reflection from the electric light on the street corner she distinguished the shapeless bulk that was her sleeping father. Jacob had only recently come in from his quest, and he slept the sleep of exhaustion.