...of an aftermath

Good nights were exchanged. Aunt Bertha and David's father, the former fervid, the latter stony, crossed snubbing glances. Invited by David's mother to pay them many visits, Mr Sternowitz accepted without too much zest, and after a bare smile from David's father, crowded out of the door in Aunt Bertha's lee. Silence followed. His father tilted his chair back against the wall with a violent thump and stared morosely at the ceiling. His mother cleared the dishes carefully, impinging on a look of anxiety, a look of abstraction. David wished they would talk. Silence only made his father more ominous. But the silence continued, and David feeling himself caught as if in talons of stress dared not move - at least not until his father spoke and eased the strain - and for escape meanwhile, could only stare at the new picture his mother had bought.

[Call It Sleep, Roth, H.]

...of brother-in-laws

Mr Sternowitz squirmed, blinked, dared not look at anyone. The hard-won relaxation of a few moments ago was destroyed entirely and everyone was on guard again. Nor was there any hope of the tension ever easing, since dinner was almost over, and there would be nothing more to divert one. David's mother assayed a few vague remarks. They went unanswered. In the strained silence, Aunt Bertha, who looked close to tears, kept muttering under her breath - 'Begrudges me everything...His spite, his sour silence...God blacken his destiny.' David looked around fearfully, hardly daring to think what might happen. Finally, Mr Sternowitz, after several preliminary coughs, thrust out his chin and smiled with forced and wavering heartiness.

[Call It Sleep, Roth, H.]

...of stairs

He became very fond of his own floor. There was a frosted skylight over the roofstair housing that diffused a cloudy yellow glow at morning and a soft grey haze at afternoon. After one climbed from the tumult of the street, climbed the lower, shadowier stairs, a little tense, listening to toilets, entering this light was like reaching a haven. There was a mild, relaxing hush about it, a luminous silence, static and embalmed. He would have liked to explore it, or at least to see whether the roof door was locked, but the thought of that height, that mysterious vacancy and isolation dissuaded him. There was something else besides. The stairs that led up were not like the stairs that led down, although both were made of stone. Common stairs were bevelled to an edge, hollowed to an aching trough by the tread of many feet, blackened beyond washing by the ground-in dirt of streets. But these that led up to the roof still had a pearliness mingled with their grey. Each slab was still square and clean. No palms of sliding hands had buffed the wrinkled paint from off their banisters. No palms had oiled them tusk-smooth and green as axe-helve. They were inviolable those stairs, guarding the light and the silence.

[Call It Sleep, Roth, H.]

...of finality

There was a horrible silence while they stared at the wad of paper on the table. Then his father slipped the bandaged hand free from the sling and began slowly stretching it back and forth to flex the cramped and clicking elbow. His face wore an expression of grim aloofness as though it were not his own hand he was experimenting with but someone else's. On his mother's features horror and pity were written. David gazed from one to the other and finally like theirs his eyes came to rest on the other hand that had just settled softly on the table, glimmering and peninsular on the green oilcloth. Minutes seemed to pass in a dull dragging vacancy in which no word was spoken. David looked up. His mother's face was unchanged as though that anguished look were caught in stone. But his father's face had become flushed, relaxed; the deep breath hissed softly at his nostrils. His eyelids had begun to linger at their shutting, opening not in one but in two stages. He spoke. Faint ratchets of effort against drowsiness and fatigue ticked and caught in his voice, thickening it. And as though to himself -

'I'll never go back to work there again. I'll never go back to printing at all. I'm through. Whatever work I do hereafter, it's going to be out doors - alone if I can. But out doors always... I'll not let myself be hemmed in by ink and iron any more. I don't want any foremen for my friends. I don't want anybody. I - I have no fortune with men.'

[Call It Sleep, Roth, H.]

...of rage

And when his father came home, he came in alone again. The sight of him this evening was terrifying. Never, not even the night he had beaten David, did he radiate so fell, so electric a fury. It was as though his whole body was smouldering, a stark, throbbing, curdling emanation flowed from him, a dark, corrosive haze that was all the more fearful because David sensed how thin an aura it was of the terrific volcano clamped within. He refused to speak. He scarcely touched his food. His eyelids, normally narrow, seemed to have stretched beyond human roundness, revealing the whole globe of the eye in which the black pupils engulfed the brown. He looked at no one. His mad, burnished gaze roved constantly above their heads along the walls as if he were tracing and retracing the line of the moulding beneath the ceiling. Between the hollow of mouth and chin, his twitching lips threw a continual flicker of shadow. There was a place above the stiff sickle nostrils that looked dented - so pinched and white they were. Only once did he break his silence and then only for a brief time in a voice as harsh and laboured as a croak.

[Call It Sleep, Roth, H.]

...of a witness to a beating

Suddenly he cringed. His eyelids blotted out the light like a shutter. The open hand struck him full against the cheek and temple, splintering the brain into fragments of light. Spheres, mercuric, splattered, condensed and roared. He fell to the floor. The next moment his father had snatched up the clothes hanger, and in that awful pause before it descended upon his shoulders, he saw with that accelerated vision of agony, how mute and open mouthed Yussie stood now, with what useless silence.

[Call It Sleep, Roth, H.]

...of a curious meeting

The truth was there was something quite untypical about their behaviour. The old peddler woman on the bench and the overalled men in the stern had seen enough husbands meeting their wives and children after a long absence to know how such people ought to behave. The most volatile races, such as the Italians, often danced for joy, whirled each other around, pirouetted in an ecstasy; Swedes sometimes just looked at each other, breathing through open mouths like a panting dog; Jews wept, jabbered, almost put each other's eyes out with the recklessness of their darting gestures; Poles roared and gripped each other at arm's length as though they meant to tear a handful of flesh; and after one pecking kiss, the English might be seen gravitating towards, but never achieving embrace. But these two stood silent, apart; the man staring with aloof, offended eyes grimly down at the water - or if he turned his face towards his wife at all, it was only to glare in harsh contempt at the blue straw hat worn by the child in her arms, and then his hostile eyes would sweep about the deck to see if anyone else were observing them. And his wife beside him regarding him uneasily, appealingly. And the child against her breast looking from one to the other with watchful, frightened eyes. Altogether it was a very curious meeting.

[Call It Sleep, Roth, H.]