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Humoresque A Laugh on Life with a Tear Behind It By: Fannie Hurst (1889-1968) |
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HUMORESQUE A LAUGH ON LIFE WITH
A TEAR BEHIND IT By FANNIE HURST 1920
CONTENTS HUMORESQUE
OATS FOR THE WOMAN
A PETAL ON THE CURRENT
WHITE GOODS
"HEADS"
A BOOB SPELLED BACKWARD
EVEN AS YOU AND I
THE WRONG PEW
HUMORESQUE On either side of the Bowery, which cuts through like a drain to catch
its sewage, Every Man's Land, a reeking march of humanity and humidity,
steams with the excrement of seventeen languages, flung in patois from
tenement windows, fire escapes, curbs, stoops, and cellars whose walls
are terrible and spongy with fungi. By that impregnable chemistry of race whereby the red blood of the
Mongolian and the red blood of the Caucasian become as oil and water in
the mingling, Mulberry Street, bounded by sixteen languages, runs its
intact Latin length of pushcarts, clotheslines, naked babies, drying
vermicelli; black eyed women in rhinestone combs and perennially big
with child; whole families of buttonhole makers, who first saw the
blue and gold light of Sorrento, bent at home work round a single gas
flare; pomaded barbers of a thousand Neapolitan amours. And then, just
as suddenly, almost without osmosis and by the mere stepping down from
the curb, Mulberry becomes Mott Street, hung in grillwork balconies, the
moldy smell of poverty touched up with incense. Orientals whose feet
shuffle and whose faces are carved out of satinwood. Forbidden women,
their white, drugged faces behind upper windows. Yellow children,
incongruous enough in Western clothing. A draughty areaway with an
oblique of gaslight and a black well of descending staircase.
Show windows of jade and tea and Chinese porcelains. More streets emanating out from Mott like a handful of crooked rheumatic
fingers, then suddenly the Bowery again, cowering beneath Elevated
trains, where men burned down to the butt end of soiled lives pass in
and out and out and in of the knee high swinging doors, a veiny nosed,
acid eaten race in themselves. Allen Street, too, still more easterly, and half as wide, is straddled
its entire width by the steely, long legged skeleton of Elevated
traffic, so that its third floor windows no sooner shudder into silence
from the rushing shock of one train than they are shaken into chatter by
the passage of another. Indeed, third floor dwellers of Allen Street,
reaching out, can almost touch the serrated edges of the Elevated
structure, and in summer the smell of its hot rails becomes an actual
taste in the mouth. Passengers, in turn, look in upon this horizontal of
life as they whiz by. Once, in fact, the blurry figure of what might
have been a woman leaned out, as she passed, to toss into one Abrahm
Kantor's apartment a short stemmed pink carnation. It hit softly on
little Leon Kantor's crib, brushing him fragrantly across the mouth and
causing him to pucker up. Beneath, where even in August noonday, the sun cannot find its way by a
chink, and babies lie stark naked in the cavernous shade, Allen Street
presents a sort of submarine and greenish gloom, as if its humanity were
actually moving through a sea of aqueous shadows, faces rather bleached
and shrunk from sunlessness as water can bleach and shrink. And then,
like a shimmering background of orange finned and copper flanked marine
life, the brass shops of Allen Street, whole rows of them, burn
flamelessly and without benefit of fuel. 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
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 pocks. Things cups, trays, knockers,
ikons, gargoyles, bowls, and teapots... Continue reading book >>
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