They reached the bus-stop shelter on the other side of the street and he closed his umbrella.
He kept clearing his throat, as he always did when he was upset. Outside the building, she waited for her husband to open his umbrella and then took his arm. The place was so miserably understaffed, and things got mislaid or mixed up so easily, that they decided not to leave their present in the office but to bring it to him next time they came. He was all right, she said, but a visit from his parents might disturb him. There they waited again, and instead of their boy, shuffling into the room, as he usually did (his poor face sullen, confused, ill-shaven, and blotched with acne), a nurse they knew and did not care for appeared at last and brightly explained that he had again attempted to take his life.
It began to rain as they walked up the brown path leading to the sanitarium. The bus they had to take next was late and kept them waiting a long time on a street corner, and when it did come, it was crammed with garrulous high-school children. The subway train lost its life current between two stations and for a quarter of an hour they could hear nothing but the dutiful beating of their hearts and the rustling of newspapers. That Friday, their son’s birthday, everything went wrong. They seldom saw Isaac and had nicknamed him the Prince. Her husband, who in the old country had been a fairly successful businessman, was now, in New York, wholly dependent on his brother Isaac, a real American of almost forty years’ standing. Sol, their next-door neighbor, whose face was all pink and mauve with paint and whose hat was a cluster of brookside flowers), she presented a naked white countenance to the faultfinding light of spring.
Unlike other women of her age (such as Mrs. Her drab gray hair was pinned up carelessly. After eliminating a number of articles that might offend him or frighten him (anything in the gadget line, for instance, was taboo), his parents chose a dainty and innocent trifle-a basket with ten different fruit jellies in ten little jars.Īt the time of his birth, they had already been married for a long time a score of years had elapsed, and now they were quite old. Man-made objects were to him either hives of evil, vibrant with a malignant activity that he alone could perceive, or gross comforts for which no use could be found in his abstract world. For the fourth time in as many years, they were confronted with the problem of what birthday present to take to a young man who was incurably deranged in his mind.
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