Description

“OI WEH! How it shines the beautifulness!” exulted Hanneh Hayyeh over her newly painted kitchen. She cast a glance full of worship and adoration at the picture of her son in uniform; eyes like her own, shining with eagerness, with joy of life, looked back at her. The Lost “Beautifulness” “Oi, let me alone. Give me only a rest.” Too intoxicated with the joy of achievement to take no for an answer, she dragged him into the doorway. “Nu? How do you like it? Do I know what beautiful is?” “Aby will not have to shame himself to come back to his old home,” she rejoiced, clapping her hands  hands blistered from the paintbrush and calloused from rough toil. “Now he’ll be able to invite all the grandest friends he made in the army.” “But how much money did you spend out on that paint?” “It was my own money,” she said, wiping the perspiration off her face with a corner of her apron. “Every penny I earned myself from the extra The smell of the paint was suffocating, but she washing.” inhaled in it huge draughts of hidden beauty. For weeks she had dreamed of it and felt in each tin of paint she was able to buy, in each stroke of the brush, the ecstasy of loving service for the son she idolized. “But you had ought save it up for the bad times. What’ll you do when the cold weather starts in and the pushcart will not wheel itself out?” “I save and pinch enough for myself. This I done in honor for my son. I want my Aby to lift up his head in the world. I want him to be able to invite even the President from America to his home and shame himself.” Ever since she first began to wash the fine silks and linens for Mrs. Preston, years ago, it had been Hanneh Hayyeh’s ambition to have a white-painted kitchen exactly like that in the old Stuyvesant Square mansion. Now her own kitchen was a dream come true. “You’d pull the bananas off a blind man’s pushcart to bring to your Aby. You know nothing from holding tight to a dollar and saving a penny to Hanneh Hayyeh ran in to her husband, a stoop- a penny like poor people should.” shouldered, care-crushed man who was leaning against the bed, his swollen feet outstretched, counting the pennies that totaled his day’s earnings. “What do I got from living if I can’t have a little beautifulness in my life? I don’t allow for myself the ten cents to go to a moving picture that I’m crazy to see. I never yet treated myself to an ice-cream soda even for a holiday. Shining up the house for Aby is my only pleasure.”