The Etiquette Of Yetta

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Title:     The Etiquette Of Yetta
Author: Myra Kelly [More Titles by Kelly]

"Stands a girl by our block," Eva Gonorowsky began, as she and her friend Yetta Aaronsohn wended their homeward way through the crowded purlieus of Gouverneur and Monroe Streets, "stands a girl by our block what don't never goes on the school."

Yetta was obediently shocked. She had but recently been rescued from a like benightment, but both she and her friend tactfully ignored this fact.

"Don't the Truant Officer gets her?" the convert questioned, remembering her own means to grace, and the long struggle she had made against it. "Don't the Truant Officer comes on her house und says cheek on her mamma, und brings her--by the hair, maybe--on the school?"

"He don't comes yet," Eva replied.

"Well, he's comin'," Yetta predicted. "He comes all times."

"I guess," commented Eva, "I guess Rosie Rashnowsky needs somebody shall make somethings like that mit her. In all my world I ain't never see how she makes. She don't know what is polite. She puts her on mit funny clothes und 'fer-ladies-shoes.' She is awful fresh, und"--here Eva dropped her voice to a tone proper to a climax--"she dances on organs even."

Now Yetta Aaronsohn, in the days before the Truant Officer and the Renaissance, would have run breathless blocks at the distant lure of a street organ, and would have footed it merrily up and down the sidewalk in all the apparently spontaneous intricacies which make this kind of dancing so absorbing to the performer, and so charming to the audience. Now, however, she shuddered under the shock of such depravity. School had taught her many things not laid down in the official course of study.

"Ain't that fierce?" she murmured.

Not all subjects of gossip are as confirmative as Rosie Rashnowsky that day proved herself to be. For as Yetta and Eva turned into Clinton Street, Rosie was discovered dancing madly to the strains of a one-legged hurdy-gurdy, in the midst of an envious but not emulating crowd.

"That's her," said Eva briefly. "Sooner you stands on the stoop you shall see her better."

And when the two friends carried out this suggestion and mounted the nearest steps, Eva pointed to what seemed a bundle of inanimate rags.

"It's her baby," she disapprovingly remarked. "She lays it all times on steps. Somebody could to set on it sometimes."

"It's fierce," repeated Yetta, this time with more conviction. She was herself the guardian of three small and ailing sisters, and she knew that they should not be deposited on cold doorsteps. So she picked up Rosie's abandoned responsibility, and turned to survey that conscienceless Salome.

Rosie was, as a dancer should be, startlingly arrayed. Her long black-stockinged little legs ended in "fer-ladies-shoes" described by Eva. Her hair bobbed wildly in four tight little braids, each tied with a ribbon or a strip of cloth of a different color, and the rest of her visible attire consisted of a dirty kimona dressing-jacket, red with yellow flowers, and outlined with bands of green. The "fer-ladies-shoes" poised and pointed and twinkled in time to the wheezing of the one-legged hurdy-gurdy. The parti-colored braids waved free. The kimona flapped and fluttered and permitted indiscreet glimpses of a less gorgeous substructure.

Miss Gonorowsky regarded these excesses with a cold and disapproving eye. "She don't know what is fer her," she remarked. "My mamma, she wouldn't to leave me dance by no organs. It ain't fer ladies."

"It's fierce," agreed Miss Aaronsohn, with a gulp, "it's something fierce."

The hurdy-gurdy coughed its way to the end of one tune, held its breath for an asthmatic moment, and then wailed into "The Sidewalks of New York." Fresh and amazing energy possessed the hair ribbons, the kimona, and the "fer-ladies-shoes." Fresh disdain possessed Miss Gonorowsky. The tune would have seemed also to work havoc upon the new propriety of Miss Aaronsohn.

"It's something fierce," she once more remarked, and then casting decorum to the winds, and the abandoned young Rashnowsky to Miss Gonorowsky's care, she sped down the steps, through the crowd and out into the ring.

Rosie, though she had never seen Miss Aaronsohn before, recognized her talent instantly, and welcomed her partnership with an ecstatic combination of the Cake Walk and the Highland Fling. Yetta returned the compliment in a few steps of the Barn Dance flavored with a dash of the Irish Jig. Then eye to eye, and hands on one another's shoulders, they fell to "spieling," with occasional Polka divertisements.

A passing stranger stopped to watch them and gave the organ-man largesse, so that still he played, and still they danced until called back to duty and reality by the uproar of the baby, now thrice abandoned. For Eva Gonorowsky had gone virtuously home, feeling that her traditions had been outraged, her friendship despised, and that her disciple had disgraced her.

Yetta and Rosie with the heavy-headed baby followed the organ for several blocks. They might have gone on forever like the Pied Piper's rats, had not the howls of the youngest Rashnowsky anchored and steadied them. When at last they had recovered breath and the proprieties, they sat amicably down upon an alien doorstep, and went back to the early--and in their case neglected--preliminaries of friendship.

They exchanged names, ages, addresses, the numbers of their family, and their own places in the scale. The baby had obligingly gone to sleep, and these amenities were carried out in due form. It seemed that they were bound by many similarities of circumstance and fate: each was the eldest of a family, but whereas Rosie could boast but one baby, Yetta's mother had three. Both mothers worked at low and ill-paid branches of the tailor's art. And both children were fatherless to all daily intents and purposes.

"Mine papa," Yetta told her new little friend, "is pedlar-mans on the country. Me und mine mamma don't know where he is even. From long we ain't got no letters off of him, und no money. My mamma, she has awful sads over it."

"Does she cry?" questioned the sympathetic Rosie, drawing her kimona closely about her in the enjoyment of this new and promising gossip.

Yetta shook her head. "She ain't got no time she shall cry. So my papa don't comes, und letters mit money off of him don't comes. My mamma, she ain't got time for nothings on'y sewing. She has it pretty hard."

"My mamma is got it hard too," cried Rosie, not to be outdone. "She don't know where my papa is neither. She don't know is he on the country even. She don't know nothings over him. Me und my mamma we looks all times on blocks und streets und stores. On'y we couldn't to find him. Und my mamma, she works all day by factories, und by night she comes on the house und brings more work. She ain't got time for nothings neither, on'y sewing und looking fer my poor papa."

"Then your papa ain't dead?" queried Yetta.

"No, he ain't dead; on'y he loses him the job." Rosie's voice as she made this statement, and Yetta's manner as she received it, would seem to say that if this were not death, it was very little better.

To Isidore Rashnowsky it had been the "sudden and unprovided death" of which the Prayer Book speaks. It had meant the destruction of the very delicate equilibrium by which he and his wife maintained their tiny but peaceful household. It threw the whole burden of four lives upon Mrs. Rashnowsky's thin and twisted shoulders. It drove him, after three weeks of unsuccessful quest for work, to cut himself off from all he cared for. Starvation was very close to them. He could contribute nothing, and he determined to take nothing: to increase the niggardly supply by diminishing the hungry demand. Mrs. Rashnowsky's earnings--even when augmented by the home work which the law forbids but life demands--was scant indeed for the maintenance of the mother and the two children. All these things Isidore explained to her patiently, resignedly, and with what bravery he could muster. And she agreed, nodding wearily over her sewing. But from his conclusion, from his determination to remove himself and his hunger from her charge, she persistently dissented. Rather, she insisted, would she take the babies to the Children's Court and get them committed to some institution. Then he and she could face the world together. She could find courage for that. But not to live without him. Never for that.

"It is but for a time," he hopefully remonstrated, "and if we give the children we cannot easily get them back. Children such as ours are not often found. They would be adopted by some rich man before, maybe, I could find a job."

This consideration had not occurred to Mrs. Rashnowsky, but when it was pointed out to her she was forced to admit its weight. The physical charm of Rosie, kimona clad and dirty, might not have appealed as insistently as her father feared to the rich adopter, and the rag-wrapped baby would have been equally safe. But to Mrs. Rashnowsky's fear and pride, to see these infants was to covet them.

And so, tearfully, fearfully, she promised to think again of Isidore's proposal. She thought all night, and all through the hurried, steaming, driven day at the factory. When at last she was free she toiled home to tell him that she could not do without him, and found that he had gone.

All these things had happened, as Rosie told her new friend, three months before. The mother had been forced into smaller, darker, cheaper quarters, and it was this transition which had so far saved Rosie from the Truant Officer. They had moved from one school district to another, and the authorities of their new habitat had not yet tracked the light-falling "fer-ladies-shoes."

"But that Truant Officer will get you sure," warned Yetta. "He comes in my house and he gets me, und makes me I shall go on the school."

"He can go on mine house all he likes," responded the lawless Rosie, making careful inventory of her hair ribbons the while, "all he likes he can go. There ain't never nobody there. My mamma she is all times on factories, und me und the baby is all times by the street. I don't needs I shall go on no school. I ain't got time."

"He'll get you on a rainy day," maintained Cassandra.

But the dread official never did discover Rosie. She was sufficiently wise to avoid any public display of her red and yellow charms until after school hours, unless she were well out of her own district. She would follow street organs and behave like any other member of a decorous audience until she was well out of the path of the ravening Truant Officer. Then she would abandon the baby to the cold stones, and herself to the enchantment of the music. Thus she achieved that freedom of which her adopted country boasts, and for which Yetta Aaronsohn--though basking in the rays of a free education, with lunches, medical attendance, and spectacles thrown in--still yearned.

There had been a time when life had been to Yetta, even as it now was to Rosie, a simple matter of loving and helping her mother, taking care of the babies, and dancing to the organs in the street. Then entered the Truant Officer, and life became a complicated affair of manners, dress, books, washing, and friendships, with every day new laws to be met, new ideas to be assimilated, old pleasures and employments to be thrown aside.

That the end of his three months of wandering found Isidore alive bordered on the miraculous; that the end of these three months found him in congenial employment was altogether a miracle. Yet these things had occurred, and Isidore's long loneliness and self-imposed exile were nearly over, when his daughter and Miss Aaronsohn melted their souls together in the langorous solvent of "Silver Threads Among the Gold." On the ensuing Saturday he was to receive his first week's wages as janitor's assistant in a combination of restaurant, hall, and Masonic lodge, much patronized by small and earnest clubs or societies, having no permanent stamping ground of their own. On the Friday afternoon the large hall was occupied by "The Cornelia Aid Society for the Instruction of Ignorant Parents Among the Poor." It had been the happy idea of one of the vice-presidents to hold the meeting within the citadel as it were of poor and ignorant parenthood, so that the members coming gingerly through unimagined streets and evidences of parenthood appallingly ignorant, might derive--the vice-president was fond of the vernacular--some idea of what the society was "up against." Automobiles, victorias, disgusted footmen, and blasphemous chauffeurs thronged the unaccustomed street, and the children of Israel thronged about them.

A genius for opportunity drew Giusseppi Pagamini and his new piano organ to this sensational business opening, and the sweet strains of the piano organ drew Rosie Rashnowsky after him. They had drawn her for many blocks, and the meeting of the Cornelias was in full swing when her kimona and hair ribbons came into play upon the sidewalk. She laid the baby upon the steps, swept clean for her reception by Isidore the conscientious, who had little idea--as he plied his broom and scrubbing-brush earlier in the day--that he was strewing the couch of his own small daughter's siesta.

Then to an audience composed of glorified gentlemen in silk hats and top-boots, and the quieter but still sumptuous chauffeur livery, Rosie threw herself into a very ecstasy of her art. Louder thrilled Giusseppi, quicker flew the "fer-ladies-shoes," wilder waved ribbons and dressing jacket. "Out o' sight," commented the footmen. "Bravissimo," ejaculated the chauffeurs, and Rosie reached the climax of her career in a pirouette which brought her, madly whirring, under the aristocratic noses of a pair of chestnut cobs, whose terrified plunges would have ended her gyrations forever and a day if a footman had not interfered. Then Giusseppi passed his battered hat, and the audience, naturally inferring that the black-eyed child belonged to the black-eyed musician, threw him such encouragement as a week of ordinary days would not have brought him.

In a reckless moment he gave Rosie a nickel, and this wealth, combined with her recent danger and escape, and with the intoxicating quality of her audience, made Rosie follow Giusseppi to the other end of the line of carriages which trailed round the corner and half-way down the next block. Here fresh triumphs awaited her, while from the steps of Fraternity Hall her infant sister called aloud for instant speech with her. The infant was still making these inarticulate demands, when Mrs. Ponsonby-Brown, holding her skirts well above her shoe tops with one hand, while with the other she applied a bottle of lavender salts to her nose, approached the meeting. She was late but unflurried. Her horses, somewhat racked by the elevated trains in Allen Street, had been entirely unnerved by the children, the push-carts, the dogs, and the flying papers, which beset them from all sides and sprang up under their nervous feet. So the philanthropic Mrs. Ponsonby-Brown had alighted from her carriage, secured a small though knowing-looking guide, and walked to her destination. Presently she reached the hall, rewarded her guide, and stopped in her surge up the steps by the yells of the youngest Rashnowsky, which had broken free of its mummy clothes, and was battling for breath with two arms like slate-pencils--as cold, as thin, as gray, and seemingly as brittle.

"Whose child is this?" she demanded of a near and large chauffeur. It was not the lady's fault that much philanthropic activity had so formed her manner that these simple words, as she said them, seemed to infer that the large green-clad chauffeur was a Rousseau among parents, that the child was his, starved that he might grow fat, and abandoned that he might go free. His reply was all that her manner demanded. And when she repeated the question to other waiting men, she was hardly answered at all.

Meanwhile the youngest Rashnowsky banged its hairless head upon the cold stone, and reiterated its demands for its guardian sister. Mrs. Ponsonby-Brown was puzzled, and she did not enjoy the sensation. She picked up the child before she had planned any further step for its disposition. She could not well drop it on the stone again, and there was no one to whom she could give it. Realizing with a sudden sense of outrage that she was affording amusement to the well-trained servants of her Cornelia associates, she retreated into the building and into the hall with the screaming Gracchus in her arms.

Her advent and the clamor of her burden interrupted the reading of a paper upon "Nursery Emergencies, and How to Meet Them," by a young lady who had exhausted the family physician, and such books as he could be persuaded to lend her. Her remarks, though interesting and authoritative, could not prevail against the howling presence of a real nursery emergency, and the attention of the audience stampeded to Mrs. Ponsonby-Brown and her contribution to the meeting. That practised and disgusted philanthropist relinquished the youngest Rashnowsky to the first pair of pitying arms extended in its direction. But pity was not what the sufferer craved, and she repudiated it eloquently.

"What shall I do with it?" cried this young Cornelia, looking helplessly around upon her fellows. "Whenever my Jimmie behaved like this I used simply to ring for Louise. I never knew what she used to do with him."

Mrs. Ponsonby-Brown snorted. "A nurse!" said she, "a hireling! You relegate a mother's sacred responsibilities to a servant." Mrs. Ponsonby-Brown had never enjoyed these responsibilities, and so was eloquent and authoritative upon them.

Other Cornelias fluttered about suggesting that the Gracchus was suffering from hunger, colic, or misdirected pins. The expert upon emergencies snatched this one from its embarrassed guardian, inverted it across her knee, and patted it manfully upon the back. The dirtiness of it, the thinness, the squalled wrappings, and the blue little hands and feet touched and quickened the Cornelias as no lecture could have done, and the resourceful vice-president found cause to congratulate herself on the milieu of the meeting.

"If we knew," said a bespectacled Cornelia sensibly and practically, "what food they were giving it, we could easily send out and get a meal for it."

"It hardly looks," interrupted another, "like the Mellin's Food and Nestle's Milk Babies one sees in the advertisements."

"And yet," said the practical member, "we can't do anything until we know what it's accustomed to. With so young a child----"

Here the door opened and an unenrolled Cornelia was added to the gathering. Her red and yellow kimona rose and fell with her quick breathing. Defiance shone in her black eyes.

"You got mine baby," declared Rosie Rashnowsky. "Why couldn't you leave her be where I put her, you old Miss Fix-its? You scared me most to death until I heard her yellin'."

With these ungrateful remarks she advanced upon the ministering group and snatched the inverted infant from the colic theorist.

"This is the top of her," she pointed out. "I guess you didn't look very hard."

Before the discredited practitioner had formed a reply the Cornelia in spectacles was ready to remark:

"We think your baby is hungry."

"Sure is she," Rosie concurred; "ain't babies always hungry?"

"And if you will tell us what you feed her on," the lady continued, "we will send out for some of it before you take her home."

Rosie was by this time established in a chair with the now only whimpering baby upon her lap.

"Don't you bother," she genially remonstrated. "I just bought her something."

And then with many contortions she produced from some inner recess of her kimona a large dill pickle, imperfectly wrapped in moist newspaper. She dissevered a section of this with her own sharp teeth, and put it into the baby's waiting mouth. The cries of the youngest Rashnowsky were supplanted by a chorus of remonstrating Cornelias. "Pickles!" they cried, and shuddered. "Do you often give that baby pickles?"

"I do when I can get 'em," Rosie answered, "but that ain't often."

And then this injudicious but warm-hearted audience drew from her the sordid little story which seemed such a matter of course to her, and such a tragedy to them.

"Und I looks," said Rosie, "all times I looks on cellars und push-carts und fire 'scapes und stores und sidewalks. Und I walks und I walks--all times I walks--mit that baby in mine hand, und I couldn't to find me the papa. Mine poor mamma, she looks too, sooner she goes und comes on the factory, und by night me und mine mamma, we comes by our house und we looks on ourselves und we don't says nothings, on'y makes so"--and Rosie shook a hopeless head--"und so we knows we ain't find him. Sometimes mine mamma cries over it. She is got all times awful sad looks."

By this time the more sentimental among the Cornelias were reduced to tears, and the more practical were surveying such finances as they carried with them, and in a very short time an endowment fund of nearly fifty dollars had been collected. The sang-froid which had throughout the proceedings distinguished Rosie was a little shaken when this extraordinary shower of manna was made clear to her, but it vanished altogether when, upon the suggestion of the practical and bespectacled Cornelia, the assistant janitor was sent for to give safe-conduct to the children and their bequest. And the amazement of Isidore Rashnowsky--summoned from the furnace room for some uncomprehended reason--was hardly less ecstatic when he found himself in the close embrace of his frenzied daughter. For Rosie's joy was nothing less than frenzy.

"It's mine papa! Oh, it's mine papa!" she informed the now jubilant and sympathetic Cornelias, who were quite ready to pass a vote of thanks to their pioneering vice-president, whose plan had afforded them more emotion and more true human sensation than they had experienced for many a day.

Isidore floated toward Clinton Street through clouds and seas of gold. The endowment together with his own first week's wages made a larger sum than he had ever hoped to gather. He wafted the baby through this golden atmosphere, the baby wafted a second section of dill pickle, and Rosie, in her red and golden draperies gyrated around them.

"You shall go on the factory right away," babbled Isidore, "und bring the mamma on the house. She shall never no more work on no factories. She shall stay on the house und take care of the baby und be Jewish ladies."

"She don't needs she shall take care of no baby," Rosie, thus lightly deposed, remonstrated; "ain't I takin' care of her all right?"

"Sure, sure," the placating Isidore made answer; "on'y you won't have no time. You shall go on the school."

This last sinister word broke through all Rosie's golden dreams. "School?" she repeated in dismay. "Me on the school?"

"For learn," Isidore happily acquiesced, "all them things what makes American ladies."

Rosie's sentiments almost detached her from the triumphal procession, so rebellious were they, so helpless, so baffled and outraged. And in that moment of brainstorm they turned into Grand Street, and came upon a piano organ, and Yetta Aaronsohn, the erstwhile censorious Yetta, in the enjoyment of a complicated pas-seul.

"For von things," Isidore ambled on, "American ladies they don't never dance by streets on organs. You shall that on the school learn, und the reading, und the writing, und all things what is fer ladies. Monday you shall go on the school. Your mamma shall go by your side. She won't," he broke out ecstatically, "have nothings else to do. You shall go now on the factory for tell her."

Rosie paused but an instant on this mission of joy. She overtook Yetta Aaronsohn homeward bound.

"I guess," said Rosie with fashionable langour, "I guess maybe I goes on the school Monday."

Yetta stared, then smiled. "Ain't I told you from long," said she, "that that Truant Officer could to make like that mit you?"

"I ain't never seen no Truant Officer," retorted Rosie. "In all my world I ain't never seen one. I don't know what are they even. On'y I finds me the papa mit bunches from money, und a hall, und he says I shall go on the school so somebody can learn me all things what American ladies makes."

"Come on my school," entreated Yetta. "You und me could to set beside ourselves."

Rosie pondered. She counted her four hair ribbons. She wrapped her kimona toga wise about her and pondered.

"I don't know," she finally answered, "do I needs I shall set by side somebody what dances on streets mit organs," and added, as Yetta's expression seemed to hint at instant parting:

"Well, good afternoon, I must be going."

Her evolution into "American Ladies" had already begun. The manners of the Cornelias had not been lost upon her.

[The end]
Myra Kelly's short story: Etiquette Of Yetta

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