Immigrant children -- Fiction; Lower East Side (New York, N.Y.) -- Fiction; Teachers -- Fiction
"For without the name," said he, "what good would the business be to ye?
Who could believe that the likes of a Jacob Morowsky would know the
truth about the blessed saints? And you're not to forget what I've
taught you. Arrows for Saint Sebastian, flames and a gridiron for Saint
Lawrence, a big book for Saint Luke (he was a scholard, you know), and
the rosary for Saint Dominick. There's not the call there used to be for
Saint Aloysius, but when you're doing him, don't forget to put a skull
in his hand. You have your 'Lives of the Saints,' haven't you?"
"I have, dear master," answered Jacob.
"Then keep on studyin' it. And ye'll do what ye can for old Biddy
Moriarty, that's took care of me ever since me poor wife died."
"She shall be of my household," answered Jacob. And so Esther succeeded
to the old man's name and the old woman's care.
Jacob Morowsky left his old quarters, and John Nolan took up his
residence in the front room of the second floor of a house that had been
the residence of an English official when New York was a Colony of the
Crown. The house had endured many vicissitudes and degradations. It was,
when Esther knew it, a tenement unpopular with the authorities because
it could not quite condescend to the laws of the Tenement House
Commission; and not too popular with its landlord because its rooms, in
proportion to its ground area, were extravagantly few. Its spacious
halls and staircase, its high ceilings and wide chimneys were all so
many waste spaces according to modern tenement architecture.
Esther and her father slept in the drawing-room behind a red curtain,
Esther in her babyhood's crib which, as she had written to the Stork,
she had quite outgrown. But no one seemed to notice that. No one, in
fact, noticed her very much. She was a good little girl. She was never
late or troublesome at school. Every Friday afternoon she brought home a
blue ticket, testifying that her application, her deportment, and her
progress were satisfactory. From time to time, as she reached new
altitudes in the course of study, the teacher's name on these tickets
varied. But the tickets were the only link between Esther's two lives of
home and school. No reproachful teacher, no truant officer threatening
arrest and the Juvenile Court, ever darkened her horizon. No outraged
Principal ever summoned her father to an uncomfortable quarter of an
hour. She was, as successive teachers noted with amazement, that rara
avis in the human family, a normal child. Even her clear dark eyes and
her dainty little features were as her ancestry decreed that they should
be. And the clear pallor of her skin--which Mrs. Moriarty tried to
combat by dressing her much in red--was the normal accompaniment to the
fine soft blackness of her hair.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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