14                                Bella Cohen Spewack

stored up wrath. Two small boys followed her with our featherbed
and valises. As she paid them, she burst out into wild curses, invok¬
ing all the black years with their pestilences to fall upon the head of
the pious, watery-eyed Mrs. Pincus.

Mrs. Forman transferred her pats to my mother's head. With
every murmured word of sympathy, she screwed up her funny little
grey eyes until they seemed to be just mere scintillating pin points of
light. Why dwell on unhappy things that are past? Better to forget
... God had already punished Mrs. Pincus. Did my mother know
that Mrs. Pincus had had an older daughter, who had run away
from her to Philadelphia? Yes with a man. And her mother had
never heard from her since.

"Beauty is like a curse," she said in her little voice. It came as if she
were pressing her lips against a knot-hole in a fence. "If her daugh¬
ter had not been so beautiful, she would still be at the side of her
mother. Now, my daughter no one will ever take from me. She is so
ugly."

And Mrs. Forman was truthfully open-eyed. Yetta, her daughter,
was a red haired, long nosed, slanty eyed girl with round shoulders
and a pitiful desire to be in style. Her eyelashes and brows were the
color of her freckles of which she had a large ill proportioned num¬
ber. She later married—or rather was married to a widower with
three children, who wiped his nose on his sleeve.
 

© Estate of Bella Spewack, Published with the permission of the estate Ciommunity Service Society
photographs reproduced with peritiission.