A Book of Great Worth Read Online Free Page B

peppering him with questions, the girl offering for his inspection a red-headed doll.
    “We’ll have lots of fun,” my father assured the children.
    He had noticed a stream flowing beneath a bridge they had crossed just before arriving at the house, and he asked Benjy if he had a fishing pole. “When I was your age I loved to fish in the pond on our farm,” my father told the boy. “It’s been a while, but you don’t forget how.”
    Then he asked the children which was their favourite subject: reading, writing or arithmetic. They looked at him blankly.
    “Oh, the children are on vacation for the summer,” Mrs. Pearlman said lightly, and she sang, slightly off-key: “No more pencils, no more books, no more teacher’s dirty looks.” Like her husband, she was in her thirties, but looked younger, with long honey-brown hair that she wore loose around her shoulders like a schoolgirl, and startling green eyes set off by a complexion that was pale and flawless. By this time, my father, who had not yet been with a woman, had fallen deliriously in love with her. The dizziness this caused added to his confusion.
    “Then what...?” he began.
    “Didn’t my husband explain?” Mrs. Pearlman asked, exasperated. “Your job is merely to talk to the children. In Yiddish.”
    The children were sent outside to play and she explained the situation. Her husband’s family had originally been German speakers, but over the years in New York had lost most of their knowledge of that language. English wa s what they spoke at business, at home, with their friends. Her husband knew no Yiddish beyond a few words, and, my father realized, had listened to his discourse without any real comprehension. But Mrs. Pearlman was a Litvak. She had come to America, to Chicago, as an infant with her parents, who were Yiddish speakers and never mastered the language of their new county, but she herself had grown up speaking English in school and, having left home early for college, a brief career as a designer, then marriage, her Yiddish was very rusty. The children, therefore, had none at all. Even the nanny-cum-house keeper the family employed in New York was no help – she was a Negro woman from the South.
    Now here, she explained to my father, was where things became complicated. She and her parents had been estranged for many years. “I won’t go into it,” she said, giving my father a frank look. “You seem to be an intelligent man. I’m sure you can imagine.”
    Actually, my father had no idea what she was talking about, but he gave her his complete, rapt attention.
    “Now, through a most fortuitous circumstance, I’ve become reconciled with my parents. I’ve been to see them. They’re invited here and will be visiting in August. They’re old now. My father...” She hesitated. “Things are different. Middle of August. That’s when they’re to arrive. That gives you more than six weeks.”
    My father’s job, he realized, was to familiarize the children with Yiddish so that they could speak to their grandparents, whom they were about to meet for the first time. “I could do it myself,” Mrs. Pearlman said, “but my Yiddish is so poor I’d just be giving them bad habits, I’m sure. And children don’t listen to their mother anyway.” She laughed gaily. “I just want you to spend time with them, as a big brother would. The Yiddish aside, we’d been thinking of hiring someone as a companion to them. There are no other children in the vicinity, and Benjy and Esther were so restless and lonely last summer. So talk to them, play with them, take them places, go fishing with them, as you suggested, but speak to them in Yiddish. And make sure they learn to speak to you.”
    •••
    “Watch that Holstein, Harry!” Schmidt snapped impatiently.
    It didn’t take much to set the farm manager off. When this happened, due to my father’s slowness or clumsiness or failure to understand and execute a command immediately, his already