She referred to her husband having had a patch placed on one of his shoes. Then he had met some friends and they had walked. One of them was a Spanish writer who wrote chronicles about New York for South American papers and was always making bad suggestions. This time he suggested that they all examine their feet, right where they were, on Seventh Avenue, to determine who had the largest.
Don Hilarión suspected that the writer had spied his repaired shoes and was calling attention very indelicately to the fact. He had arrived home feeling very depressed and had discussed the incident with his wife in front of Vicenta. The matter had gradually diminished in his mind, but in Doña Dolores’s it had behaved like a rolling snowball, reaching the phenomenal proportions of a unanimous world comfabulation to vex them, to mock their honorable poverty.
Vicenta tried to soothe her with the usual speech: “Don’t think about it, Doña Dolores. A writer! Like all the rest of them. They are always talking for the sake of talking. Who takes writers seriously?”
But Doña Dolores persisted. She relished such experiences that made her feel like a martyr. She resented Vicenta’s lightly discarding the matter, simply because she had no appearances to maintain, robbing this succulent humiliating morsel of all its imagined seasoning. She skillfully misinterpreted:
“All right, Vicenta, you let it go at that. It does not hurt you. When one is poor, one does not even have the privilege of complaining. Being poor is the worst sin I suppose, which must be constantly expiated, paid for, when one can pay for nothing else.” She compressed her lips and a wistful smile sent her eyes in search of remote places of mournful reveries.
Vicenta, whose salary had not been attended to for the last six months, misunderstood sincerely: “Doña Dolores, you know very well that I am not one to think of certain things and I am very happy to work for you as it is. But what you do is like someone stabbing you and then you take the knife and twist it around.”
“Now I twist it around! When one is in my position, one must be even accused, held to blame for one’s own sufferings.” She shifted to the other section of her servant’s speech which offered opportunities too tempting to pass over: “And as for the other matter, Vicenta, you will be paid. Don’t worry.” Her voice rose to eloquent heights: “you will be paid even if I have to tear the flesh off my bones like that famous merchant of Italy, and you can have the blood too.”
“Please! Doña Dolores! I am not worrying—” Vicenta gave up in hopelessness and turned to proceed with her chores and made an attempt at changing the conversation: “What shall we order from the grocer’s today?”
“Anything,” said Doña Dolores, disgusted with her servant’s reluctance to continue her pet type of talk. “You know better than I. That is, if they want to send it. We also owe them money and—”
An interruption was advancing tumultuously along the corridor and invaded the kitchen. It was her two children, a boy and a girl, Jeremias and Angustias, both thin, sallow-complexioned and darkly sad-eyed. Both spoke with the same tearful throatiness of their mother and showed already strong-inherited and well-encouraged tendencies to gloom, contrasting with their noisy if not cheerful behavior. This last strange and unexpectedly inconvenient attitude for Doña Dolores was resignedly explained in her mind by what she considered the vulgarizing influence of the environment. Superficially, both children had become thoroughly Americanized in an amazingly short time. They were even called Jerry and Angie in school, a thing which extracted most devilishly from their names all the glorious, tragic implications.
“We want lunch!” Jerry shouted brutally, but with elegiac overtones.
“And in a hurry!” Angie completed with even worse manners and heart-rending harmonics.
Their mother withered them with a well-planted look: “I don’t know what has come over these children since we came to this country. They were never like this in Spain. They have changed so!” In Spain they were half their present age, and never left home.
The children had sat at the kitchen table with drooping mouths and heads humbly to one side, to eat the lunch that Vicenta was preparing for them.
“Mama, can we have some money for carfare?”
“Yes, teacher is taking us to the Museum of Natural History and each one is supposed to provide his own carfare.”
“Now you want money for carfare. When it is not one thing, it is the other. In that school they are constantly demanding money. We are poor and can’t afford it.”
“Oh, Mama! All the other children are going. Must we always be thus humiliated before others?” Their chins quivered, their voices shook effectively.
“Yes, I know. You have begun to suffer privations early, but you must be resigned. Being poor is no shame when one is honest. You go back to school and tell that teacher that your father cannot afford these luxuries like the rich parents of other children, but that you don’t mind, that your father is a respectable notario and that in our poverty we base our pride.” Her voice was decidedly damp.
“But Mama, you know they won’t understand all that.” They appeared to have given up melancholic displays as useless.
“Well, they should. It is high time someone woke them up to the fact that this life is not a novel. In this country they have no consideration. All they think of is money and good times, always telling one to be gay and keep smiling.” She made an effective pause. “Smiling! Yes, while the procession goes on inside. These women teachers here never marry, never have children, they don’t know what suffering is, what privation, what life is.”
“All right, Mama, but can we have the money?”
“Go on now,” Vicenta stepped in: “You have enough museum pieces with those bespectacled old hens who teach you—”
“Miss Finch is not an old hen and she does not wear spectacles,” Angie charged.
“Never mind that. You go back there and tell them that you did not get the money. Come on! Finish that omelet. You have appetites like millionaires. We can’t be throwing food away in this house. Your father—” Vicenta checked herself. This pessimism was contagious. “Go ahead now, hurry! Run along and take an umbrella. It is raining.”
And so it was and at this time, under another umbrella, Mr. Robinson was fatefully walking toward their house.
No sooner had the children left than Doña Dolores resumed her interrupted litany: “I suppose I should also laugh at the question of the cream puffs. I should be very cheerful about it.”
“There you go talking about that again,” Vicenta said while looking into the icebox and kitchen closets to see what was needed. She knew the incident by memory. For some reason it was one of the selected tear-jerking, bitter-smile-squeezer pieces in Doña Dolores’s repertoire.
It seems that a friend, knowing Don Hilarión’s precarious financial condition, had given him some matter to investigate concerning Spanish law. It turned out to be a very simple matter and Don Hilarión felt that it detracted from his importance as a notario to do a piece of work that could have been attended to by any law apprentice, any law office amanuensis. However, when he was paid, he made his grand gesture. He went to a pastry shop run by another Spaniard in the neighborhood and bought some cream puffs.
“To sweeten the bitterness left by this humiliating job,” he said as he laid them on the table before his wife.
That night they had dinner accompanied by the usual lamentations all around. When time for dessert arrived, the children greeted the appearance of the cream puffs with vociferous sadness.