Mr. Bauer executed a self-administered pat sharply against the back of his hand.

“Keeper,” he said, “put me in the brain ward.  I—­I’m sorry, Mrs. C., so help me!  Didn’t mean to.  How is your mother, Mrs. C.?  Seems to me, at the dance the other night, Selene said she was fine and dandy.”

“Selene ain’t the best judge of her poor old grandmother.  It’s hard for a young girl to have patience for old age sitting and chewing all day over the past.  It’s right pitiful the way her grandmother knows it, too, and makes herself talk English all the time to please the child and tries to perk up for her.  Selene, thank God, ’ain’t suffered, and can’t sympathize!”

“What’s ailing her, Mrs. C.?  I kinda miss seeing the old lady sitting down here in the store.”

“It’s the last year or so, Milt.  Just like all of a sudden a woman as active as mama always was, her health and—­her mind kind of went off with a pop.”

“Thu!  Thu!”

“Doctor says with care she can live for years, but—­but it seems terrible the way her—­poor mind keeps skipping back.  Past all these thirty years in America to—­even weeks before I was born.  The night they—­took my father off to Siberia, with his bare feet in the snow—­for distributing papers they found on him—­papers that used the word ‘svoboda’—­’freedom.’  And the time, ten years later—­they shot down my brother right in front of her for—­the same reason.  She keeps living it over—­living it over till I—­could die.”

“Say, ain’t that just a shame, though!”

“Living it, and living it, and living it!  The night with me, a heavy three-year-old, in her arms that she got us to the border, dragging a pack of linens with her!  The night my father’s feet were bleeding in the snow, when they took him!  How with me a kid in the crib, my—­my brother’s face was crushed in—­with a heel and a spur.  All night, sometimes, she cries in her sleep—­begging to go back to find the graves.  All day she sits making raffia wreaths to take back—­making wreaths—­making wreaths!”

“Say, ain’t that tough!”

“It’s a godsend she’s got the eyes to do it.  It’s wonderful the way she reads—­in English, too.  There ain’t a daily she misses.  Without them and the wreaths—­I dunno—­I just dunno.  Is—­is it any wonder, Milt, I—­I can’t see the joke?”

“My God, no!”

“I’ll get her back, though.”

“Why, you—­she can’t get back there, Mrs. C.”

“There’s a way.  Nobody can tell me there’s not.  Before the war—­before she got like this, seven hundred dollars would have done it for both of us—­and it will again, after the war.  She’s got the bank-book, and every week that I can squeeze out above expenses, she sees the entry for herself.  I’ll get her back.  There’s a way lying around somewhere.  God knows why she should eat out her heart to go back—­but she wants it.  God, how she wants it!”

“Poor old dame!”