2.

Although his brother tried hard to persuade him, Michael spoke of his family and of his ten years as manager.

He said that he would be unable to earn a livelihood, if made such a pledge. "And he said that he would buy the business for one hundred thousand dollars.

He had already found a partner with half this sum. The remainder would be paid each year for five years.

This is a hold-up. Jack Green said in a cold rage. But then, after two inpatient weeks, he consented,

Angry, unable to wait, determined to depart from his wife's shock and scandal.

--Eva Green heard of the discussion, went to Michael Green, pleaded with him, invoked once more the goodness of the family,

Told Michael that he was a father and a husband, he knew what the family was, God would surely reward him,

If he refused to help his brother go away from his family. She pleaded with his wife too, she said that she believed in the law of compensation, she was unable to understand

How husband and wife were ruled by the desire for money and the good of the family too.

When they refused, she told them that they would remember this day, and the curse they had taken on themselves, and their refusal "to do what is right".

The sale was soon completed, and Jack Green departed,

He went to Chicago by himself, to begin a new life, as he thought,

At forty-two years of age: taken to Chicago by his emotion as by his emotion of pity taken into a wrong marriage.

3.

"Stretched is the family life by distances,

As if a railroad track, one thousand miles!

--Gleaming the steel, strict, curving, and abstract--

From now begins, alas! a period

Different from all before: a thousand miles!

A thousand miles stands in the living room

The lie of black keys on a grand piano

Deranged in tune, often in chaos kicked!

Who can suppose

Life is composed of things like hats and shoes?"

"Shall we begin our news?"

"Shall we begin our news?"

"No, yet, not yet!"

"But look, what he omits! This is not right."

"Not yet! but soon enough--"

"We of the dead have bettkino flip,

And let him slip with fluent lip

Self-pitying, self-engrossed--

He lies there like a posted plant,

how passively,

As in the lukewarm water of a doze".

"(What waits like spring beneath dry wooden March,
The soddenness of empty lots, their frozen turf?"

"Let him a little pleasure prove,

willing as plush,

Sunned by sparkling seaside, breaking surf,

Glinting with diamonds, bouncing in a rush--"

Siege, silence the infinite, (as at a source),
Black silence, silence ripe, after the outcry

Barbarous: Hershey Green in this dark
Nursed at himself, a little satisfied

As if he wiped his nose, wet with a cold
--Quiet (clover!), quiet of convalescence (lull,
Loll, lounge!),

"What next?" a singer said,

"Coughed and compelled, or forced (necessity,
Black distant mountain-range never surpassed!),

What then?
O Hershey Green, darkened and desperate one?"

--He answered them without necessity.
The force of habit turned like wheels in him
(As when a bicycle is cast aside).

He spoke because he had spoken, motiveless:

"Jack Green decided that he must go away to avoid
his wife's open scandal. He must go to a distant city, where she
would be unable to follow him.

Son of denouement, fugitive, he fled like his
father. The business which had made him rich, with which he had
made himself rich was placed on sale.

Some were willing to pay half a million dollars
for it, if his younger brother Michael, for ten years his manager,

Pledged himself not to take away the customers
of the business. Michael refused,

2.

"People; people would see; the world in which
The growing animal amid the blooms, booms,
And buzzes comes to the sharp sharp lighted street
Of consciousness is a world in which
People are always present, always important,
like the wind and the rain,
like the beating heart..."

--When I was brought at last to a kindergarten,
A private kindergarten kept by two maiden ladies
Fallen on genteel poverty in a brownstone house,
The excitement of newness and the great wide world
Stopped in frustration quickly.

O games and the songs
Chanted in a moving ring I did not fit from the first,
Left-handed and out of step from nativity:
I could not paste, full of nervous unrest, designs
Carpet-like, interwoven, of gay strips of color,
Upon white paper, as teacher had shown the children,
Could not adjust to the justice of marching
in the children's marches.

Another child kicked me, I kicked him back,
the teacher saw,
Seized me, but not my colleague in the human heart.
I tried to explain, tried to accrue my enemy,
Was not allowed to speak, was told to go outside,
Sit on the hallway stair in punishment.

Stricken,
Afraid my mother would hear, the classroom door closed
Before me, I sat on the stair and heard the sounds
Of the children in the classroom, moving and playing,
Excluded and deprived.

Humiliated, persecuted,
Bursting to howl my cause, ostracized, exiled,
This was my first experience of the world against me,
Forms of emotion sprang up to stay.

A child came out
From the community to call me back, to call me back
to the community.

But I refused to come. Would not
"accept forgiveness, righteousness hot in me."

4.

In the light of school, light which so much made for me
The future's playing field, my father brought home to me
A fountain pen, lost the next day in the empty lot
Behind our house where I played. Went to my mother
Begged her not/tell father, begged her intensely--

"Father and mother are of authority
The first and freest species. Love and fear
Gain from them unforgiven experience--"

When the next night he came to see me to bed,
He asked and asking smiled where my pen was?
I asked He smiled more broadly, the lying child
Was but a joke, or the lying child was himself,
And said he knew my loss, but never mind, Hershey,
And gave me his own superior fountain pen.
I knew such joy as Adam might have known
Had his father brought him back to a greater garden,
Making his sin the cause of greater good, sweetness
Of convalescence whose ground is suffering.
Yet in my joy I knew I was betrayed. My mother
Had broken faith; I felt, I knew, I recognized
There was a communication between them which
Many times would betray me,

because I was a child,
helpless and ignorant.

"Perceptions such as these grow in the boy
Like the arc-light he sometimes sees, the quiet post
Or tree of modern life which shows the street's
Essential emptiness and common poverty:
Under examples of the human condition,
As under the great buildings and long billboards
Of the great city beside the Hudson River
A childhood eats, breathes, and misunderstands--"

5.

Two weeks before Christmas, downtown to Macy's mother
Took me. There in the children's department, I,
Much moved, afraid, dismayed, saw Santa Claus, seated
Upon a throne; white-bearded, rouged, hoarse-voiced,

he laughed

Cackled and rang his bell, shook hands with me, announced
To all the gaping children that if they were good
He would come unto them, bearing gay marvellous gifts,
The Providence in children's terms, the unspeakable

unknowable

Nameless Ahhhhhhhh of Abraham,

in a department store--

A blackboard was my Christmas gift. At first it seemed
An endless field of play. But quickly as always
Freshness faded. Yet with my colored chalks I marked
My father's, mother's, brother's names on it,

Anna, our Polish maid's, my own with special feeling,
And as the very finest thing,

Woodrow Wilson, on top--

How I was praised for this, how praised moved me
From head to foot. Visitor and relative too

Were shown my feats in print, marvelled politely,

The pleasure of praise renewed again and again by them
Who praised to please the mother, while I heard

Or overheard and climbed the ego's tower, crown prince

In my own sense or sentiment,

dauphin or czarevitch.

One morning went with mother marketing, was left

On the sidewalk outside by myself too long; aloud

I cried in the foreign street, turned in the midst of loss:

Passersby paused and asked the crying child what was

Wrong, whom he was with, and then, where he lived?

Between my tears, on the sidewalk I drew the shape

Of our house-number, knowing its shape, not name,

Until mother returned, I wept still louder tears,

Suddenly purged of loss, and yet appalled perhaps

By apron-string or navel-cord,

the shadow of the womb--

7.

## SCENE TWO

As the curtain rises, Shenandoah gives the infant back to his mother. She acts as if he were not there, but turns to Mrs. Goldmark. She has been telling her nextdoor neighbor of her interview with her father-in-law.

Elsie Fish: I felt for the old man and you know how I am: I always give in to my sympathies. I know it is a weakness. But what a shame that he sould let such beliefs make him afraid.

Mrs. Goldmark: When one gets old, one is like a child.

Elsie Fish: Now I must find a new name for my boy in two hours. By three o'clock, all the guests will be here. My husband's relatives are coming and my relatives and some of the men who work for my husband, with their wives. Mrs. Goldmark, you gave your two children such handsome names, perhaps you can suggest a name to me?

Mrs. Goldmark: Thank you for the compliment. I like the names of Herbert and Mortimer more all the time. They are so distinguished and new and American. Do you know how I came to think of them? I was reading the newspaper in bed after my first boy was born. I was reading the society page, which is always so interesting.

Elsie Fish: I will get the morning paper and we will see what luck I have. I wish my husband were here. I must have his approval, he gets angry so quickly. I wonder where he is. He was so kind to me and so pleased the first few days after the boy was born.

(Mrs. Goldmark goes into the living room at the left and returns with the newspaper.)

Mrs. Goldmark: Now let us see what names are mentioned today.

Shenandoah:
This shows the appeal of America,
This shows the power of the living world:
While they gaze at the glamorous ruling class,
I must stand here, regardant at an angle--
I must stand there, quite helpless in my cradle--
Its passive as a man who takes a haircut:
And yet how many minds believe a man
Creates his life ex nihilo, and laugh
At the far influence of deities,
and stars--