Page 143 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Courtship

herself a poor working man’s child, she pleasantly walked home with
me. Fine dresses she never had, as her father was a pants operator
and a slow worker, and could not earn enough to keep up his family
of five children. So Fannie gave her earnings to her mother, and had
no surplus dresses, but what few clothes she had she wore neatly,
giving her the appearance of being elegantly dressed and making her
look charming. Girls of the common people did not paint their lips
or cheeks in those days. Fannie did not redden her lips to attract
attention: her eyes, her smile, and her figure bewitched me.
Fannie considered me one of the intelligentsia, and liked me
because of that. I used to come into the kitchen, which was also the
dining room, and read the Hebrew lesson with her. Mama and Papa,
Rose, Hannah, and Mottel were there also, but for a few seconds I
could hold her finely-shaped hand, which was like chiseled marble,
and her glowing eyes gave me an expression of love. Her sisters and
brothers did not know about our courtship. Her mother knew but
never said a word about it to me. It was evolving, and I was so shy,
and did not know how to ask for marriage. While the man takes it as
a serious matter, women as a rule see love as a sentiment, a beautiful
dream. When they have read romances and poems and seen
paintings, they begin to compare the heroes portrayed there with the
hero who makes love to them, and they find in him a great
dissimilarity. He is just a plain ordinary man like their father or
brother, who works every day in a shop and comes home in his dirty
clothes with a bristly face.
Naturally, doubts are born in their minds. Here and there a friend
has married a man who has a better or nicer job—or parents who
supply him with those luxuries that every woman would like, and
would have if society were better organized. Sooner or later this wise
girl or her mother begin to figure that if the boy will never be able to
improve his financial conditions, then she should wait for a while,
since there is plenty of time. She is so young: why rush and be like
her mother, who made the same mistake; if only she had waited and
married so-and-so who was so crazy about her, she would have lived
like a queen or a princess, with the finest clothing, an automobile,
and a servant girl—which all married women dream about—so she

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