The Goodness of St. Rocque | Page 6

in this same little queer old shop on
Prytania Street, at least to the memory of the oldest inhabitant in the
neighbourhood. When or how they came, or how they stayed, no one
knew; it was enough that they were there, like a sort of ancestral fixture
to the street. The neighbourhood was fine enough to look down upon
these two tumble-down shops at the corner, kept by Tony and Mrs.
Murphy, the grocer. It was a semi-fashionable locality, far up-town,
away from the old-time French quarter. It was the sort of
neighbourhood where millionaires live before their fortunes are made
and fashionable, high-priced private schools flourish, where the small
cottages are occupied by aspiring school-teachers and choir-singers.
Such was this locality, and you must admit that it was indeed a
condescension to tolerate Tony and Mrs. Murphy.
He was a great, black-bearded, hoarse-voiced, six-foot specimen of
Italian humanity, who looked in his little shop and on the prosaic
pavement of Prytania Street somewhat as Hercules might seem in a
modern drawing-room. You instinctively thought of wild
mountain-passes, and the gleaming dirks of bandit contadini in looking
at him. What his last name was, no one knew. Someone had maintained
once that he had been christened Antonio Malatesta, but that was
unauthentic, and as little to be believed as that other wild theory that
her name was Mary.
She was meek, pale, little, ugly, and German. Altogether part of his
arms and legs would have very decently made another larger than she.
Her hair was pale and drawn in sleek, thin tightness away from a
pinched, pitiful face, whose dull cold eyes hurt you, because you knew
they were trying to mirror sorrow, and could not because of their

expressionless quality. No matter what the weather or what her other
toilet, she always wore a thin little shawl of dingy brick-dust hue about
her shoulders. No matter what the occasion or what the day, she always
carried her knitting with her, and seldom ceased the incessant twist,
twist of the shining steel among the white cotton meshes. She might put
down the needles and lace into the spool-box long enough to open
oysters, or wrap up fruit and candy, or count out wood and coal into
infinitesimal portions, or do her housework; but the knitting was
snatched with avidity at the first spare moment, and the worn, white,
blue-marked fingers, half enclosed in kid-glove stalls for protection,
would writhe and twist in and out again. Little girls just learning to
crochet borrowed their patterns from Tony's wife, and it was
considered quite a mark of advancement to have her inspect a bit of
lace done by eager, chubby fingers. The ladies in larger houses, whose
husbands would be millionaires some day, bought her lace, and gave it
to their servants for Christmas presents.
As for Tony, when she was slow in opening his oysters or in cooking
his red beans and spaghetti, he roared at her, and prefixed picturesque
adjectives to her lace, which made her hide it under her apron with a
fearsome look in her dull eyes.
He hated her in a lusty, roaring fashion, as a healthy beefy boy hates a
sick cat and torments it to madness. When she displeased him, he beat
her, and knocked her frail form on the floor. The children could tell
when this had happened. Her eyes would be red, and there would be
blue marks on her face and neck. "Poor Mrs. Tony," they would say,
and nestle close to her. Tony did not roar at her for petting them,
perhaps, because they spent money on the multi-hued candy in glass
jars on the shelves.
Her mother appeared upon the scene once, and stayed a short time; but
Tony got drunk one day and beat her because she ate too much, and she
disappeared soon after. Whence she came and where she departed, no
one could tell, not even Mrs. Murphy, the Pauline Pry and Gazette of
the block.
Tony had gout, and suffered for many days in roaring helplessness, the
while his foot, bound and swathed in many folds of red flannel, lay on
the chair before him. In proportion as his gout increased and he bawled
from pure physical discomfort, she became light-hearted, and moved

about the shop with real, brisk cheeriness. He could not hit her then
without such pain that after one or two trials he gave up in disgust.
So the dull years had passed, and life had gone on pretty much the
same for Tony and the German wife and the shop. The children came
on Sunday evenings to buy the stick candy, and on week-days for coal
and wood. The servants came to buy oysters for the larger houses, and
to gossip over the counter