Or it may impress you as deliciously funny that the lack of a piano can seem tragic, if you have a big enough view of tragic things to see that some of them are greater. But to this girl, who does them every day and night of her life, they are simply the things which have twice made her try to kill herself, the reason why she is “disgusted, always disgusted,” as she says, very simply.
Mary Stober has a pale, strong face, with a stubborn chin and a wistful smile, very gray eyes, light brown hair in a bang on her forehead, and very red lips. She looks very young and very determined and very wistful and somewhat sullen. Her hands are red and rough and square-fingered from hard work.
She was dusting one of the rooms this morning in the soggy apartment house of which her mother is janitress, and where they and the six other children live and pay half-rent. She goes back to the factory on Monday. She sat down in one of the innumerous chairs to tell her story, fingering the grimy dust-cloth with her red fingers, which are never quiet for a minute. Her mother stood up through the recital--the little German mother who speaks English only brokenly, who wears a little shawl over her head while she sweeps down the long flights of stairs and who used to play the piano herself when she was a girl in Germany--and looked at Mary with a worried, gentle, almost heartbroken look.
“When I was ten--that was when I stopped school and went to work--I thought always about when I would be eighteen and a grand piano player,” Mary began, fingering the dust-cloth. “Then I was eighteen and I didn’t have a piano yet, and I was almost crazy. Eight years I have worked, and I haven’t got anything yet. And what’s worrying me now is where we’re going to go. We can’t stay here. Other places we’ve been we’ve had coal and things, and our money could all go for the food and clothes. But now we’ve got to pay for a stove and coal.”
She and her sister, who is nineteen and who can play the piano by ear when she can find one to play--Mary herself can only play with one hand by ear, and “people don’t like to hear that kind o’ playing,” she says--and the oldest brother, are the only ones who make money. Mary makes seven dollars a week. All of these details, which she tells simply, go to show that there is little hope for a piano. The little, crumpled mother from behind the chair she is leaning on says, in her broken way, that a piano is not so easy to get, and looks hopelessly at her daughter.