And the thought flashed into Roger's mind:
"Deborah's big family!"
He had a strange confusing time. In her office, in a daze, he sat and heard
his daughter with her two assistant principals, her clerk and her
stenographer, plunge into the routine work of the day. What kind of school
teacher was this? She seemed more like the manager of some buzzing factory.
Messages kept coming constantly from class-rooms, children came for
punishment, and on each small human problem she was passing judgment
quickly. Meanwhile a score of mothers, most of them Italians with colored
shawls upon their heads, had straggled in and taken seats, and one by one
they came to her desk. For these women who had been children in peasant
huts in Italy now had children of their own in the great city of New York,
and they found it very baffling. How to keep them in at night? How to make
them go to the priest? How to feed and clothe them? How to live in these
tenement homes, in this wild din and chaos? They wanted help and they
wanted advice. Deborah spoke in Italian, but turning to her father she
would translate from time to time.
A tired scowling woman said, "My boy won't obey me. His father is dead.
When I slap him he only jumps away. I lock him in and he steals the key, he
keeps it in his pocket. He steals the money that I earn. He says I'm from
the country." And a flabby anxious woman said, "My girl runs out to dance
halls.
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