Mrs. Emily Gebhardt

Mrs. Emily Gebhardt lived in a garden apartment in midtown Manhattan, West Side. The front room faced North onto the street just below street level. It was here that Mrs. Gebhardt and her daughter Janie, who was only now coming into her ‘teens, both slept. They had been in the apartment for almost two years. At first it had been difficult for them to sleep at night. They had been conscious of the dust that poured in through the windows, and distracted by the noise of passersby whose voices seemed to come from within the room rather than outside of it, and whose footsteps were positive and noisy as they walked by, visible—like half-men—up to their waists. But, in time, Janie had given up hearing them altogether, and Mrs. Gebhardt had come to be conscious only of those who went by late in the night. Late in the night only the drunken couples—man and woman, or man and man—were still about. Usually they were full of quarrel, their voices gut-driven and strident with intermingled fear and hate. The sound of them would go through Mrs. Gebhardt like a knife every time, for she had never yet learned to close them out.

Young Carl, who was two years older than Janie, slept in the inner room. It was large enough to hold a daybed along one wall and a chest of drawers against the wall that faced it. Some former tenant had knocked out the upper half of the partition that closed this room off from the rear of the apartment, so that it was no longer just a dark, airless cubbyhole but rather an alcove off the kitchen-livingroom. It made a decent sleeping room that way. And young Carl, who was deft with his hands, had built shelves to hold his treasures in the half-wall that still stood.