The Street Read Online Free PDF Page B

what he was doing when he insisted on her finishing high school. She addressed the envelope, folded the letter, and put it inside the envelope.
    She was about to seal it when she remembered that she didn’t have any references. She couldn’t get a job without them, and as she’d never really had a job, why, she didn’t have any way of getting a reference. Somehow she had been so sure she could have got the job in the ad. Seventy-five dollars a month would have meant they could have saved the house; Jim would have got over that awful desperate feeling, that bitterness that was eating him up; and there wouldn’t have been any need to apply for relief.
    Mrs. Pizzini. That was it. She’d go to Mrs. Pizzini where they bought their vegetables. They owed her a bill, and when she explained that this job would mean the bill would be paid, why, Mrs. Pizzini would write her out a reference.
    Business was slow and Mrs. Pizzini had plenty of time to listen to Lutie’s story, to study the advertisementin the paper, to follow the writing on Lutie’s letter to Mrs. Henry Chandler, line by line, almost tracing the words on the page with her stubby fingers.
    â€˜Very good,’ she said when she finished reading it. ‘Nice job.’ She handed the letter and the newspaper to Lutie. ‘Me and Joe don’t write so good. But my daughter that teaches school, she’ll write for me. You can have tomorrow.’
    And the next day Mrs. Pizzini stopped weighing potatoes for a customer long enough to go in the back of the vegetable store and bring the letter out carefully wrapped up in brown paper to keep it clean. Lutie peeled off the brown paper and read the letter through quickly. It was a fine letter, praising her for being hard-working and honest and intelligent; it said that the writer hated to lose Lutie, for she’d worked for her for two years. It was signed ‘Isabel Pizzini.’
    The handwriting was positively elegant, she thought, written with a fine pen and black ink on nice thick white paper. She looked at the address printed on the top and then turned to stare at Mrs. Pizzini in astonishment, because that part of Jamaica was the section where the houses were big and there was lawn around them and evergreen trees grew in thick clusters around the houses.
    Mrs. Pizzini nodded her head. ‘My daughter is a very smart woman.’
    And then Lutie remembered the letter in her hand. ‘I can’t ever thank you,’ she said.
    Mrs. Pizzini’s lean face relaxed in a smile, ‘It’s all right. You’re a nice girl. Always known it.’ Shewalked toward her waiting customer and then, hesitating for the barest fraction of a second, turned back to Lutie. ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘It’s best that the man do the work when the babies are young. And when the man is young. Not good for the woman to work when she’s young. Not good for the man.’
    Curiously enough, though she only half-heard what Mrs. Pizzini was saying, she remembered it. Off and on for the past six years she had remembered it. At the time, she hurried home from the vegetable store to put the precious reference in the letter to Mrs. Henry Chandler and mail it.
    After she had dropped it in the mail box on the corner, she got to thinking about the Pizzinis. Who would have thought that the old Italian couple who ran the vegetable store would be living in a fine house in a fine neighborhood? How had they managed to do that on the nickels and dimes they took in selling lettuce and grapefruit? She wanted to tell Jim about it, but she couldn’t without revealing how she knew where they lived. They had a fine house and they had sent their daughter to college, and yet Mrs. Pizzini had admitted she herself ‘couldn’t write so good.’ She couldn’t read so good either, Lutie thought. If she could find out how the Pizzinis had managed, it might help her and Jim.
    Then she