Interpretation of literary

The Cannibals

Stephen Heym
Pop was a dreamer, in a way. He would start speaking on a subject that touched something in his heart, and he would spin it out for hours on end, and he would make it sound wonderful. He would sit in the rocker next to the window and sway back and forth, talking all the while. The chair had a slight squeak, and the ashes from his cigarette would drop on his lap.
Mom was different. She was a worrier. She tried to save money. She became depressed every time the few dollars she managed to lay aside had to be used — a bottle of expensive medicine, or the repair bill for the boiler in the cellar that hadn't worked right from the day they made their first payment, for new pants for Jimrnie who could rip through a pair as if they were made of cheesecloth.
She was always looking into the future and finding it bleak. The house in which they lived — a shack it was, but the real estate agent called it a bungalow—would pretty nearly fall down next winter. And Pete
Marconi, who had provided Pop with a job, would soon die of apoplexy the way he drank and ate and carried on, and then where would she and Pop be? And that Jimmie had gone and joined the Army at the age of seventeen instead of being able to go through school, would surely end in no good.
Pop would listen to her patiently, exactly as he had done when they both were young and not married. He would wail tiii she had exhausted her store of glumncss, and take whatever it wa? that worried her at the moment arid twist it a little and consider it in a different light, and make it all look quite hopeful. The house hadn't fallen down last winter, had it? With patching up here or there, it wouldn't collapse this winter, either. Pete Marconi wasn't a powerful man in a town and a politician for nothing. He could affort the very best doctors, couldn't he? If the doctors didn't worry about Pete's whisky and beer, why should she? As for Jimmie — the Army would teach him discipline and a craft; maybe radar; maybe some other trade that would come in handy in civilian life. Meanwhile, Jimmie was seeing the world — Tokyo, with the Geisha girls, and the old temples, and all the people talking a kind of bird language. And Pop was off, this time on the subject of Japan.
Perhaps, he was right, Mom would think tiredly. Hadn't it always worked out, somehow? They had always managed to have something
to eat, and clothes to wear, and a roof over (heir heads. And during the war when Hickam and Hickam opened that big hush-hush plant down the river, outside of town, Pop had gotten himself a fine job there. The work hadn't been too hard for him, and the pay had been good, and she had been able to save some money every week. Now the money was gone, of course; Pop was back checking meters for the Gas and Power Company and running political errands for Pete Marconi so as to he perm Hied to keep that job. And Jirnmie — hadn't he written her that his outfit was definitely not going to be shipped to Korea, and that even if it was, they weren't sending anybody below eighteen into the battjo lines?
Mom would sigh. Things eould be worse. She would let Pop go on talking nonsense about Japan, the butt of his cigarette burning dangerously close to his fingers. She loved this man, just because he refused to be beaten by life and could Jose himself in his dreams. He made her forget the feeling of being horribly bewildered in a world too hard and too dangerous for the both of them.
Pop came up the porch steps and into the house. He threw his hat and
coat on the table in the hall and strode into the kitchen. "Mom!"
His buoyant voice made her turn quickly. She saw his expression and knew that something — great and exciting had happened to him "Guess what!" he demanded. "Jimmie!" Jimmie's coming home!"
For a moment, his face tightened. "Nothing like that, he said. I was out checking meters all day, how could I have heard from Jimmie?"
"No, you couldn't" she agreed, "And there's been no more mail from
him".
He didn't like her concentration on the boy. It was all right for her to think .of Jimmie, but not to the exclusion of everything else, not to the exclusion of himself and the good news he was bringing, He forced his face to beam once more. "Mom! There's going to be a telegram!"
She wiped her hands on her apron and sat down on the kitchen chair "A telegram? From whom? About what?"
He looked at the gray streaks in her hair, at the skin of her face that hung too loosely over her bones, at the worry lines around her eyes and her mouth. All the way home he had been planning his tactics; how he would break the news to her, how he would hint first and'speak in puzzles and tickle her curiosity until she asked him to let her have the whole story. But now he knew that he couldn't go about it by kidding her.
Gently, he laid his hanH n" ^Vi"- '""