Every Tuesday the rows of benches were packed with a
motley crowd of Poles, Russians, Slavs, Italians, Greeks,
Lithuanians--a crowd made up of fathers, mothers,
sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, neighbors, friends, and
enemies of the boys and girls whose fate was in the hands
of the big man seated in the revolving chair up in front.
But Bennie's mother was not of this crowd; this pitiful,
ludicrous crowd filling the great room with the stifling,
rancid odor of the poor. Nor was Bennie. He sat, clear-eyed
and unsmiling, in the depths of a great chair on the
court side of the railing and gravely received the
attentions of the lawyers, and reporters and court room
attaches who had grown fond of the grave little figure.
Then, on the fifth Tuesday, Bennie's mother appeared.
How she had come to be that child's mother God only
knows--or perhaps He had had nothing to do with it. She
was terribly sober and frightened. Her face was swollen
and bruised, and beneath one eye there was a puffy
green-and-blue swelling. Her sordid story was common
enough as the probation officer told it. The woman had
been living in one wretched room with the boy. Her
husband had deserted her.
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