“Then we got phonograph, but she only cry every time he play,” the mother said.
“I can’t bear to hear it,” interrupted Mary. “I’d rather play myself.”
And so finally the brother took the phonograph away, about a month ago, since it only made the girl more miserable than ever.
“And in every house I go to,” she said, “there is a piano. And one girl comes to the factory, saying she can play grand, and her father wants her to play in a cabaret. She’s only sixteen, too. I can’t be happy,” she finished simply. “I can’t be happy. And it gets my goat when anybody laughs. And every single night I dream I’ve got a piano and play so nice, and every day at work I imagine I am playing. All I want to do is to play a piano. I don’t want clothes. If I have good clothes the girls would want me to go out with them, and I don’t want to go out. It is only trouble comes of it. All I want to do is to stay home and play the piano.”
All the family like music, it seems, “but none of them but me would die for it,” she says. “And my father hated it. He wanted me only to work, day and night to work, since I was ten. But he’s gone away now. They took him away--Randall’s Island.” It was when the father was home, though, and earning a little now and then, that the phonograph, which proved a doubtful blessing, was made possible.
Mary Stober says, and her chin looks very square, that she knows she could pay for lessons--she would walk to the factory instead of riding and go without lunch--if she only had a piano to practice on at home.
It was a mixture of lysol and iodine that she took last week--the only things she could find. “I don’t care what I take,” she says, “if I can’t get what I want. Eight years I’ve worked and I haven’t gotten anything yet.” It was last August that she tried before to kill herself.
=Type of story.= As all forms of judicial procedure are included under court news, stories of this class cover such matters as police court news, criminal trials, civil suits, divorce suits, bankruptcy, wills and other probate court matters, decisions of higher courts, and findings of judicial officers. Since much court news is of a routine character, the matter-of-fact informative news story is a frequent medium for presenting it. This does not imply that such news is necessarily dry and uninteresting, for by bringing out salient and significant phases of such matters as decisions of higher courts, legal documents, wills, and bankruptcy cases, as well as of criminal and civil suits, the facts of the news can be made of interest even to the casual reader (cf. “Supreme Court Decision,” p. 88, and “Opinion of Attorney General,” p. 90). Criminal and civil cases often have a strong human interest element that, if rightly developed, may be a valuable part of the story (cf. “Criminal Court,” p. 83, and “Supreme Court Decision,” p. 89). The little comedies and tragedies of the police court have long been favorite subjects for entertaining and appealing human interest stories (cf. “Municipal Court,” p. 78, and “Forgery Case,” p. 78).