Subway from the fish store; her bedroom, all pink and yellow maple; his;
a kitchen, parlor, and dining room worked out happily in white-muslin
curtains, spindle-legged parlor chairs, Henry's newfangled chifferobe
and bed with a fine depth of mattress, and a kitchen with eight shining
pots above the sink and a border of geese, cut out to the snip of Ann's
own scissors, waddling across the wall.
It was two and a half years since Mrs. Plush had died, and the boarders,
as if spilled from an ark on rough seas, had struck out for diverse
shores. The marvel to them now was that they had delayed so long.
"A home of our own, Ann. Pretty sweet, isn't it?"
"Oh, daddy, it is!"
"You mustn't overdo, though, baby. Sometimes we're not so strong as we
think we are. A little hired girl would be best." The fish business had
more than held its own.
"But I love doing it alone, dad. It--it's the next best thing to a home
of--my own."
He looked startled into her dreaming eyes.
"Your own? Why, Annie, isn't this--your own?"
She laid fingers against his eyes so that he could not see the pinkiness
of her.
"You know what I mean, daddy--my--very--own."
At that timid phrasing of hers Henry felt that his heart was actually
strangling, as if some one were holding it back on its systolic swing,
like a caught pendulum.
"Why, Annie," he said, "I never thought--"
But inevitably and of course it had happened.
The young man's name was Willis--Fred E. Willis--already credit man in
a large wholesale grocery firm and two feet well on the road to
advancement. A square-faced, clean-faced fellow, with a clean love of
life and of Ann Elizabeth in his heart.
Henry liked him.
Ann Elizabeth loved him.
And yet, what must have been a long-smoldering flame of fear shot up
through the very core of Henry's being, excoriating.
"Why, Ann Elizabeth," he kept repeating, in his slow and always
inarticulate manner, "I--You--Mine--I just never thought."
She wound the softest of arms about his neck.
"I know, daddy-darlums, and I'll never leave you. Never. Fred has
promised we will always be together. We'll live right here with you, or
you with us."
"Annie," he cried, "you mustn't ever--marry. I mean, leave daddy--that
way--anyway. You hear me? You're daddy's own. Just his by himself.
Nobody is good enough for my girl."
"But, daddy," clouding up for tears, "I thought you liked Fred so much!"
"I do, but it's you I'm talking about. Nobody can have you."
"But I love him, daddy. This is terrible. I love him."
"Oh, Ann, Ann! daddy hasn't done right, perhaps, but he meant well.
There are _reasons_ why he wants to keep his little girl with him
always--alone--his."
"But, daddy dear, I promise you we'll never let you be lonely. Why, I
couldn't stand leaving you any more than you could--"
"Not those reasons alone, Ann."
"Then what?"
"You're so young," he tried to procrastinate.
"I'll be eighteen. A woman."
All his faculties were cornered.
"You're--so--Oh, I don't know--I--"
"You haven't any reasons, dad, except dear silly ones. You can't keep me
a little girl all the time, dear. I love Fred. It's all planned. Don't
ruin my life, daddy--don't ruin my life."
She was lovely in her tears and surprisingly resolute in her mind, and
he was more helpless than ever with her.
"Ann--you're not strong."
"Strong!" she cried, flinging back her curls and out her chest. "That is
a fine excuse. I'm stronger than most. All youngsters have measles and
scarlet fever and Fred says his sister Lucile out in Des Moines had St.
Vitus' dance when she was eleven, just like I did. I'm stronger than you
are, dad. I didn't get the flu and you did."
"You're nervous, Annie. That's why I want always to keep you at
home--quiet--with me."
She sat back, her pretty eyes troubled-up lakes.
"You mean the dreams and the scared feeling, once in a while, that I
can't swallow. That's nothing. I know now why I was so frightened in my
sleep the other night. I told Fred, and he said it was the peach sundae
on top of the crazy old movie we saw that evening. Why, Jeanette
Peopping had to take a rest cure the year before she was married. Girls
are always more nervous than fellows. Daddy--you--you frighten me when
you look at me like that! I don't know what you mean! What-do-you-mean?"
He was helpless and at bay and took her in his arms and kissed her hair.
"I guess your old daddy is a jealous pig and can't bear to share his
girl with anyone. Can't bear to--to give her up."
"You won't be giving up, daddums. I couldn't stand that, either. It
will be three of us then. You'll see. Look up and smile at your Ann
Elizabeth. Smile, now, smile."
And of course he did.
It was typical of her that she should be the busiest of brides-to-be,
her complete little trousseau, every piece down to the dishcloths,
monogrammed by her--A.E.W.
Skillful with her needle and thrifty in her purchases, the outfit when
completed might have represented twice the outlay that Henry expended
on it. Then there were "showers,"--linen, stocking, and even a tin one;
gifts from her girl friends--cup, face, bath and guest towels; all the
tremendous trifles and addenda that go to gladden the chattel-loving
heart of a woman. A little secret society of her erstwhile school
friends presented her with a luncheon set; the Keller twins with a
silver gravy boat; and Jeanette Peopping Truman, who occupied an
apartment in the same building, spent as many as three afternoons a week
with her, helping to piece out a really lovely tulip-design quilt of
pink and white sateen.
"Jeanette," said Ann Elizabeth, one afternoon as the two of them sat in
a frothy litter of the pink and white scraps, "how did you feel that
time when you had the nerv--the breakdown?"
Jeanette, pretty after a high-cheek-boned fashion and her still bright
hair worn coronet fashion about her head, bit off a thread with sharp
white teeth, only too eager to reminisce her ills.
"I was just about gone, that's what I was. Let anybody so much as look
at me twice and, pop! I'd want to cry about it."
"And?"
"For six weeks I didn't even have enough interest to ask after Truman,
who was courting me then. Oh, it was no fun, I can tell you, that
nervous breakdown of mine!"
"What--else?"
"Isn't that enough?"
"Did it--was it--was it ever hard to swallow, Jeanette?"
"To swallow?"
"Yes. I mean--did you ever dream or--think--or feel so frightened you
couldn't swallow?"
"I felt lots of ways, but that wasn't one of them. Swallow! Who ever
heard of not swallowing?"
"But didn't you ever dream, Jeanette--terrible things--such terrible
things--and get to thinking and couldn't stop yourself? Silly,
ghostly--things."
Jeanette put down her sewing.
"Ann, are you quizzing me about--your mother?"
"My mother? Why my mother? Jeanette, what do you mean? Why do you ask me
a thing like that? What has my mother got to do with it? Jeanette!"
Conscious that she had erred, Jeanette veered carefully back.
"Why, nothing, only I remember mamma telling me when I was just a kiddie
how your mamma used to--to imagine all sorts of things just to pass the
time away while she embroidered the loveliest pieces. You're like her,
mamma used to say--a handy little body. Poor mamma, to think she had to
be taken before Truman, junior, was born! Ah me!"
That evening, before Fred came for his two hours with her in the little
parlor, Ann, rid of her checked apron and her crisp pink frock saved
from the grease of frying sparks, flew in from a ring at the doorbell
with a good-sized special-delivery box from a silversmith, untying it
with eager, fumbling fingers, her father laying aside his newspaper to
venture three guesses as to its contents.
"Another one of those syrup pitchers."
"Oh dear!"--plucking the twine--"I hope not!"
"Some more nut picks."
"Daddy, stop calamity howling. Here's the card. Des Moines, Iowa. 'From
Lucile Willis, with love to her new sister.' Isn't that the sweetest!
It's something with a pearl handle."
"I know. Another one of those pie-spade things."
"Wrong! Wrong! It's two pieces. Oh!"
It was a fish set of silver and mother-of-pearl. A large-bowled spoon
and a sort of Neptune's fork, set up in a white-sateen bed.
"Say now, that _is_ neat," said Henry, appraising each piece with a show
of critical appreciation not really his. All this spread of the gewgaws
of approaching nuptials seemed meaningless to him; bored him. Butter
knives. Berry spoons. An embarrassment of nut picks and silver pitchers.
A sliver of silver paper cutter with a hilt and a dog's-head handle. And
now, for Fred's delectation this evening, the newly added fish set, so
appropriately inscribed from his sister.
Tilting it against the lamp in the place of honor, Ann Elizabeth turned
away suddenly, looking up at her father in a sudden dumb panic of which
he knew nothing, her two hands at her fair, bare throat. It was so hard
again to swallow. Impossible.
But finally, as was always the case, she did swallow, with a great surge
of relief. A little later, seated on her father's knee and plucking at
his tie in a futile fashion that he loved, she asked him:
"Daddy--about mother--"
They seldom talked of her, but always during these rare moments a
beautiful mood shaped itself between them. It was as if the mere breath
of his daughter's sweetly lipped use of "mother" swayed the bitter-sweet
memory of the woman he carried so faithfully in the cradle of his heart.
"Yes, baby--about mother?"
"Daddy"--still fingering at the tie--"was mother--was everything all
right with her up--to the very--end? I mean--no nerv--no pain? Just all
of a sudden the end--quietly. Or have you told me that just to--spare
me?"
She could feel him stiffen, but when his voice came it was even.
"Why, Ann, what a--question! Haven't I told you so often how mother just
peacefully passed on, holding a little pink you."
Sweet-Beautiful--his heart was tolling through a sense of
panic--Sweet-Beautiful.
"I know, daddy, but before--wasn't there any nerv--any sickness?"
"No," he said, rather harshly for him. "No. No. What put such ideas into
your head?"
You see, he was shielding Emma way back there, and a typhoon of her
words was raging through his head:
"Oh, Henry, protect me against anyone ever saying--that. Promise me."
And now, with no sense of his terrible ruthlessness, he was protecting
her with her own daughter.
"Then, daddy, just one more thing," and her underlip caught while she
waited for answer. "There is no other reason except your own dear silly
one of loneliness--why you keep wanting me to put off my marriage?"
"No, baby," he said, finally, his words with no more depth than if his
body were a hollow gourd. "What else could there be?"
Immediately, and with all the resilience of youth, she was her happy
self again, kissing him through his mustache and on his now frankly bald
head, which gave off the incongruous odor of violet eau de Cologne.
"Old dude daddy!" she cried, and wanted to kiss his hands, which he held
suddenly very still and far from her reach.
Then the bell rang again and Fred Willis arrived. All the evening,
long after Henry lay on his deep-mattressed bed, staring, the little
apartment trilled to her laughter and the basso of Fred's.
* * * * *
A few weeks later there occurred a strike of the delivery men and truck
drivers of the city, and Henry, especially hard hit because of the
perishable nature of his product, worked early and late, oftentimes
loading the wagons himself and riding alongside of the precariously
driving "scab."
Frequently he was as much as an hour or two late to dinner, and upon one
or two occasions had tiptoed out of the house before the usual hour
when Ann opened her eyes to the consciousness of his breakfast to be
prepared.
They were trying days, the scheme of his universe broken into, and Henry
thrived on routine.
The third week of the strike there were street riots, some of them
directly in front of the fish store, and Henry came home after a day of
the unaccustomed labor of loading and unloading hampers of fish, really
quite shaken.
When he arrived Ann Elizabeth was cutting around the scalloped edge of
a doily with embroidery scissors, the litter of cut glass and silver
things out on the table and throwing up quite a brilliance under the
electric lamp, and from the kitchen the slow sizzle of waiting chops.
"Whew!" he said, as he entered, both from the whiff he emanated as he
shook out of his overcoat, and from a great sense of his weariness.
Loading the hampers, you understand. "Whew!"
Ann Elizabeth started violently, first at the whiff which preceded him
and at his approach into the room; then sat forward, her hand closing
into the arm of the chair, body thrust forward and her eyes widening
like two flowers opening.
Then she rose slowly and slyly, and edged behind the table, her two
hands up about her throat.
"Don't you come in here," she said, lowly and evenly. "I know you, but
I'm not afraid. I'm only afraid of you at night, but not by light. You
let me swallow, you hear! Get out! Get out!"
Rooted, Henry stood.
"Why, Annie!" he said in the soothing voice from out of his long ago,
"Annie--it's daddy!"
"No, you don't," she cried, springing back as he took the step forward.
"My daddy'll kill you if he finds you here. He'll slit you up from your
tail right up to your gill. He knows how. I'm going to tell him and Fred
on you. You won't let me swallow. You're slippery. I can't stand it.
Don't you come near me! Don't!"
"Annie!" he cried. "Good God! Annie, it's daddy who loves you!" Poor
Henry, her voice was still under a whisper and in his agony he committed
the error of rushing at her. "Annie, it's daddy! See, your own dear
daddy!"
But she was too quick. Her head thrown back so that the neck muscles
strained out like an outraged deer's cornered in the hunt and her
eyes rolled up, Ann felt for and grasped the paper knife off the
trinket-littered table.
"Don't you touch me--slit you up from tail to your gills."
"Annie, it's daddy! Papa! For God's sake look at daddy--Ann! God!" And
caught her wrist in the very act of its plumb-line rush for his heart.
He was sweating in his struggle with her, and most of all her strength
appalled him, she was so little for her terrible unaccountable power.
"Don't touch me! You can't! You haven't any arms! Horrible gills!"
She was talking as she struggled, still under the hoarse and frantic
whisper, but her breath coming in long soughs. "Slit-you-up-from-tail.
Slit--you--up--from--tail--to--gills."
"Annie! Annie!" still obsessed by his anguished desire to reassure
her with the normality of his touch. "See, Annie, it's daddy. Ann
Elizabeth's daddy." With a flash her arm and the glint of the paper
cutter eluded him again and again, but finally he caught her by the
waist, struggling, in his dreadful mistake, to calm her down into the
chair again.
"Now I've got you, darling. Now--sit--down--"
"No, you haven't," she said, a sort of wild joy coming out in her
whisper, and cunningly twisting the upper half of her body back from
his, the hand still held high. "You'll never get me--you fish!"
And plunged with her high hand in a straight line down into her throat.
It was only when the coroner withdrew the sliver of paper knife from its
whiteness, that, coagulated, the dead and waiting blood began to ooze.
* * * * *
"Do you," intoned the judge for the third and slightly more impatient
time, "plead guilty or not guilty to the charge of murder against you?"
This time the lips of the prisoner's wound of a mouth moved stiffly
together:
"Guilty."
ROULETTE
I
Snow in the village of Vodna can have the quality of hot white plush
of enormous nap, so dryly thick it packs into the angles where fences
cross, sealing up the windward sides of houses, rippling in great seas
across open places, flaming in brilliancy against the boles of ever so
occasional trees, and tucking in the houses up to the sills and down
over the eaves.
Out in the wide places it is like a smile on a dead face, this snow
hush, grateful that peace can be so utter. It is the silence of a broody
God, and out of that frozen pause, in a house tucked up to the sills and
down to the eaves, Sara Turkletaub was prematurely taken with the pangs
of childbirth, and in the thin dawn, without even benefit of midwife,
twin sons were born.
Sturdy sons, with something even in their first crescendo wails that
bespoke the good heritage of a father's love-of-life and a mother's
life-of-love.
No Sicilian sunrise was ever more glossy with the patina of hope
than the iced one that crept in for a look at the wide-faced,
high-cheek-boned beauty of Sara Turkletaub as she lay with her sons to
the miracle of her full breasts, her hair still rumpled with the agony
of deliverance. So sweetly moist her eyes that Mosher Turkletaub, his
own brow damp from sweat of her writhings, was full of heartbeat, even
to his temples.
Long before moontime, as if by magic of the brittle air, the tidings had
spread through the village, and that night, until the hand-hewn rafters
rang, the house of Turkletaub heralded with twofold and world-old fervor
the advent of the man-child. And through it all--the steaming warmth,
the laughter through bushy beards, the ministering of women wise and
foolish with the memory of their own pangs, the shouts of vodka-stirred
men, sheepish that they, too, were part custodians of the miracle of
life--through it all Sara Turkletaub lay back against her coarse bed, so
rich--so rich that the coves of her arms trembled each of its burden and
held tighter for fear somehow God might repent of his prodigality.
That year the soil came out from under the snow rich and malmy to the
plow, and Mosher started heavy with his peddler's pack and returned
light. It was no trick now for Sara to tie her sons to an iron ring in
the door jamb and, her strong legs straining and her sweat willing,
undertake household chores of water lugging, furniture heaving,
marketing with baskets that strained her arms from the sockets as she
carted them from the open square to their house on the outskirts, her
massive silhouette moving as solemnly as a caravan against the sky line.
Rich months these were and easy to bear because they were backed by a
dream that each day, however relentless in its toil, brought closer to
reality.
"America!"
The long evenings full of the smell of tallow; maps that curled under
the fingers; the well-thumbed letters from Aaron Turkletaub, older
brother to Mosher and already a successful pieceworker on skirts in
Brooklyn. The picture postcards from him of the Statue of Liberty! Of
the three of them, Aaron, Gussie, his wife, and little Leo, with donkey
bodies sporting down a beach labeled "Coney." A horrific tintype of
little Leo in tiny velveteen knickerbockers that fastened with large,
ruble-sized, mother-of-pearl buttons up to an embroidered sailor blouse.
It was those mother-of-pearl buttons that captured Sara's imagination
so that she loved and wept over the tintype until little Leo quite
disappeared under the rust of her tears. Long after young Mosher, who
loved his Talmud, had retired to sway over it, Sara could yearn at this
tintype.
Her sons in little knickerbockers that fastened to the waistband with
large pearl buttons!
Her black-eyed Nikolai with the strong black hair and the virile little
profile that hooked against the pillow as he slept.
Her red-headed Schmulka with the tight curls, golden eyes, and even
more thrusting profile. So different of feature her twins and yet so
temperamentally of a key. Flaming to the same childish passions, often
too bitter, she thought, and, trembling with an unnamed fear, would tear
them apart.
Pull of the cruelties and the horrible torture complex of the young
male, they had once burned a cat alive, and the passion of their father
and their cries under flaying had beat about in her brain for weeks
after. Jealousies, each of the other, burned fiercely, and, aged three,
they scratched blood from one another over the favor of the shoemaker's
tot of a girl. And once, to her soul-sickness, Nikolai, the black one,
had found out the vodka and drunk of it until she discovered him in a
little stupor beside the cupboard.
Yet--and Sara would recount with her eyes full of more tears than they
could hold the often-told tale of how Schmulka, who could bear no
injustice, championed the cause of little Mottke, the butcher's son,
against the onslaught of his drunken father, beating back the lumbering
attack with small fists tight with rage; of little Nikolai, who fell
down the jagged wall of a quarry and endured a broken arm for the six
hours until his father came home rather than burden his mother with what
he knew would be the agony of his pain.
Red and black were Sara's sons in pigment. But by the time they were
four, almost identical in passion, inflammable both to the same angers,
the impulsive and the judiciary cunningly distributed in them.
And so, to the solemn and Talmud teachings of Mosher and the
wide-bosomed love of this mother who lavishly nurtured them, these sons,
so identically pitched, grew steady of limb, with all the thigh-pulling
power of their parents, the calves of their little legs already tight
as fists. And from the bookkeeping one snow-smelling night, to the
drip-drip of tallow, there came the decisive moment when America looked
exactly four months off!
Then one starlit hour before dawn the pogrom broke. Redly, from the very
start, because from the first bang of a bayonet upon a door blood began
to flow and smell.
There had been rumors. For days old Genendel, the ragpicker, had
prophetically been showing about the village the rising knobs of his
knotting rheumatic knuckles, ill omen of storm or havoc. A star had shot
down one night, as white and sardonic as a Cossack's grin and almost
with a hiss behind it. Mosher, returning from a peddling tour to a
neighboring village, had worn a furrow between his eyes. Headache, he
called it. Somehow Sara vaguely sensed it to be the ache of a fear.
One night there was a furious pink tint on the distant horizon, and
borne on miles of the stiffly thin air came the pungency of burning
wood and flesh across the snowlight. Flesh! The red sky lay off in the
direction of Kishinef. What was it? The straw roof of a burning barn?
The precious flesh of an ox? What? Reb Baruch, with a married daughter
and eleven children in Kishinef, sat up all night and prayed and swayed
and trembled.
Packed in airtight against the bite of the steely out-of-doors, most of
the village of Vodna--except the children and the half-witted Shimsha,
the _ganef_--huddled under its none-too-plentiful coverings that night
and prayed and trembled.
At five o'clock that red dawn, almost as if a bayonet had crashed into
her dream, Sara, her face smeared with pallor, awoke to the smell of
her own hair singeing. A bayonet _had_ crashed, but through the door,
terribly!
The rest is an anguished war frieze of fleeing figures; of running
hither and thither in the wildness of fear; of mothers running with
babes at breasts; of men, their twisted faces steaming sweat, locked in
the Laocoön embrace of death. Banners of flame. The exultant belch of
iridescent smoke. Cries the shape of steel rapiers. A mouth torn back to
an ear. Prayers being moaned. The sticky stench of coagulating blood.
Pillage. Outrage. Old men dragging household chattels. Figures crumpling
up in the outlandish attitudes of death. The enormous braying of
frightened cattle. A spurred heel over a face in that horrible moment
when nothing can stay its descent. The shriek of a round-bosomed girl
to the smear of wet lips across hers. The superb daring of her lover to
kill her. A babe in arms. Two. The black billowing of fireless smoke.
A child in the horse trough, knocked there from its mother's arms by the
butt end of a bayonet, its red curls quite sticky in a circle of its
little blood. A half-crazed mother with a singed eyebrow, blatting over
it and groveling on her breasts toward the stiffening figure for the
warmth they could not give; the father, a black-haired child in his
arms, tearing her by force out of the zone of buckshot, plunging back
into it himself to cover up decently, with his coat, what the horse
trough held.
Dawn. A huddle of fugitives. Footsteps of blood across the wide open
places of snow. A mother, whose eyes are terrible with what she has left
in the horse trough, fighting to turn back. A husband who literally
carries her, screaming, farther and farther across the cruel open
places. A town. A ship. The crucified eyes of the mother always looking
back. Back.