only one twin--Nikolai, the black.
* * * * *
The Turkletaubs prospered. Turkletaub Brothers, Skirts, the year after
the war, paying a six-figure excess-profit tax.
Aaron dwelt in a three-story, American-basement house in West 120th
Street, near Lenox Avenue, with his son Leo, office manager of the
Turkletaub Skirt Company, and who had recently married the eldest
daughter of an exceedingly well-to-do Maiden Lane jewelry merchant.
The Mosher Turkletaubs occupied an eight-room-and-two-baths apartment
near by. Sara, with much of the fleetness gone from her face and a smile
tempered by a look of unshed tears, marketing now by white-enameled desk
telephone or, on days when the limp from an old burn down her thigh was
not too troublesome, walked up to a plate-glass butcher shop on 125th
Street, where there was not so much as a drop of blood on the marble
counter and the fowl hung in white, plucked window display with
garnitures of pink tissue paper about the ankles and even the dangling
heads wrapped so that the dead eyes might not give offense.
It was a widely different Sara from the water lugger of those sweaty
Russian days. Such commonplaces of environment as elevator service,
water at the turning of a tap, potatoes dug and delivered to her
dumbwaiter, had softened Sara and, it is true, vanquished, along with
the years, some of the wing flash of vitality from across her face. So
was the tough fiber of her skin vanquished to almost a creaminess, and
her hair, due perhaps to the warm water always on tap, had taken on
a sheen, and even through its grayness grew out hardily and was well
trained to fall in soft scallops over the singed place.
Yes, all in all, life had sweetened Sara, and, except for the occasional
look of crucifixion somewhere back in her eyes, had roly-polied her
into new rotundities of hip and shelf of bosom, and even to what
mischievously promised to be a scallop of second chin.
Sara Turkletaub, daughter of a ne'er-do-well who had died before her
birth with the shadow of an unproved murder on him; Sara, who had run
swiftly barefoot for the first dozen summers of her life, and married,
without dower or approval, the reckless son of old Turkletaub, the
peddler; Sara, who once back in the dim years, when a bull had got loose
in the public square, had jerked him to a halt by swinging herself from
his horns, and later, standing by, had helped hold him for the emergency
of an un-kosher slaughter, not even paling at the slitting noises of the
knife.
Mosher Turkletaub, who had peddled new feet for stockings and calico for
the sacques the peasant women wore in the fields, reckoning no longer in
dozens of rubles but in dozens of thousands! Indeed, Turkletaub Brothers
could now afford to owe the bank one hundred thousand dollars! Mosher
dwelling thus, thighs gone flabby, in a seven-story apartment house with
a liveried lackey to swing open the front door and another to shoot him
upward in a gilded elevator.
It was to laugh!
And Sara and Mosher with their son, their turbulent Nikolai, now an
accredited Doctor of Law and practicing before the bar of the city of
New York!
It was upon that realization, most of all, that Sara could surge tears,
quickly and hotly, and her heart seem to hurt of fullness.
Of Nikolai, the black. Nicholas, now:
It was not without reason that Sara had cried terrible tears over him,
and that much, but not all, of the struggle was gone from her face.
Her boy could be as wayward as the fling to his fierce black head, and
sickeningly often Mosher, with a nausea at the very pit of him, had
wielded the lash.
Once even Nicholas in his adolescent youth, handsomely dark, had stood
in Juvenile Court, ringleader of a neighborhood gang of children on a
foray into the strange world of some packets of cocaine purloined from
the rear of a vacated Chinese laundry.
Bitterly had Mosher stood in the fore of that court room, thumbing his
hat, his heart gangrening, and trying in a dumbly miserable sort of way
to press down, with his hand on her shoulder, some of the heaving of
Sara's enormous tears.
There had followed a long, bitter evening of staying the father's lash
from descending, and finally, after five hours with his mother in his
little room, her wide bosom the sea wall against which the boiling
waywardness of him surged, his high head came down like a black swan's
and apparently, at least so far as Mosher knew, Sara had won again.
And so it was that with the bulwark of this mother and a father who
spared not the wise rod even at the price of the sickness it cost
him, Nicholas came cleanly through these difficult years of the long
midchannel of his waywardness.
At twenty-one he was admitted to the bar of the city of New York,
although an event so perilous followed it by a year or two that the
scallops of strong hair that came down over the singed place of Sara's
brow whitened that year; although Mosher, who was beginning to curve
slightly of the years as he walked, as if a blow had been struck him
from behind, never more than heard the wind before the storm.
Listen in on the following:
The third year that Nicholas practiced law, junior member in the Broad
Street firm of Leavitt & Dilsheimer, he took to absenting himself from
dinner so frequently, that across the sturdy oak dining table, laid out
in a red-and-white cloth, gold-band china not too thick of lip, and a
cut-glass fern dish with cunningly contrived cotton carnations stuck in
among the growing green, Sara, over rich and native foods, came more and
more to regard her husband through a clutch of fear.
"I tell you, Mosher, something has come over the boy. It ain't like him
to miss _gefülte_-fish supper three Fridays in succession."
"All right, then, because he has a few more or less _gefülte_-fish
suppers in his life, let it worry you! If that ain't a woman every
time."
"_Gefülte_ fish! If that was my greatest worry. But it's not so easy to
prepare, that you should take it so much for granted. _Gefülte_ fish, he
says, just like it grew on trees and didn't mean two hours' chopping on
my feet."
"Now, Sara, was that anything to fly off at? Do I ever so much as eat
two helpings of it in Gussie's house? That's how I like yours better!"
"Gussie don't chop up her onions fine enough. A hundred times I tell her
and a hundred times she does them coarse. Her own daughter-in-law, a
girl that was raised in luxury, can cook better as Gussie. I tell you,
Mosher, I take off my hat to those Berkowitz girls. And if you should
ask me, Ada is a finer one even than Leo's Irma."
The sly look of wiseacre wizened up Mosher's face.
"Ada!" she says. "The way you pronounce that girl's name, Sara, it's
like every tooth in your mouth was diamond filled out of Berkowitz's
jewelry firm."
Quite without precedent Sara's lips began to quiver at this pleasantry.
"I'm worried, Mosher," she said, putting down a forkful of untasted food
that had journeyed twice toward her lips. "I don't say he--Nicky--I
don't say he should always stay home evenings when Ada comes over
sometimes with Leo and Irma, but night after night--three times whole
nights--I--Mosher, I'm afraid."
In his utter well-being from her warming food, Mosher drank deeply and,
if it must be admitted, swishingly, through his mustache, inhaling
copiously the draughts of Sara's coffee.
Do not judge from the mustache cup with the gilt "Papa" inscribed, that
Sara's home did not meticulously reflect the newer McKinley period, so
to speak, of the cut-glass-china closet, curio cabinet, brass bedstead,
velour upholstery, and the marbelette Psyche.
They had furnished newly three years before, the year the business
almost doubled, Sara and Gussie simultaneously, the two of them poring
with bibliophiles' fervor over Grand Rapids catalogic literature.
Bravely had Sara, even more so than Gussie, sacrificed her old regime to
the dealer. Only a samovar remained. A red-and-white pressed-glass punch
bowl, purchased out of Nicholas's--aged fourteen--pig-bank savings. An
enlarged crayon of her twins from a baby picture. A patent rocker which
she kept in the kitchen. (It fitted her so for the attitude of peeling.)
Two bisque plaques, with embossed angels. Another chair capable of
metamorphosis into a ladder. And Mosher's cup.
From this Mosher drank with gusto. His mustache, to Sara so thrillingly
American, without its complement of beard, could flare so above the
relishing sounds of drinking. It flared now and Mosher would share none
of her concern.
"You got two talents, Sara. First, for being my wife; and second, for
wasting worry like it don't cost you nothing in health or trips to
Cold Springs in the Catskills for the baths. Like it says in Nicky's
Shakespeare, a boy who don't sow his wild oats when he's young will some
day do 'em under another name that don't smell so sweet."
"I--It ain't like I can talk over Nicky with you, Mosher, like another
woman could with her husband. Either you give him right or right away
you get so mad you make it worse with him than better."
"Now, Sara--"
"But only this morning that Mrs. Lessauer I meet sometimes at Epstein's
fish store--you know the rich sausage-casings Lessauers--she says to me
this morning, she says with her sweetness full of such a meanness, like
it was knives in me--'Me and my son and daughter-in-law was coming out
of a movie last night and we saw your son getting into a taxicab with
such a blonde in a red hat!' The way she said it, Mosher, like a cat
licking its whiskers--'such a blonde in a red hat'!"
"I wish I had one dollar in my pocket for every blond hat with red hair
her Felix had before he married."
"But it's the second time this week I hear it, Mosher. The same
description of such a--a nix in a red hat. Once in a cabaret show Gussie
says she heard it from a neighbor, and now in and out from taxicabs with
her. Four times this week he's not been home, Mosher. I can't help it,
I--I get crazy with worry."
A sudden, almost a simian old-age seemed to roll, like a cloud that can
thunder, across Sara's face. She was suddenly very small and no little
old. Veins came out on her brow and upon the backs of her hands, and
Mosher, depressed with an unconscious awareness, was looking into the
tired, cold, watery eyes of the fleet woman who had been his.
"Why, Sara!" he said, and came around the table to let her head wilt in
unwonted fashion against his coat. "Mamma!"
"I'm tired, Mosher." She said her words almost like a gush of warm blood
from the wound of her mouth. "I'm tired from keeping up and holding in.
I have felt so sure for these last four years that we have saved him
from his--his wildness--and now, to begin all over again, I--I 'ain't
got the fight left in me, Mosher."
"You don't have to have any fight in you, Mamma. 'Ain't you got a
husband and a son to fight for you?"
"Sometimes I think, except for the piece of my heart I left lying back
there, that there are worse agonies than even massacres. I've struggled
so that he should be good and great, Mosher, and now, after four years
already thinking I've won--maybe, after all, I haven't."
"Why, Sara! Why, Mamma! Shame! I never saw you like this before. You
ain't getting sick for another trip to the Catskills, are you? Maybe you
need some baths--"
"Sulphur water don't cure heart sickness."
"Heart sickness, nonsense! You know I don't always take sides with
Nicky, Mamma. I don't say he hasn't been a hard boy to raise. But a man,
Mamma, is a man! I wouldn't think much of him if he wasn't. You 'ain't
got him to your apron string in short pants any more. Whatever troubles
we've had with him, women haven't been one of them. Shame, Mamma, the
first time your grown-up son of a man cuts up maybe a little nonsense
with the girls! Shame!"
"Girls! No one would want more than me he should settle himself down to
a fine, self-respecting citizen with a fine, sweet girl like Ad--"
"Believe me, and I ain't ashamed to say it, I wasn't an angel, neither,
every minute before I was married."
"My husband brags to me about his indiscretioncies."
"_Na, na_, Mamma, right away when I open my mouth you make out a
case against me. I only say it to show you how a mother maybe don't
understand as well as a father how natural a few wild oats can be."
"L-Leo didn't have 'em."
"Leo ain't a genius. He's just a good boy."
"I--I worry so!"
"Sara, I ask you, wouldn't I worry, too, if there was a reason? God
forbid if his nonsense should lead to really something serious, then
it's time to worry."
Sara Turkletaub dried her eyes, but it was as if the shadow of
crucifixion had moved forward in them.
"If just once, Mosher, Nicky would make it easy for me, like Leo did for
Gussie. When Leo's time comes he marries a fine girl like Irma Berkowitz
from a fine family, and has fine children, without Gussie has to cry her
eyes out first maybe he's in company that--that--"
"I don't say, Sara, we didn't have our hard times with your boy. But we
got results enough that we shouldn't complain. Maybe you're right. With
a boy like Leo, a regular good business head who comes into the firm
with us, it ain't been such a strain for Gussie and Aaron as for us with
a genius. But neither have they got the smart son, the lawyer of the
family, for theirs. _We_ got a temperament in ours, Sara. Ain't that
something to be proud of?"
She laid her cheek to his lapel, the freshet of her tears past staying.
"I--I know it, Mosher. It ain't--often I give way like this."
"We got such results as we can be proud of, Sara. A genius of a lawyer
son on his way to the bench. Mark my word if I ain't right, on his way
to the bench!"
"Yes, yes, Mosher."
"Well then, Sara, I ask you, is it nice to--"
"I know it, Papa. I ought to be ashamed. Instead of me fighting you to
go easy with the boy, this time it's you fighting me. If only he--he was
the kind of boy I could talk this out with, it wouldn't worry me so.
When it comes to--to a girl--it's so different. It's just that I'm
tired, Mosher. If anything was to go wrong after all these years of
struggling for him--alone--"
"Alone! Alone! Why, Sara! Shame! Time after time for punishing him I was
a sick man!"
"That's it! That's why so much of it was alone. I don't know why I
should say it all to-night after--after so many years of holding in."
"Say what?"
"You meant well, God knows a father never meant better, but it wasn't
the way to handle our boy's nature with punishments, and a quick temper
like yours. Your way was wrong, Mosher, and I knew it. That's why so
much of it was--alone--so much that I had to contend with I was afraid
to tell you, for fear--for fear--"
"Now, now, Mamma, is that the way to cry your eyes out about nothing? I
don't say I'm not sometimes hasty--"
"Time and time again--keeping it in from you--after the Chinese laundry
that night after you--you whipped him so--you never knew the months of
nights with him afterward--when I found out he liked that--stuff! Me
alone with him--"
"Sara, is now time to rake up such ten-year-old nonsense!"
"It's all coming out in me now, Mosher. The strain. You never knew. That
time you had to send me to the Catskills for the baths. You thought
it was rheumatism. I knew what was the matter with me. Worry. The
nights--Mosher. He liked it. I found it hid away in the toes of his
gymnasium shoes and in the mouth to his bugle. He--liked that stuff,
Mosher. You didn't know that, did you?"
"Liked what?"
"It. The--the stuff from the Chinese laundry. Even after the Juvenile
Court, when you thought it was all over after the whipping that night.
He'd snuff it up. I found him twice on his bed after school. All
druggy-like--half sleeping and half laughing. The gang at school he was
in with--learned him--"
"You mean--?"
"It ain't so easy to undo with a day in Juvenile Court such a habit like
that. You thought the court was the finish. My fight just began then!"
"Why, Sara!"
"You remember the time he broke his kneecap and how I fighted the
doctors against the hypodermic and you got so mad because I wouldn't let
him have it to ease the pain. I knew why it was better he should suffer
than have it. _I knew!_ It was a long fight I had with him alone,
Mosher. He liked that--stuff."
"That--don't--seem possible."
"And that wasn't the only lead-pipe case that time, neither, Mosher.
Twice I had to lay out of my own pocket so you wouldn't know, and talk
to him 'til sometimes I thought I didn't have any more tears left
inside of me. Between you and your business worries that year of the
garment-workers' strike--and our boy--I--after all that I haven't got
the strength left. Now that he's come out of it big, I can't begin over
again. I haven't got what he would call the second wind for it. If
anything should keep him now from going straight ahead to make him count
as a citizen, I wouldn't have the strength left to fight it, Mosher.
Wouldn't!"
And so Sara Turkletaub lay back with the ripple writing of stormy high
tides crawling out in wrinkles all over her face and her head, that he
had never seen low, wilting there against his breast.
He could not be done with soothing her, his own face suddenly as
puckered as an old shoe, his chin like the toe curling up.
"Mamma, Mamma, I didn't know! God knows I never dreamt--"
"I know you didn't, Mosher. I ain't mad. I'm only tired. I 'ain't got
the struggle left in me. This feeling won't last in me, I'll be all
right, but I'm tired, Mosher--so tired."
"My poor Sara!"
"And frightened. Such a blonde in a red hat. Cabarets. Taxicabs. Night
after night. Mosher, hold me. I'm frightened."
Cheek to cheek in their dining room of too-carved oak, twin shadow-boxed
paintings of Fruit and Fish, the cut-glass punch bowl with the hooked-on
cups, the cotton palm, casually rigid velour drapes, the elusive floor
bell, they huddled, these two, whose eyes were branded with the scars
of what they had looked upon, and a slow, a vast anger began to rise in
Mosher, as if the blood in his throat were choking him, and a surge of
it, almost purple, rose out of his collar and stained his face.
"Loafer! Low-life! No-'count! His whole body ain't worth so much as your
little finger. I'll learn him to be a worry to you with this all-night
business. By God! I'll learn my loafer of a son to--"
On the pistol shot of that, Sara's body jumped out of its rigidity, all
her faculties coiled to spring.
"He isn't! You know he isn't! 'Loafer'! Shame on you! Whatever else he
is, he's not a loafer. Boys will be boys--you say so yourself. 'Loafer'!
You should know once what some parents go through with real _loafers_
for sons--"
"No child what brings you such worry is anything else than a loafer!"
"And I say 'no'! The minute I so much as give you a finger in finding
fault with that boy, right away you take a hand!"
"I'll break his--"
"You don't know yet a joke when you hear one. I wanted to get you mad! I
get a little tired and I try to make myself funny."
"There wasn't no funniness in the way your eyes looked when you--"
"I tell you I didn't mean one word. No matter what uneasiness that child
has brought me, always he has given me more in happiness. Twice more.
That's what he's been. Twice of everything to make up for--for only
being half of my twins."
"Then what the devil is--"
"I don't envy Gussie her Leo and his steady ways. Didn't you say
yourself for a boy like ours you got to pay with a little uneasiness?"
"Not when that little uneasiness is enough to make his mother sick."
"Sick! If I felt any better I'd be ashamed of having so much health! If
you get mad with him and try to ask him where he stays every night is
all that can cause me worry. It's natural a handsome boy like ours
should sow what they call his wild oat. With such a matzos face like
poor Leo, from where he broke his nose, I guess it ain't so easy for him
to have his wild oat. Promise me, Mosher, you won't ask one question or
get mad at him. His mother knows how to handle her boy so he don't even
know he's handled."
"I'll handle him--"
"See now, just look at yourself once in the glass with your eyes full of
red. That's why I can't tell you nothing. Right away you fly to pieces.
I say again, you don't know how to handle your son. Promise me you won't
say nothing to him or let on, Mosher. Promise me."
"That's the way with you women. You get a man crazy and then--"
"I tell you it's just my nonsense."
"If I get mad you're mad, and if I don't get mad you're mad! Go do me
something to help me solve such a riddle like you."
"It's because me and his aunt Gussie are a pair of matchmaking old
women. That the two cousins should marry the two sisters, Irma and Ada,
we got it fixed between us! Just as if because we want it that way it's
got to happen that way!"
"A pair of geeses, the two of you!"
"I wouldn't let on to Gussie, but Ada, the single one, has got Leo's
Irma beat for looks. Such a complexion! And the way she comes over to
sew with me afternoons! A young girl like that! An old woman like me!
You see, Mosher? See?"
"See, she asks me. What good does it do me if I see or I don't see when
his mother gets her mind made up?"
"But does Nicky so much as look at her? That night at Leo's birthday I
was ashamed the way he right away had an engagement after supper, when
she sat next to him and all through the meal gave him the white meat off
her own plate. Why, the flowered chiffon dress that girl had on cost ten
dollars a yard if it cost a cent. Did Nicky so much as look at her? No."
"Too many birthdays in this family."
"I notice you eat them when they are set down in front of you!"
"Eat what?"
"The birthdays."
"Ha! That's fine! A new dish. Boiled birthdays with horseradish sauce."
"All right, then, the birthday _parties_. Don't be so exactly with me.
Many a turn in his grave you yourself have given the man who made the
dictionary. I got other worries than language. If I knew where he
is--to-night--"
Rather contentedly, while Sara cleared and tidied, Mosher snapped open
his evening paper, drawing his spectacles down from the perch of his
forehead.
"You women," he said, breathing out with the male's easy surcease from
responsibility--"you women and your worries. If you 'ain't got 'em, you
make 'em."
"Heigh-ho!" sighed out Sara, presently, having finished, and diving
into her open workbasket for the placidity her flying needle could so
cunningly simulate. "Heigh-ho!"
But inside her heart was beating over and over again to itself, rapidly:
"If--only-I--knew--where--he--is--to--night--if--only--I--knew--where
--he--is--to--night."
II
This is where he was:
In the Forty-fifth-Street flat of Miss Josie Drew, known at various
times and places as Hattie Moore, Hazel Derland, Mrs. Hazel, and--But
what does it matter.
At this writing it was Josie Drew of whom more is to be said of than
for.
Yet pause to consider the curve of her clay. Josie had not molded her
nose. Its upward fling was like the brush of a perfumed feather duster
to the senses. Nor her mouth. It had bloomed seductively, long before
her lip stick rushed to its aid and abetment, into a cherry at the
bottom of a glass for which men quaffed deeply. There was something
rather terrifyingly inevitable about her. Just as the tide is plaything
of the stars, so must the naughty turn to Josie's ankle have been
complement to the naughty turn of her mind.
It is not easy for the woman with a snub nose and lips molded with a
hard pencil to bleed the milk of human kindness over the frailties of
the fruity chalice that contained Miss Drew. She could not know, for
instance, if her own gaze was merely owlish and thin-lashed, the
challenge of eyes that are slightly too long. Miss Drew did. Simply
drooping hers must have stirred her with a none-too-nice sense of
herself, like the swell of his biceps can bare the teeth of a gladiator.
That had been the Josie Drew of eighteen.
At thirty she penciled the droop to her eyebrows a bit and had a not
always successful trick of powdering out the lurking caves under her
eyes. There was even a scar, a peculiar pocking of little shotted spots
as if glass had ground in, souvenir of one out of dozens of such nights
of orgies, this particular one the result of some unmentionable jealousy
she must have coaxed to the surface.