turned green. But who knows? It was also said that Josie Drew's correct
name was Josie Rosalsky. But again who knows? Her past was vivid with
the heat lightning of the sharp storms of men's lives. At nineteen she
had worn in public restaurants a star-sapphire necklace, originally
designed by a soap magnate for his wife, of these her birthstones.
At twenty her fourteen-room apartment faced the Park, but was on the
ground floor because a vice-president of a bank, a black-broadcloth
little pelican of a man, who stumped on a cane and had a pink tin roof
to his mouth, disliked elevators.
At twenty-three and unmentionably enough, a son of a Brazilian coffee
king, inflamed with the deviltry of debauch, had ground a wine tumbler
against her forehead, inducing the pock marks. At twenty-seven it was
the fourth vice-president of a Harlem bank. At twenty-nine an interim.
Startling to Josie Drew. Terrifying. Lean. For the first time in eight
years her gasoline expenditures amounted to ninety cents a month instead
of from forty to ninety dollars. And then not at the garage, but at the
corner drug store. Cleaning fluid for kicked-out glove and slipper tips.
The little jangle of chatelaine absurdities which she invariably
affected--mesh bag, lip stick, memorandum (for the traffic in telephone
numbers), vanity, and cigarette case were gold--filled. There remained
a sapphire necklace, but this one faithfully copied to the wink of the
stars and the pearl clasp by the Chemic Jewel Company. Much of the
indoor appeal of Miss Drew was still the pink silkiness of her, a
little stiffened from washing and ironing, it is true, but there was a
flesh-colored arrangement of intricate drape that was rosily kind to
her. Also a vivid yellow one of a later and less expensive period, all
heavily slashed in Valenciennes lace. This brought out a bit of virago
through her induced blondness, but all the same it italicized her, just
as the crescent of black court plaster exclaimed at the whiteness of her
back.
She could spend an entire morning fluffing at these things, pressing
out, with a baby electric iron and a sleeve board, a crumple of chiffon
to new sheerness, getting at spots with cleaning fluid. Under alcoholic
duress Josie dropped things. There was a furious stain down the
yellow, from a home brew of canned lobster á la Newburg. The stain
she eliminated entirely by cutting out the front panel and wearing it
skimpier.
In these first slanting years, in her furnished flat of upright,
mandolin-attachment piano, nude plaster-of-Paris Bacchante holding
a cluster of pink-glass incandescent grapes, divan mountainous with
scented pillows, she was about as obvious as a gilt slipper that has
started to rub, or a woman's kiss that is beery and leaves a red
imprint.
To Nicholas Turkletaub, whose adolescence had been languid and who had
never known a woman with a fling, a perfume, or a moue (there had been
only a common-sense-heeled co-ed of his law-school days and the rather
plump little sister-in-law of Leo's), the dawn of Josie cleft open
something in his consciousness, releasing maddened perceptions that
stung his eyeballs. He sat in the imitation cheap frailty of her
apartment like a young bull with threads of red in his eyeballs, his
head, not unpoetic with its shag of black hair, lowered as if to bash at
the impotence of the thing she aroused in him.
Also, a curious thing had happened to Josie. Something so jaded in
her that she thought it long dead, was stirring sappily, as if with
springtime.
Maybe it was a resurgence of sense of power after months of terror that
the years had done for her.
At any rate, it was something strangely and deeply sweet.
"Nicky-boy," she said, sitting on the couch with her back against the
wall, her legs out horizontally and clapping her rubbed gilt slippers
together--"Nicky-boy must go home ten o'clock to-night. Josie-girl
tired."
Her mouth, like a red paper rose that had been crushed there, was always
bunched to baby talk.
"Come here," he said, and jerked her so that the breath jumped.
"Won't," she said, and came.
His male prowess was enormous to him. He could bend her back almost
double with a kiss, and did. His first kisses that he spent wildly. He
could have carried her off like Persephone's bull, and wanted to, so
swift his mood. His flare for life and for her leaped out like a flame,
and something precious that had hardly survived sixteen seemed to stir
in the early grave of her heart.
"Oh, Nicky-boy! Nicky-boy!" she said, and he caught that she was
yearning over him.
"Don't say it in down curves like that. Say it up. Up."
She didn't get this, but, with the half-fearful tail of her eye for
the clock, let him hold her quiescent, while the relentlessly sliding
moments ticked against her unease.
"I'm jealous of every hour you lived before I met you."
"Big-bad-eat-Josie-up-boy!"
"I want to kiss your eyes until they go in deep--through you--I don't
know--until they hurt--deep--I--want--to hurt you--"
"Oh! Oh! Josie scared!"
"You're like one of those orange Angora kittens. Yellow. Soft. Deep."
"I Nicky's pussy."
"I can see myself in your eyes. Shut me up in them."
"Josie so tired."
"Of me?"
"Nicky so--so strong."
"My poor pussy! I didn't mean--"
"Nicky-boy, go home like good Nicky."
"I don't want ever to go home."
"Go now, Josie says."
"You mean never."
"Now!"
He kissed his "No, No," down against each of her eyelids.
"You must," she said this time, and pushed him off.
For a second he sat quite still, the black shine in his eyes seeming to
give off diamond points.
"You're nervous," he said, and jerked her back so that the breath jumped
again.
The tail of her glance curved to the gilt clock half hidden behind a
litter of used highball glasses, and then, seeing that his quickly
suspicious eye followed hers:
"No," she said, "not nervous. Just tired--and thirsty."
He poured her a high drink from a decanter, and held it so that, while
she sipped, her teeth were magnified through the tumbler, and he thought
that adorable and tilted the glass higher against her lips, and when she
choked soothed her with a crush of kisses.
"You devil," he said, "everything you do maddens me."
There was a step outside and a scraping noise at the lock. It was only
a vaudeville youth, slender as a girl, who lived on the floor above,
feeling unsteadily, and a bit the worse for wear, for the lock that must
eventually fit his key.
But on that scratch into the keyhole, Josie leaped up in terror, so that
Nicholas went staggering back against the Bacchante, shattering to a
fine ring of crystal some of the pink grapes, and on that instant she
clicked out the remaining lights, shoving him, with an unsuspected and
catamount strength, into an adjoining box of a kitchenette.
There an uncovered bulb burned greasily over a small refrigerator, that
stood on a table and left only the merest slit of walking space. It was
the none too fastidious kitchen of a none too fastidious woman. A pair
of dress shields hung on the improvised clothesline of a bit of twine.
A clump of sardines, one end still shaped to the tin, cloyed in its own
oil, crumbily, as if bread had been sopped in, the emptied tin itself,
with the top rolled back with a patent key, filled now with old beer.
Obviously the remaining contents of a tumbler had been flung in.
Cigarette stubs floated. A pasteboard cylindrical box, labeled "Sodium
Bi-carbonate," had a spoon stuck in it. A rubber glove drooped deadly
over the sink edge.
On the second that he stood in that smelling fog, probably for no longer
than it took the swinging door to settle, something of sickness rushed
over Nicholas. The unaired odors of old foods. Those horrific things on
the line. The oil that had so obviously been sopped up with bread. The
old beer, edged in grease. Something of sickness and a panoramic flash
of things absurdly, almost unreasonably irrelevant.
Snow, somewhere back in his memory. A frozen silence of it that was
clean and thin to the smell. The ridges in the rattan with which his
father had whipped him the night after the Chinese laundry. The fine
white head of the dean of the law school. His mother baking for Friday
night in a blue-and-white gingham apron that enveloped her. Red
curls--some one's--somewhere. The string of tiny Oriental pearls that
rose and fell with the little pouter-pigeon swell of a bosom. Pretty
perturbation. His cousin's sister-in-law, Ada. A small hole in a
pink-silk stocking, peeping like a little rising sun above the heel of a
rubbed gilt slipper. Josie's slipper.
Something seemed suddenly to rise in Nicholas, with the quick
capillarity of water boiling over.
The old familiar star-spangled red over which Sara had time after time
laid sedative hand against his seeing, sprang out. The pit of his
passion was bottomless, into which he was tumbling with the icy laughter
of breaking glass.
Then he struck out against the swinging door so that it ripped outward
with a sough of stale air, striking Josie Drew, as she approached it
from the room side, so violently that her teeth bit down into her lips
and the tattling blood began to flow.
"Nicky! It's a mistake. I thought--my sister--It got so late--you
wouldn't go. Go now! The key--turning--Nervous--silly--mistake. Go--"
He laughed, something exhilarant in his boiling over, and even in her
sudden terror of him she looked at his bare teeth and felt the unnice
beauty of the storm.
"Nicky," she half cried, "don't be--foolish! I--"
And then he struck her across the lip so that her teeth cut in again.
"There is some one coming here to-night," he said, with his smile still
very white.
She sat on the couch, trying to bravado down her trembling.
"And what if there is? He'll beat you up for this! You fool! I've tried
to explain a dozen times. You know, or if you don't you ought to, that
there's a--friend. A traveling salesman. Automobile accessories. Long
trips, but good money. Good money. And here you walk in a few weeks ago
and expect to find the way clear! Good boy, you like some one to go
ahead of you with a snow cleaner, don't you? Yes, there's some one due
in here off his trip to-night. What's the use trying to tell Nicky-boy
with his hot head. He's got a hot head, too. Go, and let me clear the
way for you, Nicky. For good if you say the word. But I have to know
where I'm at. Every girl does if she wants to keep her body and soul
together. You don't let me know where I stand. You know you've got me
around your little finger for the saying, but you don't say. Only go
now, Nicky-boy. For God's sake, it's five minutes to eleven and he's due
in on that ten-forty-five. Nicky-boy, go, and come back to me at six
to-morrow night. I'll have the way clear then, for good. Quit blinking
at me like that, Nicky. You scare me! Quit! When you come back to-morrow
evening there won't be any more going home for Josie's Nicky-boy.
Nicky, go now. He's hotheaded, too. Quit blinking, Nicky--for God's
sake--Nicky--"
It was then Nicholas bent back her head as he did when he kissed her
there on the swan's arch to her neck, only this time his palm was
against her forehead and his other between her shoulder blades.
"I could kill you," he said, and laughed with his teeth. "I could bend
back your neck until it breaks."
"Ni--i--Nic--ky--"
"And I want to," he said through the star-spangled red. "I want you to
crack when I twist. I'm going to twist--twist--"
And he did, shoving back her hair with his palm, and suddenly bared,
almost like a grimace, up at him, was the glass-shotted spot where
the wine tumbler had ground in, greenish now, like the flanges of her
nostrils.
Somewhere--down a dear brow was a singed spot like that--singed with the
flame of pain--
"Nicky, for God's sake--you're--you're spraining my neck! Let go! Nicky.
God! if you hadn't let go just when you did. You had me croaking.
Nicky-boy--kiss me now and go! Go! To-morrow at six--clear for
you--always--only go--please, boy--my terrible--my wonderful. To-morrow
at six."
Somehow he was walking home, the burn of her lips still against his,
loathsome and gorgeous to his desires. He wanted to tear her out by the
roots from his consciousness. To be rollickingly, cleanly free of her.
His teeth shone against the darkness as he walked, drenched to the skin
of his perspiration and one side of his collar loose, the buttonhole
slit.
Rollickingly free of her and yet how devilishly his shoes could clat on
the sidewalk.
To-morrow at six. To-morrow at six. To-morrow at six.
* * * * *
It was some time after midnight when he let himself into the uptown
apartment. He thought he heard his mother, trying to be swift, padding
down the hallway as if she had been waiting near the door. That would
have angered him.
The first of these nights, only four weeks before (it seemed years),
he had come in hotly about four o'clock and gone to bed. About five he
thought he heard sounds, almost like the scratch of a little dog at
his door. He sprang up and flung it open. The flash of his mother's
gray-flannelette wrapper turned a corner of the hall. She must have
been crying out there and wanting him to need her. None the less it had
angered him. These were men's affairs.
But in his room to-night the light burned placidly on the little table
next to the bed, a glass of milk on a plate beside it. The bed was
turned back, snowy sheets forming a cool envelope for him to slip
in between. The room lay sedatively in shadow. A man's room. Books,
uncurving furniture, photographs of his parents taken on their
twenty-fifth anniversary standing on the chiffonier in a double leather
frame that opened like a book. Face down on the reading table beside the
glass of milk, quite as he must have left it the night before, except
where Sara had lifted it to dust under, a copy of Bishop's _New Criminal
Law_, already a prognosis, as it were, of that branch of the law he was
ultimately and brilliantly to bend to fuller justice.
Finally, toward morning Nicholas slept, and at ten o'clock of a
rain-swept Sunday forenoon awoke, as he knew he must, to the grip of a
blinding headache, so called for want of a better noun to interpret the
kind of agony which, starting somewhere around his eyes, could prick
each nerve of his body into a little flame, as if countless matches had
been struck.
As a youngster these attacks had not been infrequent, usually after a
fit of crying. The first, in fact, had followed the burning of the cat;
a duet of twin spasms then, howled into Sara's apron, And once after he
had fished an exhausted comrade out of an ice hole in Bronx Park. They
had followed the lead-pipe affairs and the Chinese-laundry episode with
dreadful inevitability. But it had been five years since the last--the
night his mother had fainted with terror at what she had found concealed
in the toes of his gymnasium shoes.
Incredible that into his manhood should come the waving specter of those
early passions.
At eleven o'clock, after she heard him up and moving about, his mother
carried him his kiss and his coffee, steaming black, the way he liked
it. She had wanted to bring him an egg--in fact, had prepared one, to
just his liking of two minutes and thirty seconds--but had thought
better of it, and wisely, because he drank the coffee at a quick gulp
and set down the cup with his mouth wry and his eyes squeezed tight.
From the taste of it he remembered horridly the litter of tall glasses
beside the gilt clock.
With all her senses taut not to fuss around him with little jerks and
pullings, Sara jerked and pulled. Too well she knew that furrow between
his eyes and wanted unspeakably to tuck him back into bed, lower the
shades, and prepare him a vile mixture good for exactly everything that
did not ail him. But Sara could be wise even with her son. So instead
she flung up the shade, letting him wince at the clatter, dragged off
the bedclothes into a tremendous heap on the chair, beat up the pillows,
and turned the mattress with a single-handed flop.
"The Sunday-morning papers are in the dining room, son."
"Uhm!"
He was standing in his dressing gown at the rain-lashed window,
strumming. Lean, long, and, to Sara, godlike, with the thick shock of
his straight hair still wet from the shower.
"Mrs. Berkowitz telephoned already this morning with such a grand
compliment for you, son. Her brother-in-law, Judge Rosen, says you're
the brains of your firm even if you are only the junior partner yet, and
your way looks straight ahead for big things."
"Uhm! Who's talking out there so incessantly, mother?"
"That's your uncle Aaron. He came over for Sunday-morning breakfast with
your father. You should see the way he tracked up my hall with his wet
shoes. I'm sending him right back home with your father. They should
clutter up your aunt Gussie's house with their pinochle and ashes. I had
'em last Sunday. She don't need to let herself off so easy every week.
It's enough if I ask them all over here for supper to-night. Not?"
"Don't count on me, dear. I won't be home for supper."
There was a tom-tom to the silence against her beating ear drums.
"All right, son," she said, pulling her lips until they smiled at him,
"with Leo and Irma that'll only make six of us, then."
He kissed her, but so tiredly that again it was almost her irresistible
woman's impulse to drag down that fiercely black head to the beating
width of her bosom and plead from him drop by drop some of the bitter
welling of pain she could see in his eyes.
"Nicky," she started to cry, and then, at his straightening back from
her, "come out in the dining room after I pack off the men. I got my
work to do. That nix of a house girl left last night. Such sass, too!
I'm better off doing my work alone."
Sara, poor dear, could not keep a servant, and, except for the
instigation of her husband and son, preferred not to. Cooks rebelled
at the exactitude of her household and her disputative reign of the
kitchen.
"I'll be out presently, mother," he said, and flung himself down in the
leather Morris chair, lighting his pipe and ostensibly settling down to
the open-faced volume of _Criminal Law_.
Sara straightened a straight chair. She knew, almost as horridly as
if she had looked in on it, the mucky thing that was happening; the
intuitive sixth sense of her hovered over him with great wings that
wanted to spread. Josie Drew was no surmise with her. The blond head and
the red hat were tatooed in pain on her heart and she trembled in a bath
of fear, and, trembling, smiled and went out.
Sitting there while the morning ticked on, head thrown back, eyes
closed, and all the little darting nerves at him, the dawn of Nicholas
Turkletaub's repugnance was all for self. The unfrowsy room, and himself
fresh from his own fresh sheets. His mother's eyes with that clean-sky
quality in them. The affectionate wrangling of those two decent voices
from the dining room. Books! His books, that he loved. His tastiest
dream of mother, with immensity and grandeur in her eyes, listening
from a privileged first-row bench to the supreme quality of his mercy.
_Judge_--Turkletaub!
But tastily, too, and undeniably against his lips, throughout these
conjurings, lay the last crushy kiss of Josie Drew. That swany arch to
her neck as he bent it back. He had kissed her there. Countlessly.
He tried to dwell on his aversions for her. She had once used an
expletive in his presence that had sickened him, and, noting its effect,
she had not reiterated. The unfastidious brunette roots to her light
hair. That sink with the grease-rimmed old beer! But then: her eyes
where the brows slid down to make them heavy-lidded. That bit of blue
vein in the crotch of her elbow. That swany arch.
Back somewhere, as the tidy morning wore in, the tranced, the maddening
repetition began to tick itself through:
"Six o'clock. Six o'clock."
He rushed out into the hallway and across to the parlor pinkly lit with
velours, even through the rainy day, and so inflexibly calm. Sara might
have measured the distance between the chairs, so regimental they
stood. The pink-velour curlicue divan with the two pink, gold-tasseled
cushions, carelessly exact. The onyx-topped table with the pink-velour
drape, also gold-tasseled. The pair of equidistant and immaculate china
cuspidors, rose-wreathed. The smell of Sunday.
"Nicky, that you?"
It was his mother, from the dining room.
"Yes, mother," and sauntered in.
There were two women sitting at the round table, shelling nuts. One of
them his mother, the other Miss Ada Berkowitz, who jumped up, spilling
hulls.
Nicholas, in the velveteen dressing gown with the collar turned up,
started to back out, Mrs. Turkletaub spoiling that.
"You can come in, Nicky. Ada'll excuse you. I guess she's seen a man in
his dressing gown before; the magazine advertisements are full with
them in worse and in less. And on Sunday with a headache from all week
working so hard, a girl can forgive. He shouldn't think with his head so
much, I always tell him, Ada."
"I didn't know he was here," said Miss Berkowitz, already thinking in
terms of what she might have worn.
"I telephoned over for Ada, Nicky. They got an automobile and she don't
need to get her feet wet to come over to a lonesome old woman on a
rainy Sunday, to spend the day and learn me how to make those delicious
stuffed dates like she fixed for her mother's card party last week. Draw
up a chair, Nicky, and help."
She was casual, she was matter-of-fact, she was bent on the business
of nut cracking. They crashed softly, never so much as bruised by her
carefully even pressure.
"Thanks," said Nicholas, and sat down, not caring to, but with good
enough grace. He wanted his coat, somehow, and fell to strumming the
table top.
"Don't, Nicky; you make me nervous."
"Here," said Miss Berkowitz, and gave him a cracker and a handful of
nuts. The little crashings resumed.
Ada had very fair skin against dark hair, slightly too inclined to curl.
There was quite a creamy depth to her--a wee pinch could raise a bruise.
The kind of whiteness hers that challenged the string of tiny Oriental
pearls she wore at her throat. Her healthily pink cheeks and her little
round bosom were plump, and across the back of each of her hands were
four dimples that flashed in and out as she bore down on the cracker.
She was as clear as a mountain stream.
"A trifle too plumpy," he thought, but just the same wished he had wet
his military brushes.
"Ada has just been telling me, Nicky, about her ambition to be an
interior decorator for the insides of houses. I think it is grand
the way some girls that are used to the best of everything prepare
themselves for, God forbid, they should ever have to make their own
livings. I give them credit for it. Tell Nicky, Ada, about the drawing
you did last week that your teacher showed to the class."
"Oh," said Ada, blushing softly, "Mr. Turkletaub isn't interested in
that."
"Yes, I am," said Nicholas, politely, eating one of the meats.
"You mean the Tudor dining room--"
No, no! You know, the blue-and-white one you said you liked best of
all."
"It was a nursery," began Ada, softly. "Just one of those blue-and-white
darlingnesses for somebody's little darling."
"For somebody's little darling," repeated Mrs. Turkletaub, silently. She
had the habit, when moved, of mouthing people's words after them.
"My idea was--Oh, it's so silly to be telling it again, Mrs.
Turkletaub!"
"Silly! I think it's grand that a girl brought up to the best should
want to make something of herself. Don't you, Nick?"
"H-m-m!"
"Well, my little idea was white walls with little Delft-blue borders
of waddling duckies; white dotted Swiss curtains in the brace of sunny
southern-exposure windows, with little Delft-blue borders of more
waddling duckies; and dear little nursery rhymes painted in blue on the
headboard to keep baby's dreams sweet."
"--baby's dreams sweet! I ask you, is that cute, Nick? Baby's dreams she
even interior decorates."
"My--instructor liked that idea, too. He gave me 'A' on the drawing."
"He should have given you the whole alphabet. And tell him about the
chairs, Ada. Such originality."
"Oh, Mrs. Turkletaub, that was just a--a little--idea--"
"The modesty of her! Believe me, if it was mine, I'd call it a big one.
Tell him."
"Mummie and daddie chairs I call them."
Sara (mouthing): "Mummie and daddie--"
"Two white-enamel chairs to stand on either side of the crib so when
mummie and daddie run up in their evening clothes to kiss baby good
night--Oh, I just mean two pretty white chairs, one for mummie and one
for daddie." Little crash.