Chapter 13

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.

And so it was that Sara and Mosher Turkletaub sailed for America with 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!"