Chapter 14

"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.

She wore it plastered over with curls. It was said that in rage it 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.