Chapter 15
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.
"I ask you, Nicky, is that poetical? 'So when mummie and daddie run up to kiss baby good night.' I remember once in Russia, Nicky, all the evening clothes we had was our nightgowns, but when you and your little twin brother were two and a half years old, one night I--"
"Mrs. Turkletaub, did you have twins?"
"Did I have twins, Nicky, she asks me. She didn't know you were twins. A red one I had, as red as my black one is black. You see my Nicky how black and mad-looking he is even when he's glad; well, just so--"
"Now, mother!"
"Just so beautiful and fierce and red was my other beautiful baby. You didn't know, Ada, that a piece of my heart, the red of my blood, I left lying out there. Nicky--she didn't know--"
She could be so blanched and so stricken when the saga of her motherhood came out in her eyes, the pallor of her face jutting out her features like lonely landmarks on waste land, that her husband and her son had learned how to dread for her and spare her.
"Now, mother!" said Nicholas, and rose to stand behind her chair, holding her poor, quavering chin in the cup of his hand. "Come, one rainy Sunday is enough. Let's not have an indoor as well as an outdoor storm. Come along. Didn't I hear Miss Ada play the piano one evening over at Leo's? Up-see-la! Who said you weren't my favorite dancing partner?" and waltzed her, half dragging back, toward the parlor. "Come, some music!"
There were the usual demurrings from Ada, rather prettily pink, and Mrs. Turkletaub, with the threat of sobs swallowed, opening the upright piano to dust the dustless keyboard with her apron, and Nicholas, his sagging pipe quickly supplied with one of the rose-twined cuspidors for ash receiver, hunched down in the pink-velour armchair of enormous upholstered hips.
The "Turkish Patrol" was what Ada played, and then, "Who Is Sylvia?" and sang it, as frailly as a bird.
At one o'clock there was dinner, that immemorial Sunday meal of roast chicken with its supplicating legs up off the platter; dressing to be gouged out; sweet potatoes in amber icing; a master stroke of Mrs. Turkletaub's called "_matzos klose_," balls of unleavened bread, sizzling, even as she served them, in a hot butter bath and light-brown onions; a stuffed goose neck, bursting of flavor; cheese pie twice the depth of the fork that cut in; coffee in large cups. More cracking of nuts, interspersed with raisins. Ada, cunningly enveloped in a much-too-large apron, helping Mrs. Turkletaub to clear it all away.
Smoking there in his chair beside the dining-room window, rain the unrelenting threnody of the day, Nicholas, fed, closed his eyes to the rhythm of their comings and goings through the swinging door that led to the kitchen. Comings--and--goings--his mother who rustled so cleanly of starch--Ada--clear--yes, that was it--clear as a mountain stream. Their small laughters--comings--goings--
It was almost dusk when he awoke, the pink-shaded piano lamp already lighted in the parlor beyond, the window shade at his side drawn and an Afghan across his knees. It was snug there in the rosied dusk. The women were in the kitchen yet, or was it again? Again, he supposed, looking at his watch. He had slept three hours. Presently he rose and sauntered out. There was coffee fragrance on the air of the large white kitchen, his mother hunched to the attitude of wielding a can opener, and at the snowy oilclothed table, Ada, slicing creamy slabs off the end of a cube of Swiss cheese.
"Sleepyhead," she greeted, holding up a sliver for him to nibble.
And his mother: "That was a good rest for you, son? You feel better?"
"Immense," he said, hunching his shoulders and stretching his hands down into his pockets in a yawny well-being.
"I wish, then, you would put another leaf in the table for me. There's four besides your father coming over from Aunt Gussie's. I just wish you would look at Ada. For a girl that don't have to turn her hand at home, with two servants, and a laundress every other week, just look how handy she is with everything she touches."
The litter of Sunday-night supper, awaiting its transfer to the dining-room table, lay spread in the faithful geometry of the cold, hebdomadal repast. A platter of ruddy sliced tongue; one of noonday remnants of cold chicken; ovals of liverwurst; a mound of potato salad crisscrossed with strips of pimento; a china basket of the stuffed dates, all kissed with sugar; half of an enormously thick cheese cake; two uncovered apple pies; a stack of delicious raisin-stuffed curlicues, known as _"schneken,"_ pickles with a fern of dill across them (Ada's touch, the dill); a dish of stuffed eggs with a toothpick stuck in each half (also Ada's touch, the toothpicks).
She moved rather pussily, he thought, sometimes her fair cheeks quivering slightly to the vibration of her walk, as if they had jelled. And, too, there was something rather snug and plump in the way her little hands with the eight dimples moved about things, laying the slabs of Swiss cheese, unstacking cups.
"No, only seven cups, Ada. Nicky--ain't going to be home to supper."
"Oh," she said, "excuse me! I--I--thought--silly--" and looked up at him to deny that it mattered.
"Isn't that what you said this morning, Nicky?" Poor Sara, she almost failed herself then because her voice ended in quite a dry click in her throat.
He stood watching the resumed unstacking of the cups, each with its crisp little grate against its neighbor.
"One," said Ada, "two-three-four-five-six--seven!"
He looked very long and lean and his darkly nervous self, except that he dilly-dallied on his heels like a much-too-tall boy not wanting to look foolish.
"If Miss Ada will provide another cup and saucer, I think I'll stay home."
"As you will," said Sara, disappearing into the dining room with the mound of salad and the basket of sugar-kissed dates.
She put them down rather hastily when she got there, because, sillily enough, she thought, for the merest instant, she was going to faint.
* * * * *
The week that Judge Turkletaub tried his first case in Court of General Sessions--a murder case, toward which his criminal-law predilection seemed so inevitably to lead him, his third child, a little daughter with lovely creamy skin against slightly too curly hair, was lying, just two days old, in a blue-and-white nursery with an absurd border of blue ducks waddling across the wallpaper.
Ada, therefore, was not present at this inaugural occasion of his first trial. But each of the two weeks of its duration, in a first-row bench of the privileged, so that her gaze was almost on a dotted line with her son's, sat Sara Turkletaub, her hands crossed over her waistline, her bosom filling and waning and the little jet folderols on her bonnet blinking. Tears had their way with her, prideful, joyful at her son's new estate, sometimes bitterly salt at the life in the naked his eyes must look upon.
Once, during the recital of the defendant, Sara almost seemed to bleed her tears, so poignantly terrible they came, scorching her eyes of a pain too exquisite to be analyzed, yet too excruciating to be endured.
III
Venture back, will you, to the ice and red of that Russian dawn when on the snow the footsteps that led toward the horizon were the color of blood, and one woman, who could not keep her eyes ahead, moaned as she fled, prayed, and even screamed to return to her dead in the bullet-riddled horse trough.
Toward the noon of that day, a gray one that smelled charred, a fugitive group from a distant village that was still burning faltered, as it too fled toward the horizon, in the blackened village of Vodna, because a litter had to be fashioned for an old man whose feet were frozen, and a mother, whose baby had perished at her breast, would bury her dead.
Huddled beside the horse trough, over a poor fire she had kindled of charred wood, Hanscha, the midwife (Hanscha, the drunk, they called her, fascinatedly, in the Pale of generations of sober women), spied Mosher's flung coat and reached for it eagerly, with an eye to tearing it into strips to wrap her tortured feet.
A child stirred as she snatched it, wailing lightly, and the instinct of her calling, the predominant motive, Hanscha with her fumy breath warmed it closer to life and trod the one hundred and eight miles to the port with it strapped to her back like a pack.
Thus it was that Schmulka, the red twin, came to America and for the first fourteen years of his life slept on a sour pallet in a sour tenement he shared with Hanscha, who with filthy hands brought children into the filthy slums.
Jason, she called him, because that was the name of the ship that carried them over. A rolling tub that had been horrible with the cries of cattle and seasickness.
At fourteen he was fierce and rebellious and down on the Juvenile Court records for truancy, petty trafficking in burned-out opium, vandalism, and gang vagrancy.
In Hanscha's sober hours he was her despair, and she could be horrible in her anger, once the court reprimanding her and threatening to take Jason from her because of welts found on his back.
It was in her cups that she was proud of him, and so it behooved Jason to drink her down to her pallet, which he could, easily.
He was handsome. His red hair had darkened to the same bronze of the samovar and he was straight as the drop of an apple from the branch. He was reckless. Could turn a pretty penny easily, even dangerously, and spend it with a flip for a pushcart bauble.
Once he brought home a plaster-of-Paris Venus--the Melos one with the beautiful arch to her torso of a bow that instant after the arrow has flown. Hanscha cuffed him for the expenditure, but secretly her old heart, which since childhood had subjected her to strange, rather epileptical, sinking spells, and had induced the drinking, warmed her with pride in his choice.
Hanscha, with her veiny nose and the dreadful single hair growing out of a mole on her chin, was not without her erudition. She had read for the midwifery, and back in the old days could recite the bones in the body.
She let the boy read nights, sometimes even to dropping another coin into the gas meter. Some of the books were the lewd penny ones of the Bowery bookstands, old medical treatises, too, purchased three for a quarter and none too nice reading for the growing boy. But there he had also found a _Les Miserables_ and _The Confessions of St. Augustine_, which last, if he had known it, was a rare edition, but destined for the ash pit.
Once he read Hanscha a bit of poetry out of a furiously stained old volume of verse, so fragrantly beautiful, to him, this bit, that it wound around him like incense, the perfume of it going deeply and stinging his eyes to tears:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting! The soul that rises with us, our life's star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar. Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy. Shades of the prison house begin to close Upon the growing boy, But he beholds the light, and whence it flows He sees it in his joy; The youth who daily farther, from the East Must travel, still is Nature's priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended; At length the man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day.
But Hanscha was drunk and threw some coffee-sopped bread at him, and so his foray into poetry ended in the slops of disgust.
A Miss Manners, a society social worker who taught poverty sweet forbearance every Tuesday from four until six, wore a forty-eight-diamond bar pin on her under bodice (on Tuesday from four until six), and whose gray-suède slippers were ever so slightly blackened from the tripping trip from front door to motor and back, took him up, as the saying is, and for two weeks Jason disported himself on the shorn lawns of the Manners summer place at Great Neck, where the surf creamed at the edge of the terrace and the smell of the sea set something beating against his spirit as if it had a thousand imprisoned wings.
There he developed quite a flair for the law books in Judge Manners's laddered library. Miss Manners found him there, reading, on stomach and elbows, his heels waving in the air.
Judge Manners talked with him and discovered a legal turn of mind, and there followed some veranda talk of educating and removing him from his environment. But that very afternoon Jason did a horrid thing. It was no more than he had seen about him all his life. Not as much. He kissed the little pig-tailed daughter of the laundress and pursued her as she ran shrieking to her mother's apron. That was all, but his defiant head and the laundress's chance knowledge of his Juvenile Court record did for him.
At six o'clock that evening, with a five-dollar bill of which he made a spitball for the judge's departing figure down the station platform, he was shipped back to Hanscha. Secretly he was relieved. Life was easier in the tenement under the shadow of Brooklyn Bridge. The piece of its arch which he could see from his window was even beautiful, a curve of a stone into some beyond.
That night he fitted down into the mold his body had worn on the pallet, sighing out satisfaction.
Environment had won him back.
On the other hand, in one of those red star-spangled passions of rebellion against his fetid days, he blindly cut Hanscha with the edge of a book which struck against her brow as he hurled it. She had been drunk and had asked of him, at sixteen, because of the handsomeness that women would easily love in him, to cadet the neighborhood of Grand Street, using her tenement as his refuge of vice and herself as sharer of spoils.
The corner of the book cut deeply and pride in her terror of him came out redly in her bloodshot eyes.
In the short half term of his high-school training he had already forged ahead of his class when he attained the maturity of working papers. He was plunging eagerly--brilliantly, in fact--into a rapid translation of the _Iliad_, fired from the very first line by the epic of the hexametered anger of Achilles, and stubbornly he held out against the working papers.
But to Hanscha they came with the inevitability of a summons rather than an alternative, and so for a year or two he brought home rather precocious wages from his speed in a canning factory. Then he stoked his way to Sydney and back, returning fiery with new and terrible oaths.
One night Hanscha died. He found her crumpled up in the huddle of her skirts as if she had dropped in her tracks, which she had, in one of the epileptic heart strictures.