The Vertical City Part 40

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 st.u.r.dy oak dining table, laid out in a red-and-white cloth, gold-band china not too thick of lip, and a cut-gla.s.s 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 _gefulte_-fish supper three Fridays in succession."

"All right, then, because he has a few more or less _gefulte_-fish suppers in his life, let it worry you! If that ain't a woman every time."

"_Gefulte_ fish! If that was my greatest worry. But it's not so easy to prepare, that you should take it so much for granted. _Gefulte_ 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 coa.r.s.e. 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 p.r.o.nounce 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-gla.s.s-china closet, curio cabinet, bra.s.s 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-gla.s.s 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 att.i.tude 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 ma.s.sacres. 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 ap.r.o.n 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? G.o.d forbid if his nonsense should lead to really something serious, then it's time to worry."