The Vertical City Part 44

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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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 p.r.i.c.k 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 ap.r.o.n, 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 pa.s.sions.

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 gla.s.ses 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, G.o.dlike, 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 sa.s.s, 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 exact.i.tude 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 repet.i.tion 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-ta.s.seled cushions, carelessly exact. The onyx-topped table with the pink-velour drape, also gold-ta.s.seled. 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, sh.e.l.ling 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 advertis.e.m.e.nts 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, G.o.d 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 cla.s.s."

"Oh," said Ada, blushing softly, "Mr. Turkletaub isn't interested in that."

"Yes, I am," said Nicholas, politely, eating one of the meats.