The Vertical City Part 45

"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 ap.r.o.n, 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_," b.a.l.l.s of unleavened bread, sizzling, even as she served them, in a hot b.u.t.ter 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 ap.r.o.n, 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 att.i.tude 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 p.u.s.s.ily, 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 a.n.a.lyzed, yet too excruciating to be endured.