United States or Luxembourg ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
And through it all the steaming warmth, the laughter through bushy beards, the ministering of women wise and foolish with the memory of their own pangs, the shouts of vodka-stirred men, sheepish that they, too, were part custodians of the miracle of life through it all Sara Turkletaub lay back against her coarse bed, so rich so rich that the coves of her arms trembled each of its burden and held tighter for fear somehow God might repent of his prodigality.
Out in the wide places it is like a smile on a dead face, this snow hush, grateful that peace can be so utter. It is the silence of a broody God, and out of that frozen pause, in a house tucked up to the sills and down to the eaves, Sara Turkletaub was prematurely taken with the pangs of childbirth, and in the thin dawn, without even benefit of midwife, twin sons were born.
"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!"
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.
Aaron dwelt in a three-story, American-basement house in West 120th Street, near Lenox Avenue, with his son Leo, office manager of the Turkletaub Skirt Company, and who had recently married the eldest daughter of an exceedingly well-to-do Maiden Lane jewelry merchant. The Mosher Turkletaubs occupied an eight-room-and-two-baths apartment near by.
"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? God forbid if his nonsense should lead to really something serious, then it's time to worry." Sara Turkletaub dried her eyes, but it was as if the shadow of crucifixion had moved forward in them.
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.
Sara Turkletaub, daughter of a ne'er-do-well who had died before her birth with the shadow of an unproved murder on him; Sara, who had run swiftly barefoot for the first dozen summers of her life, and married, without dower or approval, the reckless son of old Turkletaub, the peddler; Sara, who once back in the dim years, when a bull had got loose in the public square, had jerked him to a halt by swinging herself from his horns, and later, standing by, had helped hold him for the emergency of an un-kosher slaughter, not even paling at the slitting noises of the knife.
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 "
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.
Word Of The Day