And so it was that Sara and Mosher Turkletaub sailed for America with
only one twin--Nikolai, the black.

* * * * *

The Turkletaubs prospered. Turkletaub Brothers, Skirts, the year after
the war, paying a six-figure excess-profit tax.

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. Sara, with much of the fleetness gone from her face and a smile
tempered by a look of unshed tears, marketing now by white-enameled desk
telephone or, on days when the limp from an old burn down her thigh was
not too troublesome, walked up to a plate-glass butcher shop on 125th
Street, where there was not so much as a drop of blood on the marble
counter and the fowl hung in white, plucked window display with
garnitures of pink tissue paper about the ankles and even the dangling
heads wrapped so that the dead eyes might not give offense.

It was a widely different Sara from the water lugger of those sweaty
Russian days. Such commonplaces of environment as elevator service,
water at the turning of a tap, potatoes dug and delivered to her
dumbwaiter, had softened Sara and, it is true, vanquished, along with
the years, some of the wing flash of vitality from across her face. So
was the tough fiber of her skin vanquished to almost a creaminess, and
her hair, due perhaps to the warm water always on tap, had taken on
a sheen, and even through its grayness grew out hardily and was well
trained to fall in soft scallops over the singed place.

Yes, all in all, life had sweetened Sara, and, except for the occasional
look of crucifixion somewhere back in her eyes, had roly-polied her
into new rotundities of hip and shelf of bosom, and even to what
mischievously promised to be a scallop of second chin.

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