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 sturdy oak dining table, laid out in a red-and-white cloth, gold-band china not too thick of lip, and a cut-glass 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 gefuelte-fish supper three Fridays in succession.”

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

“Gefuelte fish!  If that was my greatest worry.  But it’s not so easy to prepare, that you should take it so much for granted. Gefuelte 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 coarse.  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.”