Back STreet

by Fannie Hurst

  The business must go for debts and good will. No one, not even those who had held for years that the firm was going into decline, knew to what extent the little old trimming-business was sinking in its tracks. Bradstreet knew. Certain creditors suspected. Adolph Schmidt, fumbling hours on end, days, months, years on end, among the rear boxes of chenilles, tassels, jets, bindings, jabots, fancy buttons, and buckles, had known.

  But not even he had known, as Ray from her angle of salesman, buyer, and accountant knew, that the “one-hoss shay” of the concern “Adolph Schmidt—Trimmings and Findings” was going to pieces.

  A natural demise. The younger generations of the petty genteels who had been content to purchase their dressmaking-findings of Adolph Schmidt, now either drifted around to Vine Street or West Fourth, to Le Boutillier’s, Alms and Doepke’s, Caldwell’s, Mabley and Carew’s, or Shillito’s, more elaborate emporiums, where the selection was wider, and, by virtue of quantity buying, the prices actually lower.

  Poor old Adolph’s leavings had been lean. “There are just a few personal things I would like to have. My mother’s sewing table.”

  “That’s a shame now. I crated it to Youngstown yesterday!”

  “Papa’s walking stick with the ivory horsehead from Frankfurt. He loved that.”

  “Now where could I have packed that?”

  Ray wanted to add: “And his gold watch and chain too. I could always hear it ticking when I was little and he lifted me up on his lap.” But she did not. All three of Adolph Schmidt’s little personal jewelry appointments, the watch and chain, a small gold clasp for holding necktie in place against the front pleat of the shirt, and a fob engraved with the seal of a Turnverein Society, had disappeared from his top dresser drawer. Even that could be borne, if only the watch, Papa’s own, were not now reposing against the heavy breathing of Marshall.

  “Any little things you want, Ray, you can have,” said Tagenhorst, at her perpetual business of picking up from the breakfast table and nibbling with her front teeth small particles of crumb and caraway seed that had dropped from the large loaf of rye bread lying beside its long steel knife, on a wooden board. She was like an untidy blonde old crow, pecking up what she coveted.

  It was the first Sunday morning in all Ray’s life that had not been crammed with the doings of her father. He pedicured that morning, he shaved at greater length than usual before a hand mirror tacked to the upper sash of the bathroom window, he dug up around the elephant ears in the front yard in summer, and in winter among the geraniums on the wire rack in the dining room. He tinkered around the tandems of the young men who came to take her bicycling, he rattled among the German newspapers, and at eleven o’clock he attended the Lutheran services, alone or with whatever member of the family he could muster.

  It struck Ray with a pang, that for the past year she had either gone bicycling every fair Sunday morning, or down to Kurt Shendler’s shop to balance his books. Except for the eagerness with which Adolph accepted her occasional company, you would never have known that he minded, particularly in the years when Freda or Tagenhorst, upholstered as any piece of furniture their parlor boasted, had accompanied him.

  It was just that death, somehow, gave you hindsight. Papa would have loved for her, looking bright and stylish, to walk in to services with him. He had been content with Tagenhorst and Freda, never crossing Ray or expressing what must have been his wish for the Sunday-morning companionship of his daughter, who was busy always, cruising with the boys.

  What would Papa, so indulgent, think now, lying out there beside Mama under earth that was still broken from the spade? What would he think if he could see her sitting there amid the strangers—Tagenhorst, Marshall, who had turned up for the first time in all the years, as if scenting carrion, and Freda acquiescent, placid, flaccid, and yet her glance, as it curved mamaward, tightening the Tagenhorsts.

  “The thing to do,” said Tagenhorst, pecking up the caraway seeds, “is to let things drift until we see what is best. ’Dolph wasn’t orderly.”

  The eyes of Marshall, which were set into pleats of whitish flesh, shot down toward his mustache, which shot upward.

  “Sell!”

  To think that Papa’s watch was ticking against that bulk!

  “What time is it, Marshall?”

  At her question, his hand moved toward the speckled waistcoat and hung there cautious.

  “About eleven, I guess.”

  That she could be made sufficiently snide over Father’s watch to have caused her to employ that device, caused the tears to spout.

  “Are you going bicycling this morning, Ray?” asked Freda brightly.

  She hoped so, although none of the boys had said anything, owing, no doubt, to deference for the Sunday morning following her father’s death.

  The glance which Tagenhorst, blonde crow, hooked onto her from above lips careful not to interfere, said its usual volumes.

  “It’s time to dress for church, Freda,” she said to her daughter, with her eyes on her stepdaughter.

  Well, no matter! She would no more have carried the ache that lay in her heart for Adolph into the pew that became stuffy and without God, once Tagenhorst set foot into it.

  “Mama, can’t I ever go bicycling on Sunday?”

  “No, you can’t ever.”

  And yet, strangely, even as the baby treble in Freda’s voice struck her to derision, she would not have wanted Freda to go. You were fly if you did things like that. Why, even so much as take a ride with the average young fellow, out toward Sedamsville, where the gravel road began, and you could almost tell, to the mile, under what shade tree along the roadside he would want to pause and throw himself down on the grass beside you, so that your knees touched, and surreptitious spooning became the order.

  “But Ray goes, Ma.”

  This invariable little pouting remark drew from Tagenhorst four small explosives.

  “Yes—but—you—don’t!”

  “Could I go if Hugo asked me?” When Freda asked this question, sitting there with her scooped-out eggshell which she had eaten so neatly and cleanly in two careful halves on the table before her, the small pearls of her teeth immaculate of stain, her blue eyes floated upward as if they had been soap bubbles.

  “Hugo would not ask you to do such a thing.”

  Was it possible, after all, that Hugo Hanck was serious-minded in his growing attentions to her stepsister? Freda might look it, but she was nobody’s fool, anyway, where Freda was concerned. The girl who married the meter-reader for the Cincinnati Gas, Light and Coke Company also married the only nephew and heir apparent of Herman Hanck, wealthy retired brewer and bachelor. The girl who married Hugo, married prospects.

  It would be good to think of Freda, who could be sweet after a fashion, and at the same time so unbelievably horrid-minded, married to Hugo who had inherited, and snug as a bug in a rug. She would be that way. A small round little bug in a cozy rug. Freda needed to be married. The trend of her questions made it imperative for Freda to be married. Why, some of the questions she asked, on those mornings she climbed into Ray’s bed—it would never do to admit it, but Ray had never even heard the phraseology of some of the thoughts that hopped, toadlike, from the cherry-colored sills of Freda’s lips.

  “There’s Kurt outside whistling for you now, Ray.”

  Yes, there it was! Two long and a short. Kurt was one of the few boys who called for Ray who had the habit of venturing into the house. But now, since the passing of Adolph, to whom he had invariably brought an El Merito cigar on the occasions of these visits, there seemed something strange to Ray about having him enter this house—of strangers.

  “So you’re going,” said Tagenhorst, with her medium-blue eyes focused in the center of their rigid, stone-blue whites.

  “Yes. I promised Kurt I’d look over his books with him this morning.”

  “I read in the Enquirer yesterday,” said Freda, in her treble, “that a girl in South Bend, Indiana, went up in a bicycle-repair
shop a fellow kept over a feed-store, and was found dead with her head off in a gunny sack two weeks later. Case of assault. What is assault, Ray?”

  “It’s enough for you to know it’s a word you shouldn’t ever use. I hope you don’t ever answer the child’s foolish questions, Ray.”

  “But I don’t see why I can’t go bicycling if Ray—”

  “Ray’s ways are her own ways,” said Tagenhorst, still at the caraways. “I guess she knows what she is doing. Always has.”

  The sentence fell down like a portcullis, shutting her off on her separate side of the moat from the mother and daughter.

  “I’ll be going.…”

  Outside on the front lawn, his bicycle standing wrongside up on its handle bars, Kurt Shendler, as he waited, was spinning a pedal and tinkering with it.

  It seemed to Ray, as she hurried out, snatching her natty straw sailor hat from the rack and pinning it onto her pompadour, that the only person in the world to whom she could turn, while the pools of misery lay in her heart, was Kurt.

  5

  The repair shop smelled of graphite, lubricating-oil, and inner tubing. In one corner of the disarray, against a bare brick wall and beside a rusty stove, was backed the flat-topped desk at which Kurt and Ray were in the habit of spending an occasional Sunday morning.

  It was a desktop of an unsavory confusion of bicycle-parts, wrenches, bolts, sample tins of grease, cotton waste, adhesive tape, tubes of tire cement, and, tucked away into pigeonholes, a further miscellany of worn-looking account-books that contained what story there was to tell of the financial status of “Kurt Shendler—Bicycle Repair Shop.”

  There was something, each time she laid aside her hat, slid into Kurt’s sleeve-protectors, swirled the stool higher, that never failed to appal Ray, as she lifted these grime-coated books from their compartments.

  There was lack of tidiness, lack of system, lack of law and order in Kurt’s bookkeeping. True, he seemed to have some sort of order to his own methods, could tell to a penny and without reference to his books the status of accounts paid and unpaid, but this period of auditing with the astute Miss Schmidt was of a paramount importance to him, quite apart from the red and black columns of his ledgers.

  The fact that she had sat at that desk, her hat laid aside, her large sleeves ballooning against her sides like wings, her hair in a thick soft “horse’s tail” against the back of her neck, and that soft golden glow off her flesh, almost as if you could feel the heat radiate, was to leave for Kurt, weeks after, a flavor that was stronger than the lasting smell of the graphite and the blur of dust off the wooden floors.

  In the sense that his predilection for mechanics, his aversion for salt meat, his talent for organization, and his inborn interest in ways and means of moving about this earth, were part and parcel of his personality, so was his consciousness that in Ray was his woman.

  He saw her as wife in a home of his making. Her hands were in the clay of which his life was to be molded. She was the woman to be in and out among his days, in and out of his doorways, of his bed, and her sweet curved waist and the acquiescing eyes, kind beyond any telling, and the generosity that seemed to envelop her in an ebullience, were the very grain and texture of his future which contained her.

  And now this passing of her father, who had sort of died in his tracks, of placid routine, and over whose daughter was powdered some of his benign personality, was sure to have the effect of drawing her more surely into the web of his life.

  He wanted to take her, as she sat there beside his desk, poring over his slovenly accountings, and bend back her head until he could feel the warmth of the golden glow off her face onto the flesh of his own, and let her tears, which he knew were in a knot beneath her smile, run warm against his flesh.

  He had, it is true, held her close and long, one twilight hour, in a sequestered glen at Eden Park, where they had bicycled for a picnic supper. Passion had raced in him, and his lips had dragged her cheek, and his breathing had fanned the glow that he felt emanating from her. He explained to her later, when his lips would carry words, that it had been the overwhelming passion of a man for the woman he would make his wife. She had been acquiescent in a way that had puzzled him. It was as if he had left her untouched by his vigor, unimpressed by his force, but pleased with the knowledge that she had given him pleasure. He had the feeling, watching her, that she was regarding his lips, as they coined the phrase of his proposal of marriage to her, with the fascinated attention of a child.

  He had not, somehow, even with her large indulgence, dared to follow it up. In fact, he could not be quite sure that she had heard. Now, in her new loneliness, there was that which gave him courage. There was a droop to coveted, stylish Ray Schmidt this day, as he sat beside her, hearing with mock humility the storm of her mock reproaches for his untidy bookkeeping.

  “What in the world is this six dollars and twenty cents? Is it against Eddy Slayback or the Eddy Steam Fittings Company? Honestly now, Kurt, I ask to know! Who could tell from the way you’ve made this entry?”

  “Don’t potter over the books today, Ray.”

  “Say, Beanpole, I’se goin’ to lay you across my knee if you doan behaive.…”

  At twenty-seven, before he had filled out to what astonishingly was to be mild corpulency, Kurt was six feet tall and weighed one hundred and eighteen pounds. It was the lankiness of early overgrowth, because he had been that six feet back in the days when his parents had still lived and conducted their small tobacconist shop on Sixth Street, and he had run his first errands as boy-of-all-work for Miller’s Carriage and Coach Company, at Sixth and Sycamore streets.

  “Let those books go, Ray.”

  “But, Kurt—”

  “I want to talk to you. Haven’t had much chance since—since your old man went out. You must know how I feel about anything that hits you.…”

  “Don’t make me cry, Kurt,” she said, looking away from him. “I cry easy—yet.”

  “It’s a funny thing to say, but I’d like it if you cried, Ray.”

  She sat swallowing.

  “Papa was everything I had.”

  “Don’t say that!”

  “I mean—I can never be as all right to anybody as I was to him. He just—liked me—terribly for what I was or wasn’t. Didn’t matter. And nobody knows better than I do what I wasn’t.”

  “You can have consolation, Ray, that you never gave the old gentleman a day’s worry in your life. You’ve got no regrets.”

  “I know better,” she said, and began to mark crosses on a piece of blotting paper. “But anyway, it helps to know that Pa never felt troubled enough about me to sit down and try and figure me out.”

  “I’ve figured you out, Ray, but I don’t care why you do things. I just know that if you do them, they’re right. For me, anyhow.”

  “If I could figure out for myself why I do things, maybe I’d have enough sense not to do them.”

  “You’re gay by nature, Ray.”

  “Gay? Gay as my Aunt Hanna’s black bonnet. I’m not gay, Kurt. I’m an old sick cat at heart.”

  “Ray, I just hate to hear you say that.”

  “I’ve got a hurt in me as big as a hen’s egg. Always had it. Born with it. Don’t know what it’s about, but it’s in me.”

  “Marry me, Ray.”

  “Remember the last time you said that to me?”

  “Yes, but I didn’t think you even listened.”

  “Will it surprise you, Kurt, if I tell you that no man has ever asked me to do that before?”

  “You’re so head-and-shoulders above every one of them. I’m the only one who has the conceited nerve.”

  “ ’Tisn’t that, Kurt, and you know it.”

  “Well, then, every fellow in this town, or that ever comes to it, is crazy—except me.”

  “Every man in this town, or that ever comes to it, figures he can have me anyway, Kurt.”

  “I wish—I wish you hadn’t said that, Ray.”

  “
It’s true.”

  “Well, anyway, I wish it like the very devil, that you hadn’t said that.”

  “You know it’s true.”

  He rose abruptly and walked over to the grimy window and stood looking down on a sooty agglomeration of old bicycle junk, while she sat with her clasped hands held motionless.

  He came back presently and stood with his feet planted far apart.

  “It isn’t true, is it, that they—can have you?”

  “No.”

  He swung her into his arms then, and kissed her again and again on the mouth.

  “You mustn’t do that, Kurt.”

  “Why?”

  No reason, except that she usually said that.

  “Aren’t you mine?”

  “You mustn’t do that.”

  “You made me feel sick just now. Just as sick as a man can feel.”

  “I know I did, Kurt. It hurt me to say it.”

  “Then why did you?”

  “It’s true.”

  “Didn’t you just say it wasn’t?”

  “I mean it’s true that they think those things.”

  “The man who thinks them from now on has me to contend with.”

  “Funny thing, Kurt, but I’ve always been like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Too free—easygoing—”

  “You’re too big-minded always to be sniffing around the p’s and q’s of every little thing you do.”

  “There’s not a nice girl in this town would be sitting up here in this deserted loft with you of a Sunday morning, Kurt.”

  “Shows you’re big-minded!”

  “Shows I don’t watch out for my own good.”

  “You certainly don’t do that, Ray.”

  “I am what I am. I simply cannot always be figuring out what I do, as if I was too good to be doing this or that. I can’t feel I’m that important, Kurt. I guess I have no dignity.”

  “You won’t feel that way about things when you’ve a home of your own, Ray.”

  “Reckon not, Kurt?”

  “I know not,” he said, and kissed her again.