Back STreet

by Fannie Hurst

  “The way I feel now, Kurt—so confused—I don’t know how I feel.”

  “Is it any wonder? Guess the old woman up at the house doesn’t make things any easier for you.”

  “She’s all right.”

  “According to how you look at things.”

  “She’s his widow. A woman may not ever have been much more to a man than his widow, even during his lifetime, but after his death there can be dignity and profit in being his widow.”

  “I guess they’re hogging everything.”

  “Not much to hog; and what there is, they’re welcome to.”

  “That’s about the way I look at it. Makes me feel more as if you belonged to me, Ray. I want to take you, now that you’re kind of stunned and hurt, and baby you, and get myself in some sort of a position to marry you.”

  “That’s wonderful, Kurt,” she said, and placed her hand on his knee and regarded him with the gray eyes that were washed in what to him was to remain indescribable sweetness.

  “The shop isn’t yielding yet, Ray. Won’t be until I’ve cleared the debt to Osterlitz for backing me. But next year I expect to begin drawing out. This is the makings of a real going concern, Ray, and our future is ahead of us. The bicycle is here to stay! I’ll be riding you around in a landaulet, one of these days, on bicycle-money, Mrs. Shendler.”

  “Me married?”

  “Why not?”

  “Kurt, will you feel hurt if I tell you something?”

  “The only way you can hurt me, Ray, is to break my heart with a two-letter word. Don’t say that word to me.”

  “Kurt, no man has ever kissed me so that it really mattered.”

  “You haven’t been waked up.”

  “Go along, Kurt. I’ve been about more than most.”

  “The other will come.”

  “That’s what I am afraid of.”

  “I’ll love you into making it come.”

  “What if it should come after I’d married you? The caring for someone, I mean. I know myself so well, Kurt. I’m all the way or zero. God help the man I fall in love with.”

  “You can’t frighten me off that way. Living and loving and building as we go, maybe I won’t have time to patronize the same tailors those salesmen and brokers around town do, but I’m going to make you money, honey, one of these days, big money, mark my word, and I’m not caring if you love me little, just so you love me long.”

  “You’re sure, Kurt, it’s not because I’m down? What would you say if I told you I’ve got good reason to believe there’s a place for me in the trimming department at Pogue’s? I don’t know that I told you that on my last trip to New York I had quite an offer from a firm we’ve been buying from for years.… If things happen so that the business goes on the sandbar, I know where to turn, Kurt.”

  “There’s not a doubt in my mind that, let alone, you’ll go down in the history of this town as one of its first crack business girls. But you’re going to quit it and go down in the history of my life instead.”

  “We’ll let it ride for a while, Kurt. You’re not ready. I’m shot to pieces. I need to get my bearings. Meanwhile, you’re free. I’m free. How’s that? Fair enough.”

  “Not for long though, Ray. I’ll be on my own, before you can say cock robin.”

  “I’d be a fool to let it be for long.”

  “I love you,” he said, and kissed her again and again on the mouth that had been kissed again and again.

  “Now what about that six-dollar-and-twenty-cent entry, Kurt, was it against Eddy Slayback or the Eddy Steam Fittings Company?”

  6

  It was strange and difficult and often heartbreaking, after a meeting of creditors had averted receivership, and one Heyman Heymann, formerly of Middletown, who held two notes that practically plastered the entire holding, had stepped in to recruit what he could of the assets.

  The arrangement with Ray was one which provided that she remain only long enough to acquaint the new owner with the multitude of small intricacies of a new business. But there was something pathetic about his dread of being left alone with this little white elephant which he suddenly found on his hands. He seemed to have a horror of being left alone with it. His way of seeming to make sure that Ray would not desert and leave him to the strange mercies of this strange phenomenon, his new business, was to manage to be about as little as possible, leaving responsibility of decision and transaction to her.

  The affiliation with Heymann was in the main pleasant. He was a corpulent middle-aged Hebrew of twenty years’ excellent business standing in Middletown, who had succumbed, when this opportunity to take over a Cincinnati business presented itself, to the pressure of a wife and marriageable daughter and migrated to the opportunities of the larger city.

  His financial dependence upon the business was negligible. He owned the building in Middletown that had housed his button factory before he had retired from it actively, and was reputed to have further real-estate holdings in Hamilton. Be that as it may, he was a less generous man than Adolph had been, imposing, from the very first day of his taking-over, small new restrictions that were prohibitive to Ray.

  For instance, the long narrow old store, lined with boxes to its ceiling and flanked by counters stacked with more boxes, was at best but dingy lure to either wholesale or retail trade.

  Heymann’s habit was to follow the departure of each customer by jerking the chain dangling from the Welsbach lights over the counters, and reduce the store to a kind of gloom, which could flow over and in turn reduce Ray to a depression that soaked her into disinterestedness. Heymann saved the backs of old envelopes for scratch paper, curtailed what he regarded as waste of twine and wrapping papers, cut down in minor and enlarged in major ways that doubtless attested to his astuteness over and above old Adolph’s; but somehow the new little economies, so unpracticed by her father, filled her with nostalgia, kept the hurt in her stirring and seeming to move about behind her bosom.

  The old habits of routine went on just as before. Willie Meyer, ancient nitwit about town, still did the chores of scrubbing up and deliveries. The same old stream of traveling salesmen dropped in, and, to a large extent, so did the same, if diminishing, clientele.

  Heymann was not the man to inject “new blood”; but rather, new conservatisms. Same old “Schmidt’s,” the stylish Ray, handsome in mourning, still dominating the old establishment, moving among the dusty boxes, each one of them identified, as to content, by a button or tassel or bit of jet or braid pasted on one end.

  You dropped in to see Ray Schmidt when you checked into town, at the Burnet House, St. Nicholas, Stag, or the Grand Hotel, just as naturally as you delved into Over-the-Rhine for a bock of Moerlein, Hauck, or Hudepohl. It did not matter whether you dealt in dry goods, wet goods, implements, luxuries, or commodities, you knew Ray for the town’s tony girl.

  Curious, but to Kurt, who except for the line of graphite under his fingernails wore his blue serge with almost the nattiness of a drummer, all this was a source of pride. Her desirability, now, somehow, that the close and homely truth of her had been revealed to him that morning in his repair-loft, was emphasized by the class of men who were eager to be seen out with Ray.

  A tony girl who had them all guessing, but who could be relied upon to take care of herself.

  If sometimes beneath his gay acquiescence to their suspended sort of relationship, fear smote Kurt, it was laid by the practical streak that dominated everything he said and thought.

  “There isn’t a marrying man in the lot of them.”

  Ray knew that too, and used to smile a lot about it to Kurt.

  “Mark Steinberg and several other New York stockbrokers are on for the races. Dollar looks like a dime to them, Mark’s Silver Boy is running at Latonia. Look for the handsome brunette in black surah silk and a yellow chrysanthemum, sitting beside Mark in his black-and-yellow wire-wheeled trap with the tandem horses. That’ll be me, Kurt, helping Mark forget he’s a grandpap.”

  And
so it went, after the death of Adolph, for the most part as it had gone before, except, after a dreadful fashion, in no wise as it had gone before.

  No matter how right eventually, things could never now quite have their flavor back. Never.

  It was usually around the low-ebb hour of dawn that, awakening after a habit that had become troublesome to her, realization would pounce upon Ray, causing her to lie trembling and miserable while day climbed slowly over the roofs of Baymiller Street. Early-morning depressions which, as she lay there on the bed in which her mother had died, could make rising to face another day almost more than she could bear. To find that the death of Adolph was not a nightmare, and that she was lying there on the wedding-bed of her parents, now loaned to her through the largesse of Tagenhorst, was to make it a touch of bitter pain. To be sure, she paid her board, twenty out of the fifty dollars a month she now earned in the store, where by the same devastation of death she had become an outsider; but her universe had slipped suddenly, like land, sliding into a sea of bewilderment.

  To think! Papa, sitting there so normally over coffee boiled with milk and sugar in it! And then, two evenings later, lying boxed, his face that had always been swept by heavy breathing, lying covered by a wooden lid, like merchandise on a store-shelf.

  Elementary wonder at death’s impartiality was out over Ray. Adolph could conceivably be dead to Tagenhorst or Freda, but to have left her like that. Without a word! Without a look back. With the passing of her mother, there had been only the rather terrified awe of the child. But Adolph had come so far into life with her. And she had not even closed his eyes in death, or seen to it what kind of socks he wore in his coffin. He had been borne, horizontal, bobbing, on the six broadcloth shoulders of six Turnverein members, out of the front door, carried tilted, down the front steps and along the red-painted brick walk, to a hearse with wooden plumes on its four corners. Adolph had gone to God without so much as a backward glance at his daughter left alone among the strangers—Tagenhorst, Heymann, Freda, and Marshall.

  As she lay on her bed in the dark hours before dawn, half awake and half submerged under the depression that made these slow awakenings her horror, it required all her energy to force herself to rise to face the days.

  Risen, and with the normal circumstances of the morning taking shape, she found that depression, in a large measure, lifted, and life became a matter of rushing ahead of who was sure to monopolize it, into the bathroom, buttoning into your shoes, buckling into your corset, looping and swirling at your pompadour, hooking, hitching into your petticoats, corset-cover, shirtwaist, and skirt, boiling your egg, and usually eating it standing beside the kitchen stove, and then bolting for the car if the weather was bad, or, if it was fine, leading your bicycle out from under the hall stairs.

  Usually on Sunday morning, these indeterminate months following the death of Adolph, when the house was plastered with a “For Sale” sign and Marshall appeared now every fortnight or so from Youngstown in the capacity of advisor to his mother, Freda stole into bed beside Ray.

  There was talk of moving to Youngstown, where, it developed, Marshall had an eye to a coal business of his own, everything of course subservient to the disposal of the house, so that it might be a comfortable widow who could one of these days turn her face toward setting herself and her son up in business in the nearby town.

  The prospect, however, was clouded somewhat for both Tagenhorst and her daughter by the uncertainty into which matters were further thrown by the failure of Hugo Hanck to precipitate his attentions to Freda by an offer of marriage.

  “Ray,” trebled Freda, one of those Sunday mornings when she had climbed from her mother’s bed and padded across the hall into Ray’s, “what is adultery?”

  “Why, Freda Tagenhorst, what’s on your mind?”

  “What is adultery?”

  “You know as well as I do.”

  “Honestly, Ray, I don’t. Of course I know it is something bad, but I don’t know what.”

  “You know your Commandments, don’t you? You’ve gone to Sunday school all your life.”

  “Yes, but I don’t mean the thou-shalt-not kind of adultery they talk about in the Bible. I mean real adultery right here in Cincinnati.”

  After all, what a child she was, lying there pink and soft and strangely kitten-like, her flaxen braids across the pillow and her softy young breasts breathing of the little excitement her question seemed to inspire.

  “Adultery, Freda, is not being true to the person to whom you are married.”

  “Oh, then it isn’t just something that any man can commit against a girl?”

  “Yes, any man who is not true to his wife commits it.”

  “I mean if he isn’t married.…”

  “Why, no, Baby. What a silly you are.”

  “Ray?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know that nuns are awful bad?”

  “No.”

  “Well, they are. There’s a girl in my class named Katy Schwa-baker, who went to a convent-school. She says … Oh, you ought to hear what she says about—”

  “Stop filling your ears with such. It’s all talk made up by dirty-minded girls with nothing on their minds but nastiness.”

  “And you know what she says, Ray? She says you can make a man marry you by pretending you’re going to have a baby.”

  “Freda, you deserve to have your mouth washed with lye and soap.”

  “But you have to be bad before you can pretend that, don’t you?”

  “Why do you think such things?”

  “You think them, only you don’t say them.”

  “I do not.”

  “You do so! With all the men running after you, how can you help thinking about what makes them do it?”

  There was something to that, only Freda’s foul-mouthed little manner of suggesting it made it loathsome. Naturally her thoughts sometimes turned to the riddle of the unanimity of the male reaction toward her. Yet who would believe, Freda least of all, how seldom, considering, such scuttling little rats of sex-thoughts as her stepsister’s darted through her own brain? There was something latent and fearful and wonderful—something dangerous and shot with the glory of being alive—in this constant teasing sense of the mystery of sex. Ray sensed that, of course. What girl didn’t? You couldn’t help thinking sometimes of the something in you that you knew was there latent, but which up to now had never been really stirred by the touch of a man. With Freda, now, it was different. She was a seething hotbed of forbidden flickers of passion. Darts of desire, in the form of the ugly questions, were constantly on her lips. How in the world expect to make Freda, lying there beside her, believe that she, Ray, did not harbor the same secret and forbidden thoughts that had been bandied among the girls in the locker room at Freda’s parochial school?

  What good did it do to try to make her understand that some of her lascivious questions were couched in a phraseology that was absolutely ununderstandable to Ray?

  “Don’t know what I mean? Oh no, you don’t know. If I know as much as I do—how much must you know!”

  How much must Ray know! The question tormented Freda. How good was Ray? How bad? How did she handle men? Had she ever …? How fly was she really? Except on her trips to New York and the visit to the St. Louis annual exposition that she had once made with her father, there had never been a night which Ray had not spent in the house on Baymiller Street. Staying out all night was part of it when girls were supposed to be bad. Probably, as Tagenhorst said, “Ray had it behind her ears.” What was it kept the toniest men hotfooting after Ray, if it wasn’t—that? What was it, but that, gave a girl the name of being fly? Girls didn’t let themselves get that reputation just for the good dinners and shows that were in it. Why, most of the men Ray ran with were married men and would cut her dead if they met her with their wives or daughters. Just how fly was Ray? Where did it get her? Kurt Shendler, a bicycle-mechanic, was the only fellow in town on the level with her. A tony girl like Ray having
to wind up and marry a domestic product like Kurt! What was the mystery of Ray? Was it possible that she had no realization of the importance of sitting herself pretty? Or was it that she had some bee in her bonnet that would fool them all? Or would she be content to become the mistress of one of the town’s big men or one of those New York traveling fellows or brokers who were always after her? Not for Freda. Marriage. Security. Freedom from the bickering thraldom of Tagenhorst, and now, with the few dollars from the sale of the house in the offing, the threat of having Marshall and his family within range. Marriage.

  “Ray, would you like to be married?”

  “Of course I would, to Mr. Right.”

  “How do you get Mr. Right?”

  “How do I know, not having got him?”

  “Why not Kurt? Or are you out for a big gun, or if you had a good chance would you just—just—live—”

  “Freda!”

  “I want to be married more than anything, and I’m not ashamed to say it.”

  “And so you should, honey. If you are as sweet on Hugo as he seems to be on you.…”

  “Last night he took Sadie Kisterwell to the Music Festival. He can’t get away from me that way. He can’t get away from me a-tall.”

  The flaxen little Freda, lying there beside her, sent a quiver through the bed then, of the movement of her body. The quiver of a woman whose fury is beginning to be stirred.…

  7

  One Sunday evening during this same month, which was a humid May of premature heat, Ray, who had dined with a drummer at Mecklenburg’s Summer Garden, a popular family resort out on Highland Avenue, found herself being importuned to accompany him to the station where he was to take a C. H. and D. train for Dayton.

  “Come as far as the depot with me, Ray. It will cheer me on my way.”

  “But, Bakeless, it’s so hot, and I hate the smell of train smoke.”

  “Yes, but think what you will be doing for a poor wretch who has to take the trip in this heat.”

  As a matter of fact, there was an additional reason for Ray’s disinclination to accompany Bakeless to the station. Kurt, who had been away in Peoria for the greater part of a week, on a matter that had to do with going into partnership with a pair of brothers who had a patent on a gasoline-driven bicycle, was due at the house that evening at eight. Bakeless’s train left at eight-fifteen, so there would be nobody at home to receive Kurt. Tagenhorst had hired a surrey for the afternoon, and with Freda and Marshall and Hugo Hanck had driven up to Hamilton to visit a crony there. A deserted house would greet Kurt.