Back STreet

by Fannie Hurst

  “Don’t count on me for certain; I’ll come if I can.” (Two or three times, lately, Walter’s mother had developed sudden euchre games, making it unexpectedly possible for him to remain in the city.)

  These little matters were scarcely sacrifices, because nothing mattered very much relatively, except being with him, therefore you lied, prevaricated, maneuvered. A man was different somehow. Walter, now, for instance, was always talking about justice and being fair to the other fellow. As if that mattered. Of course, if he cared for Tom, Dick, and Harry more than he cared for you! That was scarcely the point, and she knew it, and yet somewhere, deeply imbedded in each of them, was a different set of ethics. Walter cared, all right. But if he had told a party he would meet him at the Burnet House at five o’clock, and desperately she wanted to see Walter at five o’clock before he caught his train, Walter was sorry, as sorry as could be, and she must know how much seeing her mattered to him, but there was that arrangement to see that certain party at the Burnet House at five, and nothing was farther from his makeup than to lie or prevaricate his way out of it.

  “Of course, if any mere appointment is more important—”

  “It’s not that, Ray!”

  “Tell him you have to stay at the bank and catch up on your work. You know you do, lots of times.”

  “Yes, but not today. I’m no good at lying in these little ways, Ray. You girls don’t seem to mind it. Bill Cook is an old friend of mine, Babe. Wants to see me on a little matter of business.”

  “If the situation were reversed—”

  “I know that, Ray. But it’s just not in me. Besides, we have tomorrow evening—”

  Tomorrow evening! Hours of minutes, minutes of seconds, to be got through somehow.

  Saturday was the evening to be lived through with the heart in her feeling pinched to the hardness of a pebble. Saturday, it now transpired, to the convenience of everybody concerned, was Walter’s evening at the Trauers’. There was never any discussion about it. There it stood, isolated by silence into strange portentousness, the sense of the impending beginning when Walter cut short his noon-hour at Hayden’s to hurry to the St. Nicholas to his barber.

  From then on, the shadow of the evening began to reach a long finger across her day. Any drummer in town could have her Saturday night for the asking. Dinner at Kissel’s Atlantic Garden if he wanted it, where, along about eleven, Johnnie Carrol or Emma Carus would have the entire crowd to its feet singing “Little Annie Rooney” or “Down Went McGinty to the Bottom of the Sea.” Or, as an alternative, Heuck’s Ten-Twenty-Thirty, or Weber and Fields, at People’s. Wielert’s Pavilion; Shackling’s Opera House, Music Hall, and Promenade Garden, where you could hear a forty-piece reed band, or behold twenty celebrated European performers in spectacular and startling specialties.

  To be sitting in Kissel’s, listening to Emma Kissel play the fiddle in her father’s garden Over-the-Rhine, or dining on the veranda of the Lookout House, at the top of the Inclined Plane, with the basin of the city spread dramatically below, or playing hazard in the rear of Chick and George’s with Fred Niemeyer, a malt man out of Philadelphia, or George Bader, whose father was a large stockholder in Latonia racetrack, while Corinne and Walter were tucked away in the well-nigh unbearable propinquity of that parlor in Richmond Street, was just about the cruelest refinement of punishment.

  What were they saying and doing, and, more important still, what were they feeling? Walter and Corinne alone together and exposed to the lure of their young bodies and their young hearts and their young lips, while she, helpless in the face of a condition and a danger that were crazing to her, sat in the midst of scenes and people that seemed separated from her consciousness by a film, as if they moved in submarine gardens.

  What, seated in the secure bright parlor of that home on Richmond Street, was Walter saying to Corinne, who, as Ray had so painfully reconstructed her from the memory of casual glimpses, had the plump white flesh, on her short neck and high little bosom, of a tender young fowl?

  It was as if, there in a world that had suddenly become about as glamorous to her as an old shoe, she were asleep and dreaming of Walter, seated in that brightly lighted parlor on Richmond Street, making highly proper overtures to a personable and marriageable young girl whose innocence he reverenced.

  Fool, fool, to have let him taste her lips, when the sweetmeat of what must be the desirable mouth of a girl like Corinne Trauer had surely been denied him. That is, unless they were already his, by the sacred right of an engagement between them.

  Not on again, off again.

  Jews were like that. A Jewish fellow began to prepare for being a steady husband from the very first moment of his engagement.

  Sometimes the pressure of the picture against her brain was almost more than she could bear. Headache began to be almost a regular Saturday-night plea to terminate an evening that along around eleven o’clock became almost beyond endurance.

  “What’s the matter with Ray Schmidt, these days? Dead cat! Look here, sister, is it my company gives you the headache? This is the second time you’ve left me high and dry with an evening just beginning. Tell you what! I know a nice quiet little place that don’t give you a headache. If I felt right sure how you would take it, I’d say come along with me—”

  Here came the proposition again. How soon before Walter would make it? How soon before he dared? She had already, in the dubious privacy of a lovely dell in Burnet Woods, lain in his arms. Where so often before her sole pleasure had been the giving of pleasure, why not this supreme moment of her compensation? She had lain in his arms, a shiksa, who, so far as he took the trouble to judge, was without innocence or the impeccable purities he demanded of the woman of his own race who would bear his children. A shiksa whose lips were desirable.

  He had told her as much. Not then, but later, when her body was no longer touching his, and they were walking toward the car.

  “You’re a wonderful girl, Ray. I haven’t the right to be telling you such things, but you’re a wonderful girl.”

  What had he meant by that? Hadn’t the right. She could not bear the thought of parting from him that evening without knowing what he meant.

  “I’m not wonderful, Walter, except in a way I have always known I could like a person, once I—like him—I think I could be wonderful to someone I liked terribly—I know I could!”

  “It must be wonderful to be loved by a girl who has it in her to love like you, Ray.”

  What had he meant by that? Must be. Must be wonderful for a man who wasn’t already engaged, or about to be?

  Was this thing that was happening to her—had been happening to her ever since that day at the curb of the C. H. and D. depot—going to mean birth of pain that was entirely uncorrelated to any previous suffering she had ever known? Unless one had the power to sweep one of those boys off his feet, like the case of Della Garfunkel, of Covington, a shiksa was hopelessly outside the marriage pale of a boy like Walter.

  Even with all the implications that went with it, there were advantages to marrying a good Jewish boy. These boys had by instinct the qualities that could make life sweet for a woman. Fidelity. Stability. Generosity. Reverence for the unit of the family.

  As a child, along with the youngsters of Baymiller Street, Ray had used to shout at the children over on Ninth Street and Richmond Street, “Christ-Killer! Sheeny!” without much realization of what they meant. Later, however, even before she met Walter, it was to become abominable to her even to hear Tagenhorst blurt out against the “Ikeys” who were beginning to “run the town.”

  Adolph had always liked them as customers. They were good pay and large accounts. “Jew boys,” as Ray had often put it before she met Walter, were usually good spenders, good company, but too cautious to so much as get on a tintype with you.

  How horrid of her to ever have been capable of the phrase “Jew boy”! And here, now, one of them was a prince! That became her favorite way of trying to be casual when referring to Sa
xel. “Do you know Walter Saxel? Prince of a fellow, isn’t he?” Well, he was! One who now made her despise, after a fashion, the traveling salesmen with whom she shared big juicy sirloin steaks at the expensive pleasure resorts of the town, enduring their pawings and petty liberties in payment.

  And for what? True, the world of the large hotels, Latonia racetrack, Over-the-Rhine, and the occasional glimpses of Chicago and New York, were immeasurably more to her liking than the small Rhinish one of Baymiller Street. No use pretending that she didn’t enjoy the sporty pastimes that were not considered admirable. Neither fish nor flesh nor fowl was the stylish Ray Schmidt, but gyrating somewhere between the dull and respectable little orb of Baymiller Street and the sportier realm in which she loved to strut.

  To invade that sportier world as the wife of a man like Walter! The secret of his ability to do the handsome things that were so obviously outside the limitations of the bank clerk had been revealed in a chance remark which he let fall. There was an income from his father’s estate which he shared with his mother. Emanuel Saxel had been one of three partners in the small Hamilton jewelry firm of Dreyfous, Saxel and Kahn, now defunct. There was something of the odor of success about Walter. His manner of calling all waiters George. His manner of tipping them. Every time he took the train for Hamilton there was a delicacy under his arm. Hothouse peaches from Peebles’. A sugar Kranz from Doerr’s. Bissinger’s candied nuts. New dill pickles. A bottle of kümmel from Levi & Ottenheimer’s.

  He would be a man with whom to keep young—with whom to love the good things of life. His manner of ordering a dinner, with the proper touch of wine, which he drank so conservatively and she drank not at all, his epicureanism and love of sophisticated foods, his way of buying a bunch of violets off a vendor’s tray and giving her carte blanche to go shop his mother a silk shirtwaist for her birthday, were worldly little aspects of him to strike delight to the heart.

  Not that you could judge a man by the trifles of these externals; but the worldly stripe in a man, as Ray used to designate it to amused New York salesmen, made life so much gayer than life in the sauerkraut belt, where money was something to be earned solemnly and spent reverently—if at all.

  Funny thing, but Walter the bank clerk came to epitomize for Ray, from the moment she clapped eyes into his gray ones, a diversified worldly world of which he was not really a part. There was something portentous about him, suggestive of the hotel lobby, the racetrack, and even the Music Festival, where the Longworths, the Tafts, the Emerys, the Hannas, and the Warringtons could be seen in close-up through one’s opera glasses.

  Then, too, Walter had been to Europe. He had taken the trip with Myron Hoffheimer, a cousin his age, as a gift from his aunt Hoffheimer, during his second-year vacation at Woodward High. He had been to Hamburg, Carlsbad, Frankfurt, Berlin, and London.

  Was it any wonder, Ray used to ask herself, as she sat in public places with the picture branded against her brain, or moved through her days at the trimmings-and-findings store, or entered a house so preempted by Tagenhorst that the last vestige of Adolph was already fading out, that the new and twisting unease she was experiencing on all sides was causing her constantly to feel like crying?

  Sometimes in the weeks and then the months that followed her meeting with Walter Saxel, the wish that she had never laid eyes on him would mingle with her torment.

  11

  Many the year, after it happened, Ray, with her lips twisted until they were pale snarls in her face, was to repeat over and over again to herself: What is to be, will be. It was in the cards that it should turn out this way.

  The incident that justifiably or not she was always to feel had such vital bearing upon the trend of her entire life, was brought about by a remark from Walter that caused her head to spin and her legs to feel as if they had turned to water and were flowing away from her support.

  It was the day of the week that she had come to dread. Saturday, which meant Walter’s evening at the Trauers’. They had lunched together at Hayden’s and there still remained time for them to make a few rounds of the oval esplanade of Fountain Square. It was a noisy promenade, set within the heart of the city’s din, every carline in town passing within a block of it, and the Tyler fountain rather futilely lifting the thin clear voice of its ornamental waters against commotion.

  Presently, at Fifth Street, they would separate and go their ways, Saxel to the bank, Ray to the “Findings and Trimmings.” Would the day ever come when they would not be perpetually in the act of separating? How short those noonday periods! He had been quiet at lunch. Unusually so. What was on his mind? Something concerning her? He regarded her at times as if he would cleave with his glance the curtain of the unspoken between them. What did he suspect? What did he know? What did he want? He wanted his cake, no doubt, like all the others, and to eat it too. The rigid rightness and conventionality of the procedure with Corinne Trauer was one thing; the freedom of passing the time with a shiksa on the side, another.

  If that were true, one should despise him for it. Once a local fellow, named Willie Stamm, had said to her, “If you’re so darned nice to all us boys without caring a whoop about us, God help the one you really do fall in love with!” And here, living between Hamilton and Cincinnati all these years, had been that one. Why, he had actually attended Woodward High just three years before her cursory course there. There must have been times, think of that, when they had sat at the zoo listening to the same band-concerts on the same evenings. Perhaps, who knows, they had mingled in the same Music Hall crowds during Festival Week or ridden up and down the Ohio on the same excursion boat. And all the time, all the time, everything latent in her had been waiting. For this. For just the half-furtive act of walking with him around the esplanade of Fountain Square—of sharing him with the stoutish, blonde, secure Corinne Trauer, who on Saturday mornings was taking her piano lesson at Clara Baur’s Conservatory of Music. She would play to Walter, evenings, “Alice, Where Art Thou?” “Traumerei,” “Hungarian Rhapsody,” “Scarf Dance,” “Dance of the Fireflies,” in a bright parlor of lamps, bric-a-brac, and Honiton lace, and a sofa where the young husband of the young Corinne could relax with his head in her lap.… Thoughts like these spotted the bright day with anguish.…

  And then suddenly, walking beside her, Walter said this:

  “I’m staying in town tonight, Ray, and my mother is coming to the city on the eight-forty-five tomorrow. We’re having Sunday dinner at the Trauers’.”

  Oh, God, then, here it came.

  He had never been out-and-out frank with her. What right, he might have flared in retort to such a statement, had she to expect it? But in his way he had tried, constantly and consistently, to make her understand how things stood. There was the feeling that conscientiously he was trying to place himself in a position where one day he could say to her, “I never concealed anything from you.”

  “I see,” she said finally, in response to this statement about his mother, and looking away, because she could feel, as always, her lips crawl into a tight, ugly shape when she made retort to any one of his strained remarks about the Trauers.

  Well, after all, it was high time. Strange that the Trauers had permitted it to drag on this long without demanding from him a declaration of intentions. Unless one had been made long ago. Well, what of it? One lived. One lived through such things as this. One did. One must.

  “Ray, I’ve been thinking. Funny thing, but I’ve got my heart set on it. Before my mother and I go to the Trauers’ tomorrow for dinner, I’d like mighty much for my mother to meet you, Ray.”

  That was when it seemed to her the very capacity to stand on her legs was flowing away from her. What was going on in this boy’s head that he was daring to confront his mother with her? Was he contemplating, as the shades of what might be a formal engagement began to close him in, the rash act of coming out in the open with his declaration of preference for Ray Schmidt? Jewish boys did not present goy girls to their parents unless … Wha
t could Ray Schmidt be to Mrs. Saxel, and vice versa, unless it was that Walter knew that their two remote orbs were about to swim together in an intermarriage?

  Could it mean that happiness, actually beyond computing, lay in store?

  “Walter, do you mean that?”

  “Certainly. My mother likes to meet my friends. She’s nice that way, and interested. I thought I’d take her to spend tomorrow morning at the Zoo. She loves to see the animals there. Do you suppose you could manage, Ray, to meet us around the lion cages about eleven? Mother likes cubs. Suppose you just seem to happen into us. Know what I mean? No use making it seem like a set engagement.”

  If, where he was concerned, she could have found it within herself to have pride, this would have been terrible.

  You didn’t confront your mother all at once with a shiksa. And yet—yet it showed what forces must be at work in his brain. Walter was trying to maneuver the most delicate situation of his life. She had won in her tactics with Walter! The puzzled look in his eye, time after time, as he left her at the gate to the house on Baymiller Street! Oh, she had known what lurked there, all right. How far dared he go with this batsimer? She had seen the question play across his face, linger there, fade out into uncertainty. Once he, too, had walked her down Elm to the corner of George Street, pausing there apparently for the effect the propinquity of this neighborhood of elaborate women and drawn blinds might have on her. His hand at her elbow had trembled. She knew what was at him. Desire, and the impulse to dare to suggest to her what sooner or later they all suggested. She actually prayed to herself a little. Fear was on her that he would not have suggested in vain. Before his wishes, all things went down. But, somehow, she had staved it off, and the wrinkle of puzzlement between his eyes was to recur again and again. How far dared he go?

  The answer lay triumphantly in his suggesting to her now that she meet his mother. She was the kind of girl to whom one introduced one’s mother.