Back STreet

by Fannie Hurst

  “I’ll be there at eleven, Walter, strolling around just as if I were looking at the cubs.”

  “You understand about the pretending, don’t you, Ray? In some ways my mother is more like a baby than she is my mother. I want her to know all my friends, but, at the same time, there are some things—there are always certain things, with a mother, have to be handled with kid gloves, or they can be spoiled from the start.”

  Walter was being cautious with her and trying not to let her know how desperate his dilemma between her and the little fragrant pincushion of a creature out on Richmond Street. It was his last desperate move before the machinery of the Trauer-Saxel marriage began to stitch the pattern.

  It struck her all in the midst of an agitation of blowing hot and cold that she must show this old woman. Oh, la, la, she would wear her gray voile over pink; with the pink velvet-ribbon borders on the gray ruffling and the leghorn hat faced in pink and loaded with ribbon. This old lady, darling because she was his mother, would learn a thing or two about who could do most for her son. A snug, pretty little blonde, who used to be called fat-sock at school, with her rich connections, or a goy.

  That old lady, down for the day from Hamilton, had a surprise coming to her.

  Old lady, don’t you worry. I don’t know anything about this little Jew girl you’ve got your heart set on. She may be good as gold. So’m I, old lady, where your son is concerned, and all the things you think are going to give you conniption-fits about me aren’t going to give you them at all. I only wish you Jews baptized, because I’d be baptized. I’ll sit with you fasting on fast days, in your pew in the Plum Street Temple, and love it. I’ll love him and honor him in his own religion; and if you’ll give me half a chance, old woman, I’ll do the same for you.…

  It was October, and there were leaves flying, and along the esplanade women’s skirts were blowing sharply forward, and so were the waters of the fountain, but the face she turned toward him, because of the hot flashes across it, was spangled with a tiny sweat.

  “I’ll be at the lion cubs, tomorrow morning, Walter, at eleven on the dot.”

  “Make it seem accidental.”

  How constrained he was.

  “Walter.”

  “Yes?”

  She wanted to say to him something like this: “I’m your happiness, Walter. I wouldn’t harm a hair on the head of that girl up there, or of your mother’s; but I’m your happiness, and don’t you ever forget it.” Of course, she said nothing of the kind. “Good-by, dear, the lion cubs at eleven.”

  12

  That Ray did not turn up at the lion cubs on Sunday morning at eleven was to mean a lifetime of reiteration of a phrase that was to grind down a groove into her heart. What is to be, will be.

  Would it have made any difference? Had her failure to appear at the lion-cub cage that Sunday morning changed, in some mysterious way, the ebb and flow of her life? What if she had appeared at the cage of the lion cubs … would it have made any ultimate difference? Had there been in Walter’s heart, when he suggested her meeting his mother, anything but a casual and perhaps unexplainable desire to have her look upon the tinfoil glory of the goy he was about to renounce?

  What had been in his heart, that noonday, as, dark and troubled, he paced her around the esplanade? What?

  And strangely, although she was to ask, she was never to know. Chiefly, she concluded, because he himself did not know. Well, be that as it may—

  On the five o’clock of the Sunday morning that she was to meet him and his mother at the lion cubs, she was awakened out of a sound sleep which it had taken her long hours of wakefulness to woo, by a noise that sounded like a small dog scratching.

  At first leap of her mind into wakefulness, she thought it must be the adorable pug puppy that Walter had brought her from a street vendor two days before; but when she shot out her hand to feel for him, there he was curled up at the foot of the bed, snoring away as fast as his tiny sides could expand.

  It was Freda, crouched across the pale streak of dawn that slanted into the room like a pencil held in proper Spencerian position, who had made the sounds. What in the world? At this hour! And what a Freda!

  Something terrible was wrong with that specter sitting on its knees at the foot of Ray’s bed. Here was no little Freda, cuddling up for the surreptitious talk in which she so delighted. Five o’clock in the morning meant something different. What?

  “Freda, how you frightened me! Come in under the covers! What’s wrong?”

  She just sat shivering in the shaft of the dawn.

  “Freda, come here.”

  She drew herself with a sort of bleat from the touch of Ray, who was on her feet by now, long, narrow, indefinably taller in her ruffled nightgown, her brown hair waving along her shoulders and giving her five years more of youth than the edifice of pompadour.

  “What is it, child?”

  Without more than the second’s preparation for it, she knew.

  “Sister, come here!”

  This bleating, shuddering, chattering creature, smeared with pallor, grimacing with terror, had fallen out of the cradle of her blonde and flaccid girlhood into this horrible dawn. Freda was in terrible trouble.

  “Sister, come to bed. Don’t be afraid.”

  “What’ll I do, Ray? What will I do?”

  “You’ll come to bed and get warm.”

  “Don’t. I can’t bear to be touched. I think I must be going crazy.”

  “Put this blanket over you. Let me hold you.”

  “What’ll I do, Ray?”

  “Ray will make him do right, Freda.”

  Why, this was like one of the plays at Heuck’s. Life was a ten-twenty-thirty!

  “Go to him fast, Ray. You can’t wait a minute.”

  “Oh, Freda, little baby, how could you!”

  “I told him last night, Ray. I had to tell him.…”

  “Hugo?”

  “I had to tell him, didn’t I, Ray? I waited so and prayed—that it wasn’t true. But then, when I saw that it was—I had to tell him that when she found out—if he didn’t make it all right quick, Mama would kill him. You know Mama. I had to tell him.”

  “What did he say, Freda?”

  “He got so funny then. It was as if his face, right there in front of me, turned into a fish’s face. I thought I’d die.”

  “Tell me quickly, darling, everything he said.”

  “He looked at me, Ray, he looked at me kind of funny—I couldn’t ever tell you what it was—that look—that look—”

  “Shh-h-h-h, honey, crying won’t help. You must tell Ray everything.”

  “You know how we’ve been going together.”

  “Yes.”

  “He got to hate to come here. Our parlor windows open so plainly onto the porch, and everybody that passes can gape, and then—Mother, sitting and sitting out there rocking—all the time—”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “He wanted me to go around places with him—the way you do.…”

  “No, no, no.”

  “He began to get mad. Said I thought more of everybody else than I did of him. Kept saying that, every time I had to say ‘no’ to something he asked me to do. Kept saying and saying it until I got scared.”

  “You should have explained to him right from the start, Freda, that you are not the sort to go gadding—”

  “I did. I did. But he said—he said—”

  “What did he say, dear?”

  “He said, if—if you were the sort, why was I any better than my—sister?”

  “If I was?”

  “Yes. If you were fly, how could I expect him to think I wasn’t—”

  Was this flaxen child, huddling there in her arms, challenging her aid? Was there something of steel beneath this hysteria? … It did not matter.

  “And so?”

  “And so, what was I to do, Ray? He kept thinking I was the kind would do it if I wanted to, just as—you would—He got to acting so mad with me, Ray.”r />
  “Oh, Freda, what did it matter? Hugo is just a little pimply fellow you wouldn’t look at twice, if it wasn’t for his uncle. For all you know, the old gentleman may not even leave him a penny. Then where would you be?”

  “Herman Hanck has made his will. Hugo told me. Hugo will be rich some day. Ray, what’ll I do?”

  “You haven’t told me, Freda, just how it happened. He got to acting angry with you, and then?”

  “And then—you remember that Sunday evening you wore your new checked suit and went out about six to meet some fellow at Mecklenburg’s and you passed by the parlor and looked in and said to Hugo and me sitting there, ‘Ta-ta, be good.’ ”

  “Well?”

  “Well that sent him off. Said there wasn’t any more reason why I had to spend my time sitting him around in a dark parlor on a slippery sofa than there was for you. Said he hated our parlor, hated sitting around in it. Didn’t intend to. That evening—we didn’t go over to the Young People’s Forum at the church. We went down to a place on Fifth Street where—they gave us a room. I don’t know how it happened that way. I said, ‘Let me out,’ when I saw the place—the room—the bed—I yelled so that he had to put his hand over my mouth. I never would have, Ray, only he wanted it so. He kissed me so and said every girl was a booby in the eyes of every boy until she did. Said, anyway—as soon as his uncle got finished with the rubbishy idea that a fellow should strike out on his own, he was going to set him up, and we’d get married. I can’t tell you any more. Isn’t that enough? Ray, hurry. If Mama knows, I’ll kill myself, because she’ll kill me first if I don’t. Hurry, Ray, and tell him he’s got to make it right.”

  Ten-twenty-thirty. Ten-twenty-thirty. It was impossible to feel any reality about it. Freda in her nightdress, her flaxen braids plaited too tightly and hanging stiff as clothespins down her shoulders, crying her bitter salt tears into the dawn, the clock on the mantel ticking loudly against her sobs.

  “Why, darling, it’s dark yet. I can’t go to him now.”

  “If you don’t—he may get away somewhere. He acted so funny. Said he’d pay—if I’d do something about it—go to one of those terrible doctors that kill girls with illegal operations—”

  “Freda!”

  “He said it would be a terrible come-off to spoil things for us by letting this happen now—he—he—If you don’t hurry, Ray, he may get away somewheres.”

  “What is it you want, Freda? What must Ray do?”

  “Get him. Tell him something terrible will happen to him if he doesn’t see me through. He doesn’t think I know it, but there is a girl over in Covington named Kate Shray. He’s been going with her on the side. You may have to hunt for him, Ray. He’s scared. Maybe he didn’t sleep at home last night. Then you must try his uncle out on Burnet Avenue. You know the big red house. Take a Zoo-Eden car, and change. Don’t let him slip away, Ray. Tell him if—well, just tell him what I’ll do. Tell him it will be the most scandalous thing ever happened in Cincinnati. And it will. If Mama finds out, she’ll kill me, if I don’t kill myself first. So will Marshall kill him. Get him quick, for God’s sake.”

  “But, Freda, these things can’t be done in a day. Give me until tomorrow—this is Sunday, I’ve got an engag—”

  “If you don’t get him now,” said Freda, sitting up and dragging her hair back off her forehead with two palms until her eyes seemed to jut, “if you don’t get him now—this morning—sure as my name is Freda Tagenhorst, I’ll shoot myself. I’ve got Marshall’s gun and I won’t tell you where! I can’t live—”

  “Oh, my little girl.…”

  “Oh, no. No, no, no. Don’t my-little-girl me. That won’t help. You’ve got to get him. I wouldn’t ever be in this fix if he hadn’t seen shady goings-on all around me—You, for instance—”

  “Freda!”

  “When he saw you gallivanting off night after night, what was there left for me to do but—what he wanted?”

  “Freda!”

  “It’s true, and you know it! I don’t know whether you sleep with boys or not, but that’s the way it looks to lots of people in this town, whether you do or not.”

  “Freda, sit up! Look up! You’re a horrid lying little scorpion!”

  “I’m not. I’m not. I’m not!”

  “I say you are,” cried Ray, and shook her until her blonde plaits flew.

  “You’re for sale, and you know it!”

  In the silence that followed, as they sat there in the brightening shaft of dawn, Ray reached out then, and grasping the shoulders of Freda with her two hands, shook her until her head rattled against the baseboard of the bed, and her row of small white lower teeth banged against the uppers.

  “Liar! Nasty, mean, scheming little liar!” And shook and shook again, and the bed rattled, and the chandelier rattled, and finally it seemed the room and the universe rattled. “Liar. Liar. Liar.” And shook and shook until the blonde pulp of Freda lay breathless across the bed-top, and, breathless, sobbed:

  “I’m done now. I’m finished. This is the end. Go away. I—wonder—what—to—do—I’m done now.”

  “Oh, my little darling. Poor Freda. Dear Freda. I must have gone crazy. I’ll do for you anything you want. My poor little sweet. Ray won’t let anything happen to you—oh, my poor sweet.”

  “Then hurry, Ray. Go to him. Find him. Tell him that Freda won’t live if he don’t. Every day it makes it more terrible. Mama will find out. I can feel myself getting big. God would strike me dead for getting rid of a baby that’s so far on its way. Tell him I won’t do that. I’ll die before.”

  And so it came about that while Walter, puzzled, dallied with his mother around the lion cubs, Ray, on fire with her predicament, was racing from Hugo’s rooming house in Race Street, where he was not, to his uncle’s address on Burnet Avenue, where he might be.

  13

  The meeting with Hugo was one that was to bite in permanent and ugly etching against her memory. As luck would have it, he was seated on the steps of the side porch of his uncle’s large horrific redbrick house of ell, millwork verandas, architectural excrescences, wallowing a fox terrier.

  He was a pale-eyed, pasty fellow, with an Adam’s apple straining against the wall of his long, thin throat, and wrists that shot out like turtle necks. There was about him a manner of one born to the denim, of Monday morning’s overalls, which not even Sunday’s black-and-white pin-striped suit, with its padded shoulders, peg-top trousers, stiff detachable cuffs, and tan toothpick shoes could dissipate.

  At sight of Ray, suddenly standing there in the side yard, a wave of red poured along the pimpled plane of his forehead. Apparently his first instinct was to bolt, but since his sole choice of direction away from Ray was through a door that led into a dining room, he seemed to think better of this as an initial tactic, and resumed with the dog.

  She stood on the grass plot, watching him begin making false and highly self-conscious feints at the terrier, who wanted to tussle.

  “You know why I’m here, Hugo.”

  “Not asking, am I?”

  “But you do.”

  “Maybe I do and maybe I don’t.”

  “No maybes.”

  He was no good at concealing unease, and began ambling in long-legged fashion down the porch steps.

  “If you’ve come to start anything, you’re up the wrong tree. My uncle keeps big dogs. You’re trespassing.”

  Well, anyway, here was mere silliness to combat, not viciousness, as she had feared.

  “Hugo, all I ask is that you come for a little walk with me where we can talk without interruption.”

  “And suppose I say naw?”

  “You won’t.”

  “I will.”

  “Hugo, there is nothing to keep me from walking up these side-porch steps and into that dining room where I can see the top of your uncle’s head at the table and have the talk I need to have with you, with him.”

  The manner in which the pallor and color flew alternately across his pimpl
es was horrible. He was a horrid boy. A narrow fellow, with whom it seemed almost pathetically easy to cope.

  “If you think you can come around here trying to scare up a rumpus—”

  “Very well, then I—”

  “Take your foot off that step.”

  “You can’t frighten me, Hugo, from doing my duty.”

  “This is private property.”

  What a little fool he was!

  “Hugo, hadn’t you better agree to talk this thing—this terrible thing out quietly with me?”

  “I don’t know what thing you mean.”

  “Come along, then; I will tell you as we walk.”

  “Well—not because you’re scaring me into it.”

  “I don’t want to scare you into anything, Hugo.”

  Their walk petered out from the start, because halfway down the block, in front of a vacant lot, she spun and faced him.

  “What you have to do is plain as the nose on your face.”

  Procrastination gone to the winds, he thrust his lean features angrily toward her.

  “She’s lying!”

  “How dare you say that of my little sister!”

  “She is, and you know it. I’ve got her ticket. She’s molasses that only pours the way it wants to pour.”

  “You’ve done the most terrible thing to her that a man can do. You’ve got to right it the only way a man can.”

  “If that was the case, pretty nearly every man in this town would be righting you!”

  She stood her ground, feeling for a frightened moment as if she had congealed into something too rigid to enable her ever to move her lips again.

  “It’s vile of you to say that, and untrue. But that doesn’t change the one thing I’m out here for. You are going to marry Freda. Immediately.”

  He threw back his head, as if to laugh off an absurdity, but his lips did not complete the gesture. They began to tremble.

  “You’re crazy.”

  “At heart, Hugo, you are the kind of boy who would want to right a terrible thing like this. Don’t make things more unbearable by forcing us to force you.”