Back STreet

by Fannie Hurst

  Oh, it was right that Walter did not come. Right and loyal and part of the solidity that to her was always to seem fearful and wonderful in its immensity. The solidity which had practically destroyed her, and yet which was something to admire and about which she felt fascinated.

  Catch what the Jewish boys called a batsimer standing up to his sense of obligation in that fashion. Catch Marshall Tagenhorst, for instance, who had married a loud and irate cook, against every family wish, caring a rap what his mother, or his religion, or his responsibility required of him. Why, even Kurt, whose old parents had gone to live at Simmons Corner, confessed to not having been home but twice, the last two years of their lives. Twice in two years, mind you, and Simmons Corner not forty miles away. Catch a Jewish boy treating his folks that way. Oh, it was right that Walter did not come. In fact, after the first few weeks, it seemed to Ray that to encounter him anywhere along the way where his habits were apt to take him, would be more than she could bear. Her trip to New York, which had consumed only eight days, made the time that had elapsed since the morning she had read the news in the Enquirer seem somehow longer than it actually was. That, and the sudden cataclysmic change in the household brought about by Freda’s precipitate marriage, had packed a brief period with a dazzling allotment of events that seemed to throw sense of time out of plumb.

  The young couple had returned from French Lick Springs and were installed in what had been Ray’s bedroom, a second-story rear one, with two exposures overlooking side and backyards. Ray had given them the use of her brass bedstead and bird’s-eye maple set, assisting Tagenhorst in seaming, ruffling, and hanging new transom and window curtains, and in scrubbing the Axminster rug with soap and water. Before the return, she managed, too, to complete a burnt-wood toilet set for the dressing table, etching with a hot needle point Freda’s wedded initials onto the backs of hairbrush, hand mirror, shoehorn, and pin tray. The old habit of pottering about at the doing of chores for others, matching a sample of embroidery silk for a neighbor, racing around town on a quest for a wire hairbrush for Marshall’s wife, whom she had never seen, survived through her inertia. There had been a fierce kind of joy in decking out the room for the return of the bridal pair.

  It was extraordinary, the quality of submission Hugo had brought to his marriage. Once the words of sacrament were spoken, there had descended upon him, like rays of sun penetrating fog, the demeanor of bridegroom triumphant. The flaxen Freda, doll-eyed, but as rigid-looking in her pretty, bisque way as if she were still concentrating on achieving what she had already accomplished, returned from her brief honeymoon, the lovely and surrendering bride of an absurdly pretentious young husband.

  Herman Hanck had resisted at first, coming out with a statement which he made to a reporter that he washed his hands of his nephew’s elopement; but after overtures from the young couple, there had come along a wedding check for five hundred dollars, and a supper at the house on Burnet Avenue, from which Freda and Tagenhorst had returned in delirium of enthusiasm for the elderly brewer, who had sent them home from his fine brick house, in Avondale, in a carriage.

  Now, however, was not the time to press matters. Herman Hanck was a conservative, if ever there was one; but that he had plans was manifest.

  He as much as told his nephew, after pinching Freda’s cheek and running his heavy reddish hands along the flank of her young body, that whether or not he decided to bring them into his home, depended on certain developments. That, of course, was his way of refusing to make matters too easy for the youngsters. Obviously, the clever strategy was for Hugo to continue his position with the gas company, while Tagenhorst adopted the temporary policy of acting hostess to the young couple. No use trying to force a Hanck. Hugo knew the wisdom of biding his time with his uncle.

  It was vicariously reassuring somehow to be around the enormous complacency of the mother hen Tagenhorst, whose chick was about to sit pretty, and also to behold the phenomenon of Hugo, doltish fellow, seeming to fall in love with his wife. In a dozen secret ways he was solicitous of her, and although she wore, as yet, no badge of the growing period of her pregnancy, he was at her elbow for every step, concerned about the slightest strain upon her little dollie body, so much so, in fact, that it seemed to Ray that the eye of Tagenhorst, with its constantly narrowing pupil, like a parrot’s, might one day flash in quick suspicion. But nothing of the sort. Freda’s quality of immaturity, now that you thought of her as wife and mother, was more and more a striking and quite a lovely thing about her. Her whiteness made her seem flesh of the pearl; and the way in which she wrapped her head in yellow flaxen braids kept her childish looking in a manner that seemed just to have dawned, in delight, upon the heavy-handed, pelican-faced Hugo.

  And how she fitted into marriage! As if it were an old dressing-sack which she donned comfortably. Scarcely two weeks after the return from the honeymoon, she began to appear at the breakfast table uncorseted, her heavy creamy breasts loose in a dressing-sack, her feet slouching about in slippers she would have scorned as a girl. A newly economical, purring little Freda, who followed her husband mornings to the porch, holding her dressing-sack from falling open as far down as her breasts, waving him good-by as he swung aboard a car, and then slouching back into the house on the shoes that shuffled, and, likely as not, spending her morning at making their bed, exploring her face for blackheads, sewing buttons on Hugo’s cheaply flashy shirts, and, if the autumn days permitted, sitting on the front porch, riding a darning needle in an up-and-down motion through his cheaply flashy socks.

  To think that Freda was going to have a baby! Sometimes, lying awake, it seemed to Ray nothing short of incredible that beyond the thin partition that divided her room from that of Hugo and Freda, the miracle of the making of a baby was taking place. Well, what of that? Millions of babies were on their way into the world, but not somehow in this kind of precious propinquity. She had never lived so intimately around a woman who was going to have a baby. And Freda made it seem fastidious and lacking in all the revolting physical aspects that had been part of the childbearing of many of the girls she knew. Freda took her breakfast with gusto, bright was her morning eye, and her body, no plumper than usual, kept its normal, pretty curves. As such things go, she had been a bad girl, no doubt of that; but just the same, now that she was in the midst of the making of a baby and that baby was assured of a father awaiting it, everything dropped into the category of the beatific.

  It was fine to plan for the baby. As she lay wakeful, night after night, when misery threatened to come down like scythes slashing through and through her, and her toes climbed in a pain that had no name, it helped to concentrate on that baby. “Fleischer Brothers—Infants’ Wear,” on Fourth Street, would allow ten percent off on purchases in the name of the firm of Adolph Schmidt. They always carried things in the window like pink-wool coverlets and jackets and white-celluloid rattles with pink forget-me-nots on them.

  If only one had the time, all those things could be made at home, and so much more cheaply. How Tagenhorst, who had her days to herself, would begin to crochet and knit when she knew. When she knew! Freda would not hear to that, yet. Meanwhile it was lovely to have the secret for a little while longer, of that life in the making.

  How lucky, after all, was Freda! Life was going to be right and normal for her after its terrifying beginning based on a silly mistake. From now on, particularly after Hanck took them into the fold of his wealth, it would be safe. Secure. She would have more babies. Hugo would mature and fill out and become less silly.

  Corinne would have babies, too. His. Well, she was not the only girl in the history of the world to have a baby by a man loved by some other woman. The kibosh on such thoughts. But what if you could not help thinking them? What if they kept the night a feverish horror? Lying a few blocks away, asleep no doubt, careless of her blessedness, lay the girl who would be wife to him, and mother to his children, and recipient of the touch of his hand and the caresses of his eyes and the intimacy of his
bed and the security of his home. That was as it should be. It would be a firm, tight, protected home, where Walter would prosper, and his children would be born and thrive and study and learn music and science and the arts, and become accomplished, after the fashion of Jewish children. They had always been smart in school. Sometimes you hated them, with their hooky, eager faces and curious pretenses of inferiority that were crowned with secret convictions of superiority. Walter’s children—it was as it should be. Like to like. Walter to his kind. Ray to hers. What was her kind? The married drummers who liked to slide their hands along her flanks under the tables of public eating houses. The elderly men, with the moist lips that always reminded her of liver, who sooner or later directed their eyes or remarks toward George Street. Kurt? Ah, why not Kurt? …

  The thought rolled over Ray, troubled night after troubled night, that if only she had never clapped eyes on Walter Saxel, life would still be something to be lived up to its hilt, instead of something to lie broken and huddled over in bed, whole nights through.

  I’ve had a crash. I must get over it. Thousands of girls do. But I won’t ever. Because I can’t. I am like that.

  16

  One snow-decked day, about two weeks before Christmas, this happened: There walked into Schmidt’s, with flakes on her shoulders and caught charmingly into the mesh of her veil, Corinne Trauer and her mother.

  There she was, the fair, plump Corinne, in a short sealskin jacket, its peplum spreading from her slim waist as it tilted off her bustle, hat that rose with that same gesture of a boost from the rear, and hands thrust into a round sealskin ball of a muff upon which were pinned fresh violets. A fashionable little person, lovely smell of cold violets all about her. Mrs. Trauer, a sealskin cape of fitted shoulders and a bonnet of sprays of swinging jet, looking the animated and well-fed rôle of any Richmond Street matron. Their good mornings were the polite toneless ones that fell just short of the added intonation that would have gone with “Good morning, Miss Schmidt.” Vaguely, to their shopping memories, she was just that stylish-looking girl who had been for years at Schmidt’s. One went so seldom to Schmidt’s these days—but their veilings were still the best in town.

  “White net, please. Point d’esprit. Finest mesh.” And then, with the air of oh-if-you-must-know “—wedding veiling.”

  Here it came, crash at her. Wedding veiling. And there she was, Ray, tilting the great bolts of net off the shelves and ballooning before them the tulles that rose in soufflés.

  And then, presently, sure enough, there, oh, it was funny, considering that her impulse right along had been to seize and unwind one of the bolts and wrap it around the busy little body fingering at the textures, were the three of them, with Corinne standing posed before a pier glass, and Ray holding the tulle so that it might cascade from the crown of Corinne’s head.

  What a busy, canny little pair they were, these Trauers, rubbing the sheerness of bridal veiling between fingers, holding it against a sample of ivory-colored satin, ordering Ray, in their agreeable manners, to again and again commit the experiment of showing Corinne with different varieties of the raiments of the bride.

  “Mama this. Corinne that. You see, miss, her dress is to be out of my own wedding dress. A little more ivory in the veiling—oh, daughter, stop fidgeting. How can the young lady manage? It’s to be a Plum Street Temple wedding.”

  “Oh, Mama, wouldn’t it be heavenly if I could have orange blossoms on the hem? Walter says he’s sure to trip over it, hurrying.”

  The impulse to throttle her with the veiling became more and more absurd. Down underneath her shoulders another and hidden pair of shoulders kept shaking and shaking with the submerged silent laughter. What high little hillocks of breasts she had. Creamy deep, lovely and tender. His head would lie there.…

  “Four yards—let veil cover face just enough to make it a simple matter to lift it after the ceremony—please, Mama, don’t get me nervous again. I’m going to have my veil that way if it’s never been done before in the history of the whole religion!”

  Walter would lift the veil after the ceremony, to kiss those pale roses of lips. Those lips were there now, close enough for her to touch. To twist!

  “Don’t you think some of that pretty little Valenciennes edging will be nice for corsetcovers and dressing-sacks, daughter, to wear around the house?”

  While she was having her babies, Corinne would wear dressing-sacks, sheer white ones with Valenciennes or crocheted edgings. They would be part of the intimacy of her life with Walter. They would reveal to him loveliness of soft breasts.

  “But Walter’s mother is crocheting so much lace for me!”

  “So she is! Then come, daughter, we’ll be late at Madame Dimonson’s for your fitting. You’ll send the things promptly, won’t you, miss? You see, they’re for a wedding.”

  “Indeed I will. Oh, Miss Trauer, here, you are forgetting your muff! The pretty violets!”

  The—pretty—violets-the-pretty-violets-the-pretty-violets! His to her. The pretty violets that were on the grave of the day.

  What happened subsequently, after the two had passed out into a world lit with swirling snowflakes, was what kept her stiffly to her feet instead of permitting her to obey an impulse to huddle down hidden behind a counter and just crouch hurt there, until somehow this day wore on. Heyman Heymann, as if he had only been waiting for the lull between customers, was at her side, cracking his knuckles and trying to be kind.

  “Schmidt—Trimmings and Findings” was sold. Even the name was to be absorbed into that of the St. Louis firm. Day of little business was gone. Fortunate to break even. Of course, had already put in an excellent word for Ray, but ways of big business stereotyped. General reorganization. No women had ever been employed by the St. Louis firm. Y’know! Conservative town. Of course, always glad to put in a good word for her. Mighty glad. But ways of big business stereotyped. Never tell how the big fellows might jump.

  In this instance Ray could.

  She knew, just as surely as she stood there staring into the pier glass that had so recently reflected Corinne, that her days at Schmidt’s, where she had spent so many years of her life, were over, beginning January first, when the new firm took over the old.

  So much was over! There was a member of the Cincinnati ball team, Jack Shrier, coming to take her to dinner that evening at Lookout House, at the top of the Incline, and then on later to Atlantic Garden, Over-the-Rhine, where it was coming to be the fashion to slum after eleven. That kind of thing, the ability to spend hours with a lout of a fellow who, when out of training, drank himself, before eleven, into an amorous stupor, apparently was over too, because she sent him a message around to the Stag Hotel, stating, without troubling to offer reason, her inability to meet him that evening in the lobby of the Grand Hotel.

  On Baymiller Street, the Tagenhorsts were already at table when she arrived, bearing a dozen links of a local brand of blood sausages as peace offering for appearing unexpectedly upon the supper-scene against her announced intentions. There they were, the three of them. Tagenhorst, in a black flannelette wrapper printed all over in the design of tiny anchors, Freda and Hugo, seated around the table over a meal of a ham-end that had been boiled in stringbeans, fried eggs, cold soda biscuits over which you poured sorghum for dessert, and a pitcher of pale brew which Hugo had “rushed” from Bader’s corner saloon. There were various food knickknacks and leavings from other meals on the table. A snack of boiled beef, cloying under cold horseradish sauce. A saucer of animal crackers. A warmed-over dish of kohlrabi and a bowl of weatherbeaten-looking Schmierkäse. Tagenhorst prided herself upon a copious table, a sort of nibble of this and leftover of that, detested by Ray.

  There was never an occasion when she showed herself for an evening meal that Tagenhorst’s lips did not fold themselves back for the identical remark: “Well, to what do we owe this treat?”

  “To the fact,” said Ray, tossing down her offering of blood sausage, and drawing up a chair, “that
I’m dead on my feet.”

  “Should think you would be,” said Tagenhorst, who chewed rapidly on her front teeth. “Can’t burn the candle at both ends and not look like the wrath of God.”

  “I suppose I do look the part,” she said, and smoothed her hair as if it felt tired along with her bones, and began hacking herself a piece of the end of the ham.

  There was a small blueprint spread beside Hugo’s plate, which he perused through nearsighted eyes as he bolted his food. How rutted they were! How irredeemably committed and destined to commonness! How committed the entire world, in which she, Ray, moved, to the snide happiness to be derived from just the doing of things. Races. Ham-ends. Buggy rides. He sez ’n’ she sez. What must it be like to know someone like Della Fox or Eugene Field or President Cleveland? Commonness here. Bread stabbed up off the center plate by Hugo’s fork. Tagenhorst’s red-fringed napkin with egg stain. Freda’s high little bust always half exposed. Not even ensconced in the red-brick house on Burnet Avenue would Freda ever rise to anything above her little rhinestone commonness. Indeed, on the contrary, her little pasty gleam would run, with the years, into dinginess.

  For Hugo there was simply no redemption. His huge feet would always sprawl on the floor, pointing inward. There would be that tiny tuft of hair at the tip of his rather foolish-looking nose, and the habit of hunching himself over his food until his elbows sprang out like the legs of a grasshopper.