Back STreet

by Fannie Hurst

  The Tagenhorsts, and Ray with them, even Freda and Hugo, after they achieved the house on Burnet Avenue, would go through life on the plane of the unglamorous people who wore black flannelette with anchor designs and hacked at ham-ends on littered supper tables. The rutted horror of life in a house that smelled perpetually of the suds of family washing, the boiling of potatoes, and the gilt on a parlor chair that had a pink moire bow on its left shoulder.

  The Trauers, who were nobodies—Jews always were sort of nobodies, except in a rich way—would never live that trashily, even though their old man was nothing much more than an insurance agent. And he wasn’t their “old man” either. You didn’t refer to Mr. Trauer as “old man.” He was listened to respectfully whenever he spoke, and helped at street corners, and reverenced in his home. It was trashy here. Marshall’s attitude toward his mother was trashy. This house was trashy—and yet Hugo’s next words, leveled at her with the sly cruelty of a small boy about to pull the tail of his cat, made it seem suddenly and surpassingly dear here.

  “Marshall has swapped this house for what looks to me like a pair of twin packing cases in Youngstown,” he said, and shoved the blueprint toward her.

  She had been prepared for this. The negotiation was one of long duration and endless discussion, and now here it was, and suddenly this house on Baymiller Street became unbearably precious. She had been born in this house. The mother whom she scarcely remembered by feature had lain in a box the shape of the sole of a shoe, down the center of the room adjoining the one in which they were now seated. She had boarded in this house when Tagenhorst had become landlady of it, and when the father whose memory she loved had taken for a wife the big-boned Tagenhorst, who had ministered to him in a fashion that was snide, but which was apparently sufficient for her nondemanding father. This was a square frame little house, crammed with the memories of her lifetime. She had lain in her cradle here, toddled through its halls, felt the first pangs and joys of adolescence moving up against her body like grass tips against spring soil. Stirrings had taken place in the buds of her consciousness here; she had become aware here, within these trashy, paper-covered walls, of so much that was strange and new and mysterious about herself—about her body—about faint stirrings of dreams, desire, love, beauty, that for want of something better were classified as soul. And now, suddenly, the last vestiges of those days were to end.

  Tagenhorst, smitten evidently with some of that same sense of eruption, snatched at the blueprint.

  “Nothing is settled yet.”

  “Good as.”

  “Nothing is signed yet.”

  “But you’ve got to sign, Mama,” piped Freda. “Marshall put the cross right there, where you must write your name on the dotted line.”

  “It’s hard to know what to do, in this tormenting world,” said Tagenhorst, defensive, nervous, ready to be easily irritated where she and her stepdaughter were concerned in this matter of the property leavings of Adolph Schmidt. Or, rather, where Ray was not concerned. Out from under her, months ago, had slid the anchorage of her father’s business. Out from under her, now, was about to go his home.

  “It’s all right with me,” said Ray, and drank her coffee in quick, nervous gulps.

  “Where will you go, Ray?” queried Freda, in her treble.

  “I’ll board.”

  “We will too—won’t we, Hugo, until—”

  “I’ll go right on to Youngstown and help Marshall rent the other half of the house. No use my hanging around Cincinnati, now that the children will be going to live at the Hanck house.…”

  “Down went McGinty to the bottom of the sea,” was Hugo’s retort to his mother-in-law.

  “Why, Hugo, we will be at Uncle Hanck’s soon. Mama’s right.”

  “Down went McGinty to the bottom of the sea. We will; but why not now? What’s he waiting on?”

  “I wish I knew,” sighed Freda. “It’s hard living this way from day to day—on hopes—”

  Whenever she discussed life in the big brick house on Burnet Avenue, and the brick stable with its two rubber-tired carriages, surrey, tan trap, and storm buggy, her blue eyes began to burn as if someone had set a match to two laid grates. How they leaped with the flames of desire!

  Well, it was right to desire. It was necessary to desire. Tagenhorst, popping forkfuls of food into her mouth, was desiring. She desired profit. She desired well-being and improvement for her children. She desired much for herself. It was not inconceivable that she could marry again.

  Only Ray lacked desire. It was borne in upon her, crumbling her bread into pellets, that among those sitting there, filled with intent and purpose over the pattern of their lives, only she alone of them found herself in the predicament of not even desiring to desire.

  Let the eruption that was about to happen all about her take place. What then? Life would flow on—new interests perhaps.… Pogue’s might give her a position in their trimmings—she would find a boarding place—Why feel so seriously about anything? … Life would flow on—Freda would have her baby—

  There was a present for baby that moment in her muff out on the hatrack. A tiny knitted jacket and cap, with a pair of pink bootees to match, making an adorable set. She had purchased it that morning on her way to the store; and there it reposed, waiting to be given, in secrecy, to the flaccid little mother-to-be who sat tilting her dessert dish of canned peaches for the last bit of syrup.

  Almost immediately after the meal was cleared, she snatched Freda into her bedroom, closing the door, locking it, and springing the knitted set full upon her by spreading it across the bed.

  “If it’s a boy, Freda, you can exchange it for blue!”

  “If what’s a boy?” cried Freda, and then stood with her telltale eyes stretched with realization of the heaviness of her blunder.

  Strange, but in that instant each knew her separate truth. Ray with a sense of being taken in and a sense of sickening impotency the like of which she had never known before. Freda with the thoroughly aroused realization that it was futile to try any longer to postpone the hour of her inevitable reckoning with Ray.

  “I thought I was going to have a kid at first, Ray. Honestly I did.”

  “You lied from the first.”

  “I didn’t. I thought—”

  “You lied from the first.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “If you stand there saying that,” cried Ray, and caught and shook her shoulders until the fair white teeth of fair white Freda rattled, “if you say that again, I—I’ll hurt you!”

  Freda began to whimper, letting her body droop with the sudden inertia of a sack being emptied.

  “You won’t tell Hugo, Ray, that it was anything but a miscarriage?”

  “I won’t tell him anything,” said Ray, in the lusterless monotone of a voice too tired for inflection. “I won’t tell anything to anybody—ever—because I don’t ever want to see anybody again, least of all you!”

  “Ray, it was this way—”

  “Leave me alone. I want terribly to be—left alone. I promise anything—but if you don’t go, Freda—there’s no telling—I feel so kind of desperate—if you don’t get out of my sight—I—I might even hurt you—Go!”

  Left alone, she began to laugh and sob along her twisted lips at the first of a series of pictures that were to stalk her mind that night through: Eleven o’clock of a chiming Sunday morning. Walter and his mother dallying before the lion-cub cage at the Zoo. Herself and Hugo Hanck, standing face-to-face in front of a vacant lot on Burnet Avenue—

  17

  The precipitate kind of haste with which events proceeded struck Ray as being just as well.

  By the time the Christmas wreaths in the windows had begun to accumulate the dust of the last days of the year, Ray, to her complete lack of surprise, had received her notification that the scheme of the absorption of “Schmidt—Findings and Trimmings” into Acme Dress Findings Company of St. Louis did not include the taking over of the Schmidt employee
s.

  Freda, by the simple device of remaining in bed for a day, looking waxen and flaxen, had succeeded in conveying to Hugo whatever it was necessary to convey, because now, beatitude unpunctured, his husbandlike concern seemed switched to his wife’s return to an unimpaired state of health.

  Christmas in the house on Baymiller Street had been spent among packing cases, trunks, and dismantled rooms. The Youngstown deal had gone through; and Tagenhorst, on the strength of her renewed relations with her son and his wife, was about to embark to Youngstown for a visit, pending certain decisions of Freda’s and Hugo’s, which, of course, had to do with Herman Hanck.

  It was all precipitate, and yet an ordered kind of dissolution that seemed to have pattern. Things had been moving toward this culmination since the death of Adolph, to say nothing of the fact that, while to all intents and purposes the situation with Freda had closed that night in the bedroom, it was hateful almost beyond endurance to have access to the knowledge of the intricate and ruthless little mechanism concealed somewhere behind the docility of Freda. It was more than that. It was frightening.

  Freda and Hugo had rented a furnished room over a grocery store on Goodman Street, near Burnet Avenue. The desperately hoped-for invitation to share the redbrick house had not yet come from Herman Hanck, but he had eaten his Christmas dinner in the house on Baymiller Street, was apparently enormously taken of the Mädchen Freda, whose cheeks he was constantly pinching, and had sent around, on the eve of Christmas, by carriage-and-two, a bushel basket of walnuts and forty-eight bottles of the brew of beer which, long after he had withdrawn from the concern, continued to be manufactured in his name.

  This had thrown Tagenhorst and the young people into a state of excitement, because, at first, disappointment had been keen that the invitation for Christmas dinner had not come from Hanck. In fact, the laboriously composed little note from Freda and Hugo, asking him to holiday meal in the house on Baymiller Street, had been sent only as a reminder where lay his duty.

  But the old man, apparently unplumbed, had accepted with alacrity. For three days, in the midst of a move that was as difficult as it was complicated, Tagenhorst had been obliged to lay aside everything and concentrate on this feast. And feast it was! For three hours and a half, on Christmas Day, the groaning board of Tagenhorst offered up its viands—its noodle soup, its roast pig, its boiled beef in kraut, its drop dumplings, its hot biscuit, its seasoned gravies, its suet pudding, lemon pie, Edam cheese, its nuts and raisins, popcorn, sweets, and fruits—to Hanck who, with napkin spread, legs spread, and face spread, as it were, partook with a sustained vigor worthy of his great girth.

  It was after the dinner, warmed, it is true, with a bottle of the late Adolph’s long-hoarded Rhine wine, that Hanck, apprehending Ray alone in the hall under the stairs, grasped her with both his pudgy arms about the waist.

  “You’re a fine girl,” he whispered to her. “Would you like to have a good time some night at my house? Or maybe Atlantic Garden? Say quick!”

  Here it was again. Damnably. Mysteriously. Sickeningly. This piece of old rubber ballooning, bloated, piggy eyed, daring such a procedure, and in her own home! His little gesture of pinching Freda’s cheeks had been the gesture you reserve for children. He had even remained on his dignity, such as it was, with Tagenhorst, who had goaded him, as the Rhine wine and Hanck beer began to blend. But with Ray, who had scarcely spoken a brace of words during the long and votive meal, he had dared to run swinish.

  Lecherous, naughty old man! True, doubtless, were the rumors of his liaison with the notorious madame of one of the houses on George Street.

  That he should have dared, made her lips tighten for days of a compression that kept them jammed and rigid-looking against her clear white teeth.

  If Tagenhorst noticed, she was noncommittal.

  “I cannot make up my mind if what I am doing is for the best,” she kept saying. “For a penny I’d back out. I half wish Marshall had kept out of my affairs, the way he did before I had any to attract him. Then those children boarding out that-a-way! The old man says he is going to take them in, but meanwhile we can all die in our tracks waiting. I only hope what I am doing is for the best. Marshall’s wife is trying to do her part, writing me that letter to come to Youngstown, but once a slut always a slut.… I only hope what I’m doing is for the best.…”

  For Ray it was; of that much she felt sure. Her heart might twist and hurt at what was about to befall her, as she lived for weeks in the center of the disintegration of the house in which she had been born; but somehow, with consistency, the hand of change was upon her.

  She had taken a room at the Auths’, a house two blocks away, on Baymiller, one of the oldest houses on the street, but of immaculate upkeep by Bertha Auth, who was reported to scour the roof every morning. The Auths were an elderly pair who had borne the four daughters, all married, and out of the nest, not one of whom had ever learned English. He was a master builder from Stuttgart, by trade, and reputed wealthy, which in no way mitigated against Bertha’s constant effort to keep the rooms hitherto occupied by daughters, rented out to lodgers.

  The Auth girls, rigidly reared, had played through the years of childhood in the Schmidt backyard, but, as they grew into maturity, had not been allowed to “go” with the fly Schmidt girl.

  It was easy for Bertha Auth, however, who found her third-floor front difficult to heat and therefore difficult to rent, to forget. It was easier for Ray.

  What did it all matter? Perhaps she had been right about her daughters. At least they were all married to good substantial cabinetmakers, carpenters, men in line for the building trades. By now, practically every girl with whom Ray had grown up, was married. What future was there in clerking at Pogue’s and rooming at the Auths’? Idiot. Idiot. Idiot. The way to security lay in Kurt. He would go far, and in a line of business that had to do with transportation, and that meant his interests would be close to the sporting world. That meant much to Ray. Well, what of it? No harm in loving the excitement of the races and baseball, or the thrill of playing hazard on bets the drummers staked you to at Chick and George’s after eleven. Kurt could be trained to do the gay thing like races and occasional trips to New York. Some day, with Kurt, she might even be driving around town with her own tandem! Idiot. Idiot. A Jewish boy with gray eyes and black lashes and a black mustache over square white teeth, and a gentleness of manner and easy-spending way, and an inherent regard for the things that make for respectability and stability, had taken the heart out of every other desire.

  One went on trying to pretend that the days were worth rising to meet, or the nights, except for the blessed oblivion of sleep, worth any of the recreations that had once mattered. Was this the Ray who loved clothes, races, hotel meals, smart tilted-looking traps in which you could see and be seen, and who was not above parading, on fine Saturday afternoons, past the Stag Hotel in costume calculated to stun?

  “Ray is losing interest in herself,” Tagenhorst confided one morning to Freda. “Came down in the kitchen this morning, looking like a dead one, to press out a shirtwaist she wouldn’t have worn to a dogfight a year ago. I always did say, the flashy kind peter out first. I’m not so sure Kurt is going to ask her but, if he does, my advice to her is to grab him and grab fast.”

  “I wonder,” said Freda, standing at the kitchen window and pulling at her lower lip—a lifetime habit of hers—“I wonder what’s the matter with her.”

  “Nothing would surprise me,” said Tagenhorst, spreading a clothesline in the kitchen because the icy wind out-of-doors stiffened the drying clothes. “She’ll get caught one of these days, mark my word. You can go on just so far, getting off scot-free, and then …”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Thank God, even if you are a married woman, you’re too innocent to know!”

  “If you want to know it,” cried Freda, on a sudden high note, “I don’t believe Ray has ever gone the limit with a man.”

  “What I don’t
know, I’m not saying,” said Tagenhorst, beginning to soap the washboard, “but nobody on God’s earth can keep me from thinking …”

  “Well, I guess Ray thinks too when it comes to that. I guess she thinks plenty at what’s going on around here.”

  Ray did. Generous to a fault, she found it next to unbearable to sit silent to the spectacle of the square piano being crated for shipment to Youngstown, and the small square horsehair stool, upon which she could remember her mother sitting perched in the dusk, playing slender little airs like “Listen to the Mocking Bird.”

  Almost equally unbearable, however, was the packing of her own belongings and such of those household objects to which she was unquestionably heir. Her father’s old rolltop desk, with the smell of his tobacco deep in its timbers, the gilt chair which her mother had painted, her own bird’s-eye maple bedroom suite, enlarged crayon portraits of her parents, the doll in the rocking chair that had stood in the parlor for fifteen years. One of the boys, Jim Wohlgemuth, whose father owned warehouses along the riverfront, and where later these possessions were to go up like so much timber in a wharf fire, agreed to store all this for her, until such time as her plans should take shape. It was a heart-sickening business, breaking up the house on Baymiller. All this, notwithstanding the fact that not for worlds would she have had it otherwise.

  The position at Pogue’s did not come off. After the first douse, it struck her that this was neither as important nor as significant as it had seemed at first shock. Wasn’t an army of the unemployed marching on to Washington at the very minute? Papers full of it. Bad times. Well, that was not her immediate worry. With nine hundred dollars in the bank, and the knowledge that there were several good contacts still in the offing, she could afford to take her time. As a matter of fact, Alms and Doepke, hearing of her availability, had made an advance to her during the period she had considered her negotiation with Pogue’s practically closed.