Back STreet

by Fannie Hurst

  In a way, New York had enhanced the size of the “fry.” Miraculously, the salesmen to whom she had been a girl in port, had fallen away since she had moved to the city of their headquarters; but in their places, one contact leading to another, the easier-spending procession of the broker, the bookmaker, the white-haired playboy, made the days of Over-the-Rhine seem as if, back in her memory, they had been played on a stage no larger than a postage stamp.

  And yet—ugh—this present—how did one go through with it? How did one refrain from shaking the fuzzy-headed Taddie by her lean shoulders to realization that all her yearnings, all her sense of frustration, were phony? Silly little sex-hungry fool, sitting there feeling herself cheated, denied, when there wasn’t anything worth feeling that way over. Nothing matters, idiot! Take what you can get, only don’t bother much about getting it, because it doesn’t matter when you do get it. Get to care less and less. Make life a waiting room for death and then it can’t hurt you so terribly much, as if you let it matter.…

  You could not very well voice those loathsome lusterless sentiments to the rather ridiculous Taddie in her frizzes, as she sat there shirring the sleeve of a dress for her sister’s unborn baby.

  “Tell me some things—oh, about—the kind of things you must know, Ray—knowing men—knowing life—the way you get around—”

  “Give me that other sleeve, and I’ll hem it for you.”

  Until three in the morning they sat stitching away on the small batiste dress for the unborn baby of the sister of Taddie who lived in Fredericktown.

  19

  Ray used to say about herself, scrutinizing her face in the mirror, that she was one of those cheviot people who did not show wear and tear.

  This was not true, in the sense that it was understatement. Like many who mature at a precocious age, at twenty-four she had caught up with herself, so to speak, and could, as a matter of fact, be said to look younger than she did at twenty. A certain over-ripeness was gone, slimmer her figure, steadier and even slower her smile. On those rare occasions when she met someone out of the old Cincinnati days, the outburst of comment was almost identical:

  “Why, Ray, you’re getting better looking every day!”

  The boys in general seemed to think this. It was all she could do to manage an evening or two a week now, in which to remain home and catch up on her sewing, or keep her growing hobby of souvenir spoons polished and arranged alphabetically, according to towns. Amityville, Boston, Chicago, Duluth. There was quite a collection. Just went to show what a cosmopolitan town New York was, compared to Cincinnati. Why, in Cincinnati it would have been impossible to round out such a collection. Here it had been a simple matter to almost fill in the alphabet between Albuquerque and Zanesville within a few months.

  The boys came flocking to New York like flies to sticky paper. Memphis. Altoona. Cleveland. Dallas. Seattle. And scarcely one of them failed, after his return home, to remember her request for a souvenir spoon. All pretty much alike, these fellows; but, just the same, they kept one from having time to let tastelessness lie along the tongue in bitterness.

  One kept them at arm’s length, sometimes almost breaking the arm to do it, and during the repetitious days, one succeeded apparently in making the pansies and dotted veilings matter, because at the end of the second year there had been a ten-dollar-a-month raise.

  This ten dollars, from the beginning, went regularly to Freda. There were two children by now, and affairs had not gone well in Youngstown. The appalling had happened not six weeks after Ray’s departure for New York. Herman Hanck had married the big, furiously corseted woman known all over town as Cora, proprietor of one of the most successful of the dark, narrow houses on Longworth Street. A public display of an old man’s licentiousness that was resented by the community at-large.

  In the wake of the disaster, and Herman Hanck’s gesture of final dismissal of his nephew by way of a check for five hundred dollars, the three, Tagenhorst, daughter, and son-in-law, had departed for Youngstown.

  From the first it seemed obvious that Marshall had steered his mother into rough sailing, because the house which had partially been traded for the one on Baymiller Street turned out damp and unrentable, to say nothing of the fact that, once established in Youngstown, it seemed consistently impossible for Hugo to hold a position for more than two weeks. The array of those he had held and lost was appalling. Gas-meter inspector. Cable-car conductor. Handbill distributor. Bicycle-agent. Brush-and-broom vender. Paper-hanger. Clerk in a local agency for Yucatan chewing gum.

  Freda’s desultory letters dwelt lightly upon her mother’s predicament, her particular tussle seeming to center about the relentlessness of the succession of her babies—three miscarriages—and the fact that Hugo, although possessed of what can often be the pathetic willingness of the inefficient, could not even hold the trivial positions that matched his caliber.

  The souvenir spoons were for Emma, Freda’s eldest, when she should grow up. Every once in a while, this three-year-old tot, her hand obviously guided, wrote in some such vein as this: “Dear Aunt Ray, Thank you for the pretty bunny blanket. We are well and hope you are the same.” Or: “Dear Aunt Ray, Thank you for the one dollar. We are well and hope you are the same.”

  There was a photograph of Freda’s two flaxen babies on Ray’s dresser. The little boy was puny and in the string-bean image of his father. Emma, over-fat, with creases for wrists, and her mother’s blondness out all over her, was Ray’s idea of a really beautiful baby. The little gold pin which the child wore in the photograph, engraved “Baby,” was also Ray’s gift. “Dear Aunt Ray, Thank you for this,” and for that, the guided little fingers had occasion to write with considerable frequency.

  It was fine about Emma. It gave one something to shop for. Even when the regrettable need arose for spectacles for Emma, when she was only four, it was a warming chore to be able to have the prescription for the lenses filled by an expert New York optician. Ray, who loved to spend money, could gratify that instinct ever so cheaply by browsing around Stewart’s, Lord and Taylor’s, Hearn’s, or the novelty stores, in search of some trifle she could wrap into a tiny parcel and send to Youngstown. It gave her destination, in the hour between the completion of her own working day and the closing of the department stores. Shopping for Emma. Incidentally there was that eye of hers always peeled for the remnant, the bit of braid, the odd-and-end of taffeta or buckram, to be put by for future use. She still designed and made her own clothes, attending a dressmaker’s college for the heavier or tailored garments, or basting, stitching, or pressing away her rare and rarer evenings at home, sometimes going upstairs to run up seams on Mrs. Levantine’s sewing machine.

  The old indictments, even as it had been back in the Cincinnati days, persisted against her. “Needn’t tell me she can dress the way she does on what she earns.” All this, notwithstanding the fact that it was well-known around Mrs. Blamey’s that she did much of her stitching on Mrs. Levantine’s sewing machine, and that the yardage out of which she made her garments was, often as not, lying about her room.

  “She is a mystery to me!” Or: “Why are you always harping on the fact that she is in to sleep every night? That doesn’t prove anything, these days. Watch out, I say, for the girl who never brings her escorts to the doorstep. Beware of ‘meeters.’ ”

  Not that, in the last analysis, it mattered. Ragland and Stooey, meticulous in their policy to keep their brace of boardinghouses within the neat pale of respectability, apparently found no evidence for complaint. On the contrary, exhibited regard for their front-parlor tenant of House Number Two.

  Evidently they looked upon the comings and goings of Miss Schmidt as matters strictly within the realm of her private affairs, so long as her habits continued within the ethical standards of a house “strictly first-class.”

  Speculating on what might have happened, if the rueful incident of Butler and the horseless carriage had ever made its way in full to the newspapers, Ray found herself c
onfronted with the odd conclusion that after all it would not have mattered much. By virtue of habit she preferred Blamey’s as a place to live. Her room there, including breakfast and supper, was still more reasonable than she could hope to find again, now that prices, due to post-panic period, were advancing. But eviction, for one reason or another, would not have mattered. How to care! How once more to feel as if the surface of her body were something more than a callous surface insulating her from delight in doing. The knowledge that there was a little Emma helped. Going about with spending men helped. But chiefly her sole motive was to while away time. It occurred to her frequently, and with a sense of sickness, that what she was doing was to while away life. And life was supposed to be so precious. The struggle for it all around her indicated that. While Adolph had lived, there had been the meaning of the sweetness of mattering to him. For a while, the sense of Kurt needing her had been part of the argument she had brought to bear upon herself in the days when she was weighing his proposals. Of course, Emma needed her! The child had weak eyes! But how trivial her services there!

  Occasionally, of a Sunday morning, she ventured to the Third Presbyterian Church, on Twenty-third Street. Of rather a mystical nature, inherited from a deeply religious mother who had not lived long enough to pass her outward observances along to her daughter, it was easy for Ray, who had never had a church affiliation beyond desultory appearances with her father at Lutheran services, to conjure a sense of God—to give herself over, as to a warm bath, to the ministrations of ritual. Adolph had not been a godly man in the churchly sense of the word. She had accompanied him to this or that neighborhood church on Sunday mornings. Usually Lutheran. But that sense of God dwelt in any church house! She went there to stir it awake. God was a bosom toward which you turned a tired face that ached to cry, and somehow seldom did or could, except in church. There, during prayer, during responses, during hymn and rolling organ, the tears could course unrestrained against hands clasped to eyes, behind which she was trying to pray. Most of the time, sitting on a bench in hat and wrap, reading from a book, repeating litany, and twisting open the clasp of her purse for money, it was hard to feel intimate with God. But in the language of tears she could cry her heart out to Him, even in church.

  So it went.

  One night, in the Eden Musée, of all places, there came to her, from a widower named Russel Loemen, of Chattanooga, her second experience of a proposal of marriage.

  A city salesman named Edward Macrin, said to be the highest-priced man employed by a large wholesale dry-goods house, had organized, with an eye to entertaining the trade, a dinner-and-theater party, composed of Ray, Loemen, head of the large Chattanooga firm which bore his name, and another young woman buyer from Altoona.

  There had been dinner at the Waldorf Astoria, first-row seats at Weber and Fields’ and, afterward, champagne and rarebit at Rector’s. Loemen, plainly smitten, had invited Ray, in his southern drawl, for dinner the following evening, and for want of something more diverting they had wandered from Lüchow’s to the Eden Musée.

  “You know, Miss Ray,” he said, as they were standing beside a menacing wax Svengali, “believe it or not, Ah caint somehow make myself belong to this sporty town. Ah’m a family man, Miss Ray.”

  She took this at first for the usual explanation of the married man, being cautious.

  “To tell you the truth, Mr. Loemen,” she replied, in what was her stock phrase to remarks of this genre, “I never thought much one way or another.” As a matter of fact, she had, wondering from time to time if he were married.

  He was a tall florid fellow, fifty, in loosely spun clothes, handsome scarfpin, and strong tan-and-gray hair growing on his head like bristles.

  “Look here, Miss Ray, you’re going to think me plumb crazy, Ah know that, but Ah’m the kind of man thinks fast when he starts thinkin’ a-tall. Once Ah know a thing, Ah know it. Ah haven’t thought about much else since Ah clapped eyes on you last night. Ah want to take you back home as Mrs. Loemen. Ah can afford to. Ah’d mighty well like to, and what’s more, Ah intend to.”

  Instinct told her that this was real. Loemen had the sheepish look of a man meaning what he says.

  “Mah first wife died thirteen year ago, Miss Ray. Fust time Ah’ve so much as looked at the same woman twice since. She was a good woman, but Ah believe at last Ah’ve met her equal.…”

  Thinking it over later, again and again she was to marvel that never once had she hesitated in the definiteness of her reply. Folly lay in that reply, wilful renunciation of most of the things her loneliness craved, and a chance to redeem what looked perilously like a life in danger of slipping away into nonentity. Folly, yet the reply was on her lips almost before his words were off his.

  There were the makings of a prosperous, well-ordered life with Loemen, who was a young fifty, childless, eager. In dismissing him, consciousness of all this trooped through her mind. The volition of her will seemed something outside of herself. “No” to Loemen was inability to keep from walking down the steep depression that had become her life.

  Repeatedly she said to herself during these years of the aching void of days: People pass through phases like this. Common, everyday thing for people to pass through phases like this. Especially women. Unmarried girls, she had heard time and time again, sometimes have nervous and queer years of adjustment. Shock, such as the advent and exit of Walter Saxel, in her life, could easily be expected to temporarily unseat one’s frame of mind for over a period of years. That was as near as she ever came to admitting to what extent he continued to dominate her brooding.

  That curious external self of hers, which had so casually dismissed a man like Loemen, was the one with which she had now entirely to reckon. It was the self she carried with her to the business of Ledbetter and Scape; it was the self that lunched at Shanley’s on Saturdays, danced at the Haymarket, played euchre at public card parties, drove once in a hired tally-ho with a group of eight to Saratoga over a big Saturday racing event, or went walking on Sunday afternoons in the nattiest of the moment’s modes, her skirts plucked high with the twist of a wrist that helped give her style.

  It was that external self made the men with whom she now came in contact in growing numbers delight in her free-and-easy companionship, up to that inevitable time when the demand was sure to be for more than that, and then each and every one of them, feeling somehow cheated and led-on, resented her.

  In appearance she was at her best. “Dressy and good-looking,” the glances of people in public places and on the streets voted her. A swell-looking girl, with whom you were proud to be seen about.

  “You’re the kind of girl who misrepresents and won’t go through,” a broker once told her, when he was sufficiently in his cups to say what he was thinking, rather than to think what he was saying. “That kind of leading a man on is dishonest. I’m not out buying virtue. When I want that I go home for it.”

  That was being pretty plain. That was being plain enough to start the misery crawling.…

  In a way, it sometimes seemed to her rank immorality not to have wormed her way into the security of a life with Kurt or Loemen. The alternatives she chose—the life of the hotel luncheon, the Albany night boat over Sunday, provided there was the saving decency of another girl in the party, Fifth Avenue of a Sunday morning, to the buckshot of remarks as she passed, Shanley’s of a midnight—were pretenses just as dishonest as one of these marriages would have been.

  At least, it would have been easier to give for value received. There was, at any rate, the decency of honest barter in giving yourself to a man for home and keep. Your game was to buy without paying. Good times, recreation, gaieties, food and drink. The fact that she did not drink, far from reducing her sense of obligation, heightened it. The anomalous position of playing around with men who, as the broker said, could go home when they wanted virtue, was one that began to weigh, as more and more the spirits flagged, and as more and more the ability to care receded.

  It was well
along in the seventh year of what was becoming the unutterable staleness of the days and nights, that, walking along Wall Street one May evening, toward the office of a friend with whom she was to dine, she encountered Walter Saxel.

  20

  “This is a surprise, Ray,” he said, taking her hand slowly, regarding her slowly, and in anything but the key of surprise.

  She would have supposed of herself, had she visualized this meeting, anything except what was happening.

  It might have been Vine Street, after they had not met for twenty or thirty hours, instead of six and one-half years. It might have been almost anybody she was encountering there in the narrow din of Wall Street, except the one capable of bringing to her this surge of an almost unbearable excitement.

  “Well, of all people!” she said, just as she would have said it to any number of others from home. “What are you doing here?”

  “What am I doing here? Why, we’ve lived here for almost two years now.”