Back STreet

by Fannie Hurst

  “You don’t say so,” she said, with the usual polite surprise. But inside of her, tumbling, was the chaos of the thought that for two years of days they had trod this same city, and she had not known it! Strange that her old intuition to his nearness had not taken care of that! They had been walking the same streets, breathing the same air, and, for all she knew, ridden the same streetcars, sat inside the same theaters, at least if not at the same time, within the day, the week, the month. And she had not had the miracle of understanding to sense it. Seeing him was to stir into pain again the mortal sickness at her heart. So long as he had been out there at arm’s length—eight-hundred-miles’-length—from her pain, her predicament was something she could keep as unreal as the memory of a dream.… Now here he was, and the pains were tumbling about like acrobats.

  They stepped into the shadow of the Sub-Treasury Building, and, for an hour, while the tides flowed past, talked in the tempo of those who have little time and much to say.

  “I felt bad, your leaving Cincinnati as you did, Ray. Without a word.”

  She was suddenly, after the six quiescent years, so hurt and bitter that she did not trust her lips to try to frame the words of a reply.

  “You knew I was here, Walter?”

  “Well, yes, in a way.”

  “You look well, Walter. A little stouter.”

  “Getting along in years. I’m the father of two.”

  Without a thought for her, without a sensibility for her, without even a suggestion of awareness of the silent scream of terror she could feel dart through her as he said this, he took out a small leather case and showed her the two, their small faces bunched together. She did not look long, because all she saw was a spinning pinwheel the size of the picture.

  “Fine, Walter,” she said, and returned it. “Your family here?”

  He seemed to regard her in a sort of mild incredulity that she could be so unaware of the momentous.

  “You didn’t know? I’m a junior partner, Friedlander-Kunz!”

  It had come so soon, then! Rightly, normally, as it should. He was a young banker now. Looked it, in the well-made gray sack suit that fitted his slightly stouter figure. He was almost imperceptibly gray at the temples too, giving him somehow, to her, the artificial look of age achieved by an actor who whitens his hair.

  “Oh, Walter, I’m glad!” She was. She was, even if miseries that had for so long lain half-frozen in her were suddenly rushing in quickly released streams.

  “My mother died last April, Ray.”

  He had suffered, and not even that had got through to her.

  “Walter, dear Walter.”

  “Curious thing about that, Ray. I always wanted you to know Mother.”

  He could actually say that, apparently without knowledge that he was twisting her pain.

  “I wanted to know her, Walter.”

  “My wife’s parents died within two weeks of each other two years ago.”

  So he had been through death and birth, and by now was in the sinew of settled manhood! They, he and Corinne, had the ropy, fibrous tightening-bond between them of private sorrows and the private ecstasies. Life, death, birth. Maturity was part of his general thickening. His fingers with the square tips. His polished, squared-toed shoes. His face, now that the cheeks were heavier, seeming more four-square than of old. Solid, substantial. A banker. The un-Jewish-looking Jew, already something moneyed about him. The acceptance and solidity with which he said “my wife.” Even while it smote her, and excluded her, the solidity, as always, wrung her admiration.

  “You have been through a great deal, Walter.”

  “Good and bad, Ray. And you?”

  Her lips began to slip away from their firm tension, and she hauled them, with all her strength, back to where she could feel them smile.

  “Same old Ray, I guess, Walter. Working along, living along, playing along best I can.”

  Something of tenderness came out in his face, in a way she knew by heart, almost as if she could have touched each lineament of expression, before it lighted up.

  “I’ve missed you, Ray,” he said, as if realizing it as they stood there.

  She was conscious of her lips again and her will to keep them firm.

  “And I’ve missed you, Walter. I mean—missed the way we used to have of talking over every little thing that happened. I’m like that. I like to listen to every little thing about a person—in his business—in general.”

  What nonsense this, and yet her lips talked on.

  “That’s true, Ray. You were always a good listener. Flatters a fellow like the dickens to be listened to. Remember the day I thought they were going to bounce me at the bank because I honored a power-of-attorney check for eleven hundred dollars after the power had lapsed?”

  Did she! They had sat four hours in the C. H. and D. waiting room, while he let the last Hamilton train pull out, discussing his dilemma. She had gone home at three in the morning, leaving him to snatch sleep on the hard bench of the smoky station, and they had met again at breakfast to devise a way to cover up his predicament. Did she remember!

  They stood for an hour, tearing apart the obscuring years, and Walter reconstructing, step-by-step, the processes that had brought him east.

  “My wife’s mother’s brother is Felix-Arnold Friedlander, of the firm of Friedlander-Kunz, you know that of course?”

  Oh no, she didn’t know that! But what she said was, “Is that so?”

  “Reason they never took Aaron Trauer into the banking house was because he not only preferred his own town and his own little business, but he just out-and-out wasn’t cut out for anything else. They look on me as young blood, you see.”

  Her eyes ached with the years of seeing.

  “Well, anyway, seems there has always been an agreement between Felix-Arnold Friedlander and his partner Kunz, never to force an issue in order to favor a relative. Most conservative pair of fellows you ever saw! But when one of the junior partners was sent to Berlin to open a branch there, that seemed to constitute an opening that was part of the ordinary course of events, and so they sent for me.”

  “Walter, you will go far.”

  He would! There might be nothing of the genius of industry or high finance about Walter, but he would carry on, with munificence and a certain oriental magnificence, the traditions of so stately a house as Friedlander-Kunz. He would be a banker in whom were vested trust and respect. He would further stabilize the solidity and stolidity of the house of Friedlander-Kunz with faithful and imitative purpose. Friedlander-Kunz had long been conspicuous in foreign loans of one nature and another. Who knows? He, Walter, might even come to have an occasional finger in the international pie and consort with diplomats upon the spending money of empires!

  Walter, with his charming, gregarious manner, his inborn unction, his rather shrewd capacity to withhold a decision until just the inevitably right moment—his well-oiled mathematical bent of mind—coupled with all the ready-made power of banking paraphernalia behind him, would, in the eventuality of succession, carry firmly forward.

  This much, without her being able to formulate it in words, she knew irrevocably about Walter. As they stood in the violet-and-mauve dusk that began to wind itself against the doors and windows of Wall Street, his talk with her grew lambent, more revealing, more confidentially a résumé of the past since they had met. The business ramifications of his life, since marriage. The crucial occasion of the summons to New York. The present delicate and difficult years of adjustments. The complicated fabric of international banking.

  Her own elementary mathematical instinct made his talk comprehensible. Her self-taught facility in bookkeeping was the result of a talent. For years she had kept her father’s books, and Kurt’s, and part of the neighborly willingness to accommodate her with the telephone service during the Baymiller days, had been her reciprocal willingness to balance the corner grocer’s books for him every month. Even where she could not fully comprehend, she could be intellig
ently interested, and Walter, feeling himself heeded, let expansion take place that carried him back to the days when, for hours on end, with her capacity for interest in his affairs, she could listen without interruption.

  “It’s getting chilly standing here this way, Ray. Couldn’t we, for old time’s sake, step into Procter’s for a bite of dinner?”

  That she was being waited for, in an office of one of Wall Street’s new fifteen-story skyscrapers, by a broker who was to take her to Lüchow’s, did not even occur to her. What did occur to her must have flashed into her face, because he said hastily:

  “I often telephone home not to wait dinner when I am detained. Will you come? It’s been so long since we have had a talk. I feel the need of it, Ray.”

  Standing there, it came over her with finality what she knew to be her inability to deny him.

  21

  The coming together of Ray Schmidt and Walter Saxel was something so gradual, so innocent of scheme or plan, that its course was unmarked by the concrete incident of reaching their conclusion.

  It was impossible, looking back, for Ray to determine exactly when she reached her decision to leave Blamey’s, where she had spent six years of her life in New York. More than that, it was even difficult to go back over those conversations with Walter that had dwelt upon the feasibility of a flat.

  Certainly there was in Ray, the day, some two months following the encounter, as she rode in a cab, holding on to hatboxes and minor baggage, consciousness that, in traversing the short distance from West Twenty-third Street to the redbrick apartment house on Broadway near Fifty-third Street, she was crossing the vast steppes which separate respectability from démodé. But not in the sense of any overpowering realization that she was burning bridges after her.

  There had never been an instant, in the years intervening between that first meeting in front of the C. H. and D. and this sharp transition in her life brought about by the step she was now taking, that subconsciously she had not been prepared to do, not necessarily this, but whatever was wanted or desired by the one human being in the world whose wish was her law.

  Even back in the Cincinnati days, Walter, she now realized, could have had this for the asking. This, or less, or more: everything, or, as he had chosen to decide, nothing. As he would; then, as now. In fact, she caught herself thinking, one day, in the solitude to which she was to become so inured, “It is sweeter this way.” In almost any other relationship, she would have given him less. Her isolation into a corner of his life was to become more complete as affairs between them became more and more clandestine. This way, it was all or nothing. Yes, it was sweeter.…

  Here was a situation that unfolded itself not by machination, but as naturally as a flower unfolds itself.

  The talk about the flat had been scrappy, and chiefly, when he began to find it difficult to determine upon places for them to meet or dine, in order that their presence would not seem repetitious or conspicuous, as a means to an end. Indecision, doubts of her which had so characterized their early days, seemed to have vanished, because he said to her so simply that her heart did not even quicken by a beat: “Ray, this can’t go on. The time has come for us to have a place of our own, where I can come without all this scheming.”

  “Yes, Walter.”

  “We need a flat. Some place where I know we can be quiet and alone. This kind of thing cannot go on without becoming conspicuous, even in a city like this.”

  “I’ve thought of that. You have so much to consider.”

  “I want you to feel about all this, Ray, as a Frenchwoman would feel about it. The time has come for us to call a spade a spade. My feeling for you and my feeling for my wife and children are things separate and apart. I can be loyal to both these feelings, because they are so different.”

  Should she despise him for that? The thought rushed to her that now was the last instant of her last opportunity to keep her life her intact own. To refuse to become part of an active disloyalty to the wife of a man who coveted and was coveted in return. To refuse to become the mistress of a man who took pains to establish this wife’s footing, on the very eve of her surrender to his convenience.

  There was yet time; but so fleeting was the hesitancy that her next question was acquiescence.

  “Shall you find the—place—the flat—Walter?”

  “Yes.”

  It was better that way. The talk of money would have been abominable to her. What he could afford, or what he could not afford, was sure to be equally right.

  What he chose was a three-room apartment on the third floor of a large, five-story, redbrick building on Broadway, not remote from the beginnings of Central Park. It was a rear flat, and the bathroom and bedroom, looking into a narrow airshaft, required gaslight burning in them all day. But the large living room and full-sized kitchen facing the backs of buildings of a parallel street, Seventh Avenue, were filled with morning sunshine and remained bright into late afternoon. Offhand, it was the sort of apartment house that, externally at least, seemed far too pretentious for the modest rear flats that were tucked into it. But apparently those facing Broadway justified the heavily embossed pressed-leather foyer-walls, solemn walnut stairways with a plaster Nubian slave on the newel post thrusting up a gas torch in a red glass globe. They were of ten and twelve rooms, built railroad-fashion along a narrow hallway that shot the entire length of the flat, and rented for as high as sixty dollars a month.

  Into her small rear one, furnished in what Walter had apparently chosen en suite, Ray fitted with the close adjustment of a bit of fungus to its wall. Snugly and immediately it became home to her, the first premises that had ever allowed her the full privacy of a kitchen in which to putter unrestrictedly. There was a parlor set, consisting of five pieces, mahogany with freckled cinnamon-plush upholstery edged in ball-fringe, a substantial five-piece mission bedroom set, of walnut, with a fine clear mirror in the wardrobe-door, taboret, dresser and washstand and Walter’s cunning afterthought of a “whatnot,” to say nothing of a Verni Martin curio-cabinet for the living room, into which would cram the tiny ivory carvings, filigree objects, porcelain dogs, cats, marsupials, carnivora, and minutiae of a sort that had always delighted her heart.

  It was dear of Walter to have remembered that Verni Martin cabinet. Bless him, he had stocked one of its mirror shelves with a tiny porcelain barnyard. Cow. Hen sitting in a nest of porcelain straw. Pig, all porcelain, with two suckling piggies. She had exclaimed first of all over these, on beholding her flat.

  Then, too, it had always been her desire to attach small gay tassels to the ends of the strings of window shades, and somehow in the house on Baymiller it might have incited people to laugh. Within a week, however, there they were, dangling from the end of every window shade in the flat; and such a litter of silver-framed photographs, fringed scarves, crocheted tidies on the backs of chairs, bisque and porcelain objects, hassocks, and the like, from her store of personal possessions, that mantels, tables, dresser, whatnot, and every conceivable plane surface, were promptly covered.

  There was a small bisque angel, attached by a bit of ribbon to the center chandelier of the living room, which was to dangle there in swimming position until, from proximity to the gas jet, its pale little thighs took on a sootiness that would not scrub off.

  Immediately this flat became to Ray her kennel; her business days little more than long, chilly intervals between leaving and returning, evenings, laden with foods, commodities, thumbtacks, screening, meat grinder, toothbrush-rack, cushion tops, tidies, and luxuries for the larder.

  At once there developed in her, full-blown, out of the Zeus of past experiences, a talent for cookery, garnered from long years of memories of the house on Baymiller Street, abetted by the many times she herself had assisted her father or Tagenhorst at the huge old range; and, strangely enough, memories of the many succulent German and Austrian dishes that had been served to her in Vine Street food-palaces, lingered so poignantly against her palate, that she was able to
reproduce them. Gedämpfte Rindbrust. Nothing more than the right cut of pot roast, eye-of-the-round, properly managed in a Dutch oven. The Dutch oven to be bought at Macy’s for six dollars. Cheese Kuchen. A matter of obtaining the proper pot cheese (a journey to the Jewish district would ensure that) and baking with a proper degree of oven heat. Walter’s capacity for cheese Kuchen, she used to joke him, was beyond the output of so small a kitchen as theirs. Lamb stew with spätzle. A matter of dropping the dough from the spoon with just the proper turn of the wrist. Dill pickles. Soaking the green cucumbers in a stone crock under vine-leaves that you journeyed to Spuyten Duyvil to gather. No housewife on Baymiller ever brewed tastier.

  Homey foods that her hand had the knack of keeping delicate for Walter, whose tendency to overindulge in certain dishes to his liking, had not diminished with the years.

  Their very first dinner in her flat, the table was spread with a completeness that was more and more to characterize it. Polished silver and well-filled cruets. Heavy silence cloth, covered with a weighty damask that had been among her possessions from home. Lace mats and tidies. She could crochet rapidly, as she talked, loved the small addenda of the doily and the tidy, using them in profusion against the backs of chairs and beneath small objects.

  And so, almost overnight as it were, this abode took on a lived-in aspect, even in that early period when the place stood dead silent all day long during her absence at business; and the evenings, except the one or possibly two in the week he managed to spend there, were solitary, except for the incredible number of the chores of house-primping she could cram into them.

  And Walter liked it. Immediately it assumed for him something of a Hamilton interior. Its smell of good spiced foods lurking in portieres and plushes was part of the lived-in atmosphere, where cookery was sure to be of the best ingredients, and where you could stretch yourself out in a Morris chair that was designed according to the most relaxed lines of the human body, and where you could be a little gross in the things you wanted. If you happened to want, without employing any of the finesse necessary to coax down inhibitions in Corinne, in whom sex impulses were languid, to take Ray, she came as if the latent ecstasy pressing against the warm walls of her being were only awaiting release which he could make exquisite. She came to one on the high tide, relaxed and indescribably pliant. Supple, almost overpowering in the completeness of her surrender.