Back STreet

by Fannie Hurst

  Funny thing about this Ray. A sweetheart strung like a harp that plays to the wind, and withal a woman so slightly and rightly gross! Amenable, even though not always amused, to the slightly soiled story; a woman not easy to offend, who could lie in his arms, her eyes drugged with his nearness, and yet, the next instant, turn around and prepare a dish of pig-knuckles and sauerkraut to what Walter described as the queen’s taste, provided the queen be of delicate taste. One could dare be himself in that flat.

  It was the same with Ray. Almost incredible, to herself most of all, was the rapidity with which her interests narrowed to the interests of this flat. Even on those evenings she did not see Walter—and these were sometimes five and six, had been known to be seven in the week—there was not only occasion and obligation to be home, there was desire.

  Walter had installed a telephone. That was lovely. It hung against the wall in the entrance foyer, and on one or two occasions had been ringing as she unlocked her door. It was like a voice screaming for her presence, and she liked it.

  It seemed to her that somehow the men she had been in the habit of meeting after work hours for the divertissements of the evenings must have sensed what was what. Actually they did not, but what they did sense, with the quick antennae of ego, was her new and inner indifference. It was easy to drop out of the rigmarole of being a business girl who was not averse to the attentions of men who could show her a good time. One refusal, two, almost surely three, were sufficient to scratch her off lists that were as washable as the little silver-and-celluloid memorandum pad she wore jangling from her belt along with a chatelaine of other trinkets.

  One or two of the older men with whom she had been in the habit of going to comic operas and cafés looked askance at her second and third refusals, and a stockbroker on Nassau Street asked her outright, over the telephone, if her sailor lover had come home. But within the month that tempest in the demitasse of her affairs had died down. Without comment, even from the office force or the men and girls with whom she was thrown in close contact at Ledbetter and Scape, she was free to go home, to walls that enclosed her like the grateful folds of a shawl, there to putter, there to adjust, and, most of all, there to wait. If, during the long, quiet evening, the telephone against the wall crowed, there was the invariable thrill of jumping to its mouthpiece. If it did not, well, you knew that it was one of those evenings devoted to Corinne or social interests, and that there was tomorrow, and if not tomorrow then the day following, or the day following that. Even when a week elapsed and he did not come, there was seldom more than a day or two that he let pass without telephoning.

  Once, when she was unlocking her door at evening, frantic, what with her hands filled with small packages, to get to the telephone before it stopped ringing, there was no one at the other end of the wire when she finally did reach the instrument, and a despondency, out of all proportion to the mishap, flooded her.

  She would never have ventured the misdemeanor of telephoning him, either at his business during or after hours, or at his home—one of a row of new brownstone houses on Lexington Avenue. So that it was with a sick sense of disappointment, finally overflowing into tears, that for two hours thereafter she sat moping beside an instrument that would not ring again.

  About eleven, Walter, equally disgruntled and off even keel, put in an appearance at the flat.

  That was the evening, what with her tears and his own sense of disharmony induced by the trifling event, that Walter suggested she give up her position at Ledbetter and Scape.

  “I want to feel that you are here when I want you. It helps me to talk things out with you. That’s why it upset me this evening, when you didn’t answer the telephone. Needed to talk over that project of the Jersey City Trust Company with you. Helps me. I need you, dear, on call.”

  There was never any more to it than that. It came as a shock to her; it came as something more than that. It meant the cutting loose of the last tie that bound her to a busy outside world, of which she had always been a gay part. It meant—sitting there opposite Walter that evening, pouring him cup after cup of coffee of rich brew she knew how to prepare in a pot to which she applied a cheesecloth drip-bag—it meant—well, it meant cutting away from under her the business ground upon which her feet had so long stood.

  “I’ve been a business girl for fifteen years, Walter.”

  “And now your business is me, Ray. I need you.”

  The suffusing sweetness of that was almost more than she could bear.

  22

  It had always seemed, in the days when she had dared to let her mind wander to the possibility of life with Walter, that nothing of a character that was not part and parcel of ecstasy could ever get at her again. With him, even the dull day would be lived on a singing plane.

  Nothing of the sort. The ecstasy was there, all right. She would dawdle through her morning chores, singing and pausing to smile back to herself in the large gilt mirror, or sit sewing with her lips lifted. The incredible change had come so credibly. It had all been so quiet. No doubts, fears, sense of the forbidden. Not even the pang of terror where thoughts of Corinne were concerned, or much awareness of that sure passing over into a world admittedly demimondaine.

  The first night with him was like feeling her body become the life stream upon the secure bosom of which he could lie blessedly safe and secure. They were elements bound tightly in the wonder of blending so perfectly. With his head at her bare breast, there could never be anything so extraneous and unintimate as modesty or shyness or doubt or unfulfilment again. There were no words now needed to be spoken. The light of the perfection of the understanding between them had been kindled at the altar of that first night.

  But a few nights following, drawing down her stocking to minister to a large, throbbing water blister on her heel, rubbed there by a badly fitting shoe, she said to him:

  “It is wonderful that I never need be afraid anymore of ever revealing to you an ugliness about me. We are one, Walter.”

  He looked at her without flushing. “One,” he repeated, after a pause so imperceptible as to be perceptible only to her.

  The thought of Corinne was to begin to lie at the bottom of a pool of silence between them, seldom stirred, seldom causing turgid waters.

  Trifles happened from the very first. The iceman, calling up the dumbwaiter, demanded to know if she wished her weekly bill made out to Miss or Mrs. “To Miss—no, no, Mrs.!” Mrs., of course! The vacillation had been a slip, causing the iceman to grunt his laugh in a way that was pretty bad to have to hear. “Mrs.” it must be from now on. Mrs. What? Mrs. Schmidt. What did it matter, so long as indubitably, past redemption, past change, past anything that could ever happen, she was Mrs. to him? And so, “Mrs. Schmidt” read the name on the bell plate. He laughed when he saw it, without self-consciousness or sensitiveness.

  “That will make it easier,” he said.

  She wanted him to be tender over it and hold her closely when the precious implication of the “Mrs.” sank in. When he did not, her tenderness flowed out just the same. She was “Mrs.” all right. To him.

  And so, rapidly, the trifles grew that cemented the newness of the situation into accepted fact. Before she realized it, life had taken on its new routine—a slow-paced routine, which, far from keeping her pitched to the state that would have seemed to coincide with her heart’s delight, kept her somehow a little doused, as it were. Humbly quiet. Content to sit at sedentary tasks, while the great slow tick of a cuckoo clock she had coveted and bought herself, interspersed with the ticks of smaller clocks, made little dins against the silence. Content to sit looking out over the back roofs and the back windows and windowsill milk bottles, while rain drizzled or sunlight slid along the sooty walls. The days were each like a warm bath from which she was reluctant to emerge, lying back in them, as if, with the eyes closed, and the mind and body relaxed, it were enough just to wait. To wait for the ringing of the telephone in the entrance hall.

  Even on the days wh
en he did not come at all, or on those rarer ones when the telephone did not even ring, there was no disappointment connected with the waiting. The pattern of Walter’s time was fairly well-defined. He came on those evenings when to absent himself from home seemed most natural. Sometimes, because of conditions into which she never pried, it was nine o’clock before he arrived for dinner. She had a self-devised system for keeping the food hot, by means of immersing the pots and pans in boiling water. But always on the eve of a pending banking problem, Walter came. Strange too. She said relatively little as he talked—thought out loud, as he was fond of putting it—listening as always with an adoring attention, but slow to advise. He liked that. The word or two, the phrase from her that might steer his course just as surely as if she had spoken her thoughts, did not seem advice to him.

  A woman across the hall, named Hattie Dixon (and it is strange how under such circumstances there almost invariably develops a blonde woman across the hall), used to visit in and out during the long days; nor was Ray above a dash or two a day across the hall to the poisonously gilt-and-saffron flat of Hattie Dixon. Hattie, who was forty, but still striking in a bold Spanish sort of way, used openly to quiz Ray about the financial status of Walter.

  “Is your friend well-off?”

  “I guess he is.”

  “You guess? Don’t you know?”

  As a matter of fact Ray did not. It was a subject that had never come up for discussion between them. But more and more, it was being borne in upon Ray that, despite a modest, highly conservative hand to the purse strings where she was concerned, Walter, while his position in the banking house was still the rather nonclas-sifiable one of junior partner, was not only permitted, but expected to sit in on various types of negotiation which it was assumed he would ultimately have to meet as official.

  Obviously, already, Walter had begun to lay the foundations, in a small way, of a fortune. The quite handsome house in Lexington Avenue testified to that. Ray would still walk out of her way to look at a house occupied by Corinne. This was a narrow brownstone structure, with a high stoop, windows handsomely crisscrossed in net curtains, with small iron balconies across the sills. Once again, the shoulder of handsome upholstery showed between the curtains; and, on one occasion, as she had been passing on the opposite side of the street, there descended the stoop the slightly heavier but still blondely pretty figure of Corinne herself. It was winter, and her hands were tucked primly into a rug-shaped moleskin muff, and the rear of her handsome moleskin dolman, fringed in chenille, fitted her to perfection. Mounted on her face veil, just at the edge of her lip, a large black chenille dot, the size of a dime, enhanced her fairness. A pretty little peafowl of a matron. Snug. Right. Tight. Curious that, viewing her, little of the anomaly of her position smote Ray. Corinne was someone to regard wistfully, from a distance.

  No great sense of social misdemeanor smote Ray. She would have given much, of course, to feel free of the furtive poaching sense of theft on another’s preserves, but Corinne’s was the place in the sun of the victor. She had him in the secure, normal, protected fashion that she would always have everything. Ray’s position on the edge did not intrude into that security, except in the sense of—that was the part you did not permit yourself to think about! No denying that in literal interpretation Walter was being unfaithful. That was terrible. That was wrong—of them both. And yet, if the edge that you shaved off the pie before you put it into the oven were sufficient to keep another spirit alive! That spirit was Ray, living on leavings; on crumbs from the rich Corinne’s table, exulting on leavings, with no point of view except the makeshift one engendered by her yearnings and her spiritual and bodily hunger.

  That busy little matron, hurrying along Lexington Avenue in her modish furs, her children, her servants, her household, her security, back in the brownstone-front, was being cheated with every step she took. There was no argument against that, just the sickening knowledge that it was true, and that perhaps that very evening, liaison with her husband would take place in a homely little flat on Broadway. And yet for the life of her, admitting all this self-loathingly, it seemed to Ray so indubitable, so indubitable, that what Walter gave to Corinne was in no way lessened by what Walter gave to Ray. Shameful self-justification, of course, but a man could care for two women at the same time. The husband and father in Walter was Corinne’s. His first loyalties were hers. There would be no hesitancy in his choice between them. The mother of his children, the banner-bearer of his respectability, his success, his stability. That handsome moleskin wrap was a banner to his success. Every aspect of his polite life was bound up in Corinne. She had rights—property rights, legal rights, moral rights, ethical rights. The woman in the flat, content with the leavings, walking surreptitiously behind the moleskin wrap, was not a menace to this security. Not even to the well-being.

  According to certain established precedent it was the woman in the flat should have been shrouded in mole, instead of in the plain home-tailored jacket. Not Walter! No lavish hand where Ray was concerned. Even while often she wondered and sometimes resented, it was the way she preferred, helping somewhat to alleviate the out-and-out sting of the anomaly of her position as mistress.

  It was imperative to find some sort of philosophy to help reason out to herself her lack of sense of horror at what was happening. Spiritually, a woman must be a poor thing not to feel revolted at the predicament of being mistress to another woman’s husband—and that husband the father of small children. She wanted to experience spiritual nausea at her dilemma, and yet, all the while, it was next to impossible not to go through the days to a singing of the heart such as she had never known. Never known? Why, never even conceived! That was how the days, those first few years, spread themselves out in a fan of delight. The delight of that first little clearing of its throat, before the telephone rang. The delight of filling her flat with the kind of small inexpensive objects in which she reveled. The delight of shopping for the kinds of food that were warming to Walter’s palate. Even the delight of the long hours indoors, while sunshine and the comings and goings of people who were not living surreptitiously, flooded the street scene.

  This, then, the old Ray, with her gaiety undiminished, but her desire for its more palpable forms of the theater, the racetrack, the restaurant, practically vanished. On a few occasions, such as Walter’s absence from the city on a business trip or on a sojourn with his family, she had lunched at the large hotels, attended horse races, or an occasional theater with Hattie Dixon; but the fact remained that, over a period of three years, she had not ventured out of her flat for more than two or three consecutive hours, and then only at long intervals. The ever-impending contingency of that telephone bell!

  The appearance of a slight but persistent bronchial cough that threatened to become chronic, precipitated the rigor of this régime. The old physician who occupied a neighboring apartment diagnosed her complaint as one induced, partially at least, by lack of fresh air and exercise, and prescribed at least four hours daily out-of-doors.

  To Ray, who had a horror of even a slight indisposition, and who had never permitted Walter to suspect the sleepless nights occasioned by the cough, there was something peremptory in the old doctor’s dictate. A sickly woman would be an abomination to Walter!

  When she suggested to him that he try and arrange his telephone calls and visits in some sort of pattern, so as to allow her more freedom of action, there was such genuine bewilderment and rueful surprise in his face that she caught his cheeks in her hands, and declared, between kisses, that she did not mean one word of it.

  “Why, good Lord, Ray, I never thought of that. You’ve been tied down here like a slave.”

  “I have loved it, Walter. It’s just that I’m beginning to think that if I don’t get out a little bit more I’ll turn into a fat bronchial old lady and you’ll hate me.”

  “I never want you to stay in on my account again,” he said, and lied.

  “Why, Walter, I wish I hadn’t mention
ed it, if you’re going to take it like that.”

  “I’m glad you mentioned it. Trouble is, I can never tell ahead just what days I can get here for lunch. Uncle Felix is getting so that he likes to have me sit in on lunch-conferences. As for the other, well, you know the situation on Lexington Avenue.”

  Did she! She knew it by heart, by rote, by day, by night. The holidays of Pesach and Rosh Hashanah, when the family foregathered. The days Corinne lunched at the Bankers’ Club with her husband and Uncle Felix. The Saturday-afternoon drives Walter took with his children in a large basket-phaeton drawn by Shetlands. The birthday celebrations of each and every member of the family. Corinne’s birthday dinner. Walter’s. Little Richard’s. Baby Irma’s.

  On Felix-Arnold Friedlander’s birthday, the family dined at the Harmonie Club. On Yom Kippur they dined at his Fifth Avenue home. There were certain calendar dates like these that could be definitely foreseen. Those were the days of matinée, theater, or races, with Hattie Dixon, or if Hattie’s “friend” happened to be in town, there were one or two of the other “girls,” in the building, whom she had come to know.

  “Tell you what I’m going to do, Ray! I’m going to make it my business to try and let you know by eleven every morning what my plans are for the day. No use your sitting here like a bump on a log all day long, waiting. Funny thing now, I never thought of that, and you goose,” he said, and kissed her, “wouldn’t speak up if it killed you.”

  The thought that flooded her as she sat there with the constricting bronchial pains in her chest, was how unselfish, after all, he was; and if possible her tenderness to him became tenderer, and she began her favorite habit of kissing his fingers, one by one, and then beginning all over again, and placing each finger that had been kissed, against his lips, and without ever seeming to feel foolish, he would kiss off her kisses.