Back STreet

by Fannie Hurst

  Sometimes it smote her with a full blast of grim satire, how usual, compared to the vast sweep of hers for him, must be his feelings toward her. There was so much, according to the very nature of things, that he could never understand, any more than you could pour a quart of affection into a pint.

  Doubtless, even now, as she sat there in the midst of an arid desolation that scorched her spirit, he was innocent. How could he suffer, who did not first feel? He loved her according to the pint of measurement, while she, Heaven help her, as she was fond of saying to herself, was cursed with an absorption that was as blinding as it was blind.

  Not much doubt about it, Walter was deep in affairs that consumed him. Walter, with her memory perhaps lying snugly in his brain, sometimes no doubt even hankering for her, needing her, was innocent of his lapse of thus leaving her high and dry without funds. The capacity was not in him to reach out with his sensitiveness to her plight.

  Never generous with her, he was, nonetheless, within his reach, considerate enough of her welfare. What was happening to her would have been terrible to him. Not so terrible though—that she knew—as it was to her, sitting there in the thin wrapper that she had thrust off her back to be free of its contact in the heat, her hands empty in her lap, her knees wide, eyes lusterless, and, most fantastic of all, larder and purse bare of wherewithal.

  The need of action smote her dully, as through blanketed perceptions. The thing to do, of course, while she was gathering her senses for action, was to raise money by pawning what she had that was realizable. By that time, no doubt, consciousness of his oversight would strike Walter like a bolt. There would be cables. There must be cables. Even without the need for precaution which had been ground into her, it would never have occurred to her to write. His word was law. Once or twice she found herself passing the sealed and shuttered house on Lexington Avenue, but even that in some way suggested to her the forbidden, now that he was out of the country and away from knowledge of her movements. He would not like her skulking that way. It struck her that there might even be indiscretion in pawning the few negotiable gifts he had made her. That, she came to realize, was nonsense. At a broker’s on Sixth Avenue she raised eighty dollars on a gold watch and fleur-de-lis brooch set in garnets, the souvenir spoons, and an opal ring, her birthstone. It seemed to her, with two months out of Walter’s three passed by now, that she could manage on that until his return.

  How appalled he would be when he knew! In a way, all this horror was, one of these days, going to be worth what she had gone through. His gray eyes would pour pain for the pain he had caused her. He would hold her in the long, silent way she loved, and his compassion would stamp itself against her own heartbeat. Meanwhile, one must live!

  In August, despite a schedule of life that for her was frugal, the situation again threatened to become acute. Freda was once more with child. Hugo had lost his position with the gas company, and there was talk of moving back to Cincinnati, where his old situation as meter reader there might be regained. It cost Ray a pang of fear, reading that letter one morning as she lay too supine to rise to the heat of the day, to enclose a ten-dollar bill in an envelope. What if Walter should not return on schedule! The twelve dollars that remained in her purse was ample for the intervening week that lapsed until the estimated date of his landing, but then came the rent again, with the back months due, the eighty dollars depleted, and again there rose the specter of that flabby horror of an object, her flattened purse.

  For the first time, lying there day after day, half prostrated from the gummy heat, the grinding noise of streetcars, the humidity of her overstuffed interior, the idea came to Ray, businesswoman, to venture back into that maelstrom from which years before she had so precipitately withdrawn.

  Hattie, who, by the way, had bought ten souvenir cups and saucers of her, each with the name of a different friend painted in gold and baked in the china, had finally gone off on a Canadian holiday with her friend from Buffalo. With this last exodus, the flat building with its embalmed-smelling corridors, was as a tomb. The asphalt streets, when she ventured out into them, swam in the heat, and gave like rubber under her feet, adding to the vertiginous effect of August.

  It was out into this world, what with Walter already weeks overdue, and Kinley so little the man he had been that when she once more asked for extension he had at last uttered the threat, that there ventured, in immaculate white duck suiting and short-backed sailor with a glass-eyed bird, the timorous figure of Miss Ray Schmidt.

  Perhaps it was the timorousness that mitigated so mercilessly against her. Ledbetter and Scape, she learned at once, had gone out of existence; and a firm, in the same building, with which she had done business in the Cincinnati days, had changed entire personnel and gave her scant audience.

  It seemed to her that she was like a typhoid patient trying to get back her strength. To think, that of this strange world out here she had once been a vigorous and interested part! She must get back her legs, learn to walk in these regions again. Back in this clanging, interested universe of comings and goings, lurked a Ray Schmidt who was as mysterious to her as if she were observing her own yesteryear’s image embalmed in a mirror.

  The first day almost exhausted her. To creep back to her flat that had his robe on the bathroom door and his slippers in the cretonne shoebag, was the grateful experience of a tired dog finding his kennel. Before the tomorrow of starting out again, there intervened the long, secure night. Perhaps, before that tomorrow broke, some ship, not scheduled, would bear him to dock.

  The thought of telephoning the bank, which had for weeks been hitting her with recurring, hammering insistence, made the instrument hanging on the vestibule wall seem to dominate the flat. Wires emanating from that little yellow box connected her with a source of information. An anonymous voice asking, “When do you expect Mr. Walter Saxel?”

  What possible harm? What possible danger? Or she might even creep out to a corner telephone. Like a drunkard restraining his thirst, she did not. Walter would hate it. Silly of him. As if there were watchful detective-like figures lurking to overhear that particular telephone call. And just suppose there were! Then what? What possible harm could come out of slaking her torment with a scrap of information concerning the date of his return? However, she did not.

  The thought came to her one day that it might not be difficult to obtain a salesladyship at one of the large department stores like Wanamaker’s, Stern’s, or Lord and Taylor’s. Time and time again, in the old days, she had helped out evenings during the Christmas rush of various Cincinnati stores, and on several Christmas Eves had gone up to Hamilton to assist in Felsenthal’s shoe store. She was an efficient saleswoman, with a natural enthusiasm for merchandising. It is possible that the idea might have been more feasible at another time of year. But in August, the ebb tide of all four seasons, her applications were not even considered. Then there was another occupation that had always attracted her interest: that of the women cashiers at their desks in the smart hotel restaurants.

  One day, all decked out in the white duck, which she had immaculately laundered, she applied at the Waldorf Astoria, without so much as the knowledge that for such a position she must put forward a bond, to say nothing of a type of reference to which, outside of Walter, she had not the slightest access. Fortunately the matter never even reached those stages of discussion, because from her first word with the assistant manager who interviewed her, it became apparent that the Waldorf Astoria was not in need of cashiers.

  On her way out, as she passed Peacock Alley, an incident occurred that sent a quickened feeling rilling in her veins, and a flashing sense of the old days out over her. A robust, middle-aged man in an “ice cream suit” and flashy-looking shirt strolled over from where he had been lounging in one of the chairs, and held his straw cady in the crook of his arm as he spoke.

  “Beg pardon, but didn’t I meet you at a Knights of Columbus dance and clambake down Cape May last month?”

  Knights of Co
lumbus dance down Cape May? How well she recalled the device. Many a St. Nicholas and Burnet House dinner in the old days she had consumed on the acquaintanceship struck up on this sort of fake pretense.

  She regarded him and the quivering little places on his moist temples, which somehow always suggested to her a man who liked his beefsteak red, and, with distrust and annoyance apparent in her manner, murmured and passed on.

  Now why had she done that? What she needed was a bit of the old-time cheerio with someone as obviously innocuous as this traveling salesman. What was dead within her? What had come alive? Free of the obligation of wifehood, here she was scuttling away like an outraged matron. Besides, the phrase “clambake” had set the juices running along the sides of her mouth. A flashy, good-natured fellow like that would have been all for boarding a boat for Sheepshead Bay, a cooling ride to dinner by the sea.… Fool!

  It was midafternoon when she reached home, tired, hot, and hungry. The amount of her carfare, breaking into a dollar bill, reduced her purse to a flat object of a few coins, that you could flip as you would an empty glove.

  The incredible was happening again. Inevitably, it looked as if she were about face-to-face with what would this time amount to the crisic dilemma of another month’s rent. Kinley had given her to understand that. Three nights later, with an appetite for the rich concocted foods that had been fostered on German cookery, she sat herself down at the cleared end of her china-painting table for a meal that represented the expenditure of the last odds and ends of change left from the broken dollar that remained in her purse.

  She had read somewhere, probably in one of the Munsey’s or all-story magazines that were always lying about the flat, of a young woman faced with starvation, who had spent her last fifty cents on a bunch of Parma violets off a vender’s tray. It struck her as debonair. But she did not emulate the magazine young lady. With twenty out of her last twenty-five cents she purchased leberwurst, a loaf of rye bread, and a bottle of beer, sitting there alone in the hot dusk of her flat, munching her sausage sandwich, which she washed down with the beer, and staring with large wide-open dreaming eyes at the vast aura of silence around her telephone.

  Well, here it was again in all its fantastic horror. The dilemma of actually being faced with need for food. For two days there remained odds and ends about the flat. Soda crackers, condensed milk, fourth of a canister of coffee, end of leberwurst, a jar of maraschino cherries, the loaf of rye bread, sugar, tea, sufficient flour for a dish of spätzle. The spätzle with sausage would have made a meal tasty to her, but she ate them separately, in two meals. Chewing coffee-beans was slightly nauseous, but helped keep down appetite.

  Why, people were reduced to this on desert islands, but not within stone’s throw of delicatessen windows, where the tilted platters of boiled ham, tongue, cherries, and berries pressed their edible pink meats against plate glass. There was something obscene and terrible and private about sitting hungry in the midst of all this. Not that you were faced with actual starvation, with the negotiable furnishings of a flat all around you, but there were people about whom it was unthinkable that life should slip off the sure cog of stability. Ray was one. Something like the slow fire of anger began to burn.

  It was on Friday, cloudy, humid, lowering, after having passed twenty-four hours on tea, which she imbibed slowly and frequently through a lump of sugar held between the teeth, that she began to wrap into a neat bundle, with the intention of realizing upon it, if possible, at the same pawnshop which detained her watch, a silver-plated nut-bowl that had been her father’s.

  Strange, she afterward reiterated many times to herself, that what did happen should have come upon the moment of her doing this.

  A bolt out of the blue, or rather out of the sodden gray of a hot, sticky afternoon! To a ring at her bell, which she answered according to her cautious habit of inserting a toe into the aperture of the slightly opened door, there, in the gaslight, with the reflection shining against the glass, was a figure she recognized on the instant.

  “Why, Kurt Shendler!”

  “The girl is always right.”

  She flung open the door, and flew, in her panties, corset-cover, and open dimity kimono, into her bedroom, calling back over her shoulder: “Don’t look! I’ll be with you in a moment. Well, if you couldn’t knock me down with a feather!”

  It struck her, as she fumbled into a lace-flounced petticoat, that what she said was literally true of herself. You could knock her down with a feather. Of weakness.

  26

  Kurt had filled out, with even a threat of rotundity, but there was, to Ray at least, so much of his old gangling self intact, that he might have stepped out of his bicycle-repair loft, except that there was no longer the rim of carbon underneath his square white-rimmed nails, and Kurt’s serge suit, while not natty in the fashion that made Walter’s hang so well, was cut along the acceptable lines of the well-dressed average.

  It was difficult to hold back the tears that pressed at the back of her throat. Kurt, all agog with what to him was a visit, was in reality a visitation. He was succor from Heaven. Well, at least, if not directly from Heaven, from Cincinnati. It turned out not to be even that. Kurt, three years since, had moved to Detroit.

  “I tried every way to get my wedge into the hometown, Ray. You know me and my soft spot for old Cin-Cin, but she wouldn’t be receptive to the industry. Not an inducement for a factory to settle there. Mistake of the old town’s life to let a city like Detroit get us all, hook and bait. I’m in the automobile-part business, Ray. Manufacturing on a small scale in Detroit. Making parts for a firm called Ford.”

  “You always were interested in the horseless carriage, Kurt.”

  “Ten years from now it will be one of the big industries in this country. That’s what I think of it. Future all ahead of it.”

  “How in the world did you find me, Kurt?”

  “Easy. Met Freda Hanck on the street, in Youngstown, when I was there two weeks ago on business, and she gave me your address. She was taking her little girl to the clinic when I met her.”

  “Emma?”

  “Guess so. Sore eyes.”

  (Little Emma! That was terrible. Oh, that was terrible. Sure as anything, a letter would come now in a day or two—a needing letter.)

  “And Freda? Guess things aren’t going so good for Hugo. He was going to try moving back to Cincinnati, but last I heard he had his job back with the Youngstown gas company.”

  “I surmised as much. Freda looks right faded out. But you! Ray, I don’t believe you’ve changed a day.”

  She, upon whom time was resting like a pall, drew down her lids that her eyes might not reveal the desire for tears behind them. Changed a day! In the past months it seemed to her that each day had taken its toll from her vitality, precisely as it had taken its toll from her purse.

  “You think I’m looking well, Kurt?”

  “You’re looking immense. I’ve had many an up and down since I saw you last, Ray.”

  “But you’ve pulled out.”

  “Happy to say, yes. Not what you’d call on Easy Street yet, as the saying goes, but it looks like I’m getting around the corner toward it.”

  She placed an impulsive hand upon his knee. “Kurt, I’m mighty glad to hear that.”

  “I know you mean that when you say it. Why, Ray, I’ll wager with anybody in this town who will take me up, that in the next twenty-five years there will be almost as many automobiles in this country as horses.”

  “What ever became of that gasoline-bicycle patent you once bought up, Kurt?”

  He made the mock deprecatory gesture of warding off a blow.

  “Lost seventy-five hundred dollars on that in the end, Ray. But I wasn’t so stung as it appears on the surface. I just didn’t quite have the eyes to see that we had to skip that phase of development, because the automobile was already here. You mark my word, sister, fellows like this Ford, and Duryea, and Stearns, and Apperson, and that crowd, you mark my word,
there’s a row of fellows already setting pretty to make half a million dollars apiece. That’s why I jumped from my little old boat out in Cincinnati, when I saw it sinking, and climbed aboard this here Detroit lugger. Not saying the horse won’t always be the majority’s pick, but you mark my word, what’s coming in the way of big automobile business.”

  “I wish you everything good, Kurt.”

  “I know you do, Ray. That’s why the warm spot in my heart for you just won’t cool off.”

  “Married, Kurt?”

  “No. Guess you know where I stand on that. Freda tells me you’ve stayed single too. Wouldn’t exactly say that was bad news to me, but wasn’t that a ‘Mrs.’ on your bell-plate, as I came up, Ray?”

  What a lunk he continued to be! A matured lunk, with even some manner of prosperity and well-being to him, but a lunk he would remain, even if, as conceivable, he realized some of these dreams of business success.

  “It’s easier in New York, Kurt, to stick a ‘Mrs.’ on your bell-plate.”

  “I know what you mean. More security, eh?”

  (He knows what I mean. Don’t make me laugh. But he is nice, all right. Plain, decent, all-the-way-through nice.) His glasses left the same old bridge across his nose. That sore might open some day. And stay open. What an end for Kurt. He would go on and on in that nearsighted fashion of his, battling against the terrible odds of conditions so much bigger than he seemed to be, and perhaps out of his persistent flair for the mechanical and inventive, he might one day strike it! Quite conceivably Kurt would. And then one of these days that old bridge across his nose would turn into an open sore. Cancer! And eat slowly and terribly and greedily into Kurt and his prosperity and—oh, God, this was flightiness induced by heat—no, no, by hunger—it was the room swaying caused the mind to sway.

  “—same old busy business girl?”