Back STreet

by Fannie Hurst

  “—guess that’s what you would call it.”

  “—your sister Freda says—wholesale millinery house—”

  “—yes—now is my vacation—”

  “—good—want to see a whole lot of you—What about a good beefsteak-supper at that place down on Fourteenth Street they call Lüchow’s? Fellow took me there last night. And then a good show. Only here a week. Show me the town—”

  Good beefsteak. GOOD BEEFSTEAK. GOOD BEEFSTEAK.

  One didn’t cry. One daren’t cry. One mustn’t cry. The thing to do was to sit quietly, smile quietly, and say quietly something like, “That will be nice.” But what if one could not restrain the impulse to do something a little terribly insane? Grasp his hand and sink a tooth into one of his fingers. Oh, this madness! Heat-and-hunger madness. One must somehow trump up the clarity to say, “That would be nice.”

  “What do you say, Ray?”

  “That—would—be—nice—”

  And to think that sitting there in that stagnating afternoon—while heat moved into the room like slow pants from some crazed old dragon on a Chinese pagoda, and nothing but the wall of her flesh prevented her topsy-turvy sensation from spilling into shrieks and cries—he could sit there so insulated from her misery. The shock it was to even sit contemplating what it would have meant if Kurt had not come. To sit there another supperless, motionless evening, in a flat to which they had written her a third letter of threat of eviction, and turning off the gas. Dear Kurt. Good Kurt. Godsend Kurt.

  “—getting back to my hotel now. The Belmont. Meeting a fellow at six. Call for you round about seven. Biggest treat I’ve had, seeing you. Now you’ve got to keep them from pulling the hayseeds out of your country friend’s hair, and do a little seeing of this old New York with me. Seven is the hour. Me is the party, who will be on hand.”

  “Yes, Kurt.”

  Before she closed her hot eyelids, not three minutes after his departure, and fainted back onto the couch, it struck her how blissful it would be to swoon away, instead of wait away, the hours that intervened between that hot mid-afternoon and beefsteak dinner at seven.

  27

  It was difficult, crossing streets, climbing stairs, and doing the up-and-down things that gave license, to crowd back the impulse to clutch on to the sleeve of Kurt. That was wrong, because once or twice, by now, Kurt had given back warm little pressures, and it was not his sleeve that one was clutching. It was any sleeve. It was a tangible something to grasp, in a world where everything seemed in the act of falling away, like the objects on a table when you pull the cloth from under it.

  No question about it, something—after that first evening at Lüchow’s when she had had to hold on to herself in order not to commit the social and gastronomic error of giving rein to her ravenous impulse to bolt the rich, warming “man’s dinner”—had perched itself across Kurt’s face just as surely as his glasses were perched there.

  Heaven only knew, Kurt least of all, what had been in his mind when he looked her up. As he was to retell her, when the thing once more consciously had him in its clutch, it wasn’t that she had been consistently to the fore in his mind all these years. No point to pretend that. It was rather that in the interval he had never consciously or unconsciously thought of another woman in connection with his own life, except in terms of Ray Schmidt. Hope had lain dormant for so long, and now that same hope, feeble, was lifting its head. That, to Ray, was the sin of it. And yet, by very virtue of a week of evenings, dining at this hotel or restaurant—Waldorf, Astor House, Knickerbocker, Martin’s, Shanley’s, Brown’s Chop House, Jack’s—she encouraged that look, which was as specific as his spectacles, to gleam across his face.

  “Ray,” he said to her one evening at Shanley’s, where they were dining before going on to see Weber and Fields in a burlesque of “Du Barry” called “Du Hurry,” “I think I was a fool to give up so easy back there in Cincinnati when you threw me over. I think if I had made a fight for you, I’d at least have got your respect. Women are like that.”

  She was looking well in a big-sleeved dimity dress with cerise baby ribbon run through insertion, but for the hundredth time she wondered if, more subtly than she gave him credit for, Kurt was not somehow suspecting her of being in some sort of extremity. But no, not even the fact that she, whose generosity was a badge, had not once, in all the week, offered him the hospitality of her table, had apparently penetrated the immaculate simplicity that was Kurt’s.

  He was precisely what he seemed to be, a man to whom the fascination of one particular woman was irresistible, and who was eagerly, almost pathetically, attempting to get some sort of footing in her affection. What Kurt did not see, he did not query; and what Kurt saw was a beautiful, slightly matured, good-natured Ray, who helped him shop gifts for his sisters in Bellefontaine, Ohio, as tirelessly as in the old days she had squandered her time and her vitality upon his bookkeeping. Saw in her the same Ray as of old, only sifted over now with the slightly mysterious diamond-dust of a metropolitan quality.

  Same old good-natured, easygoing, up-and-ready Ray of the days of Over-the-Rhine, only older in a way that was strangely moving, and crammed to the very ends of her long narrow-tipped fingers with something that was everything to his desires.

  No, only that which Kurt saw literally with his eyes, did he actually behold. Beneath the surface of a situation so alien to his understanding that he could not have grasped it anyway, it never occurred to him to scratch.

  Ray, living in New York, enjoying her vacation from the millinery-and-trimmings firm, at home in a flat that, so far as his judgment told him, was the flat of any clever New York business girl, was just Ray. Oh, a little bold, some folks might take it, living alone that way, but not if you knew Ray as the boys back in Cincinnati had known Ray. Not if you knew Ray.

  Exposed once more to the aroma of a personality from which he had, in a measure, at least, been freed, it was a simple matter for the old headiness to return. After the third or fourth evening, the need of rescinding, in this nightly performance with Kurt—of withdrawing back into the terror of her predicament—impressed itself upon her.

  The chicanery to which that prospect reduced her was, even in the retrospect of years, to scorch her memory.

  There had been occasions, during these days with Kurt, when, against the prospect of the painful gnawing day ahead of her, she had slipped into the large beaded reticule she carried for the purpose, a roll off the dinner-table, a stalk of celery, a few olives, and, on one occasion, an orange and plum.

  That, it seemed to her, must represent the bottom of the abyss of her plight. But as the situation with Kurt wore its way more and more perilously to its peak, she found herself resorting to this: One evening after a performance of the Four Cohens in “The Governor’s Lady,” as they were having oyster-loaf and beer at a restaurant noted for this specialty, she clapped hands to her brow in the manner of one suddenly recalling an oversight.

  “Forget something, Ray?”

  His quick and right reaction made it easier.

  “I should say I did! Forgot to go down to the store after my money-envelope today, and tomorrow’s a Sunday, and Labor Day after that!”

  “Is that all?” he said, slapping his wallet-pocket. “Guess I can help you out on that, if you’re right good.”

  “I hate like everything to ask it, Kurt. But I like to pay my rent on the dot. I’m afraid I’ll have to strike you for a loan for over Sunday.”

  His kind, large-boned face broke with pleasure into a smile that revealed the long, yellowish teeth of his narrow jaws. He began pushing bills at her out of his well-filled wallet, his delight in this service so genuine that she could have cried for him.

  “Kurt, Kurt, not so much!”

  “Take plenty, Ray. It’s not good to be short on money over a couple of holidays.”

  “Think I will, Kurt, if you don’t mind. Fifty?”

  “Nonsense, take a hundred. I’m not afraid you’ll run away. Wish you
would, with me!”

  She lifted three twenty-dollar bills, pushing back the remaining ones.

  “Please, Ray, take eighty dollars, at least.”

  She crowded back his banknotes, in her hurry and anxiety to terminate the hatefulness of what she was doing.

  “This is plenty.”

  “Just doing a little old thing like this means a lot to me, Ray. Don’t be mean.”

  “I know, Kurt. You’re the best thing.”

  “Ray,” he said, leaning across the table, and much red diffusing his face, “does what you told me back there in the old days still hold, or is there a chance? Now, with us both considerably older—life being so short—if I had you, Ray, I’d be twice the man I am, trying to be half good enough for you. Guess you’re not of a mind to turn about-face on that turndown you gave me way back there?”

  “You mean—”

  “Ray, you’re not going to make me out-and-ask you all over again, are you?”

  “No, no, no.”

  “My sun just rises and sets in you, always has, always will. And there’s all there is to it.”

  “No, no, no. Please, Kurt.”

  “That—the way you feel about it still, Ray?”

  This, she said to herself, is the folly of unreal people in plays and books. This, she said to herself, is the equivalent of insanity. To sit here saying no, no, no, to Kurt, was to stamp herself with an act that, to one in her plight, bore no relation to rhyme or reason. To be incapable of any of the pride and resentments and outrage which Walter’s behavior toward her should so legitimately have engendered, was to own herself stricken with a fatal kind of folly. Here, before her eyes, was the same kind of security that was Corinne’s. Here it was! There it went!

  “—all right with me, of course, Ray. Seeing you again must have gone to my old head as well as to my heart. All right with me. Forget it.”

  This was insanity all right. The insanity of being glad, what with Kurt well on his way back to Detroit, that there was a tomorrow to face, which would be filled with the folly of continuing to wait for Walter.

  28

  The second morning following, which was Labor Day, after Kurt had taken the train, Ray, in a gingham apron, and her hair in a long, loose braid, was making jelly out of two pounds of blue grapes she had purchased at Charles’, her mind moving along, over the process of measuring sugar against grapejuice, almost as if someone outside herself were engaged in this small folly of making jelly.

  Walter liked grape jelly spread on his bread, as a small boy likes it. She had a trick of adding a touch of the spice of clove and mint, thereby achieving a tartness that was enormously palatable to him. As she sat over the simmering pan, that first morning in a long month of heated ones that carried not even a hint of autumn, a slight smile, like a crescent about to indulge in a sardonic droop, hovered along her face. It did not, however, achieve its threat of curve. The act of doing this close homey chore for Walter was not to be doused by any of the more knowing slants of her mind dancing in the heat lightning of anger, or a realization of the ridiculousness of her plight. There was something impregnable about the comfort of this act of making blue-grape jelly. It kept her from the mad feeling of wanting to cry out loud. It kept her from experiencing impulses to rush, tearing and preventing, down the railroad tracks after the train that, minute by minute, was carrying the security and the safety and the rightness of Kurt away from her growing loneliness and her growing fear.

  The Lusitania had docked at twelve the day before. She had not quite realized to what extent she had banked on the arrival of that boat. It had not seemed possible that sometime during the afternoon following the landing, the telephone would not crow to announce the voice of Walter.

  The ship had arrived on schedule; the hours following had moved on schedule; the grapes were jelling on schedule. Presently she would buckle up into corsets and street-clothes, venture around the block for her tiny supper provisions, return, unbuckle, light the gas, fry herself an egg and strip of bacon, pour the grease over some chopped cabbage to make coleslaw, drink her coffee with her eyes gazing above the cup toward that inanimate crow on the wall—that devilish inanimate crow on the wall—that silent terrible crow on the wall—that damned menacing dead crow—

  People went mad permitting black carrion-thoughts to wheel and circle thus in the brain.

  “Hayfoot, strawfoot,” she began to have a habit of saying to herself. “Hayfoot, strawfoot” was a rhythm to which you could make a bed, stir grape jelly, stitch a turnover to wear around the black-ribbon stock of shirtwaists. Hayfoot. Strawfoot.

  To allow herself to worry more and more about Freda’s little Emma helped too. Concentrating on the child, who must have watery, pale, astigmatic eyes, according to Kurt’s description of her, was more rousing than anything she could think of. The thing to do was to get away, begin over, take up the thread of the workaday life. And—perhaps—adopt Emma! The thing to do was to throw this nightmare off. Take hold, like a person recovering from a sickness. Get out of hell.

  Of course, in her heart, she knew that she could do nothing of the sort, and that just as surely as the blood was locked in her veins, so was her inertia to clear herself of this octopus of circumstance locked in her temperament.

  How right it would be—how well-deserved for Walter—to walk back into a flat that bore no trace of her. No little personal thing of her own. Only his sticks of wood. All there, waiting, empty, eloquent.

  As a matter of fact, after the pouring and the cooling and the sealing of the jelly, she did sit herself down to write to Freda. “Out of a position, for the time, but prospects. Eager to help with the problem of little Emma’s eyes. Write, Freda, and tell me everything. I am sure to be on my feet again in no time. Enclosed is a dollar bill for Emma. Please have her write me a nice little note.”

  It was toward the end of this letter that, without the preamble of telephone or doorbell, in walked, with his derby hat in his hand and a few raindrops glistering on his shoulders, the figure around which, from the first moment she had clapped eyes on it, her emotions had thundered and lightened.

  She had often, in contemplation, dreaded this moment for what she feared would happen. She would begin to cry terribly. Ugly, retching tears that should be reserved for privacy. He would dislike them and be cold toward them and no little repulsed, and whatever else she was to endure upon this return, it seemed to her that cold distaste at her exploding agony would be beyond her control to bear.

  There were no plans against this return, no scheme for the marshaling of her restraints, just this fear. The fear to cry. The fear to feel her naked, exposed face become the bare and rocky cliff down which the avalanche must plunge. She might have spared herself this dread. She rose, glad with the thought that her dotted-swiss wrapper was crisp, and that there was a bottle of beer on the ice.

  “Why, Walter,” she said, as he kissed her, “you’re wearing glasses!”

  The thought struck her that they were unpleasant. An obstacle to his nearness. Just three months, a week, and two days since he had sailed, and yet to her, who had kissed his eyes a hundred-hundred times, how changed and fenced-off he seemed, for the moment, in the shining gold-rimmed spectacles.

  He had the perspicacity to lift them off and embrace her again, holding her in a way that was dear to her, arm rigid against her waist, so that she could relax to the limit of the weight against it.

  There must have been a ship about which she had known nothing!

  “I came in on the Lusitania,” he said.

  A wave of the anger she had anticipated washed over her then. So he had come on the Lusitania, and now, almost twenty-four hours later, was the first she knew of it.

  He felt her stiffen.

  “I’ve thought of you every instant since, Ray, but it hasn’t been possible sooner. Richard has measles. Luckily the ship’s doctor didn’t pronounce it, or we would have had quarantine to contend with. He was pretty sick for several days, and of course h
is mother was in a state. It’s been serious.”

  “Oh, my poor boy—poor little Richard—my poor you!” The palms of her hands encased his cheeks while she held his face closer, pouring her sympathy into it. He looked tired, and already there was about his eyes the look of a man accustomed to glasses and deprived of them. She fitted them back. She dragged him to his chair. She began the routine of the countless small deeds that kept him clamped to the habit of needing her. He had been through bad times. Damn, damn, damn, that there should be suffering she had not shared with him. That was what made separation so cruel to bear. With all her sensitivity where he was concerned, Richard, apple of his eye, had sickened, and never once had her intuition telegraphed it to her. Silent months lay between them like a chasm. She wanted to leap them. She wanted the certainty, not the hope, that he was back into the enveloping security that had not budged with the months.

  “It’s good, Ray, to be back”—and he sighed out, like a man who means it.

  She was at her tricks. Bolstering him, quick with refreshment, pouring his beer in a fashion that pleased and amused him, miraculously to its peak, with not a bubble of foam overflowing, and then, collapsible as a traveling-cup, down she went into an attitude on the couch beside him, that fitted him and made his relaxation complete, even if her elbow “went to sleep” with the strain of keeping him at ease, and her hand, against his back, began, after a while, to sting of pressure.

  “Ray, you look well. A little peaked from this summer heat I hear you’ve been having, but you look beautiful to me.”

  He had always told her she was beautiful.

  “Do I? It’s because I’m happy you’re back. And Walter, you look not only well—but, oh, what shall I say?—successful!”

  “I have been, Ray,” he said, with an intensity that seemed new to him, but which was abetted because his eyeglasses shone. “I have been, Ray, but more of that later.”

  “Oh, my dear, I knew you would be—but it has been so long—waiting.”