by Fannie Hurst
Then, too, on occasions like the present one, it was part of her duty to keep her ear primed for comment. Helpful hints, as Walter called them, demanding of her the uncomplimentary along with the plaudits. She knew better than this last. “Oh, Walter, the elderly man sitting behind me thought your voice carried magnificently.” Never: “Oh, Walter, I sat next to Mrs. Sparfeld, the wife of the senator, and she said that you had the most tiresome voice in the world, no delivery, and that you gave her a pain in the neck.” Never: “As I was leaving the balcony of the One-Thousand-Dollar-a-Plate Charity Dinner, I heard a woman in the spectators’ gallery say you were a wolf in lamb’s clothing. Not only a wolf in Wall Street, but a wolf who prowled up forbidden lanes.”
That remark was six months old. What had it meant? Their discretion was so perfect. Their rule, never to be seen in public together, so rigid. Was this figure of herself, Ray, still modish, slim, solitary, skulking the back streets of his life, becoming noticeable?
For three months in Paris she had lived within a stone’s throw of the Crillon. An entire season at Aix-les-Bains she had occupied a room in a pension just a flight of hillside stairs below the hotel where Walter and Corinne had taken the cure. Nightly, she had skirted the tables at the Casino, sometimes standing elbow to elbow at the gaming-tables, or within easy eyeshot of Corinne, and yet never once had they appeared in public or even exchanged greetings.
What had it meant—a wolf who prowled up forbidden lanes? What secret prying eyes might be tunneling under the foundation of her phony security? Nonsense!
It was in the milling of the crowd around her, the day of the conclusion of the Charity Drive at the Metropolitan Opera House, that Ray, her ear cocked for titbits for Walter, heard spoken, at her elbow, a remark which, directed against herself, raced down her spine like a mouse.
“There she is! The tall one in the broadcloth suit with the silver buttons. Saxel’s shadow. They say he’s been keeping her for fifteen years.…”
31
The year he became president of the Affiliated Charities, Walter turned the Cape May house, Castle View, into a temporary home for convalescent children. Later he was to bequeath this Georgian seventeen-room mansion, on its two hundred acres, to the township of Cape May as a permanent seaside vacation ground for children from the New York tenements.
During the summer of 1915, which was before his acquisition of the even more elaborate estate of Rye, this voluntary evacuation had the effect of throwing awry plans for a summer at Cape May which had been more meticulously laid than usual.
The reason for this was to come to Ray later in a shock so blasting that she fell into the habit of dating her life before and after the episode of Youngstown. Part of the repercussive effect of this shock was the fact that she could find herself unhorsed and thrown into indescribable confusion by an isolated circumstance which, after all, was only part and parcel of a general condition which she had learned from the start to endure.
The turning over of the Cape May house, coming as an eager impulse from both Walter and Corinne, exerted no small pull upon the affairs of Ray.
For several summers, at Walter’s insistence, she had occupied, in the township proper of Cape May, the small furnished flat of a druggist and his wife who, eager for the summer income, moved into the quarters of a tent colony on the beach.
It was a pleasant little apartment over the drugstore, on a busy street, but within walk of the ocean. Electric lights flowed into her front windows at night, and in many respects there was less of the shrouded feeling of isolation there than in the flat in town. It seemed to Ray, all things considered, that her times there with Walter had been happiest of all. Away from the propinquity of his affairs, a pretty well-worn-down vein of playfulness was in the habit of asserting itself, carrying them back to the lighter moods of the old Cincinnati days. He was freer to be himself, there. And often, against their rigid precedent, they strolled out together of late evenings, down toward the moon-swept, breeze-swept, deserted end of the beach, where white sands, the color of casket-plush, sparkled, and magic stole out.
Ecstasy, of a kind that made everything disenchanting that was already written into the years seem not to matter, touched these moody tender evenings with Walter. Their hands stole together, and locked, as they walked; their feet shushed softly into the white sands; and sometimes they sat and built around themselves a mound of it, as children might have. Two human specks, filled with the immemorial lure of the flesh.
Even the long days alone in the flat over the drugstore on the shoddy little street, or of wandering alone on the unfrequented ends of the beach, sometimes directly past the two Saxel children, or even past Corinne herself, strolling the sands with her husband or friends, were tinged with some of the retrospective or anticipatory sublimity of those few evenings.
The decision to abandon the Cape May plans for the summer came as a combination of keen disappointment and yet strangely, with a certain relief. On the one hand, release from the propinquity of that scene of the pouter-pigeon little figure of Corinne entering the country club, driving her own little electric sedan along the high road, twirling her parasol as she strolled the hot sands, or sitting beside her husband in the large Pierce-Arrow! And then, on the other hand, the sweet and all-too-fugitive visits from Walter, the little chintz parlor over the drugstore, which she had aided and abetted with some of her own manifold small objects carted from town, the cretonne-covered chaise longue preferred by Walter, the late suppers and all-too-hurried dinners she prepared on the gasrange of the druggist’s wife. The tender moods of Walter beneath moonlight on white sands.…
He explained his decision to her, one muggy May evening, as they sat on the divan, the remains of the recent repast dragged into its corner.
“It’s the thing to do, Ray, and more than that, it is expected of a man in my position. I see where Felix Waldheim has given Waldheim Park to the Mothers’ Fresh Air Association.”
“Oh, it’s right that you should, Walter.”
“Certain things a man has to do. Besides, I want to do it.”
She thought, sitting there in the crib his arms made for her, how unbearable life would be without him, and how much, after all, there was to be grateful for, in a life that contained him, and how ennobling the whitening hair was to his face, and how she must somehow, some way, find it possible to trump up within herself some of this urge for what to her sometimes seemed the machine-stitched methods of wholesale philanthropy. The passion of the springtime of their love, perhaps, had quieted, but the passion of her surrender to his every conviction, wish, desire, spoken and unspoken, continued to lash and dominate her unabated through the years—a slavery that was precious to her, a subservience that exalted while it abased.
Were the emotional experiences of women like Corinne or the “girls” with whom Ray spent the rim of her time, in any way akin to hers? There had been plain talk among the latter, much of it revealing. Women like Hattie—who had long since drifted out of her life, changing residence as she changed allegiance—had a give-and-take philosophy that placed this complex question on a plane almost as simple and tangible as bookkeeping. Debit. Credit. Give what you must. Take all you can get.
Even Corinne, viewed from the strange sidelines of Ray’s position, trafficked in reciprocity and demanded of her husband in return for what she gave.
“Corinne feels I owe it to her and the children …” was not infrequently on Walter’s lips. With acceptance.
Why was it that she alone seemed so dominated by an incalculable passion that was infinitely bigger than her resistance to it? A man thought no more of you for it; less, in fact. That was the slogan of the women.
How dear and tired and small-boyish he looked, sitting there beside her. Life was wrong for her, terribly wrong, and yet nothing it might ever have contained without him could equal the fugitive sweetness of these edges of his time. Pride was for those who knew not the perfection of complete giving. There were times when you almost g
loried in lack of pride. Gloried in the fact, for instance, that during the summers at Cape May you could slink up the back streets of his beautiful lawns, for the private sense of his nearness which it gave you.
“Giving over your house means no summer at Cape May, Walter. What then? Will you rent a house?”
“No. Richard wants to tutor this summer. We thought we’d send Irma and Mademoiselle out to the Friedlander sisters at Long Branch, and go to Mount Clemens for six weeks to get some of this rheumatism baked out of my arm.”
“Walter, I think that would do you good, if only you will watch your diet too.”
“My intention was to go alone, but Corinne is feeling none too well herself.”
His way of preparing her for the item that Mr. and Mrs. Walter D. Saxel would spend May and part of June at Mount Clemens, Michigan.
“We leave on the twelfth. Think you’d better come out about the following Sunday, Ray. We can manage the way we used to at Aix.”
Yes. That meant that about a week following the arrival, at the resort’s best and largest hostelry, of Mr. and Mrs. Walter D. Saxel and maid, a Mrs. Schmidt, tailored, chic after a slightly horsy fashion, nicely caparisoned with rather sporty looking luggage, and the slim, slightly lined look of a woman who ages slowly, would step off a train and debark for one of the lesser hotels, where reservations awaited her. Usually a small suite, near a bath. A private bath would have meant much to Ray, who enjoyed lengthy ablutions. Not that Walter would have noticeably observed the indulgence, but somehow it was out of key with the scale he allotted her. “Keeping me small.” A commodity. Not a luxury. Sometimes, in his own way of facing it, and in a vernacular highly different, that was also Walter’s own way of explaining his sparseness with Ray.
The hotel at Mount Clemens where Walter had instructed her to write for accommodation was a rambling redbrick structure situated on one of the central streets of the sulphuric-smelling little spa. Big interurban trolley cars, which ran the twenty-five miles from Detroit, passed its doors; and figures in hooded bathrobes hurried or rode in invalid-chairs through the streets.
The Grove Hotel, situated on the edge of the town in a small park that overlooked a canal-like vista of St. Clair River, boasted wide verandas lined with rocking chairs, a pretentious rotunda with a colored-glass dome, flower gardens, billiard rooms, grill rooms, quite elaborate private suites, a private bathhouse where the curative waters were piped into large tiled rooms, and a cuisine for which it was justly renowned. On the opposite corner, in a white frame structure with perpetually drawn blinds, giving it the look of a gentleman’s residence closed during the family’s absence, there flourished, between intermittent tiffs with the law, the complement of a Casino, where guests from the larger hotels gathered for games, from lotto to faro.
After their two trips to Europe, with their sojourns at Monte Carlo, Deauville, Vichy, Nice, Aix-les-Bains, there was something about it all that offhand seemed shabby, insular, and provincial. And yet, withal, there was thrill in this first return to the Middle West. It struck her with a kind of strange excitement, as she changed trains at Detroit for Mount Clemens, that just within a few hours of her, in Youngstown, there dwelt the nearest of her kith and kin. Gave one a sense of belonging. It was pleasant to think of “my people” in Youngstown, just as it would have been pleasant to drive openly to the Grove Hotel and register there—openly—
In Mount Clemens there was even more time to herself than usual. The routine of the mineral bath, the massage periods, the aftermath of relaxing, kept Walter, who suffered from a rheumatic right arm, confined to his room until noon. After lunch, what with the limited activities of the little spa, sailing or fishing or motorboating on the narrow river, which opened out quite grandly into Lake St. Clair, cards at the Casino, buggy riding, automobiling, or gay trolley parties in chartered cars to Detroit, to say nothing of a surprising and new insistence on the part of Corinne for Walter’s almost constant presence at her side, it was, as Walter put it, almost impossible to “break away” for the Medes Hotel or an assigned meeting place.
After the women had retired to their rooms for siesta, the men lingered over cards or billiards; and even to attempt to drop out was to incur the uninvited company of one or two of them for a walk. Usually it was six o’clock, and then not daily, before Walter managed to snatch an hour to visit Ray in the small brown sitting room of her suite.
Not that this was without precedent. Once, at Deauville, because of the fast complexities of the life there, a week had elapsed without Walter once communicating with her at her pension. Although never before so exacting as now, Corinne was wont, however, to claim the bulk of her husband’s time on those occasions when she was able to sojourn with him away from the demands of his banking-hours.
“I’m sorry, Ray, I’d no idea this town was going to be such a goldfish bowl. You had better arrange to be at your hotel every day between four and seven, but the rest of the time you’ll have to rustle around and keep yourself entertained. Corinne has her heart set on that Detroit party for tomorrow, and it won’t do for me to decline to go to that launch trip J. P. Terhune is planning for Thursday. Terhune, as you know, is an important connection in New York. I don’t believe, if I were you, I would come around to the Casino again, Ray. It is not like Aix or Monte Carlo. The rooms are small and not always crowded.”
“It’s all right, Walter.”
“These baths are doing me a powerful lot of good. Even this terrible ill wind of war has blown some good. I don’t believe the Carlsbad waters are any better than these. Shows a fellow that America has got pretty nearly everything, if he knows where to find it. Feel my knuckles.”
“Splendid.”
“Funny thing, Ray, I’m not seeing a blessed thing of you, except once in a while up here in your sitting room, but I need you here. That’s all there is to it, I need you just as much as I need the air I breathe.”
She had meant to ask him something that secretly and even painfully was gnawing at her, particularly since the remark she had overheard at the Metropolitan Opera House some months before had sharpened her perception.
Why, suddenly, was Corinne demanding all the free little edges of his time that heretofore she had allowed him without question? Late evenings, when, once or twice, he had ventured out for a walk, she had demurred. Walter had admitted as much in explaining failures to arrive at her hotel. Even his noon hour was now greedily mortgaged. But for the whirlwind exception of the gala week at Deauville, where, by the way, in her spare time, Ray had managed to win five thousand francs, there had never been a time when Walter could not, without question, manage to be away for luncheon.
In Mount Clemens all that was different. Three meals a day Walter took in the company of his wife. After the Casino, where often Corinne took a seat at the lotto table while Walter played the wheel, for conservative stakes, it was straight back to the hotel with his wife.
Why?
What atoms in Corinne’s mind had been set in motion? Why these tiny new tactics? One morning she had by chance encountered Walter on the main street of the town, shopping strawberries for Corinne, who had suddenly expressed a desire for them. Why these tiny new tactics? The question, though, which had trembled on her lips for so long, once more remained unsaid. Why set into motion disquieting fears? Besides, in his present conciliatory, explanatory mood of trying to placate her for his enforced defaults, all her ready tenderness flowed out to meet his dilemmas; and in a sense it was sweet to suffer the waiting around, or sit out the long evenings in the crammed lobby of the Medes, talking aches and symptoms with the garrulous and the decrepit.
“Just make up your mind we are not going to see much of each other this trip, Ray, and figure yourself out a good time. There are races down at Detroit, go win yourself a pair of new shoes.”
So conciliatory was his mood for having dragged her out there for the chief purpose of sitting hour after hour around the Medes lobby, and finally in desperation herself taking the cure,
that when he departed, one evening, he left a hundred-dollar bill on the table.
“Go to the races. Kill time.”
Dear boy. The thought was infinitely sweeter than the hundred.
One day she did trolley to Detroit on a shopping-tour for a little ruby lavaliere, Emma’s birthstone, which she had long contemplated, and which the hundred dollars made suddenly possible. Paying back to herself money she had expended for Walter out of her china painting and Women’s Exchange earnings was her way of explaining to herself this defection in her rule that Emma’s gifts be paid for in special coins of her own earning.
In the jewelry section of the foremost department store in Detroit she found a pretty lavaliere on a fine gold chain, set with a good-sized ruby surrounded by tiny “chip” diamonds. Compared to the cost of similar ornaments in New York, it was a bargain at thirty-five dollars; and it pleased her to send it with the Detroit postmark. “Souvenir from the Wolverine City,” she wrote on the card; and for days thereafter she could visualize Emma, fingering excitedly at the gilt cord, clapping her hands with delight, exclaiming!
But, in all, the journey was a hurried one, because of the need she felt to be back at the hotel in Mount Clemens from four to seven. In case! He did not come, but, greatly contrary to custom, there was a short note from him on her table.
“Corinne has taken it into her head to spend a few days at the Hotel Frontenac in Detroit, while she selects herself a new automobile. Be good.” Unsigned.
It was practically the only letter she had ever received from him, barring even more cursory notes which he sometimes left in the flat on those very rare occasions when he dropped in at odd moments and found her absent.
