by Fannie Hurst
“And I,” she felt impelled to say, “feel filled with all the years there are”; but she would have cried had she said it. And so they touched glasses in silence, and she sipped the edge of hers, and he regarded her above the untouched edge of his.
That was the beginning of a round of times with Kurt that helped fill the strangely static days. Even after Walter and Corinne had returned to the Grove, where Walter immediately resumed a second series of the treatments, there was time galore left for Kurt. For drives. For dinners at the Frontenac. Theaters and late suppers. For an inspection tour of the vast automobile plants, and luncheon served from a private kitchen in a small dining room adjoining Kurt’s fine mahogany offices.
She told Walter, one evening, during one of their rare hours from five to six, that she could get him a special-body Kurt-Sussex at cost price, through the offices of an old friend of hers, none other than Kurt Shendler himself.
“I heard he was a Cincinnatian. Then you must have known him when he was running a bicycle shop back there.”
“I sure did. He took me through his plant today. It’s incredible what he has built up for himself. Kurt is the power behind all those blocks of factories. He certainly has shown me a pleasant time.”
He was all for that, and, somewhat to her surprise, continued to exhibit a concern, not quite characteristic, for what must be the tediousness of her hours alone.
“That’s right, Ray. Don’t mope. There are only two more weeks of it, but since we cannot be together as much as we want to, try to make the best of them. Get this fellow Shendler to show you around.”
She did not know whether to be hurt or gratified at this concern. Usually, the long periods of her waiting were so taken for granted. It was one of the rutted conditions between them; exigencies of business affairs, home conditions, made the edges of Walter’s time uncertainties which one took for granted, and you cut your leisure to fit that pattern.
These few weeks somehow had been different. It was as if Walter were a little grateful to whosoever would fill her time. It was not that suspicion smote her. It was just that, within her, something stirred and feared.
“Walter, you—you know I never ask you about certain things, and if I am offending you by doing so now, you need not answer. Why is it suddenly necessary for you to be so—well, what I mean is, in New York, and usually in Europe, you are not so tied. Why is it that, all of a sudden, you are not free even for an occasional dinner with me?”
He flushed and started to look angry, in a way she dreaded, an oxblood red flooding his neck and rising to deploy across his face, and then, suddenly changing his tactics, crossed from the window where he had been leaning looking down at the street below, to stand beside her, where she sat on the stiff hotel sofa.
“Ray, I’ve been meaning to tell you something for weeks. Should have in the beginning, but somehow I didn’t. I suppose you’re not going to like it. That isn’t going to change matters. It’s over twelve or fourteen years since, y’see? Little accident, I suppose you might call it.”
“Call what?”
“Fact is, Ray, one of those things that can happen, but, somehow, after so many years, don’t usually—fact is—Corinne is going to have a baby.”
“I see,” she said finally, between a pair of wooden clothespins for lips. “I see,” she repeated, and sat, wooden as her lips, upon the rigid sofa, toying with the tassel of a cushion.
He had the nicety not to attempt to touch or kiss her as he went out, although such a departure was without precedent. She was grateful for it, though, because there was something gathering within her that, had he approached, would have made talons of her fingers.
32
This was a terrible situation. In shape, a vicious circle. In substance, revolting beyond any telling.
What right had she, Ray Schmidt, to any ground whatsoever in this matter? Where did her sense of outrage, violation, smirch, come in? What was there in her relationship to this entire affair to defend her against being plunged into the mire of this predicament? “Nothing,” she cried out to herself, nothing, nothing, nothing, except somewhere, deep within her, the inability to foresee anything so gross and violating happening.
There were decencies; there were unspoken fundamental decencies that were pillars of the human structure of body, soul, and spirit. While nothing had ever been spoken between them on a subject to which she readily allotted him privacy, surely, she cried out to herself, she had been justified in allowing herself to feel safe in certain sanctities.
How dared he! Either to herself, or to—her! How dared he! That had always been one of her synthetic, home-brewed justifications. Thank God, she had only run into him again in those years after the completion of his little family. At least that made it seem less—less what? Less patently the thing it was …
All those years, all those months of days, that he had been coming to her, she had assumed to herself certain things that now, in the mocking, shocking light of events, she should never have dared to take for granted.
Certainly these were not the things you discussed, they were not even the things you discussed with yourself; and now here, in the dreadful array of full proof, lay the ruins of her illusions, the collapse of her flimsy castle, the end of the last shred of her pretense of justification.
As she sat there, in the stuffy, sulphuric-smelling hotel room that had suddenly become to her as stripped of pretense as she herself, this much became evident: something too smirched and besmirching had happened to make the old status of things any longer endurable. How had she permitted him to tell her this thing without letting loose upon him the sense of her outrage that was almost past the bearing?
Kurt was calling for her at eight. One must climb out of the ruffled negligee and into clothing for the evening drive they had planned together, precisely as if something epochal in its pain had not hung itself onto her heart since, in a normal unassailed world of twenty-four hours ago, she had made that plan.
How had she refrained, when he said, “Corinne is going to have a baby,” from striking him across the lips that had uttered the everything unspeakable that the statement implied? She would have liked, now in retrospect, to have seen those lips trickle with blood that she had struck from them. How had she refrained from doing something in the way of force, with her body, that would have hurt him, degraded, destroyed him? How was she ever to succeed now, after having sat passive there while he threw over what universe she had been able to construct out of scraps, in conveying to him the fathomless depths of her sense of outrage? Nothing between them was any longer tenable—horror was upon her.…
That night, on the spur of the moment, for which no amount of preparation would have prepared her, she did something for which, in all her experience, there was no precedent.
For the first time in the alone years of the peculiar isolation of her position, with an amount of unrestraint that astonished her every moment that she felt her lips in full recital, she unburdened the unabridged story of her relationship with Walter. Minutely, in detail, the narrative, being born, came rushing from her lips.
She had been driving with Kurt along the paved road that led to Detroit, when he turned to her kindly: “Not feeling so well tonight, Ray? You’re so quiet.”
They were spinning past the fenced meadowlands he had pointed out to her as his own, and she put out her hand suddenly on his arm.
“Kurt, could we turn off here and get the car under one of those big trees? I want to talk to you.”
“I reckon we can, since those trees belong to me,” he said, and immediately and without surprise, which she liked in him, began maneuvering the big car onto the shoulder of turf that edged the road.
A whitish July night flowed down over the meadow, moonless, but with an unusually crowded attendance of stars. One of those nights when the Milky Way and the Dipper and Vega and Arcturus are in their brightest coinage.
“Now, what is on your mind?” he said, as, with the car’s back to the
road, they sat facing an unrelieved vista of star-spangled meadow.
“Kurt, what do you think of me, anyway?”
“You know what I think of you, Ray,” he said softly, almost too softly, as if against an emotion ready to rise.
“I mean, Kurt, what are your thoughts concerning my life? What have you thought of me since you saw me in New York? What do you think of me now? About my being here. How am I here? Why?”
“I don’t let my mind dwell on the things you don’t wish to tell me.”
“Come now, Kurt, surely it must have occurred to you that there is a reason for my being out here. Surely you have heard things?”
“I have heard nothing, Ray, so help me God. This is a big world and a small world at the same time. It happens it has been a big world where you are concerned. As to what I have thought—if I have thought anything, Ray, it has had to do with a feeling of resentment that somehow, even from what little I know of it, life hasn’t done the things for you that you deserve. The rest is none of my business. Nothing you can do, Ray, or have done, can change my opinion of you.”
“You know that I am some man’s mistress, don’t you?”
“I suppose so,” he said, looking straight ahead and frowning.
“Do you know what man’s?”
“No.”
“Shall I tell you?”
“No.”
“It will help me, Kurt—to tell you.”
“Then tell me.”
“Walter Saxel. Say something, Kurt, don’t just sit—like that.”
“What is there for me to say? I remember him, of course. You went together for a while, back there. I always used to date your meeting with him from that Sunday night you stood me up with a message from the corner telephone. But that passed out of my mind. He’s made a big record in banking, I understand.”
“You never knew—more—”
“No.”
“But you suspected there was someone?”
“Dear Ray, I have tried to explain to you that always, over and above what you do, I know what you are.”
She pressed her fingers against her eyes, and for a time they sat in silence. She was not crying. Her voice came quite evenly.
“Not many women could boast having a more perfect thing than that said to them.”
“Not many deserve it.”
“Is it clear now that I’m out here with—him?”
“Yes.”
“He and his wife—he married a Miss Trauer of Cincinnati—are at the Grove.”
He sat with his lips straight, his eyes ahead, hands on the steering wheel, the knuckles of them large and white as mushrooms in the starlight.
“We were just friends before that. It was six years after his marriage that we met again. Will it surprise you, Kurt, if I tell you that he—Walter—was the first—the last? I know—even remembering all that I once told you about myself back in the Cincinnati days—how it must sound for a woman like me to be saying this, but it’s true, Kurt. Take my word for that.”
“I do.”
“Dear Kurt, how terrible I am being to you. That wasn’t your voice. That was something squeaking up there in the tree. Say it over again in your own voice.”
“I believe you, Ray.”
“I know you do, or I wouldn’t be telling you things that I’ve never even told myself. Let’s see, where was I? You see, the thing that you probably like about me is the thing that has always made me my own enemy. It’s so hard for me to dislike people or get huffy over the things that the right kind of people dislike in the wrong kind. God knows, it is me people should feel sorry for, but it’s me that is always a little sorry for people. To me, we are such a pathetic lot. All born into a world we didn’t ask to be born into. All struggling, hurting, scheming to get a little happiness out of it before we go to square ourselves with God, or whatever it is constitutes our hereafter. It is as if we get born with more appetites than we need, just in order to spend our lives trying to curb them. I read where a doctor once said a human being can only hope to conserve his health by satisfying his appetite for food by less than one-half. Same with life. We all seem born desiring so much more than is good for us.”
“Something in that.”
“But to get back—feeling all this about people—about life—I’ve never learned to say no without its hurting me a whole lot more than the person I’ve said it to. Even the rotters, the low-downs and the no-goods I’ve met in my life, haven’t disgusted me the way they should. I’ve felt sorry for them for being so third-rate and scummy. I swear to you, silly as it sounds, many a time I’ve felt sorry for a fellow while he was insulting me. Seemed to me all the time he was just a poor devil trying to make an escape of some kind or another. I’m funny that way, Kurt. It’s been my undoing—You listening?”
“Go on.”
“Well, that’s the way I’ve always been, and one day back in the days—yes, the very day I sent you the telephone message to the house on Baymiller Street, I met Walter!”
“It was him—way back there, then?”
“From the second I clapped eyes on him, Kurt, it was as if I—I’m not very good at expressing myself, but it was as if life for me had just—just begun to be life. That doesn’t say it, either. I guess what happened to me the day I met Walter was what might happen to any fool girl the day she falls in love at first sight. But with me, Kurt, I just never stopped falling. There never was a second after I clapped eyes on him that he couldn’t have had me, Kurt. It wasn’t any longer a question of good or bad, right or wrong. I had no pride. I wanted no rights.… Know what I mean, Kurt?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, I’m not trying to call a spade a silver spoon. I’m the kept woman of a married man. Only nothing—nothing can ever make it seem quite like that to me. I won’t go into what he’s been to me, or what I think I’ve been to him. I won’t dwell on the torment of knowing the part I have been playing in his relationship to his wife and family; but nothing, Kurt—I’d be lying if I said it—can ever make me believe that there was anything but sanctity of human relationship in what we brought each other. I’ve not been bad, in my relationship with Walter Saxel. I’ve loved him with a oneness that makes me at least as much his wife as—never mind that part. It’s too terrible. But with all the pain and the sin and wrongness that belong to that side of things, the husband of Corinne Saxel and Ray Schmidt—I will say it, I will—has been blessed with a perfect love. I gave him that love, Kurt. As perfect as a crystal. Do you hear that? As perfect as a crystal.”
He shuddered, with his face down in his hands—shuddered in the mild night air and hunched his shoulders as if he would retreat into them.
“Is it that terrible? Is it that horrible? It doesn’t sound that way to me. Isn’t that incredible? It doesn’t sound that way to me. It sounds almost beautiful. I know it is beautiful, as it exists within me. As for Corinne—I’ve thought about her and their children, until it has seemed to me that my head must break in halves—and perhaps it is wrong—I guess it is—but it seems to me that the greatest wrong lies in the possibility of her ever knowing. Everything about her life has been so normal. So right. So as it should be. I haven’t even taken Walter from her. His love for her is something separate and apart. What she does not know is never going to make her unhappy. That is my prayer, Kurt—otherwise—even if his children should some day learn of it, this much I know. Nothing in his relationship with me has ever tarnished their father. I’ve helped Walter, Kurt.”
“I know that,” he said, still into his hands. “You don’t need to tell me that. I know it.”
She began to cry softly, without sobs.
“What would you say if I were to tell you, after all this, that this is the end? Something has happened—something that no longer makes anything possible. I’m leaving Walter, Kurt. Isn’t that curious? I didn’t know that, when I started out on this ride with you. I know it now.”
He swung slowly and took hold of her wrist.
�
�What does that mean for me?”
“For you? Why, Kurt—you darling—you mean—”
“I mean what I said years and years ago out in Cincinnati; what I said to you years ago in New York, what I am saying to you now.…”
“Kurt, if I cry the way I want to cry, it will be terrible. Don’t say anything else, I can’t—stand—it—”
Her face in her palms, he could feel her tremble, and once more he sat with his hands on the wheel, the mushrooms large and white upon them, the sea of starlight, the sea of meadow, and the sea of silence flowing ahead of them.…
It was considerably later when he did speak; and her trembling had ceased, and her hands had dropped into her lap, and her eyes, dry, were fixed on the landscape.
“Tell you what you do, Ray. No use making this any harder than it is already. Pull yourself together and take this thing easy. I’m going to drive you back to your hotel now. My advice to you is, get yourself together and take a morning train over to Youngstown and visit Freda a bit.”
“I’ve been thinking about that identical thing, sitting here, Kurt. I’d like to see Freda and the children. Particularly Emma. I’m just hungry to see Emma. There is just one reason I can’t quite bring myself to go. You know the reason. Not on account of Freda, she doesn’t know anything from what I’ve told her, but, of course, she must guess. It’s little Emma. She—I don’t know—I don’t feel I ought to—”
“You go to Freda’s, Ray. You’ll never put anything in the way of that child, or any other, but the best. Get your bearings. Get quiet. Think. Work it all out. I’m not saying anything one way or another, except to tell you what you already know. My heart is like an open house, waiting for you. Pretty fancy speech for me, but I feel it like that. And it is a good strong fine house with all the doors and windows wide open. I want you in it this minute, more than I’ve ever wanted you in my life. Think and be quiet for a while, out there, and get your bearings on this thing. I’ll be in Youngstown in exactly seven weeks, as a delegate from our Chamber of Commerce to the opening of theirs. Before, if you want me. If I could bring you back here on the twenty-eighth day of August, married to me, I—well, there’s so many ways of saying it, but I don’t seem to be able to find one. I love you, Ray. More tonight, I think, than I have in all the years of loving you. Now don’t the idea of a few weeks’ resting and thinking and clearing up your mind visiting your folks in Youngstown strike you as fair? Think it over. There’s an idea!”
