Back STreet

by Fannie Hurst

  “I have thought it over, Kurt. I’m going.”

  33

  After the first sharp bolt of decision, the gathering-together of the personal belongings might have been done by someone outside herself, so far as she was conscious of fatigue or the passing of the long night that led to the dawn of the day of her departure.

  Even the note to Walter, addressed after some thought, care of the clerk at the Medes Hotel, was not a composition of travail. It wrote itself glibly with that external-feeling hand of hers: “Dear Walter, This decision of mine to go to my family you will understand. I will ask you to break up things at the New York end without communication with me. That part of my life is finished. In many ways it is strange it should end this way, but not so strange as that which has brought it about. Even so, I am grateful for so much that has been. I am more at peace in my decision than I ever could have believed possible. I wish you everything good.”

  That is a good letter, she thought, without tears, because it is a true letter, every word of it. She sealed the flap of the envelope along her tongue, and placed it on the top of her handbag, to be left with the clerk as she departed.

  There were countless small chores. A dress at the dry cleaner’s across the street, to be called for before taking the train. Tips to be left for certain of the hotel help who would be off duty and not know of her sudden departure. The hotel porter to be dispatched to the nearby station for railroad accommodation. Her bit of fortune at the Casino and races proved a great stroke of luck. In all, there was over four hundred dollars in her purse. Dressed in her traveling hat and suit of tan percale, she had breakfast in her room on the small table beside the windows that overlooked the street.

  The sun had not yet climbed over the roofs, and a warmish furry fog hung over the scene. Dogs without collars ran along the streets. A boy with a tray of breakfast rolls balanced on his head whistled past. The Adelphi Hotel across the way was having its spittoons cleaned. The sulphuric smell of the hot curative waters came through the window screens. A rather depressing sunless morning, and yet, to the person who seemed handmaiden to Ray, that curious external self of hers, not unpleasant.

  The matter of the note to Walter once behind her, the problem now presented itself whether or not to wire Freda. How dumfounded she would be. Kurt had suggested wiring. Perhaps it would be better. She filled in a blank from a pad of them on the small desk in her sitting room.

  “Arrive three-twenty, Pittsburgh and Lake Erie, for a little visit. Ray.”

  By then it was time to go to the train. The incredible act of performing, without consideration or connection with the doings of Walter, was about to take place. No hampering tie-up with his plans, his time, his preferences. Free. Free to go, to come, to work out her own today, tomorrow, while he, his pride, his terrible pride, stunned, a few hours later would stand beside the counter of the Hotel Medes reading the unbelievable.

  How hurt and angered and unrelenting he would be. Oh, she had taken her life into her own hands all right. Even should she weaken—and weaken she not only would not, but could not—his pride would do the rest. His terrible, relentless, wounded-unto-death pride.

  The person outside of herself was riding in a train that cut through fertile meadows. There was the rather absurd reality of the trainmen being obsequious, as members of train and boat crews somehow always were to her. The porter brought her a pillow and settled a stool at the foot of her parlor-car chair. The conductor, taking up her ticket, passed the time of day and smeared his eyes over the little swell her breasts made against her shirtwaist. Grit flew against the screened window, and again the porter was at her elbow, dusting the sill and hoisting her luggage from the floor to the wire shelf overhead. The gritty dust began to settle along her lips and the backs of her gloved hands. The day rose to its noon and she could feel the back of her waist becoming damp and wrinkled from its pressure against the railroad plush. A drummer across the aisle, with his coat removed and his large soft stomach heaving under a silk shirt that showed dark splotches of perspiration, leaned over to strike up a conversation about the heat, which ended with his inviting her into the dining car for lunch. Just a few desultory remarks, mostly questions that came off the moist shelves of his lips without waiting for a reply.

  “Traveling alone? Going to meet the hubby? Know anybody in Youngstown? Good town. Ever been to Jack’s Eating Place there? Doing anything tonight? That’s the second call for lunch. Feel like opening a bottle of beer with me?”

  Just the most desultory replies from her, and yet he felt impelled to ask her to lunch. It struck her, as she politely refused, and lay back against her chair with her eyes closed, that the men who swam around and ogled her in public places were no longer the younger ones with straight figures, but almost all, by now, had protuberant stomachs, heavy necks, and skin that hung like the folds of an elephant. Men with high-blood-pressure records in their doctors’ offices. The younger, unprotuberant, natty men were not troublesome any more.

  Rattly-bang over the rails. As she lay back, with her eyes closed, the curious, light, astonishing sense of her lack of relativity to what Walter’s plans for the day, the week, the month might be, persisted.

  “I feel as if someone had died,” she told herself, “and it is too soon after for me to realize it.”

  Rattly-bang—

  Freda and Emma and Freda’s youngest, a boy aged nine, of such pale pigmentation that he looked albino, were at the station. She saw them from the car window, lined up along the platform, as the train drew in, and, except for her being so nervously on the lookout, would never have recognized the little group. Whatever of change she was prepared to find in the person of her stepsister, nothing had prepared her for this. Freda was as round and as stubby as one of the Chinese-lily bulbs Ray was forever planting in bowls of pebbles. Round, after the fashion of women who let their bodies sag all day without corsets, until time to hoist them into stays for an occasion. The hoisted ridges of Freda’s flesh hung over the top of her corsets. The Freda who had been pastily pretty in her teens was middle-aged now, with fallen arches, shabby graying hair, and the fusty manner with children of one who boxes their ears frequently. Just one more of the many shabby women who move about the aisles of the marketplaces buying “seconds” of wilted vegetables, and the cheaper gristly cuts of meat, to cram into market baskets.

  At sight of Freda, a deep-rooted fear smote Ray. The years had been moths at the body and probably at the soul of Freda. The same years that must have eaten, in their different way, into her.

  Freda’s first remark was reassuring.

  “I’d have known you anywhere. You haven’t changed a bit, except I think you’re even slimmer, and, of course—yes, a little older, but not much.”

  How broad and how white her voice was. It had not seemed like that in the old days, and yet here it was familiarly Freda’s own.

  “Emma, here is your Aunt Ray at last. The child has been making herself sick with excitement since your telegram came. Curtis, go kiss your Aunt Ray; she has sent you so many dollar bills. Thank her.”

  The boy hung back, but Emma, in a white dress that had laundered gray, came forward with her whitish eyes that almost had the look of the blind in them, lit in the same sweet way of the anticipatory blind.

  Why, Freda’s children were the whitest, palest, most albino children she had ever seen. Freda and Hugo were blond, of course, but these two, they were like pale visitors from another planet. And no gainsaying it, Emma was not pretty. There was something studious though, and round-shouldered, about the little figure, something about the pale eyes that seemed a pathetic straining; but the girl here was not even a prototype of the communion picture that Ray loved. No luster to her, not even the bright blue and white prettiness that had been her mother’s. Poor little Emma, how sweet she was, kissing her so timidly. What an ache she lodged in your heart. For that matter, poor little Curtis too, a pale sniffling boy with pipestem legs, and some of Hugo’s gangling quality to th
eir length. Oh, the drab three dears, dulled as a looking glass dulls when you breathe on it.

  “That figure, Ray! I’d have known it anywhere. You’ll never lose it. Look at me, mealsack tied in the middle.”

  “Nonsense, Freda. None of us has escaped the years. Where are we going, dears? Take me to a hotel.”

  “I’ve fixed it so you can stop with us. That is, if you don’t mind. Things will probably be a little different from what you’re used to. Emma sleeps on the sofa in the front room, but she’s given that up to you, and will sleep with one of her girlfriends, who lives down the street.”

  “Oh, no, I couldn’t.…”

  “But I like it, Aunt Ray. I love it.…”

  A pang smote Ray. She had counted on the privacy of a room in a boardinghouse or hotel.

  “Oh, please, Aunt Ray.”

  “Of course, if you don’t think it is going to be comfortable enough, Ray—”

  “Nonsense, Freda. I just don’t want to inconvenience you.”

  That ended the discussion, and presently, although Ray had suggested a cab, which Freda disclaimed because of the distance, they were bobbing along on a trolley car, through the repetitious streets of Youngstown, Ray between Emma, on one side, whose hand was securely tucked into hers, and Freda on the other. Curtis on her lap, because at that hour the streetcars were packed.

  Like-a-dream, like-a-dream, clattered the wheels. Sitting out here in this Middle West, Ohio town, clattering home with Freda and her children to a place that was sure to flow around her in the warm, fetid waves of the semi-slum. Why was this grotesque circumstance taking place? What next?

  Sure enough, the house, an unpainted frame, without a porch, a shutter, or an ell to break its uncompromising resemblance to an old weather-beaten packing case, was situated in a burnt and grassless yard on a street of just such houses. You entered from the side, because the front door, with a piece of lace curtain stretched across its pane, was only a sham, without hinges or lock.

  So this was Freda’s castle, the castle for which the ignominy of her unspeakable maneuver of other days still lingered across the memory. It was a cramped, mean house, meanly furnished, but with certain valiant touches. Yellow-tissue roses in a cut-glass table vase. Some Japanese wind-bells that swayed in an open window.

  There were only two rooms on a floor, kitchen and adjoining parlor, where Emma slept, two pockets of leftover space with slanting ceilings and high little windows upstairs, shared by the remainder of the family. No dining room, but the table was spread in the kitchen, obviously with more ado than usual.

  Quick perceptions flashed over Ray as she entered. There was her mother’s silver cruet on the table. And the wooden shelf-clock with the flowers painted on the oval glass door had stood in the house on Baymiller Street ever since she could remember.

  In the front room where she removed her wraps, the picture of the black and white pair of horses rearing at a zig-zag of lightning had been her father’s favorite. And that carpet hassock with the red wool button in its center, and the china plate with her father and Tagenhorst, cheek to cheek, baked into its center, stood in a rack on the mantelpiece, precisely as it had stood on the rack on the mantelpiece of the house on Baymiller Street. Those old gilded cattails—who in the world would have thought of carting them here!

  Some of the old gall at the confiscation rose, but only for the passing moment. Curtis, once at home, became himself, thawing out of his rigid unease and dragging her luggage with willing hands. With the stiff bird’s-nest hat removed, and a wide apron tied around the titillating jelled movements of her hips, some of the horrid, rigid look of pretentious poverty fell from Freda. There was still yellow in the gray of her hair, and even in the glaring gaseous interior of this poor home, something of the old hint of prettiness.

  The major difficulty with the front room was that the well of staircase to the two upper rooms occupied by Freda and Hugo, Curtis and his brother Kruger, rose from the parlor, thus cutting off all hope of privacy. Unpacking a few toilet articles before going out to join Freda and the children in the cozier, brighter kitchen, a sense of discomfort set her immediately to contemplating some way out—some legitimate excuse that would not offend Freda, for getting herself a room. Curtis, loaded with the assurance born of being once more on his own ground, became the showoff, popping his head now every few minutes into the room.

  “I’m double-jointed!”

  (Curtis, close the door and let your Aunt Ray alone.)

  “Hurry, Aunt Ray, we’re going to have chicken and rice.”

  (Curtis, don’t let me have to speak to you again!)

  “Aunt Ray, want to see my fox terrier?”

  (What I go through with that boy! Smack! Now, will that hold you awhile?)

  “Yoo-hoo, Aunt Ray, look! Jackknife. Pap lets me have it on Sundays.”

  Presently, before Hugo came home from his gas-meter inspections or the older boy from his work at the brickyards, and after a peppering of Freda’s do’s and don’ts to the boy and girl that were already nerve-racking in their repetitiousness, there was time, with the dinner simmering on the stove, to sit for a bit beside Freda on a bench in the side yard.

  “Well, Ray, how does it feel to be back with plain folks once more?”

  “Plain folks, why, I wasn’t aware I had ever left them.”

  Freda laughed in a high artificial little scale. “Well, New York, Europe, Mount Clemens don’t sound plain to me. Not if you’ve lived the plain drudging kind of life I have.”

  Every word veiled, provocative, and in a curious tone of grievance.

  “Did I hear you say, coming out on the streetcar, Freda, that Hugo hasn’t been so well?”

  “Curtis, stop dragging that dog around, and go indoors and tell your sister not to let the oven get too hot for those biscuits. There’s nothing much the matter with Hugo, Ray, except what’s been the matter with him since the day he was born. Nothingness.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What I say. Curtis, let that dog alone. Hugo’s got no force, no nothing that a man’s got to have in this day and age to get on. No wonder his uncle died leaving everything to that hellion he married. I’d rather a person would be a hellion than a nothing. That’s Hugo. Nothingness is his ailment, and there’s no way to realize what that sickness is until you’re married to it. Curtis! What’s brought you out here, Ray? Could have knocked me over, when your telegram came this morning. Funny thing, that is the first telegram has ever been delivered to this house since Mama died and Marshall wired from Toledo he couldn’t come for the funeral.”

  “I just felt, Freda, as long as I was out this far Middle West, I wanted to see some of my own again.”

  “M-m. Well, I’m sorry, Ray, there’s nothing much to see.”

  “Why, you look all right, Freda. The children are nice. Emma’s right sweet.”

  “Cur—tis, if I wasn’t sitting here talking to your Aunt Ray, I wouldn’t wait until tonight to use what is hanging on the cellar door. Yes, my children are all right, but I don’t wish it to my worst enemy, Ray, to have to contend with what I have in sickness and getting Emma’s eyes even to the stage they are now. You helped a lot there, Ray. Don’t know what we would have done without you.”

  “I wish it could have been more.”

  She turned like a shot on that. “Why couldn’t it? You’ve fixed yourself pretty, haven’t you?”

  How much did Freda know? How much had she heard? What did she suspect? In many ways this was going to be terrible. Why—why had she come? On Emma’s account her instinct had been against it. Yet where—else—

  “I wouldn’t say that, Freda. Life has never been very lavish with me, if that’s what you mean. I’m just used to turning the trick of making a dollar go twice as far as it’s supposed to.”

  “You don’t expect with your traipsing around on trips to Europe and resorts, that we’ve been thinking you have kept on with the wholesale trimming concern all these years? Maybe you don�
�t realize it, but you’ve never told us different.”

  She had not realized that. What they thought out here in Youngstown among her own, she had never been able to marshal even in imagination.

  “I guess you’re right, Freda. Things, though, have been pretty much for me what I suppose you’ve guessed.”

  “What you suppose I’ve guessed? We don’t guess anything that we’re not supposed to know.”

  (Tut, tut! How she and, during her lifetime, Tagenhorst must have tried to rend the veil of their ignorance concerning her.)

  “Well, anyway, you can guess that there is nothing much I have to tell that would make it the occasion of a Roman holiday.”

  “Are you kept?”

  The question deserved its equally direct reply.

  “Yes.”

  The boy ran shouting down the yard with his fox terrier; behind them, in the kitchen, but well out of sound, the slender figure of Emma, at chores, moved every so often across the screened doorway. Imperceptibly it seemed to Ray there was something of tiny withdrawal in the apparently motionless figure of Freda.

  “Well—I only hope that if you’ve made that kind of bed to lay on, you’ve made yourself a comfortable one.” There was resentment and grievance and bitterness and frustration in Freda’s voice. “I suppose you have had a great many er—a—er—friends. I’m not the one to cast a stone, but I suppose you’ve had—many?”

  Was it possible that the privacy of her life with Walter had been as perfect as they had maneuvered it should be?