Back STreet

by Fannie Hurst

  Incredible, the need to keep before Walter the most elementary observations. His inability to withstand the lure of an invitation to indulge in public address seemed to grow with the years and with the prestige of his name on a speakers’ list. But his capacity to fatigue an audience, with a spiritless reading of a not always unspirited address, remained static. Strange, because there were aspects of his work in relationship to his public life upon which, in the sanctity of the flat, he could speak with color and authority.

  “Walter, let me write that down, just the way you said it. How was it? The buying-power of any given community is—hors de combat (whatever that means) if it is-pitted against-a selling-power-so powerful-that it-jeopardizes-the credit—if only you could let go on the platform, dear, the way you do here!”

  “There are some who do not think I am so bad.”

  “Walter, how you twist everything I say.”

  “I wasn’t aware of twisting what you just said of me. In other words, on the speakers’ platform I am a dead-cat.”

  “Why, Walter Saxel, honestly, I could just wash your mouth with soap. Kiss me and take back every word. I think you’re splendid on the platform. Getting better every day, and you know it.”

  “Aztecs of Brooklyn want me for their tenth anniversary.”

  “Well, brush up the talk you gave the Rochester Aztecs. Same crowd—same spirit.”

  “Dig that out for me, Ray—will you?”

  “Love to. I’ve got a new wheeze about Brooklyn. Cut it out of the Literary Digest. You get around so much more than I do, honey. Try to keep your ears open for the funny slants. You’re all right on the serious banking-side. I just want you to be, as they say at Keith’s Vaudeville, louder and funnier.”

  “There you are again.”

  “There you are again, you mean. Kiss me, and not another word out of you. When you squint like that, dear, you look exactly like little Arnold.”

  “Speaking of Arnold, of course it’s all a bit premature, but Corinne already insists that she wants him to enter Corton. I don’t know but what I agree with her.”

  “Oh, Walter, Corton was all right for Richard, although you know yourself how certain things hurt his spirit there. But Richard is tough-fibered compared to Arnold, and not so easily got at. Richard took his medicine about not being eligible to enter a fraternity, but Arnold will be another matter. They will break his spirit.”

  “His mother seemed to think just the contrary. He’s all imagination and no backbone. The child needs outside contacts.”

  “But why try to make a polo player out of a silk purse?”

  “Why not let him be both? Richard is.”

  “Because, in Arnold’s case, the purse will be torn to pieces.”

  “Race pride has the buoyancy to rise above race prejudice. [Her phrase.] Let Arnold when his time comes take his medicine about the Corton fraternity situation. Richard did.”

  “But, Walter, you cannot apply the same formula to two such different natures. I’ve been sending for catalogues from boys’ schools all over the country, Walter, ever since you told me there has been this talk of some day sending Arnold; and the more I read them, and the more you tell me about that child, the surer I am that he ought to be tutored at home indefinitely. Arnold is special, Walter. Don’t cut him out with a biscuit tin. Home study and in time, travel, are for his sort of nature.”

  “Not sure but what you’re right.”

  “I know I am. But all this I’m telling you isn’t really my idea. It’s yours. You’ve always been the one to emphasize that Arnold is the sensitive plant.”

  “His mother—”

  “Of course. It’s natural. She’s ambitious for him, and Corton’s the smart school to send him.”

  “I think I do understand the child.…”

  “I think you’re wonderful with your children, Walter.”

  “And you’re wonderful with me, Ray. But this is what I really dropped in about. Want you to go to the library tomorrow and read up on Abyssinia. North American Archeological Society has been after me to finance that fellow Hickerson who got himself famous down in the Congo country last autumn, and set him up in an expedition to go do some important excavation-work in Abyssinia. Seems to be a good thing, but I’ll need a lot of information at my fingertips when I meet the committee.”

  “Oh, Walter, if only Arnold were old enough to go along! Think what that would do for the boy. That’s what he needs—something like that to stimulate his courage and imagination.…”

  “Oh, I see, poking over dead men’s stones and bones in Abyssinia. That would make a hit with his mother! Ray, you’re a crazy darling.”

  “Walter, stop being silly. I mean it. But come, let’s get to work on the New York Civic Forum annual-banquet address. Can’t you—won’t you, Walter, just once forget yourself, forget your audience, your manuscript, and begin to talk—just naturally, the way you do here? Please, Walter, try to deliver without reading from your notes.… Get up there before the mirror and try it now.”

  “Mr. Chairman. Your Honor the Mayor. Honored guests, gentlemen. It is with no small sense of the honor and responsibility imposed upon me that I find myself tonight confronted with—I can’t. Give me the notes.”

  “You can.”

  “—so vast and distinguished an audience. I remind myself of the man who, walking home one night—Give me the notes. Let me read—”

  “I’m here, Walter, ready to help you if you forget. You’re going ahead splendidly—”

  “—I remind myself of the man—Let me have those notes!”

  “Don’t shout, Walter. Let’s try it over again. Just remember that if you forget—I’m here.”

  “Mr. Chairman. Your Honor the Mayor. Honored guests, ladies and gentlemen. It is with no small sense of the honor and responsibility imposed upon me that I find myself tonight confronted with …”

  38

  It turned out that the hiatus of the months in Youngstown was to divide time and tide into two eras. Not only Ray reckoned in terms of “before and after I went to Youngstown”; but the Walter of those years following, in many ways a kinder and more considerate Walter, reckoned too, subconsciously or unconsciously, in two eras.

  “What do you think, Walter? They are going to tear out the ground-floor apartments of this building and put in stores.”

  “Why, they’ve been threatening to do that since before you went to Youngstown.” Or:

  “Ray, did you ever hear me mention a Frenchman named M. Jules Marin, of whom I saw a good deal during the Guerin Conferences in France?”

  “Seems to me that was way back before I went to Youngstown; I do remember you used to mention lunching with him occasionally. Why?”

  “Nothing. Except I see where he died yesterday in Nantes.”

  “Walter, I can remember the time when nobody we knew was dead. Now it seems to me that almost every few days somebody drops out.”

  “Makes a fellow think, doesn’t it?”

  “Indeed it does. You don’t ever seem any older to me, Walter, except in importance. It’s when I see you in public that I find myself realizing things that never occur to me when you’re just here—with me—as we have been for so many years.”

  “Funny thing about you, Ray—in this flat time seems to stand still. Same old Ray.…”

  (Same old Ray. Old Ray. Old Ray.)

  “Same old furniture. Same old-shoe of a place. It’s when I’m home in the house on Fifty-third Street that the colossal sense of change and time is always with me. The children growing and developing. Corinne’s restiveness to have, and to be. Business—change—development, complications, pressure, hurry, and competition all about me. Why, when I think of this town, Ray, the day we walked into each other over eighteen years ago, and think of the changes that have taken place during that time, I sort of feel as if human realization isn’t big enough to take it all in, if you know what I mean.”

  “I do.”

  “The world my children
are going to face, if they live, please God, in the next forty or fifty years, is a mighty different one from the one we faced at their age. We won’t live to see how different.”

  “B-r-r-r. I’m not afraid to die, but I love life.”

  “While we’re on the subject. I—haven’t forgotten, Ray, a little subject we once opened, years ago out in Youngstown. Er—matter of will. Haven’t forgotten. Life is too uncertain to let a thing like that drift. Certain matters meanwhile have come up in my affairs, the Exchange merger, as you know, which make them more complicated, although fortunately all for the better. I mean to make provision for you, Ray, but in the way that a certain lawyer has got to work out for me so that—well, you know what I mean. No use putting on record any more than is absolutely necessary.”

  Oh, she had wondered through the years all right. Time and time again, hating herself the while, but nevertheless, as she sat sewing, or devising lampshades, or moving about at the mixing of the batch of cinnamon cookies it was her habit to do each fortnight for the Women’s Exchange, which also handled on commission the embroidery and the lampshades, the thought had flown quick as a bird through her mind.

  Had Walter ever carried out his announced intention of that dear tender memory of a night in Youngstown? Not that it really mattered—except—why not be honest with herself, it did matter! It mattered a great deal. It mattered for two or three terribly poignant reasons. She had earned the right to inclusion in the last will and testament of the being to whom she had been, if not all, at least many things. And then—here was where she must be relentlessly honest with herself. Not even the bald heads mounted on the short necks of paunchy bodies turned any longer to the spare figure with the metallic-looking hair and the fine lines in which the powder lingered like snow along ledges. A woman whose slenderness had turned lean and whose chic had petered out into neatness. Somehow, admitting these things to herself, the need of assurance about the future became something horridly imperative.

  Every so often she found herself wondering what had become of Hattie and Saperlee and various other of “the girls” who had drifted through the scene from time to time. There was occasionally a note from one, Greta, who had occupied a sumptuous flat in the building for about a year who, with her friend, whom she gravely described as the “Old Soak,” was living in New Orleans; and once in a while, upon a tip from her, Ray wired down a bet, on one occasion winning five hundred dollars at enormous odds.

  But in general, where were those girls? Walter must—must! And then, to be bound up in the close fabric of the last will and testament of a man into whose life you had been similarly bound, was only fair. It was the symbol of your right to take your high place among his dear ones. Walter must.…

  “There must be a technical way around just the bold procedure of inserting your name into the document, Ray. That would be bad. That’s the matter I intend to clear up with a certain lawyer.…”

  It opened, this subject, the pressure of silent questions that more and more, as she worked, pricked against her consciousness. It was all right, her doing these fancy chores, such as the cookies which she packed into painted tins and sold at a rather close margin, or the padded coathangers, decorated lampshades, and china vases. It took care, along with her rather fair average of good luck at the races, of the not inconsolable item of Emma at Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio.

  It was the “principle of the thing” that turned in her slowly, like a knife. Walter, particularly since the Exchange merger, must reckon his fortune in millions by now.

  Indeed, always reluctantly, however, where money discussions were concerned, he had told her as much, in reply to an outright question from her the day the Exchange merger was consummated. Everywhere were the evidences of the growing grandeur of his position of wealth. The home in Fifty-third Street, that had been doubled in size by the purchase of the brownstone house adjoining. The period of throwing the two houses into one had been an arduous one of poring over blueprints and architects’ drawings, and, for Ray, of exploring large, beautiful illustrated books of Tudor and Italian Renaissance drawings at the library. The central staircase, “winding up like a beautiful woman’s two arms,” had been Ray’s idea, as she had drawn it crudely on the back of an envelope while they sat one evening on their well-dented places on the sofa.

  “I wonder,” she had more than once thought to herself since, “how many times she must have looked beautiful to him, coming down those white stairs, in her white hair, her white velvet, and her white pearls.”

  God! Sometimes sitting there at the sewing, suffocation had her by the throat; thwarting, smoky sense of suffocation.

  Why, of every aspect of his life, was she alone to remain the dingy one? It was not that the flat, as always, was not the warm cloak of retreat to her that it was to him. That was understandable, dear, warm, old-fashioned corner of security. She, no more than he, would have changed it. What rankled was the consistent fact that never, once, had he permitted the luster of his success to brighten her. At birthdays and Christmas-time, duplicates of the monthly rolls of bills found their way into the fishbasket of the bisque boy on the sideboard. That was all. He had succeeded, all right, in keeping her small and brown and unelegant as a sparrow.

  One day, on an impulse he had never repeated, and chiefly because the tines of one of the forks, bent slightly, had scratched his lips as he ate, he sent up a small case of engraved flat silver of conventional design. Another time, during an epidemic of Spanish influenza, he brought her a fur coat, a good quality Hudson seal. Not exactly what she would have selected; but the act moved her deeply.

  Otherwise, the same old devices, which Walter never disapproved, of eking out with additional income from handiwork, continued. Not more than two or three times had she been forced to aid and abet her allowances to Emma with contributions from her household funds. “I’m like the fancy woman in the play, tainted money shall never touch the hands of my chei-ild.”

  But just the same, on the few occasions when she had been short and forced to resort to allowance moneys, as in the case of the ruby lavaliere, she had laboriously gone about the formality of repaying the sum from her Women’s Exchange pocket into the household purse.

  Strange, strange Walter, you, stinting me out of your plenty. Sitting there beside him in the stale air of a warm May evening, his body stretched out on a sofa, while she sat on a small carpet hassock stitching, it struck her how easily she might hate him, whose family wore so conspicuously the scalps of his munificence. The double house on Fifty-third Street. The summer home at Rye, of twice the magnitude of the old home at Cape May. The prominence of his place and Corinne’s, in the listed names of donors, endowers, patrons. The munificence of education, travel, sports, and expensive activities surrounding his children. Lately, too, out of a large sweep of room formed by the merging of the fourth stories of the two houses into a gallery, he had gathered the nucleus of what was to become one of the most important small collections of the Italian and Dutch Masters of the fourteenth and fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

  There were already two Jan Steens, a Carlo Dolci, a Cimabue triptych, an alleged Velasquez, and a Memlinc, smaller than all the rest, but which had cost many thousands more. Ray knew. The bookkeeping, the sending for catalogues, the keeping-abreast with the news of art transactions, had come to be her part of keeping Walter informed. There were folders of correspondence with Berenson in Florence, Duveen in London, Zan Marle in Perugia, in her files, and she could recite the names of “schools” not only by rote but in figures of appraisal.

  Already, expended in that room across the top of the Saxel home, was a fortune in two or three pictures alone, which, she found herself reflecting one day, would have meant affluence for her for the rest of her life.

  Bitterly, before a pride in it that was to become akin to Walter’s, began to set in, she could feel about the money expenditure represented up there in that gallery. Why, if he were to turn over to me, in a lump sum, the price of th
at little Memlinc alone, it would free me for my life; free me from the horrid performance of—the bisque basket on the sideboard.

  Yes, sitting there in the warmish May evening, while she stitched away beside him, it struck her again and again how easily she might hate him.

  39

  It was that summer, just before the closing of the town house and the departure of the household for Rye Beach, that he did what was to her something of redeeming sweetness.

  One evening he brought to her, with his own hands, in a small hamper, a young French poodle. He had carried it in a taxicab from a fancier’s where he had purchased it. He, with his aversion to bundles and baggage, had brought her this firsthand.

  “Why, Walter, I just wouldn’t take anything for this! Oh, my little sweety!”

  “I know you like dogs.”

  “Remember the little pug I had back in Cincinnati, Walter? I cried so when it died. I’ve never since had a pet really of my own except while I was in Youngstown that time.”