Back STreet

by Fannie Hurst

  It was while she was in the act of placing the two-franc piece on the red, that her lids, as if magnetized, were literally dragged to meet the pair of eyes that were regarding her like two lighted tunnels from across the table. The eyes of Irma. The young, despising, incredulous, wounded, and mercilessly appraising eyes of the daughter of Walter. Beside her, gazing in innocence at the game, stood Corinne. Mother and daughter; and, as paling, reddening, the daughter of Walter continued to impale, with her glance, the frozen eyes of Ray, her arm stole up and lay in a kind of challenging protection along the bare, white, unconscious shoulders of her mother.

  As she pushed her way out of that scene of sudden terror, it seemed to Ray that the back streets came running in spokes to the door of the Casino, ready to fold her back into their merciful oblivion.

  There was no surprise about it. She had been sitting for practically the whole of the ensuing day, playing solitaire at the center table, which she had dragged over beside the window. Hour after hour, her underlip sucked in and her eyes revolving, as if they had been well-oiled, over the layout of cards, she had sat tucked into the refuge of forcing herself to pit her mind against the small scheme of the game, the idea being not to allow yourself to dwell upon the incident that had turned heart, legs, arms, into sands which were running away, leaving nothingness. The reason she must not allow herself to think was that there was nothing to think about.

  Was it possible that all through these years she had ever dreamed it could be otherwise? Other than a fool’s paradise? Years ago, at a garden party at Rye, she had known just what she knew now. No. No. No. It was not that simple. Truth of it was, she had never really allowed herself to think. Besides, nothing to do about it. Things as they are, are as they are. Must remain as they are. The thing to do was not to think, to pull oneself together, as if it had never happened; to keep the young, hurt, angered, and loathing face of Irma, as she had laid a protecting arm along the shoulder of her mother, from moving across the lay of the cards and making her feel hot and stifled and full of the sense of a need to do something.

  And of course there was nothing at all to do. Presently, when Walter came, as come he would within a day or two or three, everything would go on precisely as it had before. The only possible precaution was to be still more careful—not even venture into the Casino’s outer rooms anymore. That was easy. Just a little more careful—and then he came, and there was no surprise about it.

  Suddenly she glanced up; he was there. How like his father, as he had stood with one indecisive foot on the curb of the C. H. and D. depot. Precisely so Richard stood now, one foot scraping back and forth as he hesitated.

  In the midst of the calamity of what was happening to her, the irrelevant consciousness smote her that, as luck would have it, she was wearing the old red challis, edged with lace which she had let wilt, and that the Babe, with the hair tied out of his eyes with ribbon, was licking a chocolate bonbon she had just tossed him.

  Precisely the picture to burn itself, as she had used to sear with her hot needle-point against burnt-wood plaques, into his young mind! The florid-wallpapered room of thick spotted carpet, portieres, and furnishings. The copy of an American all-story magazine, called Fictionettes, face down on the stiffly stuffed sofa. One of her washed-out chemises hanging to dry where there had been a bit of sun. The cigarette stubs of a habit acquired within the fortnight, strewn.

  This was the kind of scene dished up to boys from college, on larks, who dropped nickels into the slot machines of Cambridge and New Haven. Even her wrapper, when he entered, had been flowing open, revealing her seated with one lace-ruffled pantie-leg flung across the other, a cigarette, which during the last twenty-four hours she had been finding more and more sedative against the rising tide of her nervousness, smoking on the table edge.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, as she rose, clutching her wrapper together.

  It was simply incredible, this flesh of Walter’s flesh, there, a man, speaking. Was ever before such an interview as this one about to take place? Son of her spirit, son who should have been of her flesh, standing, an abominating stranger, before her. “Sit down.”

  He did, quite simply, and that was a relief, because, whatever of terror and catastrophe was about to be released in that room, he was going to be quiet about it.

  And what made it so fantastic, and what made it seem even as repulsive to herself as she felt she was being at the moment to him, was the terrible impulse to take his face between her hands—to feel his head between her hands. And yet, through it, there persisted the strange perspicacity of being able to realize how she must appear to him. One of those frowsy kept-women, who live indoors too much, and who, as the hair begins to streak, the neck to thin, and the veins to bulge, take on that plucked look of old eagles.

  Just her luck to have rubbed vaseline into her scalp the night before, so that the hair lay in clumps, revealing scalp. Just her luck—as if it mattered. To the boy sitting there gingerly on the chair edge, in white flannel trousers, pull-on sweater with some sort of insignia of a polo team across the front, twirling a soft white felt hat and with the other hand rubbing frequently over his sleek black hair, she was the anathema of anathemas. His foolish old father’s relic of an indiscretion.

  All his life, now, he would be branded with the memory of this morning in the back-street hotel room of a French spa that smelled to its very timbers of mustiness and was papered in roses done in the browns and greens of pea soup. The marble fireplace, with its varicose veins, and, on its mantel, as if ridiculously thumbing its nose, a vase of red paper carnations. That horrible unnecessary chemise drying into a shriveled human form across the back of a chair. And then, as if this morning of reckoning were fearful that one taunting detail might be spared to the son of Walter, on the back of the door, in the image of its wearer, hung the old alpaca coat of his father, which she had packed into her trunk the last minute before sailing. There it hung, facing Richard. She wanted to efface it for him. She wanted to efface the morning for him. She wanted to efface the horrible reality of herself seated there holding together the red challis wrapper with the wilted lace, and the Babe there on the chair beside her, licking his sticky chocolate.

  (My poor boy. Oh, my poor boy. Sent to propitiate his father’s mistress.)

  “Let us have this thing out, Miss—er—Mrs. Schmidt, by beginning in the middle. You’re sensible, I’m sure.”

  So this was the curious thing called the new youth. This brittle unembarrassed young voice. This crisp quality that had never been his father’s. This accent that gave him “diction.”

  “I hate like the dickens barging in here, you understand that? As a matter of fact, you have every right to throw me out. Don’t, please. I’m sure you won’t, being sensible. Lay off Father, Mrs. Schmidt.”

  She just sat.…

  “All well and good to say these matters are a man’s own. So they are, up to a point. For years we’ve been letting it happen up to a point. Hasn’t been pretty, at that, but at least we took our medicine. We think it is up to you now, Mrs. Schmidt.”

  “What?”

  “To lay off. Save him from making more of a spectacle of himself than he has in the past. Remove this ridiculous embarrassment from my sister’s position. Bow out.…”

  “You mean—?”

  “You know what I mean. I suppose if I could steam up a righteous moral indignation about the whole damned mess—pardon me, Mrs. Schmidt—I’d try to shame you with the anomalous position into which you have placed my mother, and, for that matter, us children. But I’m not here in the rôle of either moralist or my father’s keeper. I’m here because a very concrete situation has arisen which makes it imperative that I constitute myself a committee of one to request, or demand if I must, that you terminate this ridiculous situation.”

  Young upstart in white flannel pants and patent-leather hair, for whom her very heart had been bleeding ever since he entered the room; young keg of broken glass sitting there making bri
ttle sounds about life and the secret places of the inner shrine known as heart. As if they were controlled by so many spigots, like those nickel-plated urns from which they served hot coffee in the American drug stores! The incarnation, as he sat there, of the heinous thing known as the “younger generation.” She had heard Walter, without comprehending until now, talk about the “hard-boiled young ones” of the day. And now here one sat, not hurt or crushed or wounded. Just cocksure and comprehending and unsurprised. Cocksure and initiated, and so terribly, terribly level-eyed. A nice kind of level eye if you thought about it in one way. Terrible, terrible, if it fastened upon you its fair-and-square gaze with the accusatory look of a private ideal, shattered.… She had shattered that, concerning his father; but brittle young men of his training did not out and admit such.

  “You cannot, Mrs. Schmidt, continue to make my father the scandal and laughingstock of the world. For years we have had to close our eyes to the shadow of you moving along the background of our lives. Everybody except my mother, who by nature is a babe in the wood, knows. It is not square, Mrs. Schmidt, to continue to make my father, who is a public figure now, a comic strip.”

  Corinne did not know. Corinne did not know.

  “And now, as you probably are aware, my sister is about to marry. The Mordecai Pooles aren’t any more prudish than the next ones; but, Mrs. Schmidt, surely you must realize that in the face of the circumstance of my sister’s engagement and the growing danger of my mother knowing, this public nastiness cannot go on.”

  If only the floor, yawning, would swallow you up, in your red challis wrapper and slapped heart, before the merciless, unhurt, disgusted eyes of this perfect-shouldered, lean-thighed polo player, sitting there on his high horse. Why, this very quality of his sophistication had been born out of her concern for him. She, Ray, from the back alleys of his life, had steered his development and education away from the softening influences of Corinne. His self-confidence and power of assertiveness and almost terrifying insulation had been born in the stiff experience of his contacts and competition in schools and colleges which she had selected for him. How dared he grind her pain to pulp? …

  “You must get out of the picture, Mrs. Schmidt, permanently. This you must do out of regard for my father. Out of a sense of the jeopardy in which you place my mother. I wonder if you realize what this would do to her. She is a baby, a woman who has never grown up with a realization, except in a general way, that—if you will pardon my saying it—that your kind exists. She idealizes and worships my father. You dare not destroy that.”

  (Destroy. Me destroy! Boy, in this strange story of your father and me, I have been at his elbow, conserving, every inch of the way of his life. Boy, don’t destroy me, or you destroy him.)

  “Remember, Mrs. Schmidt, I have not come here to plead in the name of morality. I may criticize him, but I do not judge. In the years I was growing up and suffered at school and college the noised-about legend of my father and his shadow, it was something I accepted as a kind of humiliation that was to be part of my life. So did my sister. We even learned, in a measure, to understand and tolerate.… But now she is about to be married, Mrs. Schmidt, and you have not got the right to jeopardize her desirability in the eyes of the conservative Poole family. Go away permanently.”

  (Boy, boy, let me talk. Let me find words to say the unsayable. Don’t you know your father needs me terribly, even more, if possible, boy, than your mother needs him? Try to see that, Young Beautiful. Try to see the terribleness to him of what you are asking.)

  “You must go away, Mrs. Schmidt, without my father knowing. And then, after it is over—the break—I promise you I will see to your—er—proper remuneration.”

  Oh, the shame of the nakedness of despair she was permitting this young god on his high horse to behold! Her lips were the snake’s nest in her face again, and she began to cry, only there were no tears to wet her sobs, and they came on long, hoarse ribbons drawn from an agony of dry throat; and because he was repulsed and horribly embarrassed, he rose and closed the door and stood with his back against it, remotely, fastidiously.

  “I wouldn’t do that. Why is it that the mention of money is what always creates in situations like these hysteria of one sort or another? All right, if the mention of anything so gross between my father and you is repellent, I rescind. You have the privilege to change your mind later. Only go, Mrs. Schmidt. Save him from the destruction and the ridicule you have it in your power to bring down upon him—and his. He deserves to be saved from you. If you don’t go—”

  Her crazy impulse was to turn upon him, impishly. What-if-I-don’t? What-if-I-don’t? There—bah—and shoot out her tongue and do a half-dozen insane antics that were dancing in imagery before her eyes. And yet, somehow it was unthinkable to hear the finish of that threat: “If-you-don’t-go—”

  “I’ll go,” she said to him; and then, for fear he might finish his “If-you-don’t-go,” she repeated it. “I’ll go.”

  Neither was it strange to her that Walter should walk in then. The room was a stage, and he had been dropped his cue, that was all. How like they were, these two dark Semitics, bred well and not too typically of their race, heads mounted on necks that were shorter in the rear, hairy backs of hands, suavity of palms, sensual gray eyes that would practice restraint. The blood that bound the two was thicker than water; it was the thick coagulated blood that bound clans and made imperishable a certain heritage of Jewishness. Walter had it, staring cold-eyed at his son. Richard, who had been on his high and terrible horse two minutes before, was his father’s son now, so smitten with horror and surprise that she again wanted to take that sleek head of his between her hands and place her lips against the look of small-boy that had come over the face of young cock-o’-the-walk.

  “Get out,” said Walter to his son, slow, low, and with his brows clamping down over his eyes like the lid to an iron box.

  “I’m not ashamed, Father, of what I’m doing.”

  “Get out.”

  “I’ve the right to be here.”

  “You have no right here. This is my right—the only right I have ever placed before the million-and-one rights of my family. You have no rights here—none of you—this corner of my life belongs to me—safe, free from every one of you—the only privacy, sanctum, home, I have ever dared claim of my own. Get out!”

  The ridiculousness of the going of Richard, like a small boy, whipped!

  “Walter, don’t humiliate him—he’s right—he’s right—”

  He caught her to him. He kissed her throat. Horrible to her, he clutched at the hem of her red challis wrapper, kissing that. He was trying to say something; but he had no words, and he had no voice, only repetitious whispering-sounds that reminded her of a man having a stroke, and then that hurting, abashing manner of blubbering into her dress-hem!

  “I promise you, Walter,” she said finally, in answer to his repetitious, only half-coherent mouthings, “not while I live—never will I leave you—never—never.”

  He began again, still in the clutch of his inability to speak, to kiss and kiss the hem of her challis wrapper.

  43

  Except for the growing complexity of the precautions, things were strangely little altered by what had seemed, while it was happening, to be so crisic.

  Once more in the New York flat, with the sheetings removed from the furniture and the scores of tiny knickknacks abroad once more over the table and mantel tops—the graduated row of imitation-ivory elephants, the gilt filigree parlor set the size of a postage stamp, the three monkeys who could not hear, see, or speak. Souvenir cups and saucers. Bisque figures. Plaster Lion of Lucerne. Gilt Eiffel Tower. Vulgar little souvenir chamber pots and naughty naked little dolls stepping into bathtubs. A layout that had not changed with the years, except that the once modern apartment building had slid back into the quiet limbo of old-fashioned walk-up. The long, dim hallways, lighted now by electric bulbs that had been superimposed on the gas-fixtures, with their pres
sed-leatherette wallpapers, their disinfectant smells, belonged to an era in apartment-house building that was as dated as bustles or hitching posts.

  Not-so-tenderloin flats, some wag had christened the somber old five-storied red-brick relic of the early era of apartment buildings. That would have seemed strange to Ray, had she heard it, because, as a matter of fact, precious little of the old fancy feeling to the place survived; precious little of the old visiting back and forth, with coats flung on over wrappers. Except for one or two families, and there were family tenants now, with whom she had bowing acquaintance as she passed their doorways on her way to take the Babe for an airing, and a Mrs. Hopper on the top floor, with whom she occasionally went to the races, the days of easy informality were gone.

  It made time a little longer and a little lonelier, and the closer confinement which she practiced, as the result of what would always remain to her the calamity of the interview with Richard, a little more trying.

  The Babe and solitaire helped, and also a new kindness in Walter, which made the horrid occurrence in that back-street hotel at Aix as definite a milestone in their relationship as the affair at Youngstown.

  “You overestimate things, Ray,” he assured her when she complained of a nervousness induced by too much indoors. “I don’t say go show yourself in the first tier of the Metropolitan Opera House, but there is no reason why you cannot go about practically as you have always done. Not to occasions of which I happen to be a part, anymore, but you’ve plenty of leeway left. That is the trouble with you women. Logic doesn’t come naturally to you.”

  “I do overdo it, I know. And now that Irma is married you’d think I’d feel a little easier, wouldn’t you? But curious thing is, I just have a horror of one of these days walking into her and her husband.”