Back STreet

by Fannie Hurst

  Head of Banking House of Friedlander-Kunz Dies Suddenly at Aix-les-Bains

  Walter D. Saxel, banker-philanthropist, stricken early this morning of acute indigestion. Dies in wife’s arms before medical aid can arrive.

  Death comes as shock to financial world. Survived by wife and three children.

  45

  Somebody had stuffed up a rat-hole. She was in that rat-hole. That was one way it had of seeming to her. Then again, she was one of those Russian dolls made out of painted wood, with no feet, but a hemispherical base, so that, topple over as she would, back up she came bobbing. That was quite wonderful. It was apparently of no volition of her own that she rose again after each impact. It was just her being humanly resilient.

  Yes, that was very curious. She would never have dreamed she had within her capacity for so much resistance. She would never have dreamed anyone had. The capacity of human beings, the capacity of herself, to go on breathing when the body was little more than a mausoleum!

  The mausoleum moving about her room in the little Hotel Choiseul, warming the Babe’s food over a spirit-lamp, washing out silk stockings to hang them over an umbrella to dry. The mausoleum was careful to henna her hair, even though she had not been out for four days now. But you could never tell. They might come after her. Need her. They—meaning, oh, my God, they, meaning perhaps a doctor, to say it had all been a mistake. They—meaning Richard, to tell her something that had been left by Walter, for him to tell her privately. They, meaning—well, anyway, they might want her. They might need her. Corinne might!

  Corinne was such a baby. Such a terrible baby. Oh, my God, what a terrible baby to be left, that way. She knew, because Walter had told her some of Corinne’s babyish little fears. She knew, because Walter had told her, without ever realizing that he had told her, that Corinne, for instance, was afraid of the dark. Away back in the days before the more common use of electricity, when they had lived in the Lexington Avenue house, devices had been installed, so that no gas-jet was ever turned off, but a tiny blob kept burning so that it could be jerked up with a chain. Corinne was full of fears. She would never put on one of the ropes of her magnificent registered pearls if Walter did not first test the safety clasps, to make sure. On board ship, all his meals had to be taken with her, up on deck, beside her steamer chair, where he fed her as you would a bird, because she felt half ill. She wanted him home every possible birthday anniversary, and holiday, to meals, and at least once a week, preferably Friday nights, because it was frightening to her not to have frequent evidence of solidarity of family. Her superb chinchilla wrap, for which he had paid thirty-five thousand dollars at a Paris exposition, had been Corinne’s choice because it was such tender little-baby fur, off an animal that could never have hurt you while it lived.

  If this much had seeped through to her, Ray, think of what she did not know of the loneliness that must have fallen like a felled tree, across the heart of the babied Corinne! His solicitudes, his indulgences, his generosity, born partly, at least, out of the carking sense of treason that must have been his, had been so constant. Her life had been cradled and lined in chinchilla by him. His image must hang aching and glorified in her poor babyish heart.…

  If things were only so that she could go to her, instead of sitting bottled like the rat that had been corked into its hole!

  And yet to hold back, to make no step, even though the precaution seemed elaborate, would have been the way he wanted it. Terrible to sit there passive, the four days. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. And yet that is how he would have wished it.

  The Paris Herald had carried a subsequent column.

  “Private services for Walter D. Saxel, the New York banker-philanthropist, were held in the villa of Hotel Bernasçon on Friday—brief address delivered by the Hon. James Reedy, ex-ambassador to Turkey—lifelong friend of the deceased. Tributes were also paid by M. Felix Gateau, president of the Paris Bank of Exchange, Baron Meyer Friedlander, of Frankfurt-am-Main, Mr. David Kuhn, New York banker and lifelong friend of the deceased.… The remains, accompanied by Mrs. Saxel, Mr. Richard Saxel, Mr. and Mrs. Mordecai Poole II, will be taken to New York for final interment.”

  How soon dared she venture out? He would have wanted her to be so sure. And yet it had been two days since that article. Three, since the service. Curious though, how fragments of old memory clung to a brain numbed in a mausoleum! Three years before, a friend of Walter’s, a Nathan Dix of Pittsburgh, had died of swift stroke at Aix-les-Bains, and there had been over a week of the agony of procedure. Around dead bodies to be shipped, there revolved elaborate paraphernalia of state. Permit, document, laws of lighterage.

  Poor Corinne. Walter had become freight.

  Poor Corinne. And so passed the days. The days of the trying to thaw a mind that would not function.

  Walter must be lying in a box now, his head on one of those shirred white satin pillows. His body laid out. God, somewhere, had released the dove of his spirit into the blue ozone of eternity—

  There had been a poem like that back in the Woodward High School days—anyway, something like that.

  If you thought of it that way, the crating and the carting and the loading of the body of Walter was not so bad, but the picture of God catching the white dove of Walter’s spirit in His hands, slid about the mind, and wouldn’t stay focused—

  They must be crating him by now; carting him by now; expressing him by now to Paris. More delay. Permits. Then the boat train. Then the docks. Walter, waiting along the docks, like so much commercial cargo to be hoisted. The poor Corinne, who was afraid of the dark and afraid of the fur of an animal that in life could have bitten. He had sheltered her so—

  The fifth day she ventured out, the Babe on a new crocheted leash she had made for him during those four days, out of the inability of her hands to lie quiet. This must be the way fever patients ventured along after long illness. The legs trembled. The hands felt white and thinner and without stamina. A street gamin, in a black smock, shocked what little strength she felt out of her, as he ran shouting down the quiet little street of the Hotel Choiseul. One had to become accustomed to the feel of air against the flesh; and then, when she reached the square, there was everyone moving about quite normally and apparently happy, in a world that did not contain Walter.

  Here it was! Out here was a world that did not contain Walter. He was gone. Walter had died. Walter was dead. Walter was on his way to be buried. Strange that you had never quite fully realized it before. Walter was dead. Somehow, the busy unheeding scene of folk, many of whom had known him, seated about on benches, chatting under trees, sipping the springwaters slowly, moving about in motorcars, strolling, reading, basking, chatting, laughing, proclaimed it more loudly than the silence of the last four days. Walter was dead.

  She sat down on a bench, the Babe anchored by his leash to her wrist. The legs trembled so after fever—no, no. After Walter. Dared she venture up the hill to the Bernasçon, and like any interested, casual friend, ask just for a few facts? She was entitled to them! Damn Corinne, who could suffer unimpeded—damn—no, no, no! Frightened Corinne, who was afraid of fur that had belonged to an animal that could bite. There was aloneness for you. Even with her children about her, the aloneness of a woman like that, who had lost Walter!

  Walter was dead. Her hands, which were lying palm upward on her lap, opened slowly, as if of their colossal emptiness.

  46

  All the little clocks ticking at counteraction, and all the multitude of tiny objects, the little filigree parlor set, the gilded walnut with the views of Niagara Falls, the chamber pot, the blue glass bulldog with rhinestone eyes, the bisques, the elephants on their incline, made sort of a hubbub in the room, so that when it came to dismantling, it was a week or two before she could bring herself to strip the place of even the first portiere.

  Without the tiny commotion of the knickknacks it would become such an empty room. The first curtain down would make it grin like a skeleton. Those lace curtain
s that she had always starched and stretched herself, were eighteen years old. So were the green velour hangings with the gilt-braided valance. It was the sort of room which the removal of pictures from the wall would cause to pale in great blotches the size of the frames. Then, too, no matter how you figured it, a few tiny objects were sure to be lost in wrapping and packing. So much tissue! Where could you pack a darling little tea table the size of a postage stamp! Thank goodness the souvenir-spoon collection, eighteen years old now, even though it was not as complete as she could have wished, could now go to Emma. “Altoona” had been the last. Sterling silver, out of a Sixth Avenue pawnshop window.

  Surveying them, a thought smote her that made her flush. They were almost all sterling. Some had enameled bowls. The one from Fontainebleau, with the head of Marie Antoinette etched onto the handle, had cost three hundred francs. Twelve dollars. The average cost was about five. A couple of hundred dollars, perhaps, represented in that collection. Self-nausea smote her. The spoons were Emma’s. Had been promised her ever since she was a little girl. Besides, what with her pickings at the Casino, during the summer, and the monthly allowance Walter had left her on top of the ormolu clock at the Choiseul just a week before the calamity, there were still two hundred and seventy-five dollars pinned in an envelope against her rubber girdle. The final month’s rent on the apartment would reduce that by eighty-five. That would leave one hundred and ninety. A little frightening, but not too much so. Only a matter of getting one’s bearings.

  Time was the great factor. That was the reason for holding out against the surrender of the flat for smaller quarters. Here in this lair of over twenty years she was traceable. The giving up of the telephone would be like the breaking of a cable that connected her identity with the very sources of life. The will had been published. An enormous, important, benign will, with regard to both family and charitable disbursements. A beautiful will. There was neither surprise nor disappointment in the omission of any ostensible provision for her. He had never got to it. But somehow, some way, safe from Corinne, there must lurk among his effects, consideration for her; with the best of intentions in the world he had never reached the matter of the will—but somewhere among his effects—if only one could hold out and wait, against the pressure of time and dwindling resources.

  The will itself had been one of those which sound as if written for publication. Of course it had to be so. That was what made Walter’s dilemma, where she was concerned, so transparent. What if, after the millions to Corinne, the million each to Richard and Irma, the trust fund of like amount for Arnold, the vast sums to philanthropies, the art collection to museums—what if, in among the part pertaining to legacies to relatives, servants, there had come along, “One hundred thousand dollars to Mrs. Ray Schmidt, friend.” How dangerous and transparent that would have been. How merciful that he had been farsighted. But behind all the years of the procrastinations, there must lurk among his vast effects, safe from Corinne, safe from public eye, consideration for her.

  He had never failed her—quite. That summer of 1904, of her despair and shocking plight, a roll of bills caught against the rear of a buffet had been evidence that he had not failed her. Time and time again, when he had seemed on the verge of forgetting her steamship or railroad ticket, there, at the last moment, it had bobbed up, stuck in an envelope on a table or poked into her purse. Dear darling—

  If one could hold out just a second month. One could, of course. There was still the surplus in her purse. The Women’s Exchange was closed for the summer period, but stacked against that was the pleasant fact that Emma’s earning capacity was about to begin.

  Of course, if Walter had somehow provided her with even as much as fifty thousand, then Emma, whose eyes were none too strong—But Walter had not yet left her the fifty thousand, so providentially Emma’s self-support as teacher was just this month to begin.

  Curious, the sense of stability it gave her to so resolutely feel that somewhere, in his affairs, there lurked that consideration for her. Meanwhile she dismantled the flat slowly; almost the taking-down of a towel-rack was a rite—splashed with tears.

  The justification of her intuition came one warm forenoon when she was engaged in folding away in a round-top trunk, for dear knows what ultimate dispensation, an elaborate Honiton-lace tablecloth which she had made some fifteen years before, and off which she and Walter, long after it had become a chromo, had dined such countless times. She had used to spread it over pink sateen, and there were pink candle-shades to match.

  It was the morning that the landlord, to whom she was about to explain that October the first must see the termination of her lease, was expected; so that, when she opened the door to a ring, the sight of Richard there gave her, nearly as anything she could remember, the impulse to faint. That is, her breathing stopped, and for the moment consciousness was a mere rush of waters.…

  “I’ll come in, if I may,” he said, after what must have been an interval that made him doubt his admittance.

  Presently, and much more clearly, as that sense of rushing darkness began to recede, she and this strangely older Richard were seated on the sofa before the open trunk, around which they had awkwardly to detour.

  “My father would have wished this,” he began. Harshly, she thought.

  “Wished what?”

  “That I come for this purpose.”

  “What purpose?” (Dear heart.)

  The thing to do was not to be pitied by him. Being staccato helped.

  Under his small mustache, which he had developed since last she saw him, he kept biting his full dark-red lips. He was being crucified, sitting here in the flat of his father’s harlot; that is how it must seem to him, to whom easy women, without youth, were horrible.

  She remembered, from something Walter had once said to her, that Richard upon occasion had discussed an escapade of his while at college. It had flattered Walter and made him feel young with, and secure about, his boy. Well it might have. Richard was the one to sow his wild oats fastidiously, as if each one were one of the flawless, pink-fleshed pearls in which his family trafficked with such munificence.

  This was something strange and different to him—hawklike and terrible; and, sitting there opposite him, she found herself trying not to say over and over again to herself, knowing how revolting it would be to him if he knew, “Dear heart.”

  “I guess you know everything.”

  “From the papers,” she said, on a moan.

  “It came suddenly, absolutely without preparation. At ten minutes before five, scarcely dawn, my mother called me from the adjoining room. I had arrived the evening before with her from Paris, where she had met my boat train. When I reached the bed—he was sitting up—quite glassy—color of wax—first thought a stroke. Sent my mother rushing across the hall to my sister’s room, for restoratives, while I tried those at hand. In those few moments while we were alone—I don’t know how well I can explain this to you, Mrs.—Miss Schmidt—he wanted to speak to me. But his lips and his eyes seemed locked. In those few minutes alone with him, Father was trying to say something to, or about, you. He had that look on his face that he had that evening he found me at your hotel in Aix. I may be wrong, in a way I hope to God I am—but—but Father died with that look on his face for you—”

  (How funny. My lips won’t move.)

  “The point is, everything considered—what Father was to me—what he was to my mother—to my brother and sister—with all his—er—weaknesses—what Father was to us makes his every wish, spoken and unspoken—law. Naturally there was no proviso, in his will. I take it there was no—er—arrangement between you, Miss Schmidt?”

  “No.”

  “He would want you provided for. I know that, from something he said to me in an interview—after Aix. Secretly, between us, I want to continue whatever Father’s—er—arrangement was with you.”

  (Silly dear darling—don’t do that with your face as if what you just said was so horrible. It is beautiful
to me. More beautiful than anything has ever been.…)

  “You are good.”

  “I am fulfilling an obligation.”

  “I suppose,” she said slowly, “that according to the way people look at these things, I should refuse. But I’m not going to. It’s like having something left of him. That he thought of me at all—there at the end—puts me somehow in the class with those he loved—”

  “How much did my father—what was the arrangement—”

  “Two hundred dollars.”

  “A week?”

  “No. Every month.”

  “You mean—everything—”

  “Yes. It had to be more the last few years.”

  “Oh, my God,” he said, and got up and walked to the window.

  It made her feel, sitting there, feeling lean and hawklike and as if her eyes were too close together and her thinning nose sharper than ever, that she would like the floor to open and swallow her.

  “If it seems too much—don’t bother—”

  He drew up in front of her. “I need to go now. It’s all right. Every first of the month the money will be left for you, in cash, in a plain addressed envelope, in your letter box downstairs. You will understand the need for secrecy.”

  She wanted to put her hand on his arm, to tell him to be careful of his darling neck at the big international polo-meet, in which, from the newspapers, she knew he was going to play; she wanted, almost beyond the restraining, to draw him down, for just five minutes, onto the couch beside her. He might have something to say that matched more closely with the mood that must have brought him there. If only he would stay. Five minutes.

  She dared not ask, because, as she stood there wanting so terribly to put her hand on his sleeve, the door had closed behind him.

  47

  The day that Richard was killed, outright, in the polo match over which she had wanted to warn him to be careful of his darling neck, such an irrelevant thought quietly struck her, as she read the headlines over a shoulder in a Fifth Avenue bus.