Back STreet

by Fannie Hurst

  “Why, babykums darling, don’t you know me?”

  At that he leaped up and began to lick her, filled with atonements and treating her as if she had just come into the room after an absence. Later, facing her cronies at the track in her new smile, she put up a bold front something like this:

  “Well, the Babe almost bit me when he saw me in them. I hope you won’t.”

  After the first few weeks it was easier. It came less and less to seem to her, each time she smiled, that the crash of crockery was about to take place in her mouth.

  And yet, out of the mental fabric of superstition, lores, occultism, and taboo, woven by years of her contacts with followers of games of chance, it seemed to Ray that, with the advent of the teeth, hoodoo, as she put it, descended, and her luck departed.

  Whatever the contributory causes, the fact was that from the day she stood before the mirror of the hotel in Twenty-third Street, regarding the strange new machine-stitched look to the lower half of her face, something in the way of a turn in the tide of her affairs was manifesting itself.

  “Lay off thirteen days, and see that you don’t see a white horse in the meantime, and your luck will come back on the fourteenth,” advised one of the cronies.

  The white-horse part seemed easy enough in New York, where motor traffic jammed the streets; but, as luck would have it, a delivery wagon drawn by a fine white stallion was standing in front of her hotel as she emerged with the Babe her twelfth day following her abstinence from the track.

  That ended that experiment! The dentistry had cost over two hundred. The inactive twelve days had cost. That always disconcertingly narrow margin was narrowing. The following day she reappeared at Belmont, a jack-of-diamonds folded four times on the inside of her left shoe, for luck.

  “If it doesn’t beat everything!” did not do much toward solving matters. Perhaps the consistent tie-up in her mind of the dentistry with the reversal of luck, was due to the fact that the several hundred dollars expended on her mouth had reduced her margin to its lowest, subtly reducing, with it, a certain self-confidence.

  Be that as it may, she chewed cloves; spat over her left shoulder at the new moon; avoided stepping on the cracks in sidewalks; drank a glass of bootlegged gin with her back three-quarters to the Milky Way; and plucked one of the Babe’s hairs, blew it off the back of her left hand, and caught it on the palm of her right.

  An old bookmaker who, several years before, had stopped pinching her on the thighs, had a cackle which went something like this:

  Luck’s a son-of-a-gun,

  You got it or you ain’t.

  Nothing much to do about it,

  You got it or you ain’t.…

  “I ain’t,” she said to herself one night in the horrid old chronic stillness of her room, and then, as she put it, “laughed up the wrong sleeve.”

  One day, during this May in New York that had been hateful to her, sending her home as it did almost every afternoon with a fresh debit entry nicked into her unease, a wish packed somewhere in the cold-storage recesses of her mind thawed suddenly and boldly through.

  “I want to go and see Walter’s grave.

  “Why not?” In all probability the house in East Fifty-third Street was closed for the summer. She could have slid into the street herself to fortify her convictions that the family must all be at Rye by now. But Walter would have hated that! Now suddenly, after years of feeling that he might also not want this, it came to her that he might! Surely out of the twenty-four hours of every day of every month of all the years since—there were some brief moments he would want reserved for her to stand over his grave. He would, in all probability, have said of her now, as he had sometimes said in life, when she grew putty-colored from too much indoors, “Don’t bend too far backward.” How terrible, if in staying too consistently away, she had been bending too far backward!

  “I want to go and see Walter’s grave.”

  On a May day she went out by subway, surface-car, and taxi to the Salem Fields Cemetery, situated on the edge of Brooklyn. It was a full mature May, overdeveloped into premature fulsomeness, as if it had great breasts that ached of the surging saps pressing against them.

  There were stone gates with Hebrew inscriptions and a phrase in English, which startled: “House of Life.” Graveled paths, bordered in orderly rows of the tips of crocuses, bisected the lay of the land, and then began the precise march of mausoleums and monuments, moving handsomely backward in a strange petrified surf of gravestones. Meyerberg. Block. Rothschild. Goldwasser. Becker. Stern. Glauber. Fineberg. Hirsch. Scharff. Wimpfhimer. Kahn. Obermeyer. Bry. Strauss. Bernstein. Zader. Klein. Victorius. Poole. Zacharias. Gerber. Bower. Harrison. Dreyfous. Pearl.

  SAXEL

  WALTER

  DEARLY BELOVED HUSBAND OF

  CORINNE TRAUER SAXEL

  DEARLY BELOVED FATHER OF

  RICHARD

  IRMA

  ARNOLD

  BORN JULY 6TH, 1870. DIED JULY 29TH, 1923.

  HE WALKED IN BEAUTY

  And beside it:

  RICHARD

  BELOVED SON OF

  CORINNE TRAUER SAXEL

  BELOVED BROTHER OF IRMA AND ARNOLD

  BORN JANUARY 6TH, 1899. DIED OCTOBER 2, 1923.

  GOD LOANED HIM TO US

  The mausoleum, in course of construction, on the very crest of the hill, was obviously to be the final grandeur of Walter’s and Richard’s resting place. A Greek temple, an Old English “S,” and part of the “A” and “X,” already chiseled against the pediment.

  She began to cry, terribly, and make gurgling sounds. May, with the full breasts and the willow trees that drooped all over this beautiful burial ground, seemed standing silent and offended at the grossness of her crying.

  Dearly beloveds—

  50

  Long after she was indistinguishably one of them, she continued to fight off becoming one of them. They were all like that; wary of one another. “Mustn’t let myself get like the rest of these ragtags. I’ll make a killing and quit.”

  Once, in Latonia, within a stone’s throw of Cincinnati, and by way of a fluke that was the talk of the cronies for weeks, Ray, on a sweepstake, twenty to one, did make a killing.

  An old man, named Ed Hofmeister, who had known her back in the days when, as a girl, she had spun the hazard-wheel in the back room of his place Over-the-Rhine, staked her, out of his own big winnings, to one of the most sensational dark-horse events of the year.

  One thousand dollars! He had put up fifty for her, and there, one thousand simoleons, clear! A stroke of fortune that was important to her over and above anything that was apparent on the surface. The beginnings of the nest egg on which she could retire. She had dreamed of that, these years. Why, on that she could almost, aided and abetted by small sweepings now and then from the tables, withdraw to a place like Aix-les-Bains. You could live so cheaply at Aix. Infinitesimally so, if you knew the ways and means as she knew them. The place was honeycombed with genteel Englishwomen and women not so genteel, living in pensions and venturing forth semi-occasionally, under the badge of evening dress, for an evening of careful replenishment of their small pensions or widow incomes. You could do pleasant things at Aix. During season, bask in the little park to grandstand music, take tea for a few francs on a tiny plaza, watch the big cosmopolitan world and his women go by, and even during the winters, tucked away, oh, so cheaply, there were rest and memories at Aix, and she was tired—bone-tired.…

  The night following this scoop, she gave a dinner to Ed Hofmeister, another old fellow named Marty Kaplan, whose father used to play cribbage with Adolph in the house on Baymiller Street, and a woman who, in her day, had been quite spectacular around Cincinnati and Louisville as the beautiful Mary Noalan who had married Ted Mapes, the famous jockey, in a balloon.

  It was a gesture expected of her and, as Mary, who was always early inebriated off somebody’s hip-flask, put it, “Ray did it up brown, and in true old-time Ray Schmidt style.”r />
  She gave this dinner at the Sinton, a new hotel since her time, not far from the site of the old St. Nicholas. Without drinks, which Marty saw to later in the back rooms of Kessler’s Café on Vine Street, the check, what with tips and flowers and special requests to the orchestra from Mary, mounted to sixty dollars.

  But it was worth it, not only because of her warm glow of gratitude to Ed, who was almost dead even then, old codger, of a liver complaint that was to kill him two months later but, though none of her guests knew it, beneath the brown sequin bolero jacket of her trumped-up evening dress of brown lace, there surged the first warmth of security she had known in many a circuitous weary day of the rounds of Belmont, Latonia, New Orleans, and Louisville.

  “You look as handsome as a speckled hen,” Ed told her that night. A speckled hen. Her head turned to the mirrored wall of the Sinton dining room. Speckled hen. That was a new one. Speckled hen. Curious how, as they grew older, the lean avian look seemed to force itself through the faces of the gaming women. Well, perhaps along with the others, she was an old bird, too. Over thirty years since she had sat not half a mile from this very site, at dinner—the night she met Walter. The face above the spangled bolero that looked back at her from the mirror was in its way the wattled old majestic face of a sitting eagle.

  “Well, boys, well, girls,” was going on underneath the bolero jacket, “I may look like a plucked eagle, but this is my swan song. Tomorrow, if you take the trouble to look for me, which you won’t, I’ll be on my way. New York. Paris. Aix. How sweet to be tucked into the peace of a back street at Aix—at rest—”

  “Ray,” Ed was saying, leaning his teeming breath close to her face, “you know I’ve become a rich man since the days you hung around this town, don’t you?”

  “I certainly do, Ed. Don’t know anybody more entitled to it.”

  “To my way of thinking, a good old one is worth ten times as much as a fair-to-middlin’ young one. I don’t know much more about you than I did in the old days. Want to know me better? I’m not asking pay for what I did for you in the little matter of the sweepstake. Do as much for any old friend. So help me God, it come clean into my mind, like this: I’ll place this bet for Ray for old times’ sake and because she’s a good old gal.…”

  “Good of you, Ed. Mighty good.”

  “My proposition is as separate as hell from the little thing I did for you at the track. I’ve got a flat on Vine Street, Ray, over Ryan’s, nobody’s business but my own—private as hell for a night—”

  “Oh, Ed, let that part go. I’m not like that.”

  “The hell you’re not!”

  “—anymore.”

  “All right with me. You kind of got me for the minute—the way you always in the old days kind of got every man that ever looked at you—for the minute.”

  Later, when there were drinks in the rear of Kessler’s, he stunned her with the horridness of a kiss the shape of two moist liver-colored lips pasted against the back of her neck.

  “I must go,” she said, freeing herself, and trying to keep her mouth from crawling of disgust.

  “Don’t let me detain you,” said Ed, making a slow, enormous wink at Mary. “But it’s bedfellow-time.…”

  She got out of the soiled clatter of talk that followed that one, and took a streetcar to her hotel in Fourth Street. There, for the remainder of the night, she packed, bathed the Babe, washed her own hair, and sat in a henna-pack until dawn.…

  Whenever possible, in her almost routinized cycle of following the races, she omitted Latonia, because of its immediate proximity to Cincinnati. The old town, changed, rejuvenated, modernized, refurbished in those years since its umbrageous hills had closed in her universe, was always her dread.

  Here, in the streets of the plateaued city through which the Ohio passed, cutting into Latonia on its southern flank, were the graves of the footsteps of her youth. Asphalt had supplanted the cobbles, gone was the famous old pulsing artery of the canal, plated over now with the smooth face of a boulevard, and, along the streets, scarcely a face that was familiar, and in which she, in return stirred a memory.

  In the few times of her return, not once had she found the courage to wander her way past the house on Baymiller. The old store of Adolph Schmidt was now part of the site of a fifteen-story office-building, and Over-the-Rhine mere legend.

  One evening she did take the Zoo-Eden trolley car, alighting at the top of the incline for the view of the city which, from the eminence of the Rookwood Pottery, spreads itself like a smoky fan. A city cupped in the amphitheater formed by hilltops, a city of low, smoky, thriving industry, shot with tall buildings, flung with bridges, and long since animated from the small München-like placidity of thirty years ago to this quickened metropolis of Chamber of Commerce buildings, City Hall, Armory, Music Hall, Art Museum, Art Academy, United States government-buildings, hotels, theaters, apartment houses, business blocks, clubhouses, hospitals, churches, schools, and hereditary estates of old families with honored ancestors.

  The thought smote her, standing there on the hilltop, that even old Adolph had contributed to the regality of this self-styled Queen City. No appeal on behalf of the Turnverein, the Public Sing, the Music Fest or Opera, had ever found him unresponsive. Back in the days of Adolph, who could sit in Moerlein’s beer-garden and keep time with his old head to the strains of Gounod, the Schmidts had done their part in helping create the impulse to crown these hilltops with the glory of art and music.

  Adolph and Lena Schmidt, whose markless graves she could not muster herself to seek out, had pressed their obscure, unhonored strength into the community impulse to lift this Cincinnati from the level of its canals.

  Sense of their memories dishonored, sense of shame, recollections both sweet and bitter, were what kept her face averted most of the time she was in Cincinnati, and grateful that nine times out of ten what few faces she did recognize did not in turn recognize her. Memories padded around this town at practically every turn.

  There was a curb at the C. H. and D. depot.…

  51

  “It was not to be,” repeated over and over again, once more had a way of making everything seem easier.

  The first day back in New York, after a morning of purchasing a steamship ticket on a one-class boat called the American Farmer, of rushing the Babe to a veterinarian’s for a badly inflamed eye, and of trying futilely to locate Mrs. Cleveland of the Columbus Avenue apartment, who had moved, taking with her the old valises that for years had been stored with her, a letter reached her by way of general delivery.

  It was from Emma, written just one week previously, and it seemed to Ray, as she read it, that heartache could be more than a figure of speech. The heart could literally hurt. Hers did, in a pain across her left breast.

  “Dearest Aunt Ray: Something, sweet Aunt Ray, that I have prayed not to have to tell you is happening to me. It is no good to tell Mother or Father or the boys. They have all they can do as it is, even with my help. But, oh, darling, my eyes! It’s cataract this time, over the left. It’s all milky now and, dearest, when I close my right eye, I can’t see at all. And I’m frightened. And to think it should happen right at the beginning of my teaching year. And I love it so! And they’re so good to me here. The eye doctor in Newcastle says the chances are excellent for an operation’s clearing it up. But it will mean half a year out—and expense. I wouldn’t ask you, dearest of aunts, better-to-me-than-any-one-in-the-world. But you’ve always been so good. You saved me once. Save me again. I know in your gay life of travel and excitement it won’t mean so much to you in the way of sacrifice as it will mean happiness and salvation to me. Sweet Aunt, help me.… Emma.”

  In the moment of receiving that letter she could have laid down her life against the pain of that child. It was as if every bone in her body hurt so that she could feel the outline of her skeleton burning against the flesh.

  Those big bright-blue eyes of Emma, that somehow, behind their slightly enlarged irises, ha
d the look of blue flowers under water. An immemorial cry of the old for its young rang through her pain. “And I live on, tired, old, no-good me, healthy and sound, while her sweet eyes are filled with milkiness.…”

  Give? Her impulse, standing there in the musty hurry of the general-delivery section of the post office, was to flee to this stricken child—her sweet eyes that were innocent. That was what made the pain so all but unbearable. They were such innocent eyes, Emma’s were, to be fuddled with cataract.…

  A passerby, in sporty plus-fours, seeing her bent over her stocking, extracting something, gave her a rude dig in the thigh purposely. There was her handkerchief, containing seven one-hundred-dollar bills, besides the sixty-odd dollars and the steamship ticket in her purse.

  No use speculating. Five hundred of it would have to go in a money order to Emma. One might speculate as to whether she could afford an outside or an inside steamship-room, as she had that morning, or whether it would pay to insert an advertisement in the Times to try and locate Mrs. Cleveland and the suitcase, but over the destiny of Emma’s eyes … The money order that finally went to her was for six hundred.

  No use pretending, though, that it did not matter. It did, and it mattered terribly. Not so much to her plans. The only appreciable difference, for the moment, was that she changed the outside to an inner room, thirty-eight dollars refund on that, and did not insert the advertisement for the missing Mrs. Cleveland and the suitcase.

  But the something that had lifted with the advent of one thousand dollars was squatting back on her chest. Swept, with the stroke of the pen that signed the money order for Emma, was the sense of the new security of days that were to be spent in the quasi-seclusion of the small French spa that would fold her into the inexpensive placidity—a placidity, drenched in memories, that at the same time would hold out to her, during season, the one means of livelihood for which, these days, alas, these years, she seemed qualified.