Back STreet

by Fannie Hurst

  God, one simply must not sit there, hour after hour, reliving such moments as the nick in the cherub’s nose.

  The maddening continuous foreign whine of voices from the courtyard! The din that was suddenly terribly alien. She wanted home these days, with a nostalgia that was twisting. With so much in the way of the strategic next move to think about, irrelevant pictures kept cluttering up concentration. A spring afternoon at the Fifty-ninth Street entrance to Central Park, with the first buds spangling bushes. Belmont Park, with her horse running to form, and sun drenching grandstand and faces that were familiar to her. Walter at Cape May, on a moonlit strip of beach. The cinnamon-brown velvet sofa, after the table had been dragged away, his head, tired, against her.…

  “Snap out of it” was a new one she had heard the American college boys use at the Casino. Snap out of it! Yes, but how? The thing to do was to bide one’s time and the good break would come, but the biding came high. Food. Francs going out and, except for the tiny enforced sales of the tiny objects, nothing coming in.

  Something sweet did come in. A letter, written in the full power of restored eyesight.

  “My dearest of dear Aunts: Just because I never write anymore does not mean that you are ever far out of my mind. You lead such a gay, wandering life, that you sometimes fail to supply us, naughty dear, with sufficient address. But now that it is Aix, indefinitely, as you put it, I hasten to tell you that I love you and owe you everything and am back at my work and have had two promotions and my eyes are splendid. And from what the doctors tell me, I have every reason to feel they are permanently so.

  “One of these days, no matter how little you want it, or need it, I am going to treat myself to the great joy of slipping my first one-hundred-dollar check into a long envelope that will bear the homely return address of Newcastle, Indiana. These long envelopes will reach you from time to time as I feel able, dear Aunt, so be sure and keep me advised of any change of address. Not that a hundred of them could ever really repay you, but the rest you must take in the payment of love. We are all well, and don’t forget that if you ever need a new maid or a secretary, your loving niece is eager for a glimpse of Europe.”

  There was no good letting go the impulse to laugh—it would have been a horselaugh—it might have been a bray—

  A strange thing happened. There was an Englishwoman, a Mrs. Meserick, who lived in a pension on a street that backed up against Ray’s, appreciably more of a commodious hostelry, except that there were railroad tracks in front of it. Sometimes they sipped vermouth together at the sidewalk table of a little sawdust-strewn buvette they both frequented, and on one occasion Mrs. Meserick, pressed, had borrowed a dozen francs. Mrs. Meserick was seventy, had eked out her living from the gaming tables of the cycle of spas for fifty years, and, on the countless occasions of street mendicants approaching them, was kind, if only with sous.

  The day that Ray, pressed by the prospect of having to dispose of certain objects that were almost unbearably close to her, finally sought out, in really great travail, Mrs. Meserick in her lodgings, there was a group of gamins about the sidewalk and a gendarme at the entrance to the little room.

  Mrs. Meserick had died in her sleep.

  She tried, in a frantic and therefore extremely unconvincing fashion, to make it understood to the gendarme, in a roomful of seemingly irrelevant people, that the deceased had owed her a dozen francs and would have wanted that sum to be paid immediately out of what was left.…

  It struck her, after she had been somewhat firmly shouldered by the gendarme down the stairs, how shockingly futile and even horrible had been her demand. Fancy walking into the apartment of a dead friend in America and requesting the payment of a petty debt. Oh, she needed to be at home—she needed to be back at home to get her bearings.…

  The terrible fact of the matter was that by now she was faced with the crisis of selling possessions that were not possessions at all, except in the sense that hands and knees and heartbeats are possessions. There were the silver watch that Walter had bought that day at Geneva, his gold cuff links, the pin-seal wallet, and the pair of patent-leather shoes, with the arch-supports.

  They were revenue; the cuff links alone, even allowing Anatole’s rascality, would pay August’s room rent. That was important. Even with the prospect, once the tide turned, of breaking up any day for the homeward sailing, the security of the roof was important. It kept off the sniffing suspicion of Papatou that all was not on even keel. It kept the infrequency of her comings and goings unremarkable, it kept the nose of any possible suspicion of not all well, sniffing elsewhere.

  Once, when she had not ventured downstairs for five days except, when Marchand was chained, to the courtyard with the Babe, Papatou had come knocking at her door to inquire in pantomime if all was well. After that, such lapses ceased to be lapses, and became matter-of-course with Madame l’Américaine.

  Madame l’Américaine was biding her time and yet biding, when, with her footsteps seeming to echo in the hollow of her head, she turned her face toward Anatole with the little silver watch from Geneva in the palm of her hand.

  Walter had bought her that and buckled it around her wrist. Almost his sole personal gift to her. They had even quarreled over it and that somehow was what made it easier to part with it first. His voice, though, that in the end had been forgiving, must be prisoner in it. Next to the personal things which he himself had worn, the cuff-buttons, the wallet, the shoes, it was her dearest link to the inexpressibly dear—for sale. The meaning of my life. The power of myself to hurt. The power of myself to be glad. The sweetness of my memories. For sale. Here is my silver watch. Locked into this silver watch is something that cannot die. Anatole, if you knew that, you would not cheat.

  This was rank sentimentality, the mealy self-indulgence of trading on easy emotions.

  Anatole, if he knew that, would not cheat! Anatole, if he knew that, would cheat her to her very eyeballs! The way to handle Anatole was to make him understand the futility of trying to put anything over, where the value of this watch was concerned.

  “Anna, tell Anatole I expect seven hundred francs for this watch. Swiss movement. Good as new!” It brought four hundred.

  Four hundred francs for the watch! It had cost eight. She knew because she had bought one precisely like it for Emma. Four hundred francs. She felt like banging, one after the other, the fat cheeks of Anna, as she handed over the paltry sum. But of course one did nothing of the sort. What she did was to buy veal, petits pains, sugar, of which the larder had been empty for a week, alcohol for the spirit-lamp, shoes, fresh malines for a shoulder-scarf, face-powder, Castile soap, giblets for the Babe, and, hurrying home, cross the palm of Papatou with the sum total of next month’s rent.

  So much for that, except that it left her, as to francs in the pocket, precisely where she had started. Then it struck her that the thing to do was to wound an already open wound, which she did by carrying the next day to Anatole the gold cuff links and the wallet, for which he brought back to her precisely the amount of the watch.

  The ridiculous fancy had her in its clutch, the sentimental fancy for which she flagellated herself, that while she had the shoes, the patent-leather ones with the faint cracks across each, where his weight had pressed and his foot had curled in the walking, it really was not so bad about the watch and the cuff links. (If only you could stop crying nights!) There were the shoes! They were wrapped each in a strip of canton flannel, in the drawer of a chest that was now about empty.

  Thank God, they, the shoes, were too trivial to be negotiable. The thing to do now, what with another month’s lodging clear, was to make her tiny beginning. Five francs to bring in ten. Ten, twenty. And so on, by a process which Walter had once explained to her in terms of compound interest. Countless gambling fortunes had been started that way. At the boule tables, too, mind you.

  There was the classic story of the Frenchman, M. Poiteau, baker in a patisserie at Rouen; sent to Aix through the largesse of his em
ployer for a cruel rheumatic complaint; placing twenty francs on the boule table on the first of a month, and leaving Aix six weeks later with one hundred thousand francs.

  On twenty thousand francs—on ten—she could buy security from this heritage of fear. Twenty thousand francs—when there were less than four hundred in the wad of her purse underneath the pillow.

  Walter—if you had only realized—you could have spared me this.…

  56

  Around that long outer boule table were no few grandmas of the evening! Along about eleven o’clock, in finery that hung from the racks of their shoulders, they came, in ones, along the spokes of side streets that radiated toward the Casino. They smelled of frizzled hair and old dress shields and Chianti-spots on yokes and laps that had been pressed with a too-hot iron. They were ladies, for the most part, with loose skin hanging in sacs along the underparts of their upper arms, and strong isolated hairs growing out of their chins, and cheekbones on which the pleated flesh had been laid over with rouge that squatted lightly, in the same detached fashion of the henna-dye that refused any longer to align itself with the frizzed coiffures.

  They stood out in the pattern of gallant ruin around the table, no more cruelly etched, however, than the waxed, burnsided old boys who rolled their eyes to make them appear naughty, and pinched at ladies’ legs underneath the tables, to conceal their impotence. Pretentious relics of better yesterdays, most of them, in machine-stitched toupees and shirtfronts time and time again chalked over.

  A frieze of old valiants with porcelain smiles, trying to hide fear of paresis with the look of seeming to still be lascivious.

  Do-I-look-like-that? No. Do-I-look-like-that? No. God, what if …

  The youngsters, by contrast, were what heightened the effect of crow and crone. Fellows actually scarcely beyond the period of their first long trousers; older brothers, themselves still surprised with the dawn of down along their jowls, who had been obliged to prove their majority in order to obtain entrance. American boys with allowances or incomes or spending money. Younger brothers. A seventeen-year-old dauphin to a long-since-overturned throne. A duke’s youngest son. The twenty-year-old twins of a South American copper king. Legend had it that it was not unknown for youth on a lark to put its small brothers into their first long trousers and gain them entry here. Youth, cutting its gaming and gambling-teeth at la boule. The buzzing at their shoulders of the scenting bevy of cocottes.

  The South American twins, restive of the traffic in petty francs, and eager to graduate to the tables of man’s estate in the rooms adjoining, played night after night to the limit of the stakes permitted, and tossed their coins like feed to sparrows.

  Occasionally, among the frieze of onlookers, Ray caught one or two of them; once a ten-franc piece, which she placed and lost. It was horrible, hovering, night after night, around those South American boys, and, occasionally, at the more conservative shoulder of the duke’s youngest son, or the American boys who kept up a running and extremely local patter of colloquialisms. Red-hot mama! Hotsy-totsy! Atta-baby!

  There was one, the seventeen-year-old possessor of an entrance ticket that had been maneuvered, and heir to a rubber-heel fortune that would have bought the entire principality of his running mate, the Bulgarian prince with the Oxford accent, who had a habit of clicking his fingers and exclaiming, “Hot dog, snap out of it!” at whatever turn in the tide of the affairs of this strange company of men, women, and grandchildren.

  He was a crazy-haired youth, with a birthmark strewn over one cheek, and hands that seemed to fly in all directions, as he raked in his winnings before the croupier should shovel them toward him. Sometimes, to the hilarity of the onlookers, the odd chip or the odd franc flew so wildly that it struck a bystander quite willy-nilly. One night a chip danced right down Ray’s low bodice and lodged there against the bare flesh. She fished it out, and with it, won five francs, and with the five won ten, and with the ten lost ten.

  After that, she hovered chiefly in the vicinity of the willy-nilly rubber-heel prince, placing her bets cagily over his shoulder, reaching for any chance flying foam from his chips.

  It would have been comparatively a simple matter to go up to this youth and banter some francs out of him; so many of the cocottes, to say nothing of the crones, were constantly at him. One quickly learned to beg alms in the spirit of carnival, for fear the specter of need should show its head, offend your patron, and turn him away, cold.

  The crones did it. The cocottes did it. Even the old men. But somehow, for the life of her, hovering there night after night, in the brown dress with the fresh malines scarf, the laid-on circles of her rouge that might have been placed on her cheekbones with a rubber stamp, the porcelain smile, the slightly palsied habit of her head to shake, the neckwattles held by a brown velvet ribbon, like pea-vines to their stick, she could not bring herself to out-and-out ask. Hover, yes! Hover, until the tables were half deserted and of weariness the lids hung over her eyes like bat-flesh.

  The blond son of an Alabama patent-medicine king, said to be already keeping the gilt-haired danseuse of a Paris music hall, who played his stakes at the baccarat tables in the rooms where his youth forbade him, had a way, toward the end of an evening, of tossing a handful of coins straight up into the air, and laughing with his big, firm white teeth at the pecking crows.

  It was part of the spirit of carnival to scramble for coins that would buy giblets.… One evening, in the tussle, a man’s heel came down on her thumb and caused the blood to spurt out. That was pretty bad. Not the wound, which healed rapidly, but somehow the picture she made to herself, on all fours, her back bare and with a ridge down its middle, which she could never quite reach with a powder puff, fingers groping among cuspidors and table legs and feet-of-the-evening, for rolling coins.

  Ugh! That was somehow, in a remote and highly unpleasant manner, equivalent to the lapse she had allowed herself the day she had actually permitted some neighbor children (it might easily have been Papatou) to see her pick chicken feet out of a refuse can. Simply must not let such things happen. Never again. The blond boy from Alabama could toss his coins. Let the others crawl in that horrible panorama of carnival.

  The thing to do was to pull herself out of her dilemma. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, and yet the days passed, and out of that dwindling four hundred francs from the cuff links and wallet, it was difficult to risk next day’s security by planting so much as another franc piece, the hand simply refusing to dig down for one, into the dilapidated finery of her evening bag.

  Now, if only that sweet freckled American youngster over there, who always seemed to have so much spending money, and who played with the delight of a child, could even suspect that by staking her to a hundred francs he might be starting her on—Nonsense! How could he suspect? Merely because she stood across the table from him, smiling. He never smiled back, chiefly because he never looked.

  Perhaps the reason youth no longer looked back was out of deference for the little habit she had taken on lately, of nodding her head. She had noticed it quite suddenly one day at the Casino, while standing opposite a long mirror. Why, her head was shaking! She was nodding at herself without meaning to nod at herself. Silly, quit it! But on she went nodding. Nervousness. Old Mrs. Winninger, on Baymiller Street, had been a great nodder. Palsy. Well, cut it out. Then for days she did not nod again, and suddenly, there she would be at it again, without knowing. She took to wearing a tiny jet ornament on the side of her hair. It was easier to tell when the nodding began, by the twinkling of the jet.

  Well, anyway, if one of those nice kids, without her having to go up to him, would toss her a stake. You simply dared not go down into the narrowing wad in that old sequined evening bag. You dared not.…

  Curious, though, how comparatively little frightened, deep down, she was! Walter had once told her the legend of a man lost in the snows of an Alpine pass, who had dared, within half a mile of a lighted hut, to let himself become pleasantly sleepy, and, succum
bing, had perished. The thing to be was frightened—unsleepy. The thing to keep yourself was frightened. Act! But how?

  One day, sitting with the Babe in the sag of her skirt and looking from her steep window into the courtyard where moved all day and had their being, the strangers of that strange world down there, an idea did auger through into her mind.

  Why not present herself in just the plain facts of her dilemma to the American consul? Silly, there would be no consul at a place like Aix. Well, better still, why not appeal to some of the dozens of Americans now registered, at the height of the season, at all the better hotels of the town? Not necessarily at the Bernasçon. God, not there, or even the Splendide, but there were dozens of wealthy Americans registered at the Europa or Astoria. Go to one of the well-fixed Americans, the man of the family if possible, or, if need be, his wife. Simple. To the point. I am an American woman, stranded abroad. A loan of two hundred dollars would put me on my feet in no time, and enable me to return to my home in the States. Even if I do not put it to you very desperately, I am in need. Will you help me?

  Why, of course! Time and time again, to women at the track, to women in the flat building, she had given help on lesser provocation. Anybody would. An American who thought nothing of losing thrice that sum at a table would be quick to come to the aid of a countrywoman. Somewhere in Paris, or was it Berlin, there was an organization for just that purpose. If only one knew just where. But there was humiliation about that, and besides one needed credentials. Here, in a gaming resort, anyone was likely to find himself in a dilemma! The thing to do was to get into something chic, feel chic, be chic, and go boldly. Time and time again, she rehearsed it, aloud before the mirror, as Walter used to. I am an American woman, temporarily stranded abroad. Please forgive what may seem a presumption, but I know you will understand. A loan of a hundred or two—