Back STreet

by Fannie Hurst

  “Excuse it, won’t you, please? I must have had a bad dream. Mal rêve.”

  What were they saying to her—of her? The voice of Madame Papatou, filled with questioning grunts: “Voilà madame, qu’est-ce qu’il y a? Êtes-vous malade? Rêvez-vous? Qu’est-ce qu’il y a avec vous à cette heure de la nuit?”

  Papatou, his old fat stomach bulging in his ridiculous underwear, and his eyes unnice, as they roved the torn places of her robe and gown. The dim eyes of the curious, hanging like faintly lit grapes in the background. Oh, my God, were they thinking her crazy? …

  “I’m ever so sorry, Madame Papatou. Je suis triste. Dream. Rêve. Je ne suis pas malade, comprenez-vous? Mon petit chien—je pleure pour mon petit chien—my dog—I weep for him—”

  They had wept with her, that day in the courtyard, this strange assorted mixture. Grief should be a great leavener. “Je suis triste, mes amis—sad—I am sad—mon petit chien—mon pauvre petit chien—my heart hurts while I sleep—and I cry out—pardonnez-moi—”

  They were kind, these strange alien faces, behind which thoughts went on in a language not her own, and to whom she was as mysterious as they to her, Madame Papatou even remaining after the others, to knead with her terrific hands, in a vigorous massage along her body.

  “Bien, madame, n’est-ce pas? Good. N’est-ce pas? Goo-od.”

  “Oui. Oui. Bien, madame, but a little lighter—please—”

  “Bien, madame?”

  “Oh, très good, madame. But I—je suis—much better—ouch!”

  “Bien, n’est-ce pas?”

  “Yes. Yes.” If only she would stop kneading. Those terrific fingers working into the hollows of her neck, along her thighs, under the very vertebrae of her spine. “Ouch—please—”

  “Bien, n’est-ce pas?”

  “Oui. Oh, my God, not so hard—”

  “Bien, n’est-ce pas?”

  “Oui, but—”

  “Bien?”

  Of course, to have forgotten! What lack of diplomacy, when of all times her rent was beginning once more to be due in a week, it was unwise to let the slightest duress show itself. There was a franc and ten centimes in her purse.

  “Here, Madame Papatou, merci bien.”

  “Bien, madame. Merci. Bon soir.” The terrific Papatou, placated, slipping the coins into the pocket of the chemise, taking up her lamp and going. “Bien, Madame—maintenant vous restez bien.”

  This was no good. Nights like this took it out of one. There began a parade through the mind. Playing jacks on the Auths’ steps in Baymiller. A boy named Charley Schermer, who had once sprung upon her from Clagmeyer’s alley, as she passed it one day when she was scarcely more than eleven, and said unmentionable things to her. Adolph’s fat knee, which had jounced her up and down on it, detaining her with caresses, when she was eager to be off to play. Kurt’s nearsighted blue eyes, desiring her. The small old-fashioned rocker, in which her mother had loved to sew, and which Tagenhorst had spirited off to Youngstown. The low gleaming of Cincinnati, beheld through the two smokes of twilight and factory, from a spot on Walnut Hills called Ingleside. The hum of the hazard-wheel in a back room, Over-the-Rhine. Hamilton, Ohio, as you stepped off the C. H. and D. into a drab red station. Voices at night along the canal. Woodward High at noon, when boys awaited you at the corner. A drummer in Wielert’s asking you if you were innocent. The fatty look to Freda’s face, as it lied about the baby. The Stag Hotel, with fresh window boxes of bachelor’s buttons, as she had passed it one spring afternoon, wearing the last word in a piqué skirt, the new “rainy day” length. The barrel figure of Adolph, singing at Turnverein. Walter, the night he had come bearing the Babe in the hamper.…

  Sh-h-h-h! She must have cried out again, this time from the rim of a very light doze. Simply must not do this. Besides, the time had come to plan. No more procrastination. Old Mother Hubbard, she went to the cupboard, to get her poor dog a bone—Thank God, Babe’s cupboard had never been bare. But now the cupboard was bare all right. Well, here goes. The Americans, tomorrow. The brown tweed suit with the turban still had its quality of chic. Now, now, give the devil his due, she still had style all right. Countrywoman in dilemma. Small loan would tide over …

  It was bright noon when she awoke, without the headache which had tormented her at intervals during the night, and feeling ready for what lay before her.

  But in spite of presenting herself at the Hotel Europa, about two o’clock, just as the dining room was filled, and running her eye over the register of little white cards, she did nothing as planned. Each white card bore a name. Reinhardt. Plant. (There had been Cincinnati Plants. Fine conservative large family. But somehow—well, somehow, one didn’t approach a Plant this way.) Greer, Dreyfous. (Dreyfous, French or American? American Jews are generous. Still, it might be a French Dreyfous.) McCaffry. (Good name.) Stedman. Opdike? (There had been a Maggie Opdike at Woodward High. Trashy people, who would grow rich trashily.) Swan. D’Artagnan. (There had been a character in the literature course at Woodward High, named that—D’Artagnan.) Vaselli. (Italians.) Sir Hubert Grenbole. (No, one could not appear on her uppers before a Sir Hubert.) Ryan. Ponscarme. St.-Beauve. Levi.

  She drew back her lips then, that had not breakfasted, and directed a smile to the portêr which she realized was her glassiest.

  “I wish to see Mrs. Levi.”

  “Mrs. Levi and her daughter, they have checked out theese morning for Paris, madame.”

  “Oh, yes. Oh, yes, of course, I see. They did say something about it.” Couldn’t very well say then, “Mrs. Ponscarme will do, or Mrs. St.-Beauve.” (Besides, you could not in a thousand years approach a Mrs. St.-Beauve.) The thing to do was to move grandly out through the lobby, with the vista of diners showing in the dining room beyond, or, quick as a flash, he might suspect. One of those women who peddle lingerie, with samples of the materials in their handbags, or a solicitor for an automobile-touring company. There was an idea. Somewhere there must be positions like that open.…

  The day drifted, and strangely without hunger or concern. The boule tables did not operate at the Casino in the afternoons, but the garden was pleasant, and there were benches where one could sit without needing to order drinks.

  She wondered a little how she looked, seated there on an iron bench, with her handbag, to which she had applied shoepolish, on the seat beside her, and the corners of her lips nicely up. Not bad. She could tell her head was not nodding, because, when it did, it jarred her headache, which was returning, but not enough to matter. Certainly she did not look the part of having lived through last night—or, for that matter, the night before that, or the night before that, before that.…

  A tall, rather gaunt, wide-shouldered, narrow-hipped woman, with a face that was filled with little valleys, but molded, withal, in a certain grandeur. A ruin, if you must, but one with a straight back.

  The sun wore down, and chill came up, and it was time to go home and dine and rest and dress. Time to go home and rest and dress. Why, in God’s name, for the sake of a cheese-bun, which had made her ill at that, had she let go those shoes? The one saying “Ouch!” It would be simpler, even with the Babe gone, to go back to that room now, if the chest of drawers were not empty of those two patent-leather—God, this was lunacy! To sit thus in a garden, with laughing, strolling, normal people moving past, dreading to go back to a room because the last possession of a dead man’s shoes were no longer in it! Of course one went back. Rested. Dressed. There was a sign up at the Casino entrance. La boule tonight. It was always there. Baccarat. Chemin de fer.

  But somehow, passing out on her way back to the pension, there was something about this sign! The placard, “La boule tonight,” which she had passed a hundred times without heeding, had winked, beckoned her in some unobtrusive way that had snagged her attention.

  Really the effect was not so bad. Curious she had never thought of it before. Talk about necessity being the mother of invention! With the bolero jacket left off, from which the
sequins were peeling like scabs, the brown net gave the effect of the new, daringly low neckline and sleeveless mode so many of the American and French women were affecting that season. It left the arms bare, and, with a little pinning and arranging, gave the rear effect of a waist-deep “V.”

  Took little things like this to buck one up! Why, if some women had that back—if the famous French actress who was recuperating at the spa and who only wore rhinestone straps for the rear part of her bodices, had that back …

  It was still a stunning back, except for the ridge, and had the same length and taper to it of the “stylish” figure that had caused many a head in front of the old Stag Hotel to turn.

  Just all the difference in the world, leaving off that bolero. The aigret in the hair was not much good. Passé. All the lovely young, these days, were wearing their heads either docked and marcelled to the perfection of every strand accounted for, or low and plain and sleek, without ornament.

  For a long while, before the mirror beneath the gas-fixture, there was the question of the small jet ornament. On. Off. Better off, no doubt of that. Younger, and the jet made the hair look brassy.… But it helped to know the ornament was there. Sometimes, without it, even in the mirror-lined rooms, the shaking of her head remained unnoticeable to her. With the jet, the little dancing of the beads was like a signal. Not only could she see, but they made a tiny noise, when her head got to nodding.

  It was horrid to nod. See a doctor about that. Nerves. Old lady Winninger had it for years.…

  Curious, what a habit food was. Now that the headache was gone again, and the exhilaration had come with the effect of the refurbished gown, she was downright hungry. Two glasses of water assuaged that, and the conviction that there would be food later at the Casino. It was going to be that kind of night.

  Sure enough, as if for a corroborative beginning, there seemed to be more of a crowd than usual, about la boule. More youngsters. Apparently a whole new contingent of American, college-appearing fellows, with sleek heads and faultless ties and some of the really adorable and ridiculous pomposities of the precocious minor. There were cocottes aplenty, too, like sparrows alighting for crumbs. Not the very young, who hovered in dazzling flocks around baccarat and chemin-de-fer. The older pecking daws were out here in the la boule rooms; older, but more meticulous to be gay.

  There was that handsome young Klinger! A Pittsburgh Klinger, whose father, at the moment, was the subject of a loud divorce scandal that was being enacted at Nice. He was the one from whom she had caught the twenty francs once, and had the nasty encounter with the French girl in the carrot-colored woollen wig.

  The bolero jacket off, was very effective. One moved through the brace of mirrors, feeling long, bare, nice arms and tapering back.…

  Walter had always been very much the husband where her décolleté was concerned. “Cover up your shoulders. What is the idea of all that nakedness? Don’t like it.”

  A young fellow, also American, was tossing his coins about in a fashion she had not seen duplicated since the South American twins. Up went his shower of coins, like sparrow-feed. Gatherers on the sidelines, keepers.

  The trouble about horning into the group was that they were almost all French girls around him. They squabbled so, and were apt to become ugly.…

  There was one fellow seated between two waxed old Frenchmen with false shirtfronts, an English lad in horn-rimmed glasses, a repeater, playing a system time after time. Number five; number five; number five; number five. Sometimes the first winnings of these fellows playing a system exhilarated them to the extent of passing a five-franc piece, willy-nilly, over their shoulders, for luck. After half an hour, as she waited, suddenly and with an empty-handed gesture he pushed back his chair and walked off.…

  “Heigh-ho, poor kid. Hard luck. Better next time.”

  Farther along, a Parisian in burnsides, looking like a riding master, was winning. Naughty old boys like that, though, did not distribute indiscriminately, if at all.

  The young Americans were the darlings. There was one, with a sleek tan head and a face that must have caused the admission clerk to look thrice at his passport. A fledgling, not, as yet, as they would have put it in the elegant phraseology of Baymiller, dry behind the ears. A darling, winning too, and chaffing with his colleagues, and being generous in a way that had already attracted a little flock of French girls to his elbows.

  Well, why not? She was as much of the spectacle of the evening as any of them. Who were these French girls, with the unwashed-looking necks, and the burnt hair, and the elaborate décolleté, to keep shoving her back to the outer fringe? Besides, these darling, reckless, naughty little boys, cutting their citizen-of-the-world teeth, were her countrymen! That tan-haired boy, there, the darling! A mere baby playing hooky from his crib and winning so recklessly with the luck of an innocent abroad, was her compatriot. God damn the pecking greedy daws between her and him. She was hungry! Her head, of just shameful degrading creature-hunger, was nodding like a nail file when you hold it between thumb and forefinger and pluck the loose end. She could see, in the mirror, the dancing of the jet. She was hungry, with that caved-in feeling that made one see everything twice. The way to treat these pecking daws was to peck as they pecked—shove as they shoved—push as they pushed. If need be, scratch and claw as they could claw—there—now—this way, boy! Me! That’s the boy!

  It landed, swift and sure into the outstretched talon of her hand, without the youth so much as glancing back to see its destination, and causing a little gasp, but no contesting, among the girls.

  “Arnold mustn’t throw away his five-hundred-franc notes like that,” sang one of the colleagues, “or Mama’ll spank. Irma’ll spank!”

  The shock of that went home so quietly! Like a bullet that enters a breast without pain. Why, of course, that was Arnold. That was Arnold, who only yesterday, at Mount Clemens, had been tucked away under the heartbeat of his mother. She might have known it. That was Corinne’s hair—that was Walter’s Arnold.

  There were five hundred francs in her hand. The joke of having died and cried over the shoes that said “Ouch!” Here was something more directly from the flesh of the flesh that had been Walter. Five hundred francs as if from the dead hand of Walter, by way of the live hand of his son. Catch me giving these up.… Catch me.

  Papatou declared to the officials it was the sight of the long envelope from America, from New-cas-tle, Indeeana, to be exact, that had been lying untouched, halfway under the door, for three days, which first jerked him to the realization that Madame l’Américaine had not been seen so much as scuttling through the corridors to the outhouse for almost a week. That, and to quote him literally, the faint stink of death which had seemed to seep out as he applied eye to the keyhole.

  The old miser of an Américaine! She had died from lack of food, her dry mouth open, with a bubble, as if of glassine paper, spanning it, and, all the time, a five-hundred-franc note plastered to her bosom like a porous plaster.

  Movie Adaptations of Fannie Hurst’s

  BACK STREET

  1932: Produced by Universal Pictures. Directed by John M. Stahl. Starring Irene Dunne and John Boles. Screenplay by Gladys Lehman.

  1941: Produced by Universal Pictures. Directed by Robert Stevenson. Starring Margaret Sullavan and Charles Boyer. Screenplay by Bruce Manning and Felix Jackson.

  1961: Co-produced by Ross Hunter Productions and Carrollton Inc. Directed by David Miller. Starring Susan Hayward, John Gavin, and Vera Miles. Screenplay by Eleanore Griffin and William Ludwig. Academy Award nominee for Best Costume Design, Color.

  Fannie Hurst

  BACK STREET

  Fannie Hurst (1889–1968) was an American novelist. Born in Hamilton, Ohio, and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, she graduated from Washington University in St. Louis in 1909. Hurst was a member of the Lucy Stone League, the Urban League, and was appointed to the National Advisory Committee to the Works Progress Administration in 1940. She was also a delegate to the
World Health Organization in 1952. She published more than twenty novels and story collections in her lifetime.

  BOOKS BY FANNIE HURST

  Anatomy of Me

  Back Street

  Family!

  Humoresque

  Imitation of Life

  Lummox

  A President is Born

  Song of Life

  Stardust