Back STreet (11 page)

“Ray, you’re not going to—”

“Honey, you going to be terribly upset if I tell you something? I’m the biggest fool ever walked in shoe-leather, but I can’t marry you, Kurt. Feel like—well, I just feel something terrible, putting it to you that way, but I know that’s the way you would want me to do it.”

He sat quite still, with his hands hanging loosely between his spread knees, and the light from a gaslight throwing pallor against his pallor.

“It’s you, Kurt, ought to be turning me down, not me you,” she said, closing her eyes on the spectacle of him sitting there in the fallen-forward attitude.

“I knew it,” he said, without moving, and his voice sounding to her, as she sat there with her eyes squeezed shut, like a buggy rumbling over an old wooden corduroy bridge. “Something decided you Sunday night, when you never showed up.”

“Why, Kurt …”

“Something decided you that night, Ray. I don’t say it would ever have been different in the long run; but the next time I heard your voice, when I called Monday early to take your bike down to the shop, something had dropped out of it. For me. Tell me, Ray!”

“I can’t, Kurt,” she gasped. “I can’t.”

“Why?”

“Because there’s just nothing—to tell.”

It was happening, and the marvel of it to Ray was that the part of her life which had not contained it seemed never to have existed. Terrible, in a way, because even that part of her life which had so recently held the darling figure of Adolph was part of the unreality of those yesterdays which did not contain Walter.

The years that did not contain him were so many dead segments of time, to be counted off rapidly, as you would count days off your fingers. Curiously unrelated yesterdays, through which you must have moved simulating eagerness, when it transpired you had never known eagerness before it began for you that warm Sunday evening on the curbstone in front of the C. H. and D.

It was happening with more completeness every day. The waiting for the telephone message. The waiting on the corner of Sixth and Race, to meet him to go to lunch. The waiting with him at the C. H. and D. for the tiny hurried good-bys as he caught the five-forty-five for Hamilton.

Precisely nothing else mattered. The days were punctuated by how much you could be together, how these meetings could be arranged, where to meet, when to meet, and how not to be too conspicuous about it.

Curious, but from the first, this need to be furtive established itself on an undiscussed basis.

“It won’t be easy for me to stay in tonight, Babe. That would
make three Wednesdays in succession, and the first thing I know, Mother will begin bothering her head about why I stay down-city so often.”

That sent the bottom scuttling out of Wednesday evening, leaving it simply something to be endured through until Thursday luncheon, assuming that luncheon could be arranged.

Luncheons were simpler, but not always possible.

On Tuesdays the Dutch Treat Club met, an organization of fifteen or so of the town’s young Jewish men, who assembled for luncheon at the Stag. The town’s best, Ray noted with pride, as realization of young Saxel’s connections began to impress her. Walter’s father, a Hamilton businessman who had died twenty years before, had been first cousin to Stanley Hoffheimer, of the Hoffheimer Avondale Promotion Company, with whom Walter had lived during the three years he attended Woodward High School. Members of the Dutch Treat Club comprised such names as Milton Freiberg, Walter Seasongood, Jr., Stephen Straus (Straus and Mindlin), Junior Sonnenfeld, Mark Wise, Lester Wormser, and the Bowman boys. You walked on Wormser-laid sidewalks in Freiberg shoes. The huge Straus Clothing advertisement was as regular a feature in the
Enquirer
as the death-notices.

It was a matter of pride to relinquish Walter to these upstanding occasions, even when secretly it seemed to her he should at least have made the offer to relinquish them in favor of lunching with her, around at a place called Hayden’s, famous for potato pancakes.

Had the situation, she often told herself, been reversed, nothing could have taken precedence over the possibility of an hour with Walter. Indeed, always on the supposition that such an hour might unexpectedly offer itself, it soon became her technique to accept only tentatively whatever invitations presented themselves.

“I think I can go, but I can’t let you know definitely.” (Must ask Walter if there is any chance of his staying in the city Tuesday evening.)

“Don’t count on me for certain; I’ll come if I can.” (Two or three times, lately, Walter’s mother had developed sudden euchre games, making it unexpectedly possible for him to remain in the city.)

These little matters were scarcely sacrifices, because nothing mattered very much relatively, except being with him, therefore you lied, prevaricated, maneuvered. A man was different somehow. Walter, now, for instance, was always talking about justice and being fair to the other fellow. As if that mattered. Of course, if he cared for Tom, Dick, and Harry more than he cared for you! That was scarcely the point, and she knew it, and yet somewhere, deeply imbedded in each of them, was a different set of ethics. Walter cared, all right. But if he had told a party he would meet him at the Burnet House at five o’clock, and desperately she wanted to see Walter at five o’clock before he caught his train, Walter was sorry, as sorry as could be, and she must know how much seeing her mattered to him, but there was that arrangement to see that certain party at the Burnet House at five, and nothing was farther from his makeup than to lie or prevaricate his way out of it.

“Of course, if any mere appointment is more important—”

“It’s not that, Ray!”

“Tell him you have to stay at the bank and catch up on your work. You know you do, lots of times.”

“Yes, but not today. I’m no good at lying in these little ways, Ray. You girls don’t seem to mind it. Bill Cook is an old friend of mine, Babe. Wants to see me on a little matter of business.”

“If the situation were reversed—”

“I know that, Ray. But it’s just not in me. Besides, we have tomorrow evening—”

Tomorrow evening! Hours of minutes, minutes of seconds, to be got through somehow.

Saturday was the evening to be lived through with the heart in her feeling pinched to the hardness of a pebble. Saturday, it now transpired, to the convenience of everybody concerned, was Walter’s evening at the Trauers’. There was never any discussion about it. There it stood, isolated by silence into strange portentousness, the sense of the impending beginning when Walter cut short his noon-hour at Hayden’s to hurry to the St. Nicholas to his barber.

From then on, the shadow of the evening began to reach a long finger across her day. Any drummer in town could have her
Saturday night for the asking. Dinner at Kissel’s Atlantic Garden if he wanted it, where, along about eleven, Johnnie Carrol or Emma Carus would have the entire crowd to its feet singing “Little Annie Rooney” or “Down Went McGinty to the Bottom of the Sea.” Or, as an alternative, Heuck’s Ten-Twenty-Thirty, or Weber and Fields, at People’s. Wielert’s Pavilion; Shackling’s Opera House, Music Hall, and Promenade Garden, where you could hear a forty-piece reed band, or behold twenty celebrated European performers in spectacular and startling specialties.

To be sitting in Kissel’s, listening to Emma Kissel play the fiddle in her father’s garden Over-the-Rhine, or dining on the veranda of the Lookout House, at the top of the Inclined Plane, with the basin of the city spread dramatically below, or playing hazard in the rear of Chick and George’s with Fred Niemeyer, a malt man out of Philadelphia, or George Bader, whose father was a large stockholder in Latonia racetrack, while Corinne and Walter were tucked away in the well-nigh unbearable propinquity of that parlor in Richmond Street, was just about the cruelest refinement of punishment.

What were they saying and doing, and, more important still, what were they feeling? Walter and Corinne alone together and exposed to the lure of their young bodies and their young hearts and their young lips, while she, helpless in the face of a condition and a danger that were crazing to her, sat in the midst of scenes and people that seemed separated from her consciousness by a film, as if they moved in submarine gardens.

What, seated in the secure bright parlor of that home on Richmond Street, was Walter saying to Corinne, who, as Ray had so painfully reconstructed her from the memory of casual glimpses, had the plump white flesh, on her short neck and high little bosom, of a tender young fowl?

It was as if, there in a world that had suddenly become about as glamorous to her as an old shoe, she were asleep and dreaming of Walter, seated in that brightly lighted parlor on Richmond Street, making highly proper overtures to a personable and marriageable young girl whose innocence he reverenced.

Fool, fool, to have let him taste her lips, when the sweetmeat of what must be the desirable mouth of a girl like Corinne Trauer had surely been denied him. That is, unless they were already his, by the sacred right of an engagement between them.

Not on again, off again.

Jews were like that. A Jewish fellow began to prepare for being a steady husband from the very first moment of his engagement.

Sometimes the pressure of the picture against her brain was almost more than she could bear. Headache began to be almost a regular Saturday-night plea to terminate an evening that along around eleven o’clock became almost beyond endurance.

“What’s the matter with Ray Schmidt, these days? Dead cat! Look here, sister, is it my company gives you the headache? This is the second time you’ve left me high and dry with an evening just beginning. Tell you what! I know a nice quiet little place that don’t give you a headache. If I felt right sure how you would take it, I’d say come along with me—”

Here came the proposition again. How soon before Walter would make it? How soon before he dared? She had already, in the dubious privacy of a lovely dell in Burnet Woods, lain in his arms. Where so often before her sole pleasure had been the giving of pleasure, why not this supreme moment of her compensation? She had lain in his arms, a shiksa, who, so far as he took the trouble to judge, was without innocence or the impeccable purities he demanded of the woman of his own race who would bear his children. A shiksa whose lips were desirable.

He had told her as much. Not then, but later, when her body was no longer touching his, and they were walking toward the car.

“You’re a wonderful girl, Ray. I haven’t the right to be telling you such things, but you’re a wonderful girl.”

What had he meant by that? Hadn’t the right. She could not bear the thought of parting from him that evening without knowing what he meant.

“I’m not wonderful, Walter, except in a way I have always known I could like a person, once I—like him—I think I could be wonderful to someone I liked terribly—I know I could!”

“It must be wonderful to be loved by a girl who has it in her to love like you, Ray.”

What had he meant by that? Must be. Must be wonderful for a man who wasn’t already engaged, or about to be?

Was this thing that was happening to her—had been happening to her ever since that day at the curb of the C. H. and D. depot—going to mean birth of pain that was entirely uncorrelated to any previous suffering she had ever known? Unless one had the power to sweep one of those boys off his feet, like the case of Della Garfunkel, of Covington, a shiksa was hopelessly outside the marriage pale of a boy like Walter.

Even with all the implications that went with it, there were advantages to marrying a good Jewish boy. These boys had by instinct the qualities that could make life sweet for a woman. Fidelity. Stability. Generosity. Reverence for the unit of the family.

As a child, along with the youngsters of Baymiller Street, Ray had used to shout at the children over on Ninth Street and Richmond Street, “Christ-Killer! Sheeny!” without much realization of what they meant. Later, however, even before she met Walter, it was to become abominable to her even to hear Tagenhorst blurt out against the “Ikeys” who were beginning to “run the town.”

Adolph had always liked them as customers. They were good pay and large accounts. “Jew boys,” as Ray had often put it before she met Walter, were usually good spenders, good company, but too cautious to so much as get on a tintype with you.

How horrid of her to ever have been capable of the phrase “Jew boy”! And here, now, one of them was a prince! That became her favorite way of trying to be casual when referring to Saxel. “Do you know Walter Saxel? Prince of a fellow, isn’t he?” Well, he was! One who now made her despise, after a fashion, the traveling salesmen with whom she shared big juicy sirloin steaks at the expensive pleasure resorts of the town, enduring their pawings and petty liberties in payment.

And for what? True, the world of the large hotels, Latonia racetrack, Over-the-Rhine, and the occasional glimpses of Chicago and
New York, were immeasurably more to her liking than the small Rhinish one of Baymiller Street. No use pretending that she didn’t enjoy the sporty pastimes that were not considered admirable. Neither fish nor flesh nor fowl was the stylish Ray Schmidt, but gyrating somewhere between the dull and respectable little orb of Baymiller Street and the sportier realm in which she loved to strut.

To invade that sportier world as the wife of a man like Walter! The secret of his ability to do the handsome things that were so obviously outside the limitations of the bank clerk had been revealed in a chance remark which he let fall. There was an income from his father’s estate which he shared with his mother. Emanuel Saxel had been one of three partners in the small Hamilton jewelry firm of Dreyfous, Saxel and Kahn, now defunct. There was something of the odor of success about Walter. His manner of calling all waiters George. His manner of tipping them. Every time he took the train for Hamilton there was a delicacy under his arm. Hothouse peaches from Peebles’. A sugar
Kranz
from Doerr’s. Bissinger’s candied nuts. New dill pickles. A bottle of
kümmel
from Levi & Ottenheimer’s.