Back STreet (16 page)

“Oh, Mama, wouldn’t it be heavenly if I could have orange blossoms on the hem? Walter says he’s sure to trip over it, hurrying.”

The impulse to throttle her with the veiling became more and more absurd. Down underneath her shoulders another and hidden pair of shoulders kept shaking and shaking with the submerged silent laughter. What high little hillocks of breasts she had. Creamy deep, lovely and tender. His head would lie there.…

“Four yards—let veil cover face just enough to make it a simple matter to lift it after the ceremony—please, Mama, don’t get me nervous again. I’m going to have my veil that way if it’s never been done before in the history of the whole religion!”

Walter would lift the veil after the ceremony, to kiss those pale roses of lips. Those lips were there now, close enough for her to touch. To twist!

“Don’t you think some of that pretty little Valenciennes edging will be nice for corsetcovers and dressing-sacks, daughter, to wear around the house?”

While she was having her babies, Corinne would wear dressing-sacks, sheer white ones with Valenciennes or crocheted edgings. They would be part of the intimacy of her life with Walter. They would reveal to him loveliness of soft breasts.

“But Walter’s mother is crocheting so much lace for me!”

“So she is! Then come, daughter, we’ll be late at Madame Dimonson’s for your fitting. You’ll send the things promptly, won’t you, miss? You see, they’re for a wedding.”

“Indeed I will. Oh, Miss Trauer, here, you are forgetting your muff! The pretty violets!”

The—pretty—violets-the-pretty-violets-the-pretty-violets! His to her. The pretty violets that were on the grave of the day.

What happened subsequently, after the two had passed out into a world lit with swirling snowflakes, was what kept her stiffly to her feet instead of permitting her to obey an impulse to huddle down hidden behind a counter and just crouch hurt there, until somehow this day wore on. Heyman Heymann, as if he had only been waiting for the lull between customers, was at her side, cracking his knuckles and trying to be kind.

“Schmidt—Trimmings and Findings” was sold. Even the name was to be absorbed into that of the St. Louis firm. Day of little business was gone. Fortunate to break even. Of course, had already put in an excellent word for Ray, but ways of big business stereotyped. General reorganization. No women had ever been employed by the St. Louis firm. Y’know! Conservative town. Of course, always glad to put in a good word for her. Mighty glad. But ways of big business stereotyped. Never tell how the big fellows might jump.

In this instance Ray could.

She knew, just as surely as she stood there staring into the pier glass that had so recently reflected Corinne, that her days at Schmidt’s, where she had spent so many years of her life, were over, beginning January first, when the new firm took over the old.

So much was over! There was a member of the Cincinnati ball team, Jack Shrier, coming to take her to dinner that evening at Lookout House, at the top of the Incline, and then on later to Atlantic Garden, Over-the-Rhine, where it was coming to be the fashion to slum after eleven. That kind of thing, the ability to spend hours with a lout of a fellow who, when out of training, drank himself, before eleven, into an amorous stupor, apparently was over too, because she sent him a message around to the Stag Hotel, stating,
without troubling to offer reason, her inability to meet him that evening in the lobby of the Grand Hotel.

On Baymiller Street, the Tagenhorsts were already at table when she arrived, bearing a dozen links of a local brand of blood sausages as peace offering for appearing unexpectedly upon the supper-scene against her announced intentions. There they were, the three of them. Tagenhorst, in a black flannelette wrapper printed all over in the design of tiny anchors, Freda and Hugo, seated around the table over a meal of a ham-end that had been boiled in stringbeans, fried eggs, cold soda biscuits over which you poured sorghum for dessert, and a pitcher of pale brew which Hugo had “rushed” from Bader’s corner saloon. There were various food knickknacks and leavings from other meals on the table. A snack of boiled beef, cloying under cold horseradish sauce. A saucer of animal crackers. A warmed-over dish of kohlrabi and a bowl of weatherbeaten-looking
Schmierkäse
. Tagenhorst prided herself upon a copious table, a sort of nibble of this and leftover of that, detested by Ray.

There was never an occasion when she showed herself for an evening meal that Tagenhorst’s lips did not fold themselves back for the identical remark: “Well, to what do we owe this treat?”

“To the fact,” said Ray, tossing down her offering of blood sausage, and drawing up a chair, “that I’m dead on my feet.”

“Should think you would be,” said Tagenhorst, who chewed rapidly on her front teeth. “Can’t burn the candle at both ends and not look like the wrath of God.”

“I suppose I do look the part,” she said, and smoothed her hair as if it felt tired along with her bones, and began hacking herself a piece of the end of the ham.

There was a small blueprint spread beside Hugo’s plate, which he perused through nearsighted eyes as he bolted his food. How rutted they were! How irredeemably committed and destined to commonness! How committed the entire world, in which she, Ray, moved, to the snide happiness to be derived from just the doing of things. Races. Ham-ends. Buggy rides. He sez ’n’ she sez. What must it be like to know someone like Della Fox or Eugene Field or President Cleveland? Commonness here. Bread stabbed up off the center
plate by Hugo’s fork. Tagenhorst’s red-fringed napkin with egg stain. Freda’s high little bust always half exposed. Not even ensconced in the red-brick house on Burnet Avenue would Freda ever rise to anything above her little rhinestone commonness. Indeed, on the contrary, her little pasty gleam would run, with the years, into dinginess.

For Hugo there was simply no redemption. His huge feet would always sprawl on the floor, pointing inward. There would be that tiny tuft of hair at the tip of his rather foolish-looking nose, and the habit of hunching himself over his food until his elbows sprang out like the legs of a grasshopper.

The Tagenhorsts, and Ray with them, even Freda and Hugo, after they achieved the house on Burnet Avenue, would go through life on the plane of the unglamorous people who wore black flannelette with anchor designs and hacked at ham-ends on littered supper tables. The rutted horror of life in a house that smelled perpetually of the suds of family washing, the boiling of potatoes, and the gilt on a parlor chair that had a pink moire bow on its left shoulder.

The Trauers, who were nobodies—Jews always were sort of nobodies, except in a rich way—would never live that trashily, even though their old man was nothing much more than an insurance agent. And he wasn’t their “old man” either. You didn’t refer to Mr. Trauer as “old man.” He was listened to respectfully whenever he spoke, and helped at street corners, and reverenced in his home. It was trashy here. Marshall’s attitude toward his mother was trashy. This house was trashy—and yet Hugo’s next words, leveled at her with the sly cruelty of a small boy about to pull the tail of his cat, made it seem suddenly and surpassingly dear here.

“Marshall has swapped this house for what looks to me like a pair of twin packing cases in Youngstown,” he said, and shoved the blueprint toward her.

She had been prepared for this. The negotiation was one of long duration and endless discussion, and now here it was, and suddenly this house on Baymiller Street became unbearably precious. She had been born in this house. The mother whom she scarcely remembered by feature had lain in a box the shape of the sole of a
shoe, down the center of the room adjoining the one in which they were now seated. She had boarded in this house when Tagenhorst had become landlady of it, and when the father whose memory she loved had taken for a wife the big-boned Tagenhorst, who had ministered to him in a fashion that was snide, but which was apparently sufficient for her nondemanding father. This was a square frame little house, crammed with the memories of her lifetime. She had lain in her cradle here, toddled through its halls, felt the first pangs and joys of adolescence moving up against her body like grass tips against spring soil. Stirrings had taken place in the buds of her consciousness here; she had become aware here, within these trashy, paper-covered walls, of so much that was strange and new and mysterious about herself—about her body—about faint stirrings of dreams, desire, love, beauty, that for want of something better were classified as soul. And now, suddenly, the last vestiges of those days were to end.

Tagenhorst, smitten evidently with some of that same sense of eruption, snatched at the blueprint.

“Nothing is settled yet.”

“Good as.”

“Nothing is signed yet.”

“But you’ve got to sign, Mama,” piped Freda. “Marshall put the cross right there, where you must write your name on the dotted line.”

“It’s hard to know what to do, in this tormenting world,” said Tagenhorst, defensive, nervous, ready to be easily irritated where she and her stepdaughter were concerned in this matter of the property leavings of Adolph Schmidt. Or, rather, where Ray was not concerned. Out from under her, months ago, had slid the anchorage of her father’s business. Out from under her, now, was about to go his home.

“It’s all right with me,” said Ray, and drank her coffee in quick, nervous gulps.

“Where will you go, Ray?” queried Freda, in her treble.

“I’ll board.”

“We will too—won’t we, Hugo, until—”

“I’ll go right on to Youngstown and help Marshall rent the other half of the house. No use my hanging around Cincinnati, now that the children will be going to live at the Hanck house.…”

“Down went McGinty to the bottom of the sea,” was Hugo’s retort to his mother-in-law.

“Why, Hugo, we will be at Uncle Hanck’s soon. Mama’s right.”

“Down went McGinty to the bottom of the sea. We will; but why not now? What’s he waiting on?”

“I wish I knew,” sighed Freda. “It’s hard living this way from day to day—on hopes—”

Whenever she discussed life in the big brick house on Burnet Avenue, and the brick stable with its two rubber-tired carriages, surrey, tan trap, and storm buggy, her blue eyes began to burn as if someone had set a match to two laid grates. How they leaped with the flames of desire!

Well, it was right to desire. It was necessary to desire. Tagenhorst, popping forkfuls of food into her mouth, was desiring. She desired profit. She desired well-being and improvement for her children. She desired much for herself. It was not inconceivable that she could marry again.

Only Ray lacked desire. It was borne in upon her, crumbling her bread into pellets, that among those sitting there, filled with intent and purpose over the pattern of their lives, only she alone of them found herself in the predicament of not even desiring to desire.

Let the eruption that was about to happen all about her take place. What then? Life would flow on—new interests perhaps.… Pogue’s might give her a position in their trimmings—she would find a boarding place—Why feel so seriously about anything? … Life would flow on—Freda would have her baby—

There was a present for baby that moment in her muff out on the hatrack. A tiny knitted jacket and cap, with a pair of pink bootees to match, making an adorable set. She had purchased it that morning on her way to the store; and there it reposed, waiting to be given, in secrecy, to the flaccid little mother-to-be who sat tilting her dessert dish of canned peaches for the last bit of syrup.

Almost immediately after the meal was cleared, she snatched
Freda into her bedroom, closing the door, locking it, and springing the knitted set full upon her by spreading it across the bed.

“If it’s a boy, Freda, you can exchange it for blue!”

“If what’s a boy?” cried Freda, and then stood with her telltale eyes stretched with realization of the heaviness of her blunder.

Strange, but in that instant each knew her separate truth. Ray with a sense of being taken in and a sense of sickening impotency the like of which she had never known before. Freda with the thoroughly aroused realization that it was futile to try any longer to postpone the hour of her inevitable reckoning with Ray.

“I thought I was going to have a kid at first, Ray. Honestly I did.”

“You lied from the first.”

“I didn’t. I thought—”

“You lied from the first.”

“I didn’t.”

“If you stand there saying that,” cried Ray, and caught and shook her shoulders until the fair white teeth of fair white Freda rattled, “if you say that again, I—I’ll hurt you!”

Freda began to whimper, letting her body droop with the sudden inertia of a sack being emptied.

“You won’t tell Hugo, Ray, that it was anything but a miscarriage?”

“I won’t tell him anything,” said Ray, in the lusterless monotone of a voice too tired for inflection. “I won’t tell anything to anybody—ever—because I don’t ever want to see anybody again, least of all you!”

“Ray, it was this way—”

“Leave me alone. I want terribly to be—left alone. I promise anything—but if you don’t go, Freda—there’s no telling—I feel so kind of desperate—if you don’t get out of my sight—I—I might even hurt you—Go!”

Left alone, she began to laugh and sob along her twisted lips at the first of a series of pictures that were to stalk her mind that night through: Eleven o’clock of a chiming Sunday morning. Walter and his mother dallying before the lion-cub cage at the Zoo. Herself and Hugo Hanck, standing face-to-face in front of a vacant lot on Burnet Avenue—

The precipitate kind of haste with which events proceeded struck Ray as being just as well.

By the time the Christmas wreaths in the windows had begun to accumulate the dust of the last days of the year, Ray, to her complete lack of surprise, had received her notification that the scheme of the absorption of “Schmidt—Findings and Trimmings” into Acme Dress Findings Company of St. Louis did not include the taking over of the Schmidt employees.

Freda, by the simple device of remaining in bed for a day, looking waxen and flaxen, had succeeded in conveying to Hugo whatever it was necessary to convey, because now, beatitude unpunctured, his husbandlike concern seemed switched to his wife’s return to an unimpaired state of health.