Back STreet (17 page)

Christmas in the house on Baymiller Street had been spent among packing cases, trunks, and dismantled rooms. The Youngstown deal had gone through; and Tagenhorst, on the strength of her renewed relations with her son and his wife, was about to embark to Youngstown for a visit, pending certain decisions of Freda’s and Hugo’s, which, of course, had to do with Herman Hanck.

It was all precipitate, and yet an ordered kind of dissolution that seemed to have pattern. Things had been moving toward this culmination since the death of Adolph, to say nothing of the fact that, while to all intents and purposes the situation with Freda had closed
that night in the bedroom, it was hateful almost beyond endurance to have access to the knowledge of the intricate and ruthless little mechanism concealed somewhere behind the docility of Freda. It was more than that. It was frightening.

Freda and Hugo had rented a furnished room over a grocery store on Goodman Street, near Burnet Avenue. The desperately hoped-for invitation to share the redbrick house had not yet come from Herman Hanck, but he had eaten his Christmas dinner in the house on Baymiller Street, was apparently enormously taken of the
Mädchen
Freda, whose cheeks he was constantly pinching, and had sent around, on the eve of Christmas, by carriage-and-two, a bushel basket of walnuts and forty-eight bottles of the brew of beer which, long after he had withdrawn from the concern, continued to be manufactured in his name.

This had thrown Tagenhorst and the young people into a state of excitement, because, at first, disappointment had been keen that the invitation for Christmas dinner had not come from Hanck. In fact, the laboriously composed little note from Freda and Hugo, asking him to holiday meal in the house on Baymiller Street, had been sent only as a reminder where lay his duty.

But the old man, apparently unplumbed, had accepted with alacrity. For three days, in the midst of a move that was as difficult as it was complicated, Tagenhorst had been obliged to lay aside everything and concentrate on this feast. And feast it was! For three hours and a half, on Christmas Day, the groaning board of Tagenhorst offered up its viands—its noodle soup, its roast pig, its boiled beef in kraut, its drop dumplings, its hot biscuit, its seasoned gravies, its suet pudding, lemon pie, Edam cheese, its nuts and raisins, popcorn, sweets, and fruits—to Hanck who, with napkin spread, legs spread, and face spread, as it were, partook with a sustained vigor worthy of his great girth.

It was after the dinner, warmed, it is true, with a bottle of the late Adolph’s long-hoarded Rhine wine, that Hanck, apprehending Ray alone in the hall under the stairs, grasped her with both his pudgy arms about the waist.

“You’re a fine girl,” he whispered to her. “Would you like to have
a good time some night at my house? Or maybe Atlantic Garden? Say quick!”

Here it was again. Damnably. Mysteriously. Sickeningly. This piece of old rubber ballooning, bloated, piggy eyed, daring such a procedure, and in her own home! His little gesture of pinching Freda’s cheeks had been the gesture you reserve for children. He had even remained on his dignity, such as it was, with Tagenhorst, who had goaded him, as the Rhine wine and Hanck beer began to blend. But with Ray, who had scarcely spoken a brace of words during the long and votive meal, he had dared to run swinish.

Lecherous, naughty old man! True, doubtless, were the rumors of his liaison with the notorious madame of one of the houses on George Street.

That he should have dared, made her lips tighten for days of a compression that kept them jammed and rigid-looking against her clear white teeth.

If Tagenhorst noticed, she was noncommittal.

“I cannot make up my mind if what I am doing is for the best,” she kept saying. “For a penny I’d back out. I half wish Marshall had kept out of my affairs, the way he did before I had any to attract him. Then those children boarding out that-a-way! The old man says he is going to take them in, but meanwhile we can all die in our tracks waiting. I only hope what I am doing is for the best. Marshall’s wife is trying to do her part, writing me that letter to come to Youngstown, but once a slut always a slut.… I only hope what I’m doing is for the best.…”

For Ray it was; of that much she felt sure. Her heart might twist and hurt at what was about to befall her, as she lived for weeks in the center of the disintegration of the house in which she had been born; but somehow, with consistency, the hand of change was upon her.

She had taken a room at the Auths’, a house two blocks away, on Baymiller, one of the oldest houses on the street, but of immaculate upkeep by Bertha Auth, who was reported to scour the roof every morning. The Auths were an elderly pair who had borne the four daughters, all married, and out of the nest, not one of whom
had ever learned English. He was a master builder from Stuttgart, by trade, and reputed wealthy, which in no way mitigated against Bertha’s constant effort to keep the rooms hitherto occupied by daughters, rented out to lodgers.

The Auth girls, rigidly reared, had played through the years of childhood in the Schmidt backyard, but, as they grew into maturity, had not been allowed to “go” with the fly Schmidt girl.

It was easy for Bertha Auth, however, who found her third-floor front difficult to heat and therefore difficult to rent, to forget. It was easier for Ray.

What did it all matter? Perhaps she had been right about her daughters. At least they were all married to good substantial cabinetmakers, carpenters, men in line for the building trades. By now, practically every girl with whom Ray had grown up, was married. What future was there in clerking at Pogue’s and rooming at the Auths’? Idiot. Idiot. Idiot. The way to security lay in Kurt. He would go far, and in a line of business that had to do with transportation, and that meant his interests would be close to the sporting world. That meant much to Ray. Well, what of it? No harm in loving the excitement of the races and baseball, or the thrill of playing hazard on bets the drummers staked you to at Chick and George’s after eleven. Kurt could be trained to do the gay thing like races and occasional trips to New York. Some day, with Kurt, she might even be driving around town with her own tandem! Idiot. Idiot. A Jewish boy with gray eyes and black lashes and a black mustache over square white teeth, and a gentleness of manner and easy-spending way, and an inherent regard for the things that make for respectability and stability, had taken the heart out of every other desire.

One went on trying to pretend that the days were worth rising to meet, or the nights, except for the blessed oblivion of sleep, worth any of the recreations that had once mattered. Was this the Ray who loved clothes, races, hotel meals, smart tilted-looking traps in which you could see and be seen, and who was not above parading, on fine Saturday afternoons, past the Stag Hotel in costume calculated to stun?

“Ray is losing interest in herself,” Tagenhorst confided one
morning to Freda. “Came down in the kitchen this morning, looking like a dead one, to press out a shirtwaist she wouldn’t have worn to a dogfight a year ago. I always did say, the flashy kind peter out first. I’m not so sure Kurt is going to ask her but, if he does, my advice to her is to grab him and grab fast.”

“I wonder,” said Freda, standing at the kitchen window and pulling at her lower lip—a lifetime habit of hers—“I wonder what’s the matter with her.”

“Nothing would surprise me,” said Tagenhorst, spreading a clothesline in the kitchen because the icy wind out-of-doors stiffened the drying clothes. “She’ll get caught one of these days, mark my word. You can go on just so far, getting off scot-free, and then …”

“What do you mean?”

“Thank God, even if you are a married woman, you’re too innocent to know!”

“If you want to know it,” cried Freda, on a sudden high note, “I don’t believe Ray has ever gone the limit with a man.”

“What I don’t know, I’m not saying,” said Tagenhorst, beginning to soap the washboard, “but nobody on God’s earth can keep me from thinking …”

“Well, I guess Ray thinks too when it comes to that. I guess she thinks plenty at what’s going on around here.”

Ray did. Generous to a fault, she found it next to unbearable to sit silent to the spectacle of the square piano being crated for shipment to Youngstown, and the small square horsehair stool, upon which she could remember her mother sitting perched in the dusk, playing slender little airs like “Listen to the Mocking Bird.”

Almost equally unbearable, however, was the packing of her own belongings and such of those household objects to which she was unquestionably heir. Her father’s old rolltop desk, with the smell of his tobacco deep in its timbers, the gilt chair which her mother had painted, her own bird’s-eye maple bedroom suite, enlarged crayon portraits of her parents, the doll in the rocking chair that had stood in the parlor for fifteen years. One of the boys, Jim Wohlgemuth, whose father owned warehouses along the riverfront, and where
later these possessions were to go up like so much timber in a wharf fire, agreed to store all this for her, until such time as her plans should take shape. It was a heart-sickening business, breaking up the house on Baymiller. All this, notwithstanding the fact that not for worlds would she have had it otherwise.

The position at Pogue’s did not come off. After the first douse, it struck her that this was neither as important nor as significant as it had seemed at first shock. Wasn’t an army of the unemployed marching on to Washington at the very minute? Papers full of it. Bad times. Well, that was not her immediate worry. With nine hundred dollars in the bank, and the knowledge that there were several good contacts still in the offing, she could afford to take her time. As a matter of fact, Alms and Doepke, hearing of her availability, had made an advance to her during the period she had considered her negotiation with Pogue’s practically closed.

She never entered into the matter of employment, however, with them, or any other Cincinnati firm, because one morning, seated at breakfast, and reading the announcement of the wedding date of Corinne Trauer and Walter Saxel, the thought flowed calmly over her: Why should I stay around here? I think I’ll wire Eddie Ledbetter and ask him if the job he offered me in New York three months ago is still open. Funny I never thought of that before. Why should I stay around here? …

She was always to say, even when her residence in New York had lengthened out into years, that to her it was never more than a resting-place between trains. A Cincinnati girl visiting New York she was to remain, with the feel of every bone in her body. Even after five years, when the large front parlor which she occupied in a boardinghouse on West Twenty-third Street had gradually come to be furnished in practically all of her own private objects, she was still using such allusions as, “When I go back home—”

Strange, too, because from the first, roots of a sort had gone down into the new asphalt soil. Her business affiliations with Ledbetter and Scape, of Greene Street, started off being a success, because at the conclusion of her second year she was drawing ninety-five dollars a month, the next-highest salary of any woman in the house where she boarded. With the exception of the first few months, when she changed address frequently—for such homely reasons as cockroaches, inebriate neighbors, lack of heat, lack of cleanliness—she had found permanent residence at “Mrs. Blamey’s,” two redbrick houses joined by bridges and giving the combined effect of a small hotel.

There had been little time for the alleged loneliness of the big city. The work at Ledbetter and Scape, mere stock supervision in the veiling and artificial-flower department, which she regarded as child’s play after the more responsible combination of buying-and
selling-rôles she had been accustomed to assume, was nevertheless confining. You arrived at Ledbetter and Scape at eight-thirty and you signed out at five. Supper at six-thirty in the basement dining room of Blamey’s was a gaslit, noisy, highly gregarious affair, where you made social connections, such as they were. At least, such as they were to Ray. Middle-aged businesswomen in “McKinley for President” or “Bryan for President” celluloid buttons, who came down to meals bearing copies of
She, Robert Elsmere, Ramona, Ben Hur, Under Two Flags
, or
A Forbidden Marriage
. The married men, most of whom looked as if they were insurance- or bond-salesmen, with typical boardinghouse wives, and children who were being reared in the miscellaneous but respectable atmosphere of Mrs. Blamey’s. The single men at Blamey’s always seemed to Ray to belong to an uncannily consistent species, with extremely long noses and colds in all of them. From the swivel chairs of small offices which they usually shared with two or three other concerns, they represented lumber firms in the Northwest, or constituted the New York agency of a child’s patent high-chair corporation that manufactured in Grand Rapids. Not a few of them held desk positions in freight offices or with the big wholesale-merchandise firms along lower Broadway and Fifth Avenue. There were two claim agents for streetcar systems boarded at Blamey’s, and a ticket man at the box office of Tony Pastor’s.

A credit man at Lord and Taylor’s fine store at Broadway and Twentieth Street had boarded at Blamey’s with his wife and two children for eleven years. Also a head bookkeeper for one of the New York offices of the Singer Sewing Machine Company, and his wife, a deaf-mute of arresting beauty, were among those whose long residence attested to the stability of Blamey’s. As a matter of fact, the original Mrs. Blamey had died during the second year of her proprietorship, and two middle-aged bachelors, Ragland and Stooey, had carried it on ever since.

One of the popular witticisms in which everyone indulged on every possible occasion was to refer to old lady Ragland and Miss Stooey. Even Mrs. Levantine, the deaf-mute, never failed to
lip-read the phrase, if it were used at table, and her lovely face break into smile.

A Miss Taddie Selcox, of Blamey’s, said to be one of the fastest court-stenographers in New York, and recipient of many competitive awards, had once suggested to Ray that they pool their resources and rent a pair of rooms where they could arrange for kitchen-privileges and feel in a position to entertain, but the idea stirred her not at all.