Back STreet (21 page)

“Yes, Walter.”

“We need a flat. Some place where I know we can be quiet and alone. This kind of thing cannot go on without becoming conspicuous, even in a city like this.”

“I’ve thought of that. You have so much to consider.”

“I want you to feel about all this, Ray, as a Frenchwoman would feel about it. The time has come for us to call a spade a spade. My feeling for you and my feeling for my wife and children are things separate and apart. I can be loyal to both these feelings, because they are so different.”

Should she despise him for that? The thought rushed to her that now was the last instant of her last opportunity to keep her life her intact own. To refuse to become part of an active disloyalty to the wife of a man who coveted and was coveted in return. To refuse to become the mistress of a man who took pains to establish this wife’s footing, on the very eve of her surrender to his convenience.

There was yet time; but so fleeting was the hesitancy that her next question was acquiescence.

“Shall you find the—place—the flat—Walter?”

“Yes.”

It was better that way. The talk of money would have been abominable to her. What he could afford, or what he could not afford, was sure to be equally right.

What he chose was a three-room apartment on the third floor of a large, five-story, redbrick building on Broadway, not remote from the beginnings of Central Park. It was a rear flat, and the bathroom and bedroom, looking into a narrow airshaft, required gaslight burning in them all day. But the large living room and full-sized kitchen facing the backs of buildings of a parallel street, Seventh Avenue, were filled with morning sunshine and remained bright into late afternoon. Offhand, it was the sort of apartment house that, externally at least, seemed far too pretentious for the modest rear flats that were tucked into it. But apparently those facing Broadway justified the heavily embossed pressed-leather foyer-walls, solemn walnut stairways with a plaster Nubian slave on the newel post thrusting up a gas torch in a red glass globe. They were of ten and twelve rooms, built railroad-fashion along a narrow hallway that shot the entire length of the flat, and rented for as high as sixty dollars a month.

Into her small rear one, furnished in what Walter had apparently chosen
en suite
, Ray fitted with the close adjustment of a bit of fungus to its wall. Snugly and immediately it became home to her, the first premises that had ever allowed her the full privacy of a kitchen in which to putter unrestrictedly. There was a parlor set, consisting of five pieces, mahogany with freckled cinnamon-plush upholstery edged in ball-fringe, a substantial five-piece mission bedroom set, of walnut, with a fine clear mirror in the wardrobe-door, taboret, dresser and washstand and Walter’s cunning afterthought of a “whatnot,” to say nothing of a Verni Martin curio-cabinet for the living room, into which would cram the tiny ivory carvings, filigree objects, porcelain dogs, cats, marsupials, carnivora, and minutiae of a sort that had always delighted her heart.

It was dear of Walter to have remembered that Verni Martin cabinet. Bless him, he had stocked one of its mirror shelves with a tiny porcelain barnyard. Cow. Hen sitting in a nest of porcelain straw.
Pig, all porcelain, with two suckling piggies. She had exclaimed first of all over these, on beholding her flat.

Then, too, it had always been her desire to attach small gay tassels to the ends of the strings of window shades, and somehow in the house on Baymiller it might have incited people to laugh. Within a week, however, there they were, dangling from the end of every window shade in the flat; and such a litter of silver-framed photographs, fringed scarves, crocheted tidies on the backs of chairs, bisque and porcelain objects, hassocks, and the like, from her store of personal possessions, that mantels, tables, dresser, whatnot, and every conceivable plane surface, were promptly covered.

There was a small bisque angel, attached by a bit of ribbon to the center chandelier of the living room, which was to dangle there in swimming position until, from proximity to the gas jet, its pale little thighs took on a sootiness that would not scrub off.

Immediately this flat became to Ray her kennel; her business days little more than long, chilly intervals between leaving and returning, evenings, laden with foods, commodities, thumbtacks, screening, meat grinder, toothbrush-rack, cushion tops, tidies, and luxuries for the larder.

At once there developed in her, full-blown, out of the Zeus of past experiences, a talent for cookery, garnered from long years of memories of the house on Baymiller Street, abetted by the many times she herself had assisted her father or Tagenhorst at the huge old range; and, strangely enough, memories of the many succulent German and Austrian dishes that had been served to her in Vine Street food-palaces, lingered so poignantly against her palate, that she was able to reproduce them.
Gedämpfte Rindbrust
. Nothing more than the right cut of pot roast, eye-of-the-round, properly managed in a Dutch oven. The Dutch oven to be bought at Macy’s for six dollars. Cheese
Kuchen
. A matter of obtaining the proper pot cheese (a journey to the Jewish district would ensure that) and baking with a proper degree of oven heat. Walter’s capacity for cheese Kuchen, she used to joke him, was beyond the output of so small a kitchen as theirs. Lamb stew with spätzle. A matter of dropping the dough from the spoon with just the proper turn of the wrist. Dill pickles. Soaking the green cucumbers in
a stone crock under vine-leaves that you journeyed to Spuyten Duyvil to gather. No housewife on Baymiller ever brewed tastier.

Homey foods that her hand had the knack of keeping delicate for Walter, whose tendency to overindulge in certain dishes to his liking, had not diminished with the years.

Their very first dinner in her flat, the table was spread with a completeness that was more and more to characterize it. Polished silver and well-filled cruets. Heavy silence cloth, covered with a weighty damask that had been among her possessions from home. Lace mats and tidies. She could crochet rapidly, as she talked, loved the small addenda of the doily and the tidy, using them in profusion against the backs of chairs and beneath small objects.

And so, almost overnight as it were, this abode took on a lived-in aspect, even in that early period when the place stood dead silent all day long during her absence at business; and the evenings, except the one or possibly two in the week he managed to spend there, were solitary, except for the incredible number of the chores of house-primping she could cram into them.

And Walter liked it. Immediately it assumed for him something of a Hamilton interior. Its smell of good spiced foods lurking in portieres and plushes was part of the lived-in atmosphere, where cookery was sure to be of the best ingredients, and where you could stretch yourself out in a Morris chair that was designed according to the most relaxed lines of the human body, and where you could be a little gross in the things you wanted. If you happened to want, without employing any of the finesse necessary to coax down inhibitions in Corinne, in whom sex impulses were languid, to take Ray, she came as if the latent ecstasy pressing against the warm walls of her being were only awaiting release which he could make exquisite. She came to one on the high tide, relaxed and indescribably pliant. Supple, almost overpowering in the completeness of her surrender.

Funny thing about this Ray. A sweetheart strung like a harp that plays to the wind, and withal a woman so slightly and rightly gross! Amenable, even though not always amused, to the slightly soiled story; a woman not easy to offend, who could lie in his arms, her eyes drugged with his nearness, and yet, the next instant, turn
around and prepare a dish of pig-knuckles and sauerkraut to what Walter described as the queen’s taste, provided the queen be of delicate taste. One could dare be himself in that flat.

It was the same with Ray. Almost incredible, to herself most of all, was the rapidity with which her interests narrowed to the interests of this flat. Even on those evenings she did not see Walter—and these were sometimes five and six, had been known to be seven in the week—there was not only occasion and obligation to be home, there was desire.

Walter had installed a telephone. That was lovely. It hung against the wall in the entrance foyer, and on one or two occasions had been ringing as she unlocked her door. It was like a voice screaming for her presence, and she liked it.

It seemed to her that somehow the men she had been in the habit of meeting after work hours for the divertissements of the evenings must have sensed what was what. Actually they did not, but what they did sense, with the quick antennae of ego, was her new and inner indifference. It was easy to drop out of the rigmarole of being a business girl who was not averse to the attentions of men who could show her a good time. One refusal, two, almost surely three, were sufficient to scratch her off lists that were as washable as the little silver-and-celluloid memorandum pad she wore jangling from her belt along with a chatelaine of other trinkets.

One or two of the older men with whom she had been in the habit of going to comic operas and cafés looked askance at her second and third refusals, and a stockbroker on Nassau Street asked her outright, over the telephone, if her sailor lover had come home. But within the month that tempest in the demitasse of her affairs had died down. Without comment, even from the office force or the men and girls with whom she was thrown in close contact at Ledbetter and Scape, she was free to go home, to walls that enclosed her like the grateful folds of a shawl, there to putter, there to adjust, and, most of all, there to wait. If, during the long, quiet evening, the telephone against the wall crowed, there was the invariable thrill of jumping to its mouthpiece. If it did not, well, you knew that it was one of those evenings devoted to Corinne or social interests, and that there was tomorrow,
and if not tomorrow then the day following, or the day following that. Even when a week elapsed and he did not come, there was seldom more than a day or two that he let pass without telephoning.

Once, when she was unlocking her door at evening, frantic, what with her hands filled with small packages, to get to the telephone before it stopped ringing, there was no one at the other end of the wire when she finally did reach the instrument, and a despondency, out of all proportion to the mishap, flooded her.

She would never have ventured the misdemeanor of telephoning him, either at his business during or after hours, or at his home—one of a row of new brownstone houses on Lexington Avenue. So that it was with a sick sense of disappointment, finally overflowing into tears, that for two hours thereafter she sat moping beside an instrument that would not ring again.

About eleven, Walter, equally disgruntled and off even keel, put in an appearance at the flat.

That was the evening, what with her tears and his own sense of disharmony induced by the trifling event, that Walter suggested she give up her position at Ledbetter and Scape.

“I want to feel that you are here when I want you. It helps me to talk things out with you. That’s why it upset me this evening, when you didn’t answer the telephone. Needed to talk over that project of the Jersey City Trust Company with you. Helps me. I need you, dear, on call.”

There was never any more to it than that. It came as a shock to her; it came as something more than that. It meant the cutting loose of the last tie that bound her to a busy outside world, of which she had always been a gay part. It meant—sitting there opposite Walter that evening, pouring him cup after cup of coffee of rich brew she knew how to prepare in a pot to which she applied a cheesecloth drip-bag—it meant—well, it meant cutting away from under her the business ground upon which her feet had so long stood.

“I’ve been a business girl for fifteen years, Walter.”

“And now your business is me, Ray. I need you.”

The suffusing sweetness of that was almost more than she could bear.

It had always seemed, in the days when she had dared to let her mind wander to the possibility of life with Walter, that nothing of a character that was not part and parcel of ecstasy could ever get at her again. With him, even the dull day would be lived on a singing plane.

Nothing of the sort. The ecstasy was there, all right. She would dawdle through her morning chores, singing and pausing to smile back to herself in the large gilt mirror, or sit sewing with her lips lifted. The incredible change had come so credibly. It had all been so quiet. No doubts, fears, sense of the forbidden. Not even the pang of terror where thoughts of Corinne were concerned, or much awareness of that sure passing over into a world admittedly demimondaine.

The first night with him was like feeling her body become the life stream upon the secure bosom of which he could lie blessedly safe and secure. They were elements bound tightly in the wonder of blending so perfectly. With his head at her bare breast, there could never be anything so extraneous and unintimate as modesty or shyness or doubt or unfulfilment again. There were no words now needed to be spoken. The light of the perfection of the understanding between them had been kindled at the altar of that first night.

But a few nights following, drawing down her stocking to
minister to a large, throbbing water blister on her heel, rubbed there by a badly fitting shoe, she said to him:

“It is wonderful that I never need be afraid anymore of ever revealing to you an ugliness about me. We are one, Walter.”

He looked at her without flushing. “One,” he repeated, after a pause so imperceptible as to be perceptible only to her.

The thought of Corinne was to begin to lie at the bottom of a pool of silence between them, seldom stirred, seldom causing turgid waters.

Trifles happened from the very first. The iceman, calling up the dumbwaiter, demanded to know if she wished her weekly bill made out to Miss or Mrs. “To Miss—no, no, Mrs.!” Mrs., of course! The vacillation had been a slip, causing the iceman to grunt his laugh in a way that was pretty bad to have to hear. “Mrs.” it must be from now on. Mrs. What? Mrs. Schmidt. What did it matter, so long as indubitably, past redemption, past change, past anything that could ever happen, she was Mrs. to him? And so, “Mrs. Schmidt” read the name on the bell plate. He laughed when he saw it, without self-consciousness or sensitiveness.