Back STreet (23 page)

“I don’t know. Silly of me to say that, wasn’t it? Now what do you suppose made me say that? Go on, I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“But I want to,” he said, kissing her palms, “when you feel like that. But I’m surprised at you, Ray.”

“I’m surprised at myself, Walter. Don’t pay any attention to me. Go on. I’m a fool.”

“You know how indispensable you are to me.”

“I think I do, Walter. But I just wish you’d say it more often.”

“I’ll try to. I keep thinking you take it for granted.”

“I know. Men are that way. It’s their great sex-error.”

“I know things aren’t easy for you, Ray. As a matter of fact, neither are they for me—this arrangement, I mean.”

“I realize that, boy, with every breath I breathe.”

“Life is a complicated enough arrangement—without this—this—”

“Don’t I know it?”

“Guess I shouldn’t have said that, now, should I?”

He shouldn’t. He shouldn’t.

“But I figure you know where I stand, Ray—between you and Corinne, I mean.”

She sat for a moment without breathing.

“I’m in love with my wife, Ray. You know that.”

“Yes,” she said, trying to make the word audible.

“What makes you so wonderful, Ray, is that you’re not the kind of person to go flying off at a tangent at a remark like that. You understand.”

“I do, Walter,” she said, feeling as if there were ropes around her heart, trying to haul it from its moorings.

“I love Corinne, Ray.”

God, God, God, if he would only quit saying it!

“Whatever doubts I may have had back there in the beginning—”

Then he had had doubts! Damn Freda! Damn life—no, no, no—as if that morning at the zoo would have made any difference!

“Whatever doubts I may have had, back there when we both were free, are gone now, Ray. I did the only thing there was to do. Corinne has been a good wife, a good mother, and I owe much to her—connections—”

Cad, you. No, no; darling, you. Life is like that. Nobody is all good, all bad—

“And I love you too, Ray. Lots of women could never understand that. The French do. Corinne couldn’t. It is a strange thing, Ray, this loving two women at the same time in a totally different way. Sometimes I feel so puzzled with myself that I marvel I keep quite sane.”

(Himself. Himself.)

“Strange, take that little woman in the house on Lexington Avenue. She has not got your mind, Ray. I can’t talk to Corinne for five minutes at a time that the same thing doesn’t happen. Trifles. Gets off the main issue to the personal. Can’t pin her down. One of those skidding woman-minds. Ambitious for all sorts of things that shouldn’t matter, but do. Stewing over the children. Worrying over cooks and fur coats, stair carpets and winter apples. Financial affairs of our friends and how to outdo them. Most loyal little creature you ever did see. Go through fire for me. Wonderful mother, good housekeeper, fine appearance, great connections, good as a glass of fresh cream, go through fire for me.”

(You’ve said that once.)

“Knows how to wheedle her uncle where my interests are concerned. Great little diplomat. Big spender, where it is necessary, but conservative where it is not. Kind of woman who will head a home in as fine a fashion as a man could wish it.”

(Go on, maybe it will help me to hate you!)

“I’m telling you all this, Ray, because I feel I owe it to you, and because you understand. If I seem nervous sometimes and jumpy, it
is because I’m in the devilish position of wanting to be two places at the same time. Here, and there with her and the children.”

“Better if you’d never clapped eyes on me!”

“Yes, if you look at it in a certain way. It is a dangerous position for a man like me, and yet, take my word for it, I wouldn’t change things. I couldn’t give you up, Ray. You’re just the Rock of Gibraltar to me. You’re more than that. You’re the only person in the world to whom I am myself. That’s a fact. The one minute in the day that I really become myself is when I enter this door. You’re the reason, Ray. Always the same. Selfless. You’re a woman that can satisfy a man completely. You’re tolerant of a man because you understand him. When you love a person you love him more than you love yourself.”

(You don’t! You don’t! You don’t!)

“Often when I’ve gone away from here and get to realizing the way I’ve sat for hours talking about myself and my affairs and my interests, I get ashamed. I like to think out loud to you, Ray. I’m myself, here. Corinne is all ambition for the children, for the home, and for me, and that is as it should be. You’re ambitious too, but in another way. I can talk to you about my work. I need that, Ray. Just between you and me, I’m in deep waters most of the time; in the midst of affairs that offhand seem over the head of a man like me. That’s why I need encouragement and understanding, on my way up the scale. Sometimes it seems to me that if I don’t get here to talk things over with you, that I can’t go on. My wife’s Uncle Felix is a hard man, Ray, in the sense that he expects his kind of efficiency, plus, out of the man who is to carry on his work. Corinne doesn’t realize that. I firmly believe I am qualifying every day for my work, but half the time I’m panting, Ray. With fear.”

“My poor boy, my darling boy. You have it in you to accomplish what you set out to accomplish.”

“I have, haven’t I, Ray? Say that again.”

“You have a good, strong, receptive mind, Walter. You have cool judgment, caution, and solid reasoning power. You are a splendid mixer. You have personality. You observe and you remember what you observe.”

“By God, I do. Now, take this case of the Fulton Mortgage and Trust Company. Remember my telling you about our firm and the Mississippi Valley loan.…”

“The time you went out to St. Louis?”

“Yes, remember you looked up some data on the Mississippi Valley matter at the library for me to study out on the train.”

“Yes, I love looking up data for you, Walter.”

“Now, I couldn’t have talked that Mississippi Valley any place in the world the way I did right here in this flat, Ray. That’s what I mean. I needed to think out loud.”

(You needed me to think out loud!)

“I needed your sympathetic understanding. You’ve got that, Ray, sympathy and understanding and patience and sweetness, and I love you.”

“And I love you, Walter, so terribly that sometimes it frightens me.”

“Tush! Nothing to be frightened about. So long as you are the dear, sweet, patient girl you are, nothing can go wrong. Temperance in this thing, and seeing each other only as often as it is easily possible, rather than as often as we wish to, is all we need to keep everything sweet as new cream. If I had my way, Ray, I’d be here twice as much as I am. Remember that and be content.”

“I am content.”

“And more than content?”

“More than content.”

“How much more?”

“So much more, Walter, that if I were to go to sleep tonight, and never wake, I would have died the happiest person in the world.”

He could have cried.…

One day, seated before her writing desk, which by night became a folding-bed, and going over her household accounts, which for her own edification she kept in immaculate order, it occurred to Ray that it might be a good idea, now that more of her time was her own, to “take up something.”

Money matters, where Walter was concerned, had from the very start been a source of peculiar strain and self-consciousness between them. It was not that he was exactly penurious; it was never to analyze that simply. It was just that the subject of money seemed to embarrass him, as if it were something too gross to bear discussion, even while his conservative disbursements, to her at least, indicated a preconceived scheme.

His way of evading was to leave, the first of every month, five new twenty-dollar bills stuck into the bisque basket on the back of the bisque figure of a fish peddler on the crowded shelf of the crowded sideboard. That apparently was the monthly sum he had figured could cover the expenses of the little ménage.

In a way it did. Thirty dollars rent left, if cleverly managed, a sufficient margin for gas, telephone, ice, food, clothing, and incidentals, particularly if you were as handy with the needle, as canny a shopper and cook, as Ray. But barely more than sufficient. Walter abominated a tough or inferior cut of meat, and what with sirloin-steak fourteen cents the pound and chicken sixteen, it required the
unerring hand of the calculating buyer. He was a great one for fruit, too, stretching out on the sofa after one of the full and satisfying meals, with a cut-glass bowl of apples, oranges, and bananas on the table beside him, and making the peeling of an apple with unbroken rind quite a function. Wines he usually sent himself, either clarets or ports, and, as his taste became more precious, Moselles, Sauternes, Cointreau, and dry and fine champagnes. But often while shopping on her own budget, it was more than Ray could do to resist for him the lure of a cobwebby bottle of Chianti in its crib, or the rows of translucent violet, crystal, and brown liqueurs that the liquor stores mounted in their show windows.

It meant managing a bit, hunting around for remnants where her own clothes were concerned, and watching such items as gaslight, laundry, carfares, and cookery, when Walter was not about. Once or twice she had run beyond her allotment, but there had been her own small nest egg of several hundred dollars. When that petered out, as it did to her surprise, due chiefly to the troubled problem of little Emma Hanck’s eyes, there were a few occasions, such as the imperative need for a new kitchen-range, a large dentist-bill, a music box for which she hankered, when it became necessary to raise the vexed question of money.

“Walter, I hate to have to mention it, but really, that is such a bad bare spot on the wall between the doors! Those newfangled cuckoo clocks are darling. I don’t suppose you’d feel like affording one for eighteen dollars?” Or: “Walter, I just can’t bake you piecrust that’s fit to eat in that old oven. What do you say to one of those new Pet ranges? They’re forty dollars, but worth it.” Or: “Walter, would you think I was nervy if I wanted one of those six-dollar Dutch ovens for pot roasts?”

There had never been any demurring. The money had been forthcoming, not out with it and down with it then and there; but after his departure, there it would be, tucked into the basket of the bisque fishmonger.

Strangely, this seeming delicacy on the part of Walter was secretly the source of much hurt pride to Ray. When you were as close as she to Walter—as close as Walter to her—there was no
place for a reservation such as this one. The strange guarded manner with which he withdrew into himself on the subject of money, kept a distance between them that was mystifying. Again and again she told herself that it could not be penury. When in his middle thirties, Walter was already in the ranks of a man reputed to be wealthy. Not that he ever permitted Ray, who understood most of his financial affairs so intimately, to know just what he was actually drawing from the banking house. But what she did know was the amount of Walter’s life insurance, the nature of certain of his private holdings, the growing values of at least three of his small parcels of city property; and one wintry day he had sent her to Brooklyn for the purpose of “sizing up” the lay of a fifty-foot lot on Joralemon Street. “Just kind of see how it looks, Ray. You’ve good judgment.”

It was wrong of Walter to place her in the rigid vise of an allowance. Dear knows that she spent his money with far more conservation than she would her own, and with sole aim to conserve for him, whose every interest was infinitely more to her than her own. It was not nice of Walter, to say nothing of the fact that, what with his growing epicureanism and delight in the table, his desire to see her at least always nicely dressed, it kept her pinched.

His expenditures on family, although he was constantly complaining of the increased demands upon him, were beginning to approach the magnificent. There were two nurses for the children now. A closed carriage, closed coupé, landaulet, and the children’s phaeton and Shetlands.

Within four years, Corinne had refurnished the house on Lexington Avenue from top to bottom, and Walter had recently purchased a fine old Georgian mansion set in three acres, at Deal Beach, for the summer home.

Not but all this was as it should be. Imagine the life-giving sun and salt air and open space flowing into the bone and sinew of growing babies. Besides, a man owed it to his prestige. But it seemed a shame that along with his increasing munificence of scale of living the thought never seemed to enter Walter’s head that it might be equally within his power to lighten things materially for Ray.

It was quite one thing to have to count hopefully on a small
killing at the races in order to be able to send along a money order to Freda (nothing could have induced her to divert Walter’s funds into her family-channel, certainly not to little Emma’s); but it was quite another matter to be obliged to confess to a woman like Hattie Dixon that balcony seats were all she could afford for a matinée, or that tea or a drink at Martin’s afterward was too much a stretch of the purse.

“You’re a fool! Ask! Catch me not asking George for what I don’t see!”

That must have been true, because Hattie was usually wellsupplied with money, to say nothing of a collection of quite valuable jewelry, by the big bluff Buffalo broker whose occasional weekends in New York were the source of noisy parties in the Dixon flat. “Ask! Them as asks, gets.”

Perhaps. But even when the allowance was running low, solely because of her expenditures on Walter’s behalf, the words would not come. Guilty of the very reticence she resented in Walter, she tightened her purse strings for a series of small private denials until the next appearance of the banknotes in the bisque basket.

Curious that Walter should subject her to this. But even while at times her blood boiled, particularly after an enforced humiliating revelation to Hattie, who was always willing enough with the proffer of a small loan, she would invariably melt into a state of idealization of his shortcomings.