Back STreet (29 page)

“I came in on the
Lusitania
,” he said.

A wave of the anger she had anticipated washed over her then. So he had come on the
Lusitania
, and now, almost twenty-four hours later, was the first she knew of it.

He felt her stiffen.

“I’ve thought of you every instant since, Ray, but it hasn’t been possible sooner. Richard has measles. Luckily the ship’s doctor didn’t pronounce it, or we would have had quarantine to contend with. He was pretty sick for several days, and of course his mother was in a state. It’s been serious.”

“Oh, my poor boy—poor little Richard—my poor you!” The palms of her hands encased his cheeks while she held his face closer, pouring her sympathy into it. He looked tired, and already there was about his eyes the look of a man accustomed to glasses and deprived of them. She fitted them back. She dragged him to his chair. She began the routine of the countless small deeds that kept him clamped to the habit of needing her. He had been through bad times. Damn, damn, damn, that there should be suffering she had not shared with him. That was what made separation so cruel to bear. With all her sensitivity where he was concerned, Richard, apple of his eye, had sickened, and never once had her intuition telegraphed it to her. Silent months lay between them like a chasm. She wanted to leap them. She wanted the certainty, not the hope, that he was back into the enveloping security that had not budged with the months.

“It’s good, Ray, to be back”—and he sighed out, like a man who means it.

She was at her tricks. Bolstering him, quick with refreshment, pouring his beer in a fashion that pleased and amused him, miraculously to its peak, with not a bubble of foam overflowing, and then, collapsible as a traveling-cup, down she went into an attitude on the couch beside him, that fitted him and made his relaxation complete, even if her elbow “went to sleep” with the strain of keeping him at ease, and her hand, against his back, began, after a while, to sting of pressure.

“Ray, you look well. A little peaked from this summer heat I hear you’ve been having, but you look beautiful to me.”

He had always told her she was beautiful.

“Do I? It’s because I’m happy you’re back. And Walter, you look not only well—but, oh, what shall I say?—successful!”

“I have been, Ray,” he said, with an intensity that seemed new to him, but which was abetted because his eyeglasses shone. “I have been, Ray, but more of that later.”

“Oh, my dear, I knew you would be—but it has been so long—waiting.”

“Successful beyond my dreams, Ray.”

“And now—”

“And now—nothing, except these good old times with my good old Ray.”

“Good old Ray.” It was the first time those three words had been assembled for her. She was not sure that she liked them. Good—old—Ray.

“Bad old Walter,” she said playfully.

His eyes widened as he looked at her.

“Bad?”

Now why had she said that? What good was it going to accomplish at this moment? There would be time to establish her self-respect, with herself, at least, by somehow bringing him to judgment for his incredible omissions, and the pain and danger and cruelty and mental anguish he had bequeathed to her during his absence.

“Dear old Walter.”

He had the look, all right, of a man with whom all is right in the world. His and Corinne’s world. All of the squashed-down jealousies that had been pecking her for months came pushing now to the surface. Walter and Corinne and their children. The habit of solidarity must be upon him. Corinne, toward whom, with her mind, she entertained conscience and respect and deep humiliation, was nevertheless a scald across her heart. She and Walter had traveled together, gone into the same staterooms and hotel suites and closed the door after them—together. Signed hotel registers as Walter D. Saxel, wife, and children. All the lean, waiting, scorching months that she had been sitting there in the midst of her terrible embarrassment, the solidity had been solidifying. Unless you
were of the stuff that heroines in plays are made of, it was impossible to yield him to that solidity. Yield him? It seemed to Ray, alive to his nearness, thawed to happiness in a way that made her feel as if all her veins were little ice-bound streams suddenly released by spring, that, as never before—that as never before—here lay perfection.

“Walter, Walter, life is so short. We must never again be apart.”

“Never, Ray. I needed you terribly.”

“Say that again.”

“Terribly. Time and time again it seemed that I must cable for you. Just someone to talk to, Ray. Someone to whom I could think aloud. I’ve been in large affairs, Babe. Of course you read all about how everything went through.”

She had not. It had never occurred to her that actually this matter of a state loan was of sufficiently large significance for press notification.

“And Walter, Walter, it was all your doing!”

“Naturally the papers did not treat it from that angle. I wasn’t mentioned, but my wife’s uncle is enormously pleased, and so is the firm, and of course it is known all over the banking circles.”

His wife’s uncle! If only he would stop putting it that way. He did it so unconsciously. So solidly. So satisfiedly. Sometimes, on those rare occasions when these forbidden rages crept out like poisonous little mice from their corners, one had to stamp them down and stamp them down. After all, one was there to take what one could get. The fringe of his life. The fringe of his time. If need be, the fringe of his affections. Beggars were not choosers. Thieving beggars who took what was not their right, were not choosers. Take what you can get. Have no conscience about it, because all that life holds for you lies in what you can get out of the fringe to his life. What she does not know, is not hurting her. She has the entire pudding and you are only asking an occasional currant. Take what you can get. Keep what you have, greedily.

“These have been the most strenuous, nerve-racking months of my life, Ray, but they have been worth it, the endless delays and all. I’ve my pace now. This game no longer has me frightened. I’ve been through hell, though, getting that pace. I’ve needed you, Ray.”

“Oh, my dear boy!”

“And I’ve needed this part of my life, Babe. Needed it until it seemed to me I must fly my way across the ocean. Negotiating with men in fezzes who don’t speak your language even when they speak Oxford English, and trying to swing big affairs of state with an international background the size of Cincinnati, Ohio, for equipment, is more of a strain than a fellow realizes until after it’s over. Time and time again I’d have given the whole bunch of tan-skinned plenipotentiaries for a fifteen-minute look-in on this. I feel like a man who is all of a sudden out of a pair of tight boots into his carpet slippers.”

“Never, never let it happen again, Walter,” she said, with her lips against the back of his hand. “It has been terrible for me, Walter. Terrible.”

“I’ll tell you the entire story another day, when I’m not dead-beat, Babe; I’ll tell it to you from my first step off the boat in France, when the general manager of the Paris branch met me with some secret diplomatic news that changed the whole affair at the very beginning. I’m tired with my brain and tired with my bones. Is it any wonder, girl?”

“No, dearest, no.”

“Did you think about me a great deal, Babe?”

“You know I did. About nothing much else.”

“I need to relax. I’ll get to relax—here.”

“My dear. My dear.”

“I’ve been like a tightly wound clock, for months now. Rest me, Ray.”

“My dear. My dear.”

“I need to be rested, by you.”

“Ray will rest you. Lie here, my love.”

His eyes closed; but his lips, against her hand, opened intermittently to whisper. “Tired. Dog-tired. I’m tired. Rest me, Ray. I’m tired.”

“My poor tired dear. Rest. Rest.”

“I’m tired—tired—”

As he sat there, his weight relaxed more and more against her,
and her arm, of pressure, began to grow numb, a tom-tom beating itself softly into her brain:

Hayfoot. Strawfoot.—“I’m tired. I need to relax.—I’ve been like a tightly wound clock.—I’m tired.—I need to relax.—”

I. I. I. I. I.—Me. Me. Me. Me. Me.—I. Me. I. Me. I. Me.—I. I. I. I. I.

“I’ve been so pressed, Ray. So pushed. So dazed by it all. I’ve been so dazed.”

I. I. I.

“I like to feel your hand.”

I. I.

“I could fall asleep like this. Only I must be going …”

I.

“I never knew how really tired I was …”

I. I.

“I’ll need you, Babe, more than ever now.”

“My dear.”

“I will.”

I.

“I’m so tired.”

I.

While he slept, her arm, which she could not relax, took on the feeling of something disembodied from its socket, and the tom-tom in her brain became slow anger.

Not one word, not one question, apparently not one direct concern for the interminable weariness of her waiting months. The worse-than-weariness, the interminable torment, deprivation, yes, actual want. There were soft little paunches sagging slightly from his sleeping face. Indulgences. The soft nonalcoholic face of a man who dined too well. A face that had not been denied.

The planes of her own face, which he had described as a little peaked, were flat. A lean denied face. Not one question. Not one concern. Me. I. I. Me. Not one realization. And it would go on being like this. Trapped by the incredible quality of her folly; trapped there with her arm as numb as it ever would be in its grave, while he slept, relaxed against it. Soiled, sordid, three-cornered
predicament. Prisoner to this infatuation which had no ending; prisoner to his happiness, his desires, his well-being. If only he had asked once, just once! It was anger’s turn now; and as her eyes grew dry and hot, he stirred and reached up to stroke her cheek while his eyes remained closed.

“That five hundred dollars that I stuck in the bisque basket a night or two before I left—I hope it lasted out all right, Babe. Should have wired you more, but kept thinking every next boat would be mine, and didn’t want to risk anything further by wire—”

Before she need reply, he had dropped off again, this time relaxing against the cushion, leaving her arm free of its weight.

What had happened flashed at once to her as clearly as a cameo. Even before she rose, to tiptoe over to the sideboard, where the bisque boy stood in his accustomed place, it was all clearly defined in her mind in its dreadful irony. There was the bisque boy all right! What had occurred was no more than a small incident that had happened to her once before. The bills, inserted by Walter into the fishboy’s basket, must have slipped out and rolled down onto the ledge of an “X” of unfinished woodwork reenforcing the back of the sideboard.

There they were! A roll of greenbacks, with a rubber band around it, caught in the upper half of the crisscross of woodwork. Nothing to be surprised about. You pulled out the sideboard a little, and there they were! Things happened that way. She started to laugh.
Sh-h-h
. One must not wake Walter. What if one could not stop laughing. She began to mash her hand against her mouth, to mash back the growing laughter.

Finally, because she could not crowd back the growing, crowing laughter, she went into the clothes closet of the bedroom, and there, crouched in the darkness among such muffling objects as her hanging dresses, let laughter have its way.…

The year that Woodrow Wilson was elected President of the United States, Walter’s eldest child, Richard, became fourteen. These events synchronized indelibly in the mind of Ray, because her plan for Walter’s birthday gift to his son was a long, framed panel, containing the photographs or pictures of the full line of Presidents of the United States, with those of Taft, Roosevelt, and Wilson autographed.

At Ray’s instigation Walter had written to ex-President Roosevelt, to President-elect Wilson, and had sent a messenger to Washington for the Taft signature.

The extent to which Ray had set her heart on Richard’s having his birthday gift from his father set off with the finishing touch of that signed photograph of the new President, was little short of fanatical. The photograph was procured all right and, mounted in its frame, which Ray had designed so that it could be enlarged for the photographs of future Presidents, stood wrapped and waiting, on Richard’s birthday, for Walter to deliver it to his son. The frame itself was a labor of infinitesimal detail, which had cost at least half a year of minute labor. Of embossed leather, with the names of the various states and territories tooled in it, each name was intertwined with its own official or unofficial flower, the four corners of the panel studded with goldenrod embalmed under crystal disks.

“It’s the kind of gift, Walter, a boy can remember his father by
all his life,” Ray tried to impress upon him during the long period of its making. “Richard is getting to be old enough now for educational presents. Not just toys that cost a lot of money. That’s why I was so anxious for you to get little Irma the ‘Lilliputian Travel Series,’ instead of that doll’s house.”

“Something in that, of course,” Walter had conceded over and over again, but with impatience toward the end. “Her mother wanted her to have that doll’s house because it won the prize at some exhibition or other. I’ll get her the travel set. As to Richard, that’s all very well. I agree. But what is the use putting your eyes out over the embroidery and all that fancy-work of flowers around the names? The boy won’t appreciate the amount of work that went into it.”

“I want him to know the flowers of the states.”

“Rubbish. Leave that to his teachers.”

“It’s not rubbish for an American boy to know things like that.”

“Well and good, but don’t get that fagged look around your eyes. It makes you look cross-eyed. Ever know that, Ray? When you get tired nowadays, you take on a curious out-of-focus look.”

“Why, Walter,” she said, rising and crossing to the mirror, and coloring as she always did when he made reference to her personal appearance, “what in the world put that into your head?”