Back STreet (3 page)

Ray Schmidt, that half-fast little near-chippie out in Cincinnati, would care enough to bother to find him a lifeline! She was like that. Cared like the dickens about folks. Not about him in particular. Didn’t flatter himself. That was precisely the point. She just naturally bothered about a man’s muffler, if he was subject to sore throat. Nothing extraordinary about that in a wife. But somehow—didn’t expect it from a girl that fly. Cared about keeping a dinner check down just as if a fellow were her husband. Talked to a man about the value of endowment policy and nest egg as if she were the one to profit by it.

And so into the hour of his shameful crisis had walked the figure of this Ray whom he had not seen a dozen times in his life, and then for only a sporadic evening in a Vine Street café, concert hall or Heuck’s Theatre for a melodrama.

She had actually responded with a money order for half the amount he had so frenziedly requested and a promise of the additional within sixty days. That had been two years ago, and Prothero had all but paid her back in small monthly instalments.

Fine gal. No questions. No pressing. Fly? Yes. Had to admit it. Did the things he would break his own daughter’s neck for. But levelheaded as a wife, and a darned sight better looking than the run-of-the-mill of wives. (Not that he had any kick coming.) A girl with a nest egg in her sock. Never mind where she got it.

Saved it, no doubt. Leave it to those Cincinnati sauerkraut eaters. Girl like that working in her father’s little concern—solid as Gibraltar—small credit, but never tell a thing about those thrifty Germans—salted away—well, never mind all that. Where the dickens though, did a man get off with her? Say, she was swell. If a girl like Ray would go the limit—say, would she? Had she? Say, had she?
Of course she had, and would. But had she? Darned if a fellow could tell. Darned if I know. Darned if anybody seems to know. Every once in a while some fellow at the Stag or Gibson House seemed on to a lot about the real truth concerning this girl and what she was—but usually you had the feeling that the fellow was spinning a yarn out of a half truth. Didn’t know any more than you knew before. Just how far …

Just how far?

She darted her eyes, she nodded her head, she tilted her neck, and took a sip of beer through her veil, with her eyes continuing to roll above the rim of her glass.

The wife regarded drinking through the mesh of a veil as vile. What a girl. What a seductive feeling it gave you to see the veiling suck in against her lips that way. What a darned good-looker. Gray eyes. What made them so nice were the lashes. Black! Rather big, strong-boned face, as a matter of fact, but just downright the kind that brought you to your toes. The way those eyes were cut in. Couldn’t exactly describe it, but it was a tasty face. The way olives and caviar and sardelles were supposed to be tasty.

Yessir, a darned good-looker. Style. Why, the girls in the East were just beginning to wear those light-tan box coats with the mandolin sleeves. And leave it to Ray to be among the first to venture one of those short-back sailor effects that were worn tilted to the angle of a toboggan-slide. Darn it all, when a girl answered a man’s question, as to just how far he dared go with her, with all that rolling motion of her face and body, a fellow would be plumb crazy not to take his cue.

“Tell you how I feel about this thing called life, Ray.”

They all began more or less that way.

“It’s short.”

“Sure is, Prothero.”

“The Lord gives us all sorts of ways to enjoy happiness. I mean to do the right thing by the wife. That’s me. And then in a class all by itself love another gal in those ways where the wife don’t quite fill the bill. Sabe?”

“Yes, I sabe, Prothero. It’s n. g. If you don’t believe me, go over to any of the tables you see round here and put it up to the upholstered mamas you see there.”

In the warm beer-scented security of Wielert’s first-class family resort, the heavy harmonies of a full reed band, playing Wagner, Beethoven, “Ach, du lieber Augustin,” “The Boat Is Coming Around the Bend, Good-By, My Lover, Good-By,” flowed over table after table of Cincinnati’s High-German, solid-as-Gibraltar citizenry, dipping mustachios into foam-crested mugs.

Into this old-world atmosphere of cream-colored walls, inscribed with German mottoes of epicurean source, there gathered, evening after evening, around the solid-mahogany tables, the firmly hewn bourgeoisie of this Munich-on-the-Ohio. Wielert’s—“the true family resort in every respect.”

Surrounding the table where Prothero and Ray were letting the foam on their glasses blink out sud by sud, were gathered the spine of the community. Sons and daughters of the Rhine, who could date their invasion back to that historic day when citizen Nicholas Longworth had first conceived the idea of transplanting his countrymen from the sunkissed vineyards of the Rhineland to these similar bland hills of Cincinnati, whither he had migrated and prospered.

The vineyards did not quite come off; the transplantation did. Evidences of it and its progeny were everywhere in Wielert’s. Families that dined out once a week. Sturdy, unstylish women with enormous busts, who ate and drank with relish but knew, to the penny, for how much less they could spread their groaning home tables with these luxuries of
Schmierkäse
and
Schnittlauch, Bratwurst
that had been fried without a prong of the exploring fork puncturing the sausage casing for loss of juice. Solid, thrifty men, in gates-ajar collars and congress shoes, to whom the
Turnverein
and
Sangverein
, the right lager, the virtuous wife, the virgin daughter, the respecting son, the well-tended business, were universe.

Yes, siree, it was possible, all right, sitting there in the pretentious early-evening respectability of Wielert’s pavilion, while a man in short pants, with braid running down the side seams, knee-shy
stockings, and a small green hat with a brush in it, yodeled, to feel a little mad over the desirability of Ray. One tony girl.

And where there was smoke there must be fire. Ray Schmidt was to be had for the asking all right, if you knew how to ask. Girls simply did not run around that way, dressed to knock out a fellow’s eye, unless—unless—

“How long is it, Ray, since I’ve known you?”

“More years than I’m going to admit, Prothero, that I’ve been gadding about with you boys as you come to town.”

“I remember taking you to a baseball game in a feather boa that was one of the first I ever clapped eyes on. Remember, you helped me shop for one for the wife?”

“Yes, it was purple. Got it at Pogue’s.”

“All those years ago, and darned if I know one bit more about you now than I ever did, Ray. Good company. Girl, if ever there was one, that a fellow can turn to in a pinch; and yet—darned if I know.…”

“If I didn’t know you for what I know you to be, I’d think you were trying to propose to me, or something.”

“I am, Ray, trying to propose something.”

“What’s on your mind, Prothero?”

“Ray—would you sleep with a fellow—with me—”

For answer, she drew back her hand slowly, without surprise, and swung it with a hollow-sounding bang against the narrow cheek of the narrow Mr. Prothero.

Not but what every other man, sooner or later, by innuendo, had asked it. But never had anyone summed it up in the nasty little compact phrase that had issued from Prothero.

The shocking, stark-naked phrase, coming, it is true, off lips that she had more than once allowed to kiss her, had robbed her of her usual power of evasion. The hand that had struck out had been the hand of some violated inner being. Something private and away from the self that was being lived here in the unsacred everydayness of existence, in this town on the bank of a river, had leaped up hurt and banged in the crude form of fingertips against a human cheek, leaving imprints. One felt sick, with living.

A man named Henry Rathman, who at the time was already general shipping agent of the steamboat company that was ultimately to bear his name, had once walked her down Race Street as far as the corner of Longworth and tried to urge her into this narrow notorious lane, nodding significantly in the direction of the unlighted, heavily curtained second-story window of a narrow-shouldered house, one removed from the corner, Madame Yesska’s.

That had seemed so horrible to her at the time (she was sixteen) that she always thereafter said of Rathman, without enlarging further, that he gave her “the shivers,” although it is again here true that she had subsequently allowed him to kiss and press her and, on one occasion of a steam-launch outing of a Turnverein Society up
the canal as far as Lockland, had permitted him to keep her head pressed against his shoulder for the homeward trip of the moonlit excursion.

He had wanted it. To withdraw was to bring conspicuous remonstrance. He had so palpably enjoyed that pressure of her cheek against his coat, where she could feel his heart make little swelling movements of increasing celerity. How easy it was to give pleasure. Your own pleasure was the result of giving that pleasure. To say “No” hurt more than the dilemma of granting a reluctant “Yes.” That had always been Ray’s particular predicament, although almost invariably there came the time when the “No” amounted to almost the explosion of disgust that had motivated her action in striking Prothero across the cheek.

And yet, the affair at Wielert’s had been without precedent. No one had ever before summed up for her in words of one syllable, as Prothero had, the unspoken which lay in the eyes and along the moist lips of most of the men who regarded her. Letting rest these sleeping dogs that crouched in the eyes of men, you could relax, for instance, with your head against the coat of a man like Henry Rathman, all the way from Lockland down to Plum Street, filled with the none too restful consciousness that beyond the moment probably lay a situation that would have to be handled. Subsequently, Rathman would be almost sure to press her into a position where the ultimatum would either terminate their relationship, or merely postpone an inevitable crisis.

Apparently the fact that men were like that was part of the scheme of a universe into which she had been born, a girl.

At least men were like this where she—Ray—was concerned.

For the first time in her life, that night after leaving Prothero, seated, before going indoors, on the front veranda of the house on Baymiller Street, a doubt of her father crossed her mind.

Was her stepmother right, after all? Had Adolph, during those years following her mother’s death, the formative years between seven and fifteen, let her run wild as a weed? Was she, in result, in the eyes of the miscellaneous men with whom she ran, just the potential chippie? What other so-called respectable girl in town
could conceivably have been presented with the viscid question that had come to her off of Prothero’s wetted lips? Ugh!

It was cold sitting there in the late evening on the front porch of the house on Baymiller Street. Damp November chill whitened the breath, sank through the roomy box coat, and ran up beneath petticoats and chilled her cotton-clad legs.

Papa, Papa! said Ray to herself, sitting down on the porch-railing and dangling one high-buttoned shoe. Oh, Papa, Papa! Her throat was hurting. She wanted to cry, but with a wilful sort of self-flagellation would not let herself, but sat there in the late chill of the silence of Baymiller Street, swinging her high-buttoned shoe, with its dangling tassel.

The Colerain Avenue car, dragging heavily along, threw a momentary light against the veranda; and the motorman, a new one named Fred Harley, leaned over and waved his cap. She threw him back a stiff-handed salute off her left eyebrow. Nice fellow. Didn’t realize he was fresh. Held the car for her if she was late, mornings.

“Don’t know he’s fresh!” had been her stepmother’s snorting retort to Harley’s habit of waving as his car passed. “Don’t know he’s fresh! Huh! I’d like to see him so much as wave a finger, much less blow kisses, at Freda or any other girl on the block. A man knows quicker than a barometer knows, which way the wind blows in the matter of girls.”

That was doubtless true. It was also true that in all probability there was not a girl on Baymiller Street who would have waved back to Fred Harley, or to whom Prothero would have dared utter that sickening question. For that matter, not a girl on Baymiller Street would have been found seated in Wielert’s after eleven, unchaperoned, with a traveling salesman generally known to be a man of family.

No one would have been quicker than Ray, had such occasion arisen, to join in family prohibition against her stepsister Freda’s appearing in a rôle which Ray permitted herself. Prothero would not dream of asking a girl like Freda to take a ride up to Hamilton with
him and sit sipping beer and crumbling pretzels at Stengel’s, while he visited the linings-and-dress-findings department of Howell’s.

Freda had a demanding little way with her. She believed that the more you demand of a man, the more he thinks of you. It would no more have occurred to her, for instance, to admonish a suitor to put the seventy-five cents it had cost him to come bearing a box of bonbons, toward a savings account, than it would have to sit around Wielert’s with a married traveling salesman.

Men respected Freda. True, they respected her chiefly because her mother did not trust one of them out alone with her. There lay the secret! Ray had been mother to herself during those years when men first began to lay hands upon her. Schmidt had trusted her, going his guileless, unobserving way and leaving it to his girl to somehow go hers.

Sitting there swinging her scalloped shoe, the thought smote Ray that, since her father’s marriage to the widow Tagenhorst had been destined to happen anyway, it might better have happened sooner. True, when Adolph, newly widowed, had rented the house on Baymiller Street to the wife of the late Otto Tagenhorst, and he and his daughter had continued to live in the old home as boarders, Ray had come under the influence of the woman who was later to become the second wife of her father. Still, it had been too late. The interval of years when the widower had been courting the widow, and Tagenhorst had conscientiously and subtly “kept out of it” by not seeing fit to express her opinions of the lax social methods of Ray, except by the contrast of her own daughter’s immaculately tidy behavior, had been the formative ones that had somehow clinched the point of view concerning the daughter of Adolph Schmidt. Ray was fly.