Back STreet (31 page)

(Me-Me-Me-Me-Me-Me-Me-Me-Me-Me.)

“I love you, Walter.”

“I love you, Ray.”

“Say it again.”

“I love you, Ray.”

“I love you, Walter, I love you.”

It should be said for Walter that his part in a drama that was to be played against the background of economics, diplomacy, philanthropy, and ultimately the war, international affairs, arms, armistice, and finance of high and intricate order, was to lodge in his mind as nothing short of phenomenon and accident of circumstance.

Long before America made formal entry into the World War, the firm of Friedlander-Kunz had already established conspicuous precedent for what was consistently to remain its policy throughout the holocaust years.

On the other hand, even when Ray had occasion to sit in the vast, red, gold-filled mouth of the Metropolitan Opera House, and listen to Walter attempt to inflame an audience that had been gathered there in the name of affiliated charity, of which he was a vice president, or as in later years, when she was to behold him seated on a dais beside men upon whose judgment the destiny of America in world war was to be decided, there seemed nothing incongruous in this evidence of his place in the affairs of men.

Not once, upon the occasion of Walter’s active part in one of the largest drives in the history of organized charities, did it strike Ray, that afternoon in the Metropolitan Opera House, that it might be a far cry from the remote, diminished-looking little citizen with the authority to plead from that immense stage for the financial cooperation of the nation, back to the black-haired, gray-eyed
youth she had first encountered on the coping of the C. H. and D. railroad station in Cincinnati. His place seemed rightly here among men of weight in the affairs of state and finance.

From where Ray sat, these men of weight were specks, animated shirtfronts, dots for features, reminding her in formation, of Lew Dockstader’s minstrels. Only Walter emerged for her, the lineaments of his face filled with clarity, his address of flowing lucidity to her, partly, it is true, because she had composed and rewritten it time over again, on her typewriter.

Even the detail of his small black tie was apparent to her across the vast depth of auditorium. She had retied it for him, finally removed it, pressed, and retied it to a nicety.

Walter’s was not an impassioned speech. Mayor Mitchel, Otto Kahn, Felix Warburg, John Finley, had previously moved the audience to tears, cheers, and checks. Walter’s, on the other hand, was a careful and studied compendium of statistics and laboriously accrued facts which he had placed in a sheaf on the typewriter in Ray’s apartment just twenty-four hours previous. Infant mortality. Aged Blind. Crippled Catholic children. Protestant Big Sisters. Jewish Juvenile Delinquency. The paper he was reading was her careful compilation of statistics, reports, budgets, pertaining to the sectarian charities of the city.

She wished passionately, sitting there bending forward to lose no sound, that he need not have to read it. Part of the success of his predecessors lay in the gesture of conviction, the moist eye, the booming and diminuendo voice. Walter’s voice almost droned through his material. Walter, who could not bear to see a thinly clad child shiver, or encounter an elderly beggar! In the flat before the mirror, there had seemed to her to be the forthright qualities of vigor and passion in his voice. And now here, suddenly, before the thousands, something in Walter failed to project itself.

“Read, Walter, as if the needy poor were standing in hordes behind you, egging you on. Read, Walter, as if your own babies were undernourished and thinly clad and you were pleading for them.”

All very well and good within the well-warmed crowded little room that was so benign to him at all times. There, his voice did
boom, and his eye command; but here, in the impersonal vastness, that voice became the recitative one of the statistician, his impassioned plea took on the key of faint harangue, and the audience began to squirm. There was no showmanship in Walter’s manner of address, which by its very nature needed, in order to challenge response, to be shot out of the cannon of a personality.

With a sense of frenzied futility, sitting there in the balcony, her hands white at the knuckles, Ray felt his poorly projected fervor and yearned for the power to somehow divert it into ringing blasts against a slipping audience.

Years later, before a war audience, in that same auditorium where hundreds of thousands of dollars were to be raised in a Victory Drive, he was to fail her even more devastatingly than now; was to hold back the self, which before the mirror in her flat, could sometimes seem to rise to impassioned oratorical heights.

How innocent Corinne seemed of all of Ray’s kind of raging travail at the parade of his inadequacies.

In the third box to the right of the first tier, as if they were sitting for a portrait of “Mrs. Walter D. Saxel and children,” were Corinne, Richard, and Irma. Corinne in a small mink toque with aigrets, a handsome mink jacket thrown open, and a shower of lace flowing among her two strings of pearls on her small high bust. Every inch the prideful, secure wife, the impeccable mother, the entrenched, the chaste, the normal. Everything had happened right in its place and in its order and as it should be, to Corinne. It always would. Life would see to that. Walter would see to that. Even her children were already grouped about her in a small barricade. Richard, gawkier even than when last she had spied him at the occasion of Walter’s helping to officiate at Flag Day exercises. A tall, supine young fellow, strangely unlike either Corinne or Walter, but said to resemble the Frankfurt-am-Main Friedlanders. Irma, in the plump fair image of her mother, a fan of lovely yellow curls, spread as if drying in the sun along her lace collar.

They were like a dream, down there in that box, so snugly partitioned by brass and red velvet, a warm fragrant dream of security and solidity, a dream tinctured with nightmare. There were,
in addition, two distant cousins in that box. Strong, lean, aquiline maiden women, with strong dark hair mixed with gray, and heavily decked out in the beautiful twenty-two carat gold-scrolled jewelry of the period. They were Hanna and Jennie Friedlander, maidens of vast inheritances, and, according to many a humorous recital by Walter, pests in the Saxel household. But nonetheless they were part in the solidarity. The entrenchment of Corinne. The entrenchment of the Friedlanders. Of the Saxels. Of the race.

How different the falling away of her own family had been. It was more than a month after Tagenhorst’s death that little Emma had written Ray, thanking her for a ten-dollar check for an Easter gift, and adding, almost by way of postscript, the serious accident to her grandmother of a fall over a porch-rail while shaking a rug, the indirect results of which were so ultimately cause of her death. Even though she sent money to her people, as she constantly did, with the gleanings of her racing, china painting, and sofa-pillow money, and kept what contacts with them she could, by way of letters, small gifts, the solidarity was lacking. The superb solidarity of clan, which, with a paradoxical insistency, was something to admire, even while it continued to crush and defeat her.

There was, to be sure, her pride in Emma. The never-ceasing thrill of “Aunt Ray” with which her lusterless little letters began. Emma, from her photograph in first-communion dress and veil, was blonde, pasty, terribly nearsighted behind thick lenses, but, withal, a source of pride to Ray that could reduce her to the impulse of tears. There was strange solace and inner satisfaction in standing before the cabinet photograph of Emma in her communion dress and bouquet of carnations, and letting unshed tears obscure her into Ray’s dim idealization of what Emma should be. Not frail and pasty and weak-eyed, but, through the blessing of tears, lovelier than loveliness. But even this rather vicarious yearning of a stepaunt over a stepniece was not quite the thing which you could almost trace by a dotted line, as they did in comic strips, from the calm safe eyes of Corinne to the figure of Walter, framed in the huge proscenium.

Damn them. Curse them. Bless them. These solid Jews. These sticklers for one another. These tight units of kith and kin, which
are more ostracizing than ostracized. How they did for one another! The charities of Jews in the name of Jews! Honor thy father and thy mother and the old and the broken ones of the tribe. All denominations, of course, gave by way of charities, to their own; but, somehow, it seemed the Jews who, self-conscious with past pain, gave more bountifully, to spare their own future pain. Already, before he was fifty, Walter’s name was well to the fore of practically every large charity in the name of his people. By the time he was fifty, the Corinne Saxel Wing in the Mount of Olives Hospital was completed. By the time he was fifty-three, he would have given away his first million. You could count them off, too, the Jews who, like Walter, the country over, were giving in the name of the solidarity.

Try to break in. Try to crash the gate of Jewishness. That dotted line from the eye of her there in the box, surrounded by the indescribable wealth of his children, to the eye of him there in the proscenium, no larger than a raisin, but filled with the mysterious mucus of family solidity.

Yes, even defeated by it, ostracized by it, she could not look upon the calm little-dowager prettiness of Corinne—whose hair, whitening, made her lovelier—and not thrill, and at the same time, paradoxically, maddeningly, not feel bitter, rankling, hurting, and soiled.

That was the part, this last, this feeling of smirch, that one never dared quite to meet.

Leaving the opera house, crushed into the crush, as so many times she had grown accustomed to nestling herself in the anonymity of the throng, at piers, at theaters, in hotel lobbies, in various public places, there they were! Corinne, the Misses Friedlander, Richard, Irma, almost close enough to touch. She could in fact have reached out and tapped Walter as he joined them. The crowd milled and detained them. There was a bright flush on Walter’s cheekbones, and his children reached out to him, and his women laid hands upon him, and there were handshakes from those who knew him and from those who ventured to extend the stranger’s hand of congratulation.

More and more, as the public aspect of his life claimed him, he insisted upon Ray’s presence in the throng. It made subsequent discussion so much more vitally their common interest if she had heard his address, witnessed the same play or opera, been present at the same ceremony, or attended the same art show or auction. She had learned to be clever about this last, comparing art catalogues, digging out the history of paintings at the public library, inspecting the collection at close range long before the day of sale.

Then, too, on occasions like the present one, it was part of her duty to keep her ear primed for comment. Helpful hints, as Walter called them, demanding of her the uncomplimentary along with the plaudits. She knew better than this last. “Oh, Walter, the elderly man sitting behind me thought your voice carried magnificently.” Never: “Oh, Walter, I sat next to Mrs. Sparfeld, the wife of the senator, and she said that you had the most tiresome voice in the world, no delivery, and that you gave her a pain in the neck.” Never: “As I was leaving the balcony of the One-Thousand-Dollar-a-Plate Charity Dinner, I heard a woman in the spectators’ gallery say you were a wolf in lamb’s clothing. Not only a wolf in Wall Street, but a wolf who prowled up forbidden lanes.”

That remark was six months old. What had it meant? Their discretion was so perfect. Their rule, never to be seen in public together, so rigid. Was this figure of herself, Ray, still modish, slim, solitary, skulking the back streets of his life, becoming noticeable?

For three months in Paris she had lived within a stone’s throw of the Crillon. An entire season at Aix-les-Bains she had occupied a room in a pension just a flight of hillside stairs below the hotel where Walter and Corinne had taken the cure. Nightly, she had skirted the tables at the Casino, sometimes standing elbow to elbow at the gaming-tables, or within easy eyeshot of Corinne, and yet never once had they appeared in public or even exchanged greetings.

What had it meant—a wolf who prowled up forbidden lanes? What secret prying eyes might be tunneling under the foundation of her phony security? Nonsense!

It was in the milling of the crowd around her, the day of the conclusion of the Charity Drive at the Metropolitan Opera House,
that Ray, her ear cocked for titbits for Walter, heard spoken, at her elbow, a remark which, directed against herself, raced down her spine like a mouse.

“There she is! The tall one in the broadcloth suit with the silver buttons. Saxel’s shadow. They say he’s been keeping her for fifteen years.…”

The year he became president of the Affiliated Charities, Walter turned the Cape May house, Castle View, into a temporary home for convalescent children. Later he was to bequeath this Georgian seventeen-room mansion, on its two hundred acres, to the township of Cape May as a permanent seaside vacation ground for children from the New York tenements.

During the summer of 1915, which was before his acquisition of the even more elaborate estate of Rye, this voluntary evacuation had the effect of throwing awry plans for a summer at Cape May which had been more meticulously laid than usual.

The reason for this was to come to Ray later in a shock so blasting that she fell into the habit of dating her life before and after the episode of Youngstown. Part of the repercussive effect of this shock was the fact that she could find herself unhorsed and thrown into indescribable confusion by an isolated circumstance which, after all, was only part and parcel of a general condition which she had learned from the start to endure.

The turning over of the Cape May house, coming as an eager impulse from both Walter and Corinne, exerted no small pull upon the affairs of Ray.

For several summers, at Walter’s insistence, she had occupied, in the township proper of Cape May, the small furnished flat of a
druggist and his wife who, eager for the summer income, moved into the quarters of a tent colony on the beach.