Back STreet (38 page)

All she knew! Their relative prices. Their relative value in the dealers’ mart! Dear innocence.

“I’m not one of those exacting girls like Olga, for instance. She wants to be an opera singer. Most girls hate to teach. I wouldn’t. I’d love it.”

“Don’t be so sure, Emma, that you won’t be able to, one of these days. Things look bad for it now, but something may happen.…”

“Oh, Aunt Ray, you—you couldn’t! Mama says you’re too poor now—”

“Sh-h-h, darling. Why, you’re trembling. No, I don’t mean that I could now. I’m just saying—maybe some day—”

“If I could go to Ohio State University, or to Miami, I think I’d be the happiest girl—I think I’d be the happiest girl that ever lived.”

She was almost pretty when her pastiness glowed like that. Why, at Emma’s age, she, Ray, had never given a thought to the advantages of education. She had discontinued High School without any duress from her father, but because the quick tides of life outside had lapped her feet. Boys. Dances. Canal parties. That, it was true, would not be the case with Emma. Even the neighborhood boys, dances, and parties were already passing her by. Emma would most likely be a teacher, work her way through the state university, live in a dormitory, and the routine of classroom and examination-papers would be no bore to her. A girl whose perpetual virginity seemed written across her face. Emma must be fortified with education for what life was apparently to hold for her.…

“Aunt Ray, I don’t want ever to get married. I want to be like you.”

(If you followed your impulse to laugh, something would bruise this child.)

“Oh, no, Emma!”

“I do. I don’t like boys very much, Aunt Ray, and they don’t like me at all. I want to do like you. Be in business. Only I want my business to be teaching.”

Zealously and well, Freda must have guarded this girl of hers against the sound of the rattle of the family skeleton. Thank God for that!

“Be good and do right, Emma. The rest will take care of itself. You’re too young to know yet much about what you really want.”

“I’m not too young to know I want to be like you, Aunt Ray.”

This stifling, this embarrassing adoration. You wanted to laugh. You wanted to flee from its sweetness and its wrongness. Only where?

There was the crisic date of the coming of Kurt, approaching day by day, and there was the weight inside her of the death she had died at Mount Clemens, and there was the terrible inertia that scarcely gave her the strength to face the days. It took strength to plan and act, or flee. Strength that seemed to have solidified into a dead lump too heavy to drag.

Then, along in early August, came a cool spell; and in an attempt to defeat somehow this inertia, she ventured forth, with Freda and with Emma, on one of the latter’s nursing days off, for the unprecedented event in their lives of lunch at the town’s largest hotel.

“Ray, I declare, the drummers still stare at you the way they used to in Cincinnati. Never saw the like.”

“Nonsense, Freda.”

“But it’s not nonsense.” Around the lobby the heads did still turn, but the bald heads now, of men with embonpoint.

One of them strolled over to her as she stood waiting for Freda and Emma while they were across the street gathering up a pair of shoes for Curtis that had been half-soled.

“Didn’t I meet you once in Dayton?” he asked, through a toothpick.

“You did not,” she said, looking him full in the eyes, which were swimming with mucous film.

“Who was that?” asked Freda, returning.

“One of the boys I used to know in Cincinnati,” she lied. Somehow the very quality in her which had made possible the incident, was something to be ashamed of before Emma.

One August afternoon, of inability to endure another moment of the lassitude of lying hour after hour on the bed, Ray dressed about four and took a walk around the rather straggling streets of the tagend of the town.

The sun baked against the dust of the unmade roads, and the blinds of the shabby workingmen’s frame houses were drawn against heat and glare. Goats nibbling in the side and backyards of many of these houses were practically the only signs of animate life at this ebbtide hour of a midsummer afternoon.

It seemed to Ray, walking along under a parasol which she twirled, that the depression of it all—the flat turfless yards, the smoke haze from the brickyards and factories, the inanimate reminders of the dreary routine of the lives lived within those packing-case houses, as evidenced by washtubs tilted against the sides of houses, rubbish heaps, oleanders in tubs—was in a way worse than the depression occasioned by agony of mind. Here, embalmed into the heat haze of this picture, were the sordid monotony, ugliness of vista, repetition of dirty chore, soiled discomfort of bodies, imprisoned defeat. To suffer actively was preferable to what must be the passive depression of the lives that swilled their growlers of beer, scrubbed their stained clothes, earned their meager factory wage, cohabited in unsavory beds, bore their puny children, and had their day-by-day being in these avenues of unrelieved poverty.

It threw her into a mood of revolt and live-while-you-may that caused her, a little later, to commit the indiscretion of entering an exhibition room which she happened to be passing, and buying Kruger a brand-new latest-model Columbia bicycle, which she knew to be the dream of his life, and which reduced her none-too-bulky bankroll by fifty dollars.

It was an impulse and indiscretion that threw scare into her as she walked her way back home, and then brought out some philosophical self-justification.

Glad I did it. Poor kid, what is he ever going to get out of it anyway, with that jumping face of his? No vitality to him. No force. Even less to him, if possible, than to Hugo. Glad I did it. Besides, getting down to rock bottom is what will help me to decide. It’s like a storybook. Kurt coming to town in eight days. Oh, God, how can I? How can’t I? I can. Why, the security alone. Mrs. Kurt Shendler. Send and charge to Mrs. Kurt Shendler, the little pearl heart, with the gold chain. It is to be a gift to my niece. Emma, I want you to meet your new uncle. Our first present to you is four years at Smith’s College—no, it was Smith College, of course—and then four years abroad. Then you are to live with us in our Detroit mansion. No, you didn’t refer to your home as a mansion, even if it were one. Our home. Freda, you and Hugo and the boys are to move to Detroit, where Kurt will give Hugo a position of importance in the plant. Your home will be near our home. Not too near. No poor-relation dependence. I hate that. What we give you will be not only the equal of what we have, but very often the superior. Why is it that people who give must always give in smaller proportion than what they themselves have? I should like for you to have a larger house even—a better automobile—Our home will be open to you, but you will have yours. Our home. Mr. and Mrs. Kurt Shendler’s. Why, a woman would be crazy, out of her senses, at this time of life, not to crawl gratefully into this golden opportunity. Besides, it went to show, it went to show by now, that she had given the best years of her life, and for what? So that he—Walter—might in the end let her glide out of his existence without even—without even—

The thought, after what had been, of her walking that casually
out of his life, the leaving of the note, the taking of a train, the ensuing barrage of silence, was one that, flashing over her time after time during the life of a day, would cause the nap of her flesh to rise, drenching her in a misery that affected her in the physical manner of making it hard for her to swallow.

There was something terrifying about that kind of infringement of the physical into her misery. Sometimes, for a full minute at a time, she could not swallow, and that sense of paralysis seemed in a way to affect her breathing, and sweat would break out over her, and one more day would become one of torment.

Twice, in spite of herself, filled with loathing for her act, she called at the general-delivery window of the post office. “Anything for Mrs. Ray Schmidt?” Knowing the while that there was nothing to expect.

Had she not disappeared? Of course, if he really wanted to find her! He knew the city of her whereabouts. There was a way. A man of Walter’s resources could find a way. It was simply that he had not turned his head after her, as she left. The ignominy of that should be a staff to lead her away from the further ignominy of hanging around the general-delivery window of a public post office.…

Yes, it was well, better, that the bicycle for Kruger had reduced her roll of bills to a wad. It meant an enforced decision.

I wonder, she thought to herself that afternoon following the purchase of the bicycle, as she walked her way homeward, twirling the parasol, if anybody else was ever in such a fix. The thing to do is clear. So right. The thing that is over, so wrong. If only I could despise him—Walter—as much as I despise myself. God, what a scare that man gave me, turning the corner so suddenly! For a second he looked like Walter. I wonder if I can be going a little mad. He is blond, and doesn’t look like Walter any more than I do. What—how—it is the sun—my headache—

Another pastime of the long, stagnant days was to sit on the side steps of the Hanck house, with a litter of two-week-old puppies that had been born to Curtis’s fox terrier, crawling about in the sun. There were five, the shape of enlarged tadpoles with ridiculous little bellies full of mother’s milk, and stick-up tails about the length of
a short lead pencil. The lapful of the entire litter was scarcely a sag in her skirt. They’re so little, was her way of explaining to herself the tight, hurt feeling in her throat at the spectacle of the puppies asleep in her lap. They’re so little. The tiniest of all, with a black face and a white spot on the tip of its small, frantic tail, had a habit of closing its clover-smelling mouth about her forefinger and pulling on it. There was always the danger of becoming too attached to a dog. But just this one, the tiniest, she took over to her room and made it a bed out of a chip-basket and some pink sateen. Mornings, unable to endure even a sheet for a covering, as she lay bare-limbed, locked in lethargy, the little fellow slept and snored in the crook of her arm, while the sun pressed against the drawn shades and flies buzzed around the chandelier.

“How worthless I am,” she thought, as the date of Kurt’s arrival climbed nearer. “Why don’t I get up and go over and help Freda rinse clothes? I have all the qualities of the bad women you read about in books. I act kept. Women with husbands and children and homes don’t lie around in nighties half the day, mooning over dogs. What’s the use lying to myself any longer? I’m not fit for anything but loving. I’m not fit even to be loved. Walter, let me slink back into the edge of your life, where I belong, where I’m not even fit to be, except for the one bit of splendor there is about me. My love of you—my love of you.”

This sort of thing ended in fits of crying and lying huddled with her pet, until, breathless for the best moment of her entire day, in burst Emma, eager for the service of love in helping her aunt to dress.

One morning, the twenty-fifth of August, to be exact, coming out of the post office, where she had gone this time with something terribly akin to prayer on her lips, she encountered one of the old territory-traveling men of the Cincinnati days, whom she recognized immediately, even under the considerable suet of his greatly increased weight.

“Funny thing, Ray, Roy Ahler told me he thought he’d seen you in town the other day.”

Then it had been Roy, lunching at the hotel the day she had
been there with Freda and Emma! She could have sworn that the tall gray man dining there with what were obviously his wife, daughter, and possibly son-in-law, was the Roy Ahler of many an Over-the-Rhine expedition. His carefully averted glance had confirmed that suspicion.

“Roy lives here, you know. Quit traveling years ago and went into the instalment-furniture business. Made a fortune. Youngstown Furniture Company. And you? Say, you’re to the life, Ray!”

“No blarney, Ed. My calendar tells me the same story yours tells you.”

“Living here?”

“With my sister.”

“Still Ray Schmidt?”

“Still Ray Schmidt.”

“Well, sir, now, what I don’t know more and beyond that, don’t hurt me. Anyway, I’m for you. Always was. Question before the jury now is, are you free to come around to a little penny-ante game at the hotel tonight? Nixon Stroock is in the town. Remember Nix? No? Well, he used to hit the Rhine town occasionally. Guess he came after your time. Well, anyway, good fellow. We’re both out of New York for the same firm. Party is taking place in the rooms of one of Nix’s friends. A Mrs. Dolly Curtis. Good number. Good crowd. Eight of us. Tickle me, and I know it would Nix, to have you, Ray. Old time’s sake.…”

Why not? The evenings in the rear side yard with Freda and Hugo and the children were horrors. The unrelenting wrangling of Freda at her children. Do. Don’t. Stop. Quit. Even in the dark Kruger’s face twitching like lightning. The loathsome habit of Hugo of kicking off his shoes and wriggling his toes in his furiously darned socks. Poor little Emma, tired from her arduous duties with children, sitting with her hands clasped about her knees, and her head back against her aunt’s lap. One needed relief from this to keep from feeling a little mad. A good game of poker, as in the old days, mild limit, got your mind off yourself and the menacing imminence of need of decision.

“Don’t know but what I might, Ed.”

“Say, that’s fine, now. Suppose you come around with me to the hotel. They’ve got a Wednesday specialty there. Baked shad with boiled potatoes. Afterward we’ll join up with the crowd.”

There was the puppy up in her room to be fed, and not a telephone either at the Werreneths’ or Hancks’. Well, anyway, her shirtwaist felt wilted, and there was always the chance, the off-off-chance, that somehow, some way, there might be waiting that telegram. That special-delivery letter.

“I’ll go home and red up a bit, and meet you after dinner, Ed.”

“All right. Don’t know when I’ve had such a setting-up as running into you. I’ve lost a boy in the war. Joined up with the Canadians. Didn’t know that, did you, Ray? Hard hit.”