Back STreet (4 page)

Now, although three months Ray’s senior, there was something unspecked and protected about Freda’s youth—something right and normal. The boys who courted Freda were the boys who, if not in a position, were at least in the mood, for marriage. It was not inconceivable that a certain Hugo Hanck, temporarily nothing more than a gas-meter reader, but the only nephew and heir apparent of
one of the town’s outstanding brewers, would finish off his courtship of Freda with marriage.

The fact was that, at eighteen, with the exception of Kurt Shendler, who owned a small bicycle-repair shop, and who had been at Ray to elope with him to Middletown ever since the days when she was fourteen and had ridden her bicycle into his shop for “pumping up” after school, Ray had never had an out-and-out offer of marriage.

No. The thought kept smiting her, as the cold poured in faster and faster beneath the mandolin-sleeves and against the cotton stockings, that if Papa had been less lax with her, or his marriage with Tagenhorst, since it had to come, had happened in the days when she was still young enough to be taken in hand by a stepmother, she would not be sitting out here sick with the nausea of disgust because a married traveling salesman had put into words the unspoken expectation which, encouraged by her general behavior, lurked in the eyes and manner of every man who enjoyed easy liberties with her and hoped for greater.

It was not that you could blame Papa. God love him, no! You could not expect caution of a man in whom mistrust had never been born. But if only—if only, somehow, some way, and still remaining Papa, just as he was, he had trusted her a little less.…

It was not wise to enter the house with her throat hurting so from pressing down tears, because Papa was still up. She could see him through the parlor window seated beside the dining-room table reading the
Volksblatt
through two pairs of spectacles. Seen through the lace curtain, the vista of dark parlor intervening, he looked as placid as the friar on his beer mug, his large shining hairless head falling forward now and then in intermittent fits of dozing. God love him. No amount of well-being could seem to spare her from the hurt of his seeming pathetic to her.

On one occasion she had wanted to appear to shed tears because she had succeeded in arousing a man, whose jealousy she momentarily coveted, into saying harsh things to her.

It was difficult for her to cry, because she was not feeling; and so she sat and thought of her father, and his inability even to think of
her in terms of fallibility, and the way his face fell into benign sort of fat and adoring creases when he looked at her, and that lonely little fashion he had of sometimes rubbing his hand across the furrows of his brow, and immediately it was all she could do to keep the tears from turning into sobs.

Even back in those dim childhood days during the life of her mother, her father had set up a sort of perpetual hurt in his daughter. In the untranslatable coinage of a phrase that was frequently used in a local way to sum him up, Adolph was
eine gute Schnucke
.

It was the one linguistic atavism Ray permitted herself. She liked to call him
Schnucke
. It expressed some of her indescribable hurt over his darlingness.

A young reporter on the
Enquirer
, who had boarded at the house during the days when Tagenhorst had taken it over, had summed up the figure of her father, as they had once sat of a summer evening on this very same porch rail, regarding him through the parlor lace curtain. “Your old man sure is a character. Somebody ought to put him in a book.” He was that. People often said to her, “Your father certainly is a character.” Was it because he was as placid, by nature, as the friar he resembled? Well, if never to learn from all the bad things that happened to you made you into “a character,” Papa certainly was that. Pa just wouldn’t distrust. Let a bookkeeper cheat out his very eyeballs, as two of them already had, and Papa would go right on without precaution, trusting the next one and the next, just as if nothing had ever happened. Let Papa catch bronchial pneumonia two winters in succession from going out onto the sidewalk from the heated store without hat or coat, and Papa would keep right on stepping from one extreme temperature into another, just as if he had not almost lost his life from two serious illnesses thus induced.

Adolph was never tired of celebrating to his first wife the narrowness of his escape from the ensnarements of Cora Goebel. But did that prevent him from ultimately marrying this same Cora Goebel? It did not. An experience that had really seemed to cut deeply into Adolph, apparently had not cut at all. Seven decent years after the death of Lena, each bringing to the union a half-grown daughter, Cora Goebel Tagenhorst and Adolph Schmidt were married.

Papa lived life like that. Apparently nothing could really get at him. It was the same where Ray was concerned. His girl was a good girl, and go away with all your hocus-pocus talk from people who didn’t have anything better to do. What had happened to girls before, did not make any difference. Ray was able to take care of herself. If Tagenhorst felt differently about Freda, and shushed over her like a mother hen, that was all right too. Everything was all right.

Well, Papa, this is how all right your all-right world is. A man has just asked me—a man has just asked me in dirty little words, the question every man I have ever known, except Kurt, has asked me with his manner.

The tears popped and hung in small diamond-shaped panes in the mesh of her veil. What’s to be done about it, Papa? How can I start over being a different kind of me with men? …

A car lumbered by again, carrying one lone passenger huddled in a rear seat. This time the driver of the night’s first “owl” leaned out, as the flash of its dirty yellow light fell against the Schmidt house, and, inserting two fingers between his teeth, let out a short, shrill whistle.

It was Harry Knorr, one of the older boys on the line. Poor fellow, that was a cold and lonesome job for you, running a Colerain owl-car. Fresh of him, though, to slow down and keep whistling. For goodness’ sake, he’d wake up the neighborhood! Oh, poor fellow—lonesome …

What she did in the act of entering the house was to pause for a moment, place a kiss on the palm of her gloved hand, and blow it off in the direction of the Colerain owl-car, as it slowed down to what amounted to a standstill.

Gracious! Tagenhorst was forever leaving doors and windows open, so that when Ray entered at night, the draft of the hall door opening sent more of them slamming throughout the house.

The thought trailed through Ray’s tired mind that she did it on purpose. As if to say: “Bang, bang, bang, here she comes! Well, it’s not my say, I’m only her stepmother, and I’m not the kind that intends to get a reputation for being a nagging one! After all, she was dry behind her ears before I married her father. If it suits him it has to suit me. But if it were my Freda, God forbid, I’d rather see her dead.…”

Freda, with a stick of yellow braid over each shoulder, and ointment glistening on two chin pimples, was most probably up there in that room at the head of the stairs now, lying in bed beside her mother. Presently, half asleep, she would be gently shoved out, to patter barefoot across the hall into her own room. That would be when Adolph finally grew tired of his intermittent nocturnal habits of dozing, reading his German paper, and pouring himself another coffee or beer, and began hoisting himself upstairs.

My little bed warmer, he used to call his stepdaughter, and pinch her cheek as it blushed.

“Papa, such talk before Freda!”

It occurred to Ray, with something of a shock, during occasional of these ejaculations of hers, that actually she was three months
younger than this stepsister whose innocence Tagenhorst was forever championing.

Three doors slammed throughout the drafty house, as Ray, with the two tears hanging against the diamond-shaped panes of her veil, entered.

It was difficult to remember to guard against those little on-purpose things. Oh, well, what did it matter? It made a lot of difference, nit! Whoever wanted to know what time she came in, was welcome to the privilege.

Why on earth did Tagenhorst insist upon turning out the hall gas when she went upstairs? Papa never failed to stumble over the hatrack. The floor of Tagenhorst’s heaven would be paved with small gas-bills. Last month, in an eight-room house occupied by four persons, the gas consumed had amounted to forty cents. Skinned shins and stubbed toes testified to that. It was right to be thrifty, of course, particularly now that Adolph’s twenty-year lease on the store had expired and he had been obliged to undertake renewal at heavy rental increase. It twisted the heart out of one to see him sitting rubbing the wrinkles of his forehead, as if they hurt him. Tagenhorst’s economies should be meticulously observed, but there was a difference between economies and smallness. Tagenhorst was the difference. It was small of her to go off to bed, leaving Adolph to stub his gouty old toes going upstairs. Small, small, small. In the few years since her father had remarried, it was a household of new smallnesses. Small of Tagenhorst to go off to bed, leaving Adolph the old end of headcheese, when she knew how he would have enjoyed slivering down into the yielding richness of the new one in the icebox. She stinted Adolph that way. Little things. If only he were not so good-natured it wouldn’t hurt so to have him stinted out of his rights. Sometimes one found oneself wishing there was something downright mean about Papa. It would keep you hurting less for him.…

“My
Schnucke
is sitting in a draft,” she said, upon entering, her precaution against his dangerous tendency for bronchitis, automatic.

He was already in the midst of an act that was his second nature.
Adolph loved to set a lavish table. He delighted in preparing and administering refreshment.

He was already cutting down through the hard heel of the cheese for a sliver which he would presently convey to her on a slab of the richly dark loaf of pumpernickel that stood end-up on the table. “
Naschen ein Bischen!
” She pretended to ignore him when he addressed her in German; and, strangely, the sole use he made of his native tongue, at least in the last brace of years, was the sentence or two he occasionally addressed to his daughter.

“Run and tell it to the Oberdorfers,” was the retort with which she had weaned him to a more general use of English. The Oberdorfers were a family on Baymiller Street, five adult daughters and one son, all American-born, who spoke the pure Low-German of their parents and little if any of a highly impure English.

He poured the final contents of his granite coffeepot, which it was his habit to whiten and sweeten while it boiled, into his used cup, and handed it to his daughter, who took a sip and gave it back to him. She would do the same with the cheese on the slice of pumpernickel too, bite into it and return it to Schmidt, who would consume it with the coffee. Poor old Pa. The gas made his pallor glisten like paraffin.

“Who banked the stove, Pa? You shouldn’t be sitting in this chill.”

Tagenhorst had, of course. Well, what Father did not notice, did not hurt him, but how dared she, knowing his susceptibility to cold?

“Sit a little, Ray. It’s not so late.”

Not, Where had she been? Why had she been? It’s past one. Shame! Everything she did was to him right and normal and as it should be.

If only it had not seemed so right and normal. If only it had struck him, back in the days when she had been the high-spirited, high-busted Ray Schmidt of fifteen and sixteen years of age, who was striking her gait as a lulu with the boys, because she found it so difficult to say no to them.

If only he had suspected her and corrected her and doubted her
just a little, she would not be sitting there now, like one of the hordes of soiled pigeons that came home every night to huddle and bleat under the eaves of the post office in Government Square.

“There’s a whole
Leberwurst
in the icebox, Daughter, that will melt in your mouth. I stopped by for it at Hamberger and Newburgh’s. I’ll fix you a sandwich with some beer.”

Almost frugal at table himself, Adolph’s eyes watered more readily than his mouth. Ever since she could remember, Ray had seen him come home laden with provender that had tempted his glance along the way. Cheeses, potted and pickled delicacies, smoked meats, tinned fish lurked in his icebox and even in his desk drawers at the store.

“I’ve just had tongue at Wielert’s—with Prothero. How’s that?” She knew it would be all right. All right in a way that was suddenly hateful and hurtful to her.

“MacQuirk was in, after you had left the store, asking for you.”

MacQuirk was another salesman out of New York. Jets and passementeries. Sixty, if a day, sporty after the easy-spending, lavish-tipping fashion that had come to mean the New York manner. Married, of course. Grown daughters, in fact, and grandchildren. He was regarded as a crack amateur bowler, and liked to have Ray accompany him, on the one or two of his semiannual evenings in town, to the local alleys, where he attracted quite a gallery of spectators. Then, Over-the-Rhine for boiled beef and horseradish sauce, beer and pretzels, with Ray, whom he called the town’s toniest.

It was galling to be tony to MacQuirk, who would not have tolerated her doings in daughters of his own. But then, it gave MacQuirk pleasure to walk along Vine Street with Ray. Tony girl with hips and a bust to her. Style. He was the kind of spender who made her feel special and excited and remote from the machinery of living. Waiters scurried before MacQuirk. Without consulting her, he started every meal with giant olives, celery stuffed with Roquefort cheese, and a short, new, provocative drink called “Manhattan cocktail.”

Once, on a three-day, five-dollar-a-round-trip excursion to Chicago,
which Ray had made with her father, they had encountered MacQuirk on Michigan Boulevard with his wife, a woman of at least sixty, with a cold, embittered face and none of the sporty bearing of her husband. It had been a quick, constrained little meeting, and MacQuirk had actually blushed over the introductions. Adolph, of course, had noticed nothing; but the immediate consciousness had stung Ray to the quick, that MacQuirk had hesitated over introducing his wife.