Back STreet (45 page)

And when, so absurd were the antics of the Babe in his scarf, her hilarity became a little hysterical, Walter caught her to him and, in a way that had not occurred for years, kissed her with a flash of youth and an old vitality in his embrace that left her with an old sweet limpness. It was as if the reincarnations of their youth had leaned into these bright fleeting days of this summer at Aix. There was so little talk of the world that lay too heavily upon him. Even the children were scarcely discussed. No public addresses to be worried over and memorized. No typing or scouting about for catalogues or art-dealers’ quotations. None of the racking, momentous, and highly special crises of finance that had harassed him throughout the period of the war. Not even the usually daily sheaves of cables from the banking house were permitted to come through to him this summer. As Walter himself put it, this was a case of taking a complete rest or having one for which he was not ready forced upon him.

Ray suspected that part of his docility to this complete business detachment, which was not characteristic of him, was due to an element of scare thrown into him by an attack of acute indigestion that had laid him low during several days of the sojourn at Paris. As a matter of fact, the cause of the sharp gastric attack was easily traceable to his inability to resist the compensations of the table. Before rich foods that were palatable to him, he became the small boy, throwing discretion to the winds and forgetting past after-dinner adversities in the gratifications of the moment.

“I’ll have a little of this, even if it kills me,” was his almost invariable comment upon surrender.

To demur, or withhold from the table certain of his favorite dishes, such as richly potted roasts, cheese Torten, pickled delicacies, which were sure to incur from him later expressions of regret, was to arouse his immediate irritation, even anger.

“Don’t treat me like a child. I know what is good for me and what isn’t. My, how I dislike all this interfering.” But in any event, the attack in Paris had not been without its effect. “I know what ails me better than those French doctors. The attack had nothing at all to do with the number of those little escargots I ate at Prunier’s. It’s complete rest I need, and I’m getting it.”

Just the same, he was a little chastened that summer at Aix, went through a double term of the cure with a sort of shamefaced regard for his diet that, because it was so boyish, hurt her.

“None of that hors-d’oeuvre for me tonight, Ray. Not hungry for it.” The face of the matter, of course, was that he wanted nothing more than the assorted array of salads, tinned fish, cunningly piled artichoke hearts, pickled mushrooms, pâté de foie gras, coiled anchovies with hearts made of their own paste, caviar in beds of ice, endive stuffed with Roquefort; and the pathetic little evasion hurt her. It was not the evasion in itself that hurt, or the self-denial, so much as the idea of the default of the flesh. Why need it be? Especially for him, who felt humiliation. If he had only known it, his debilities, at least where she was concerned, were dear. All the remainder of that summer, as she felt him consciously slowing his pace, observing his diet, leaving the Casino shortly after midnight, attending meticulously to the period set aside for his walks, massages, and rest, her tenderness flowed out to him as it would to a child in a dilemma.

Sometimes, in the evenings, when the women were attending a concert or grand opera at the fine opera house adjoining the Casino, they ventured, by way of one of the little horse-drawn barouches, for a drive along a tranquil old road in the direction of the next town, Chambéry, where trees met to form a leafy tunnel practically all of the way. The trotting horse, the rounded back of the driver,
the lazily flecking whip, the lumbering of distant hills against the skyline, Walter’s fingers laced into hers, fireflies, tinkle of the semi-occasional horse that passed theirs or the still more infrequent whizz of an automobile, were part of the remote reality seen through eyelashes that had been recently kissed by Walter.

“Walter”—fingers interlaced—“I love you.”

“I love you, Ray.”

Clip. Clop.

The driver had a little song which he sang under his breath.…

“I love you, Walter.”

“I love you, Ray.”

Clip. Clop. Neither driver nor his pasteboard-looking horse troubling to ponder at the wintry-looking romance they were drawing gently through the powdery night.

“Walter,” she asked him suddenly, during one of these drives, that, as it took place, was being embalmed as precious memory to her, “have you any regrets?”

He had been lying back, his head against her shoulder, his fingers interlaced with hers. “About what?” he asked her, without moving.

“Us.”

Clip. Clop.

“When you ask me that, Ray,” he said quietly, after a long pause, “you might as well continue and ask if I have any regrets because I have hands, or because my children are healthy, or because there is a sun.”

It was she who was silent then, so long that he spoke again.

“You have held my life together, Ray. What force I have would never have been disciplined without you. I don’t always admit it, even to myself, but practically everything I am, or everything I have accomplished, has been you. The schooling of my children, the history of my business, the very pictures on my walls have been you. I know that, Ray, and when I am sane like I am now—tonight, I admit it. Me, have regrets!”

The blood began to whir in her ears of the suffusing sweetness of what he said, and yet what she had hoped for was that he would turn the question: “Have
you
any regrets, Ray?”

It was not only that the assurance to the contrary was bubbling at her heart to be spoken, but the question, even though prompted by her own, would have reflected a similar solicitude for herself that somehow she wanted terribly.

What, after all, had she given up in an entire lifetime that could compare with even the stolen sweetness of such an evening as this? “The only ill that can ever befall the perfection of what we have,” she told him over and over again, “is that anyone else be hurt by what we are doing, and that we must never let happen.” He knew what she meant, and invariably lifted her fingers and kissed them for this. But just the same, if only now he had leaned to her with the question, “Ray, have you any regrets?”

“No, I have no regrets, Ray, except for the lie. There would never have been a way to make her see how this aspect of my life has never encroached upon hers. It has been hard. I have suffered. But I have no regrets, Ray.”

(I. I. I. I. I. I.)

“Nor I.”

“I have needed you, Ray, every inch of the way.”

(I. I. I. I. I. I.)

“And I you.”

“I have been happier with you than I deserve.”

(I. I. I. I. I. I.)

What if, suddenly, she should throw this hand from her lap, leap from the slowly moving vehicle, and run laughing down the road, thumbing her nose back at him, screaming her derision? That would be madness; the escape of the sense of madness that sometimes pressed against the wall of her being when she felt herself, as now, beating vainly against the walls of his being, as if he were so much mortar and stone.…

He lifted her hand suddenly and pressed it against his brow. “I’ve a headache. I like to feel your hand. I’m so tired, Ray. It rests me to be with you.”

For an hour longer they rode at snail’s pace along the quiet, tree-laced road, and presently he fell asleep with his head against her numb shoulder, and her palm against his brow.

The engagement of Irma to Mordecai II, eldest son of Mordecai Poole, founder and president of the North American Coffee and Mocha Company, brought to an abrupt ending a midsummer that was filled with the little perfections of occasions such as these.

Happening, as she had beheld it happen, through the eyes of Walter, the affair of this betrothal, nevertheless, when it actually precipitated itself, came as a shock to him.

“Why, Walter, you act as if something dreadful had occurred, instead of something which you had not only been expecting, but hoped for.”

They had been seated in her little sitting room, reading aloud from the Paris
Herald
the considerable announcement of the engagement party that had been held a few evenings previous in the gardens of the Hotel Bernasçon.

At this remark, one of the familiar gusts of anger, similar to the one inspired by her remark about the back streets of his life, swept him.

“You talk as if I’d been trying to marry her off.”

“Nonsense, Walter! But you know yourself, when Irma decided to stay back this summer and visit the Pooles and then come over later with Richard, you suspected what was going to happen. You told me as much.”

“You women have a set of mental processes that are beyond me.
You and her mother had this thing arranged in your minds before the two ever met. If I had my way she wouldn’t be thinking of marriage for another five years.”

She sat very still at that, flushing with a suddenly tapped flood of bitterness and strange pleasure.… “You and her mother.”

Yes, much of what he said was true. She realized it now. Ever since, through the eyes of Walter, she had beheld Irma and young Poole going off alone, or in groups, to see Richard excel in polo, or skiing at Lake Placid, or dancing in the new ballroom that stretched across the top floor of the Poole town house, the dream of this ultimate alliance had nested in her mind.

As Walter had constructed him in her mind’s eye, the eldest child of Mordecai Poole, a chip off the block of a father as renowned in the affairs of Jewry, humanitarianism, philanthropy, art patronage and industry as a Straus, Warburg, or Marshall would add to the already firm structure of the house of Saxel the completion of a tower, and mortar, with a kind of impenetrability that had never failed to awe as much as it had defeated her, that solidarity of a race in which, vagaries of social ambition to the contrary notwithstanding, the clan impulse would not die.

It was right and fitting that a Saxel should marry a Poole. She beheld Irma, through the vicarious mirror of her father’s eyes, in an after-war era that was beginning to be littered with the truck of such phrases as “flapper” and “jazz-baby,” moving along to the syncopated rhythm of her time, into a destiny as sure and smug and normal as Corinne’s. Irma, whose burning, youthful, and at one time really bitter determination to transcend, with the assault of money, certain ostracisms which were galling to her, had been a tempest all right; but tempest in a teacup it had turned out to be. With Corinne, in whom the daughter had aroused ambitions remote to her, the same was true. With the advent of young Mordecai II all that was strangely quiescent now, canceled, as it were. Irma, whose smug Teutonic prettiness was in the image of her mother’s, would marry, even as her mother before her, young, well, and within the clan. There would be issue—issue of Walter’s issue.

How passionately she, Ray, had desired that marriage, now came over her in a kind of slow anger. Why? In order that the wall which, over twenty years ago, had closed him in, might continue to shut her out. Why? In order that for Corinne, who had everything, there might be even more of the abundance that had filled her arms with children—an abundance that lay crusted in pearls along her plump throat, and which, all unconsciously, was borne out in the dowager perfection of her smug manner.

Why need she desire for Corinne further endowment to the already bursting granaries of her life? Why was she, seated there, in the snide back-street quarters that were typical of the usual mounting he gave her, being barked at for a seemingly inadvertent remark she had made about this impending marriage?

“To hear you talk, one would think I had gone out to make the match.”

“No, Walter, no. I only meant …”

“You only meant! You only meant somehow to make it appear that what I wished for the girl was to find her a rich husband and marry her off.”

“No, no, Walter.”

“When, as a matter of fact, it is obnoxious to me. The whole business. No complaint against Mordecai, he’s a fine young fellow. But she’s too young. Let her wait a few years. I want her at home with her mother and me. It isn’t that I don’t think this chap is good enough for her. I don’t think anybody is good enough for her.”

“You’re right, Walter. But the real time for the right marriage is when two young people decide for themselves. You did.”

He gave her a look at that, as deep, as mystifying, as filled with turgid depths as the pool of unclarified pain she had always carried in her heart concerning a certain Sunday morning and its consequences.

“Well, anyway—she is the dearest thing, Ray. I don’t want to seem to say it, because she is mine, but—Irma is the dearest thing.…”

“You darling,” she said, feeling her eyes fill, and yet somehow sitting carefully away from him, as he stood teetering on spread feet
before the window that looked out upon the courtyard with its tin umbrellas.

But the coming of the young people and the subsequent arrival of Mordecai Poole, senior, and his young and second wife, from Carlsbad, put an abrupt end to the rather easily managed scheme of things which had been possible up to then. The Saxel-Friedlander-Poole party now occupied a fine old building, also hotel property, known as the Villa, set well beyond the formal gardens of the Bernasçon, and usually given over to visiting royalty, the Prime Minister of England, personages and their entourages from various lands, who occupied it from time to time during season.

Here, even to the meals, which were served to piping-hot perfection from the hotel kitchens, the party took up a sort of carnival family life, sufficient unto themselves, yet in evidence everywhere—Mordecai Poole, senior, whose resemblance to Bismarck was striking, and his handsome young Viennese wife, driving through the town in a buff-colored, special-body Kurt-Sussex touring car that was conspicuous even for Aix-les-Bains; everywhere, too, you encountered the engaged couple, driving, walking, golfing, or, straight as needles on their mounts, galloping along the bridle paths; everywhere Friedlanders, playing bridge on gala afternoons on the elaborate terraces of the Hotel Splendide, motoring with newly arrived cousins, the Dreyfouses of Frankfurt-am-Main, gathering before lunch in large animated groups around the mineral springs; evenings, the party, or segments of it, flooding the Casino, dining there, on gala nights, at-large special tables, or playing at chemin-de-fer or baccarat with consistent conservatism.