Back STreet (53 page)

The touts came to have a name for her, culled from the nameless limbo from whence spring most nicknames. Aunt Bernhardt.

In a remote way there was something of a superb ruin about her. A gaunt oldish tragedy, who seemed to wear a ramrod up her back, against sagging.

Dentistry had become so terribly expensive. Why, she could remember back in the Cincinnati days when you had a tooth filled for fifty cents and a bridge for a dollar and a half.

The trouble, she kept telling herself, was the habit “the girls” had of chewing soft sweets during the afternoons. Someone or other was always turning up at the grandstand with a box of chocolates or taffies. It sort of eased your nerves to relax between events over a bonbon and a bottle of pop. Too much candy—sweet tooth—must be responsible for the painful disintegration which had set in along the erstwhile strong double row of her firm white teeth.

One dentist in Louisville diagnosed her trouble as pyorrhea and advised a period of three months’ treatment before estimating the amount of salvaging work that might then be done. Anxious as she was to preserve intact what Walter used to call her Phoebe Snow smile, the price of even the preliminary treatments mounted into hundreds. Then, besides, both a dentist in New Orleans and one in New York had advised her to “have them out.”

At first this was repelling and not to be considered, but after months of the considerable odds and ends of dentists’ bills, for just temporary reliefs, and weeks of nights when she walked the floor with the Babe huddled up against her tortured cheeks for the warmth, she surrendered, and two weeks later, with a temporary
“set” in her mouth, began the long period of attempting to adjust the rigid plates to her healing gums.

It was horrible. Grimacing to herself in the wavy mirror of the small hotel room in West Twenty-third Street, where she sometimes put up during the New York runnings, when her old room at Mrs. Cleveland’s did not happen to be available, her smile seemed of glass and her gums pink tin.

“Why, I can’t go about this way! I’m a hag. My mouth looks better all sunken, without teeth. I’m a hag, this way.” She began to cry before the mirror, squeezing her nose with her handkerchief and talking aloud after a habit she had developed. “Why should I care about this mouthful of glass and tin making of me a hag? I only care, sweetheart, not to look in a way that would have been horrible to you. If it wasn’t for that, I wouldn’t care. Why should I? What have I got to care about, except my Babe? My darling muvver’s baby. My gookie angelums Babe.”

This last was what Walter would have called a new wrinkle. “A dog is all right in his place, but excuse me from women that slobber over them.” This habit had not come upon her consciously. She only knew that even to have attempted to convey in words to the outsider the need in her for the black poodle, would have been to appear ridiculous. Occasionally she met someone whose love of dogs matched in some way with her own, and it was a relief to talk. But for the most part she found outlet in murmuring, only in private, endearments to the Babe that flowed off her lips against her better judgment.

“What would muvver do without her sweetsum bestsum friend in all the world? My patient sweetsums Babe. My good little darlingest friend. Muvver’s all.”

Usually the Babe, who still wore his hair tied back from his eyes with the bit of ribbon, and whose haunches were shaved, lay with his muzzle on the toe of her shoe as she talked.

Curious thing, but when first he beheld her in her new set of teeth, he lifted back his lips to show his own shining ones and snarled. It was the first time he had ever shown her the slightest hostility, and it almost killed her.

“Why, babykums darling, don’t you know me?”

At that he leaped up and began to lick her, filled with atonements and treating her as if she had just come into the room after an absence. Later, facing her cronies at the track in her new smile, she put up a bold front something like this:

“Well, the Babe almost bit me when he saw me in them. I hope you won’t.”

After the first few weeks it was easier. It came less and less to seem to her, each time she smiled, that the crash of crockery was about to take place in her mouth.

And yet, out of the mental fabric of superstition, lores, occultism, and taboo, woven by years of her contacts with followers of games of chance, it seemed to Ray that, with the advent of the teeth, hoodoo, as she put it, descended, and her luck departed.

Whatever the contributory causes, the fact was that from the day she stood before the mirror of the hotel in Twenty-third Street, regarding the strange new machine-stitched look to the lower half of her face, something in the way of a turn in the tide of her affairs was manifesting itself.

“Lay off thirteen days, and see that you don’t see a white horse in the meantime, and your luck will come back on the fourteenth,” advised one of the cronies.

The white-horse part seemed easy enough in New York, where motor traffic jammed the streets; but, as luck would have it, a delivery wagon drawn by a fine white stallion was standing in front of her hotel as she emerged with the Babe her twelfth day following her abstinence from the track.

That ended that experiment! The dentistry had cost over two hundred. The inactive twelve days had cost. That always disconcertingly narrow margin was narrowing. The following day she reappeared at Belmont, a jack-of-diamonds folded four times on the inside of her left shoe, for luck.

“If it doesn’t beat everything!” did not do much toward solving matters. Perhaps the consistent tie-up in her mind of the dentistry with the reversal of luck, was due to the fact that the several hundred dollars expended on her mouth had reduced her margin to its lowest, subtly reducing, with it, a certain self-confidence.

Be that as it may, she chewed cloves; spat over her left shoulder at the new moon; avoided stepping on the cracks in sidewalks; drank a glass of bootlegged gin with her back three-quarters to the Milky Way; and plucked one of the Babe’s hairs, blew it off the back of her left hand, and caught it on the palm of her right.

An old bookmaker who, several years before, had stopped pinching her on the thighs, had a cackle which went something like this:

“I ain’t,” she said to herself one night in the horrid old chronic stillness of her room, and then, as she put it, “laughed up the wrong sleeve.”

One day, during this May in New York that had been hateful to her, sending her home as it did almost every afternoon with a fresh debit entry nicked into her unease, a wish packed somewhere in the cold-storage recesses of her mind thawed suddenly and boldly through.

“I want to go and see Walter’s grave.

“Why not?” In all probability the house in East Fifty-third Street was closed for the summer. She could have slid into the street herself to fortify her convictions that the family must all be at Rye by now. But Walter would have hated that! Now suddenly, after years of feeling that he might also not want this, it came to her that he might! Surely out of the twenty-four hours of every day of every month of all the years since—there were some brief moments he would want reserved for her to stand over his grave. He would, in all probability, have said of her now, as he had sometimes said in life, when she grew putty-colored from too much indoors, “Don’t bend too far backward.” How terrible, if in staying too consistently away, she had been bending too far backward!

“I want to go and see Walter’s grave.”

On a May day she went out by subway, surface-car, and taxi to
the Salem Fields Cemetery, situated on the edge of Brooklyn. It was a full mature May, overdeveloped into premature fulsomeness, as if it had great breasts that ached of the surging saps pressing against them.

There were stone gates with Hebrew inscriptions and a phrase in English, which startled: “House of Life.” Graveled paths, bordered in orderly rows of the tips of crocuses, bisected the lay of the land, and then began the precise march of mausoleums and monuments, moving handsomely backward in a strange petrified surf of gravestones. Meyerberg. Block. Rothschild. Goldwasser. Becker. Stern. Glauber. Fineberg. Hirsch. Scharff. Wimpfhimer. Kahn. Obermeyer. Bry. Strauss. Bernstein. Zader. Klein. Victorius. Poole. Zacharias. Gerber. Bower. Harrison. Dreyfous. Pearl.

SAXEL

The mausoleum, in course of construction, on the very crest of the hill, was obviously to be the final grandeur of Walter’s and Richard’s resting place. A Greek temple, an Old English “S,” and part of the “A” and “X,” already chiseled against the pediment.

She began to cry, terribly, and make gurgling sounds. May, with the full breasts and the willow trees that drooped all over this beautiful burial ground, seemed standing silent and offended at the grossness of her crying.

Dearly beloveds—

Long after she was indistinguishably one of them, she continued to fight off becoming one of them. They were all like that; wary of one another. “Mustn’t let myself get like the rest of these ragtags. I’ll make a killing and quit.”

Once, in Latonia, within a stone’s throw of Cincinnati, and by way of a fluke that was the talk of the cronies for weeks, Ray, on a sweepstake, twenty to one, did make a killing.

An old man, named Ed Hofmeister, who had known her back in the days when, as a girl, she had spun the hazard-wheel in the back room of his place Over-the-Rhine, staked her, out of his own big winnings, to one of the most sensational dark-horse events of the year.

One thousand dollars! He had put up fifty for her, and there, one thousand simoleons, clear! A stroke of fortune that was important to her over and above anything that was apparent on the surface. The beginnings of the nest egg on which she could retire. She had dreamed of that, these years. Why, on that she could almost, aided and abetted by small sweepings now and then from the tables, withdraw to a place like Aix-les-Bains. You could live so cheaply at Aix. Infinitesimally so, if you knew the ways and means as she knew them. The place was honeycombed with genteel Englishwomen and women not so genteel, living in pensions and venturing forth semi-occasionally, under the badge of evening dress, for an evening
of careful replenishment of their small pensions or widow incomes. You could do pleasant things at Aix. During season, bask in the little park to grandstand music, take tea for a few francs on a tiny plaza, watch the big cosmopolitan world and his women go by, and even during the winters, tucked away, oh, so cheaply, there were rest and memories at Aix, and she was tired—bone-tired.…

The night following this scoop, she gave a dinner to Ed Hofmeister, another old fellow named Marty Kaplan, whose father used to play cribbage with Adolph in the house on Baymiller Street, and a woman who, in her day, had been quite spectacular around Cincinnati and Louisville as the beautiful Mary Noalan who had married Ted Mapes, the famous jockey, in a balloon.

It was a gesture expected of her and, as Mary, who was always early inebriated off somebody’s hip-flask, put it, “Ray did it up brown, and in true old-time Ray Schmidt style.”

She gave this dinner at the Sinton, a new hotel since her time, not far from the site of the old St. Nicholas. Without drinks, which Marty saw to later in the back rooms of Kessler’s Café on Vine Street, the check, what with tips and flowers and special requests to the orchestra from Mary, mounted to sixty dollars.

But it was worth it, not only because of her warm glow of gratitude to Ed, who was almost dead even then, old codger, of a liver complaint that was to kill him two months later but, though none of her guests knew it, beneath the brown sequin bolero jacket of her trumped-up evening dress of brown lace, there surged the first warmth of security she had known in many a circuitous weary day of the rounds of Belmont, Latonia, New Orleans, and Louisville.

“You look as handsome as a speckled hen,” Ed told her that night. A speckled hen. Her head turned to the mirrored wall of the Sinton dining room. Speckled hen. That was a new one. Speckled hen. Curious how, as they grew older, the lean avian look seemed to force itself through the faces of the gaming women. Well, perhaps along with the others, she was an old bird, too. Over thirty years since she had sat not half a mile from this very site, at dinner—the night she met Walter. The face above the spangled bolero that
looked back at her from the mirror was in its way the wattled old majestic face of a sitting eagle.

“Well, boys, well, girls,” was going on underneath the bolero jacket, “I may look like a plucked eagle, but this is my swan song. Tomorrow, if you take the trouble to look for me, which you won’t, I’ll be on my way. New York. Paris. Aix. How sweet to be tucked into the peace of a back street at Aix—at rest—”

“Ray,” Ed was saying, leaning his teeming breath close to her face, “you know I’ve become a rich man since the days you hung around this town, don’t you?”

“I certainly do, Ed. Don’t know anybody more entitled to it.”

“To my way of thinking, a good old one is worth ten times as much as a fair-to-middlin’ young one. I don’t know much more about you than I did in the old days. Want to know me better? I’m not asking pay for what I did for you in the little matter of the sweepstake. Do as much for any old friend. So help me God, it come clean into my mind, like this: I’ll place this bet for Ray for old times’ sake and because she’s a good old gal.…”