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Not first place in grief. But first in her right to sit there, this Sunday morning, checking off, with the heretofore hearsay Marshall, who had never showed himself in Cincinnati, the furniture, and even the large gold watch and chain that Schmidt had for thirty years worn spanning the great girth of his vest. There had once been a small photograph of Lena Schmidt, in bangs and basque, with the cheek of Ray crushed up to hers, in the back of that watch. And now the watch was Tagenhorst’s, and the dining-room table, about which they were sitting and which had been coveted, chosen, and purchased by Lena Schmidt, was Tagenhorst’s, and the usurped right to dispose of everything pertaining or appertaining to the dear figure of Adolph, who had lived and died so snugly within the small orb of his Cincinnati home and business, was Tagenhorst’s.

“Papa would not have wanted it like this,” Ray could not help blurting out. “He told me once, just before his remarriage, that he intended to make a will.”

“You are welcome to make this your home for as long as you like.…”

Underneath her little bosom, with the barrage of starched ruffles
worn to bolster it up, something must have stirred and given pang to the blonde Freda, who placed her hand, with its turquoise ring, on top of Ray’s tannish one.

“It’s more your home than mine, Ray.”

That was true; yet the mere saying of it by Freda was sufficient to assuage the hurting of some of her resentments.

After all, Tagenhorst was within some of her rights, and Adolph had been her husband; and a widow, at sixty, with the blonde, flaccid problem of Freda, under whose pasty prettiness ran vexatious problems, and now this heavy-necked son by a former marriage turning up, was not fit to cope with trials that to Ray, nineteen, were not even trials.

Whether Adolph had made a will or not—what did it matter? The
Schnucke
in Adolph had failed to make it. The heartbreaking, good-natured complacency for which lay a perpetual little pool of tears in the heart of Ray, had failed … not Adolph.…

Let come what might! Suppose Tagenhorst did have the house. And just for argument, suppose then that some day Freda, and this big bull here, did inherit it. Terrible of course, in a way. Terrible! And yet, obviously, this big-headed bull, to whom Tagenhorst was forever sending small sums, could never be more than just what he was. Truck-driver for a coal firm in Youngstown. Nothing to hope for from that direction. As for Freda, little, horrid-minded Freda, she was always creeping into her bed of a Sunday morning with intimate soiled questions on her cherry-colored lips that made her seem to need every ounce of the meticulous protection Tagenhorst could afford for her.

One had to be philosophical to keep from succumbing to an impulse to cry one’s body into a veritable pool of tears. It would have helped to be able to scourge these people here around the table—her table—with anger. But somehow, even in the act of taking from you what was rightfully part yours at least, it was difficult not to feel compassion for Tagenhorst, sixty, widowed, acquisitive, and tired.

Let them have it. Likely as not, Freda, whose rabid little appetite for answers to the soiled questions was insatiable, might sink to
this lowest level of herself. Without it, Tagenhorst was fairly sure to become an object of Ray’s perpetual financial responsibility. So it was just as well. One had to look at it that way to be able to bear it at all. Adolph’s watch and chain, for instance, lying on the thick pad of Marshall’s appraising palm.

The bull Marshall, whose nostrils were distended as if he smelled meat, was all for immediate disposition of the holdings. Well, let them haggle; they had yet to learn to what extent the holding of the store, lacking the personality of its founder, was defunct.

The business must go for debts and good will. No one, not even those who had held for years that the firm was going into decline, knew to what extent the little old trimming-business was sinking in its tracks. Bradstreet knew. Certain creditors suspected. Adolph Schmidt, fumbling hours on end, days, months, years on end, among the rear boxes of chenilles, tassels, jets, bindings, jabots, fancy buttons, and buckles, had known.

But not even he had known, as Ray from her angle of salesman, buyer, and accountant knew, that the “one-hoss shay” of the concern “Adolph Schmidt—Trimmings and Findings” was going to pieces.

A natural demise. The younger generations of the petty genteels who had been content to purchase their dressmaking-findings of Adolph Schmidt, now either drifted around to Vine Street or West Fourth, to Le Boutillier’s, Alms and Doepke’s, Caldwell’s, Mabley and Carew’s, or Shillito’s, more elaborate emporiums, where the selection was wider, and, by virtue of quantity buying, the prices actually lower.

Poor old Adolph’s leavings had been lean. “There are just a few personal things I would like to have. My mother’s sewing table.”

“That’s a shame now. I crated it to Youngstown yesterday!”

“Papa’s walking stick with the ivory horsehead from Frankfurt. He loved that.”

“Now where could I have packed that?”

Ray wanted to add: “And his gold watch and chain too. I could always hear it ticking when I was little and he lifted me up on his lap.” But she did not. All three of Adolph Schmidt’s little personal
jewelry appointments, the watch and chain, a small gold clasp for holding necktie in place against the front pleat of the shirt, and a fob engraved with the seal of a Turnverein Society, had disappeared from his top dresser drawer. Even that could be borne, if only the watch, Papa’s own, were not now reposing against the heavy breathing of Marshall.

“Any little things you want, Ray, you can have,” said Tagenhorst, at her perpetual business of picking up from the breakfast table and nibbling with her front teeth small particles of crumb and caraway seed that had dropped from the large loaf of rye bread lying beside its long steel knife, on a wooden board. She was like an untidy blonde old crow, pecking up what she coveted.

It was the first Sunday morning in all Ray’s life that had not been crammed with the doings of her father. He pedicured that morning, he shaved at greater length than usual before a hand mirror tacked to the upper sash of the bathroom window, he dug up around the elephant ears in the front yard in summer, and in winter among the geraniums on the wire rack in the dining room. He tinkered around the tandems of the young men who came to take her bicycling, he rattled among the German newspapers, and at eleven o’clock he attended the Lutheran services, alone or with whatever member of the family he could muster.

It struck Ray with a pang, that for the past year she had either gone bicycling every fair Sunday morning, or down to Kurt Shendler’s shop to balance his books. Except for the eagerness with which Adolph accepted her occasional company, you would never have known that he minded, particularly in the years when Freda or Tagenhorst, upholstered as any piece of furniture their parlor boasted, had accompanied him.

It was just that death, somehow, gave you hindsight. Papa would have loved for her, looking bright and stylish, to walk in to services with him. He had been content with Tagenhorst and Freda, never crossing Ray or expressing what must have been his wish for the Sunday-morning companionship of his daughter, who was busy always, cruising with the boys.

What would Papa, so indulgent, think now, lying out there
beside Mama under earth that was still broken from the spade? What would he think if he could see her sitting there amid the strangers—Tagenhorst, Marshall, who had turned up for the first time in all the years, as if scenting carrion, and Freda acquiescent, placid, flaccid, and yet her glance, as it curved mamaward, tightening the Tagenhorsts.

“The thing to do,” said Tagenhorst, pecking up the caraway seeds, “is to let things drift until we see what is best. ’Dolph wasn’t orderly.”

The eyes of Marshall, which were set into pleats of whitish flesh, shot down toward his mustache, which shot upward.

“Sell!”

To think that Papa’s watch was ticking against that bulk!

“What time is it, Marshall?”

At her question, his hand moved toward the speckled waistcoat and hung there cautious.

“About eleven, I guess.”

That she could be made sufficiently snide over Father’s watch to have caused her to employ that device, caused the tears to spout.

“Are you going bicycling this morning, Ray?” asked Freda brightly.

She hoped so, although none of the boys had said anything, owing, no doubt, to deference for the Sunday morning following her father’s death.

The glance which Tagenhorst, blonde crow, hooked onto her from above lips careful not to interfere, said its usual volumes.

“It’s time to dress for church, Freda,” she said to her daughter, with her eyes on her stepdaughter.

Well, no matter! She would no more have carried the ache that lay in her heart for Adolph into the pew that became stuffy and without God, once Tagenhorst set foot into it.

“Mama, can’t I ever go bicycling on Sunday?”

“No, you can’t ever.”

And yet, strangely, even as the baby treble in Freda’s voice struck her to derision, she would not have wanted Freda to go. You were fly if you did things like that. Why, even so much as take a
ride with the average young fellow, out toward Sedamsville, where the gravel road began, and you could almost tell, to the mile, under what shade tree along the roadside he would want to pause and throw himself down on the grass beside you, so that your knees touched, and surreptitious spooning became the order.

“But Ray goes, Ma.”

This invariable little pouting remark drew from Tagenhorst four small explosives.

“Yes—but—you—don’t!”

“Could I go if Hugo asked me?” When Freda asked this question, sitting there with her scooped-out eggshell which she had eaten so neatly and cleanly in two careful halves on the table before her, the small pearls of her teeth immaculate of stain, her blue eyes floated upward as if they had been soap bubbles.

“Hugo would not ask you to do such a thing.”

Was it possible, after all, that Hugo Hanck was serious-minded in his growing attentions to her stepsister? Freda might look it, but she was nobody’s fool, anyway, where Freda was concerned. The girl who married the meter-reader for the Cincinnati Gas, Light and Coke Company also married the only nephew and heir apparent of Herman Hanck, wealthy retired brewer and bachelor. The girl who married Hugo, married prospects.

It would be good to think of Freda, who could be sweet after a fashion, and at the same time so unbelievably horrid-minded, married to Hugo who had inherited, and snug as a bug in a rug. She would be that way. A small round little bug in a cozy rug. Freda needed to be married. The trend of her questions made it imperative for Freda to be married. Why, some of the questions she asked, on those mornings she climbed into Ray’s bed—it would never do to admit it, but Ray had never even heard the phraseology of some of the thoughts that hopped, toadlike, from the cherry-colored sills of Freda’s lips.

“There’s Kurt outside whistling for you now, Ray.”

Yes, there it was! Two long and a short. Kurt was one of the few boys who called for Ray who had the habit of venturing into the house. But now, since the passing of Adolph, to whom he had
invariably brought an El Merito cigar on the occasions of these visits, there seemed something strange to Ray about having him enter this house—of strangers.

“So you’re going,” said Tagenhorst, with her medium-blue eyes focused in the center of their rigid, stone-blue whites.

“Yes. I promised Kurt I’d look over his books with him this morning.”

“I read in the
Enquirer
yesterday,” said Freda, in her treble, “that a girl in South Bend, Indiana, went up in a bicycle-repair shop a fellow kept over a feed-store, and was found dead with her head off in a gunny sack two weeks later. Case of assault. What is assault, Ray?”

“It’s enough for you to know it’s a word you shouldn’t ever use. I hope you don’t ever answer the child’s foolish questions, Ray.”

“But I don’t see why I can’t go bicycling if Ray—”

“Ray’s ways are her own ways,” said Tagenhorst, still at the caraways. “I guess she knows what she is doing. Always has.”

The sentence fell down like a portcullis, shutting her off on her separate side of the moat from the mother and daughter.

“I’ll be going.…”

Outside on the front lawn, his bicycle standing wrongside up on its handle bars, Kurt Shendler, as he waited, was spinning a pedal and tinkering with it.

It seemed to Ray, as she hurried out, snatching her natty straw sailor hat from the rack and pinning it onto her pompadour, that the only person in the world to whom she could turn, while the pools of misery lay in her heart, was Kurt.

The repair shop smelled of graphite, lubricating-oil, and inner tubing. In one corner of the disarray, against a bare brick wall and beside a rusty stove, was backed the flat-topped desk at which Kurt and Ray were in the habit of spending an occasional Sunday morning.

It was a desktop of an unsavory confusion of bicycle-parts, wrenches, bolts, sample tins of grease, cotton waste, adhesive tape, tubes of tire cement, and, tucked away into pigeonholes, a further miscellany of worn-looking account-books that contained what story there was to tell of the financial status of “Kurt Shendler—Bicycle Repair Shop.”

There was something, each time she laid aside her hat, slid into Kurt’s sleeve-protectors, swirled the stool higher, that never failed to appal Ray, as she lifted these grime-coated books from their compartments.

There was lack of tidiness, lack of system, lack of law and order in Kurt’s bookkeeping. True, he seemed to have some sort of order to his own methods, could tell to a penny and without reference to his books the status of accounts paid and unpaid, but this period of auditing with the astute Miss Schmidt was of a paramount importance to him, quite apart from the red and black columns of his ledgers.

The fact that she had sat at that desk, her hat laid aside, her large sleeves ballooning against her sides like wings, her hair in a
thick soft “horse’s tail” against the back of her neck, and that soft golden glow off her flesh, almost as if you could feel the heat radiate, was to leave for Kurt, weeks after, a flavor that was stronger than the lasting smell of the graphite and the blur of dust off the wooden floors.