Back STreet (10 page)

“If you aren’t the mightiest nicest girl! I’m going to see a lot of you. Only you haven’t told me much about yourself. Guess you live at home and all that?”

He did not guess anything of the sort. It was his way of finding
out that she did not live at home. Thank goodness, though, the truth of it was that she lived at home as much as any Trauer, Moss, Strauss, or Littauer girl of Richmond Street. She knew them all. They came into the store, usually with their mothers. Good dressers. Good but cautious spenders. Knew values. On summer evenings you could see them sitting out on their stoops, talking from house to house. Well-kept, secure homes, with immaculate whitened copings and the shoulders of upholstered furniture in summer covers showing through the open windows. Well-kept, secure families, with surreys or smart little traps at the curb.

“I live at home with my stepmother and stepsister. ‘Schmidt’s—Trimmings and Findings’ used to be my father’s. I am still in the store.”

“Seems to me I’ve heard of you. Ray—Schmidt.”

“Probably.” It smote her with a sense of unutterable depression that she hoped not.

“Well, anyway, we’ve met!”

The conductor on the Colerain car pulled his cap at her and grinned as they entered.

“The boys on the line all know me,” she said, by way of explanation, as they seated themselves. “Lived on the line all my life”—and then could have bitten back the words. Nothing to be ashamed of.

“What is the procedure? Does one come to call on you, or I’m wondering wouldn’t you like to go Over-the-Rhine one of these evenings? I stay in town one or two nights a week, when I know my mother has one of her friends spending the night with her.”

There it came! He would not even ask, much less take, Corinne Trauer Over-the-Rhine, unchaperoned. Or for that matter, chances were he would not have asked Freda at all.

Well, no use crying over that. You were what you were. Besides, just suppose he had asked to call. That would be nice, wouldn’t it, with Tagenhorst having all sorts of people in and out, over the project of selling the house, and, more likely than not, Freda monopolizing the parlor, with the door left open a discreet six inches, but an unwritten law against entering it. Not what you would call a home to the queen’s taste! Anyway, these high-class Jewish boys
were not given to calling at the homes of shiksas. Della Garfunkel, a girlfriend across the river, in Covington, Kentucky, had married one, Max Victorius, of the family of bankers in Muncie, Indiana, without his ever having laid eyes on her folks. Jewish boys were funny that way.

“You can telephone me at the store some day. We haven’t a telephone, but the cigar store next door, Fink’s, will call me. We’ll see.”

“We won’t do anything of the sort. Some day! We’ll see now. Look here, Ray, wasn’t it agreed I am going to see a lot of you?”

They sat in the rumbling streetcar, washed in dirty lamplight, their bodies touching softly to the jerkings and the short stops, and now, more completely than ever, there was no such thing as her ability to say no.

“Suppose we meet at your store on Thursday about six and we’ll decide then where to go.”

Monday—Tuesday—Wednesday—Thursday. The waiting was already begun.

“I guess that will be all right.”

“Not disappointed about anything, are you? Would Friday be better? Mentioned Thursday because it is one of the evenings my mother’s card club meets, and it’s easy for me to be away.”

“Thursday is all right. I don’t like the boys to call for me at the store. Meet you at the Burnet House.”

Why had she said that! What was it made her do the common thing? Catch Corinne Trauer meeting him at the Burnet House!

“That will be fine,” he said, with what seemed to her a new ease.

Rumble, rumble along, their bodies giving slightly to the motion, the sultry breeze causing him to lift off his derby hat. An elation laid hold of her that was absurdly out of proportion to the act of riding home with a nice young fellow who might have been one of a half-dozen she was apt to meet in the course of the month.

The elation continued until she was home and in bed, when, presto, it turned into depression.

Later, when Ray, who was clumsy at evasion, explained to Kurt, in what terms she could muster, that a “certain party’s” turning up unexpectedly from out of town had made it necessary for her to send the telephone message of Sunday evening, he interrupted her in a matter-of-fact voice that was surprising most of all to himself, considering the pounding against his temples.

“Surest thing ever, Ray,” he said, “it was exactly as if somebody had tapped me on the shoulder when I was sitting there waiting for you to show up, and said to me, ‘Kurt, watch out!’ ”

“Why, Kurt Shendler, what are you talking about?”

“I don’t know just beyond what I’m saying, but I’m watching out for all I’m worth.”

What did he suspect? What was there to suspect? What did she herself suspect? Acting guilty when there was no cause to be guilty, and acting that guilt toward Kurt to whom she was not pledged!

“Oh, I’m not saying you owe me an explanation,” he said, as if in answer to her thoughts. “What satisfies you, Ray, has to satisfy me. I’m just saying I had the feeling, sitting there Sunday night waiting, as if someone was looting my life or my repair-shop of the contract I signed up at Peoria on the gasoline-driven bike.”

“You’re talking nonsense, pure and simple.”

They were walking along Richmond Street in the twilight of
the Tuesday following, Ray having suggested what was rare for her—a neighborhood walk.

Burning, the desire to pass the Trauer residence lay against her consciousness. She knew the house, had known it for years by sight, but now she felt the need to refurbish the slipshod impressions that lay palely in her mind.

Suddenly that house on Richmond Street, just three blocks from her own, which up to now had been as commonplace to her as any house on Dayton Street, West Ninth, or Freeman, had become of peculiar, almost hypnotic, interest. The blonde Corinne Trauer, whom it now seemed to Ray she could remember as an overplump little girl, two or three grades beneath her in the Eighth District school, dwelt in this shrine to which came Walter Saxel on the twenty-five-mile trainride from Hamilton the one day in the week, Sunday, when he might have been free of the journey.

What was the relationship of these two? What thoughts did Corinne Trauer, laying her slightly kinky blonde head nightly on her pillow in the house just three blocks removed from Baymiller Street, carry of Walter Saxel into the secret watches of the night?

Ray wanted to pass and repass the house, constructing what picture she could. But she did not, until Tuesday evening, when it seemed natural to stroll by with Kurt.

There it was, third from the corner, one of the narrower and more unpretentious of the block’s dwellings, set back nicely on a little terrace with a white-stone coping. It was a smallish snug house, which a young man of this tight, solid race would only dare visit with such regular periodicity on the basis of intentions or promise of them.

It was still precocious May, stuffy and of unseasonable heat, and Richmond Street, fed, was disporting itself, in its family way, along the rows of well-scrubbed front stoops.

There was no one before the Trauer home, but the front door stood open, and there was a small gaslight burning in red glass in the hallway, and you could see beyond that the dining room was lighted. Trauers at supper. There was a hatrack, with antler pegs, and a china umbrella-stand in the hallway. Walter’s hat had hung
there! A light-tan runabout, on wire wheels, stood at the curb, its overfat little tan-and-white mare hitched to a black iron boy. There was something about the small horse, with its pretty cream-colored mane, and tail that had been braided and brushed out, that suggested Corinne Trauer. Its plump sides breathed evenly; its pale-brown eyes, in blinkers, knew no fear. It was a cared-about little horse. Perhaps Walter had driven it. Or would drive it.

“Wait until I give you a ride on our gasoline-bicycle, Ray, then you’ll know what real motion is,” said Kurt, his eyes all for the picture she made stroking the well-curried flank of the plump little horse. “Come, it will be cool in Lincoln Park, let’s go there.”

He wanted, before this evening was over, to have cast out the unease in his heart. The thought even smote him of trying to get Ray to elope with him to Covington. Right off. He had a chum, Tom Buzzel, and his wife, who would go along. Trouble with talking about a thing too much was talking too much about it. Two could live as cheaply as one. Always a way. The longer they hemmed and hawed, the more difficulties would present themselves. There was money ahead in this new partnership with the inventor of a device to attach a motor to an ordinary bicycle. Ray was not the girl to risk getting into lean times, dear darling, and yet on the other hand, she was the one girl with the stamina to buck them. Any way you looked at it, there was going to be disapproval over a marriage with Ray on the part of the stepaunt with whom he made his home. Dang it all, just fool woman-stuff. Never willing to let one another live.

“Ray, if you only would?”

“Would what?”

“Your mind is a thousand miles away.”

The Trauers kept tony hours. Seven-o’clock supper, and still at table, with the whole of the rest of Richmond Street already out on stoops. After all, the New York Friedlanders were among the world’s largest banking firms. She knew. She had looked them up. Aaron Trauer might be only in the life-insurance business, but he had these enormously wealthy connections of his wife to lend prestige. Catch a rich Jew like Felix-Arnold Friedlander seeing his sister
or his sister’s children want for anything. Plain as the nose on your face that a mere life-insurance agent could not unaided afford that house and the smart little horse and buggy in front of it. Chances were, the eastern connections would take a clean, bright young fellow like Walter into the New York banking house. For all she knew, that might be the secret of his position in the Cincinnati bank. Who knows? The sense of misery began to crawl around her heart again, and roost there.

“Come, let’s go into the park, Ray. I can talk better there.”

She lifted her skirts to cross the street, conscious that along the stoops heads were turning after her.

“That’s that Ray Schmidt. Stylish, isn’t she? Those
batsimers
wear their clothes well. The boys don’t exactly come out and say she is n. g., but my guess is that she’s fast. That’s a pretty idea, isn’t it? Gored skirt with a Spanish flounce. They say she makes every stitch she wears over at Alvin Sewing School. Those shiksas have a knack.”

It was pleasant to feel the heads turn after her dotted-swiss dress over its blue sateen slip and caught in at the waspish waist with a wide blue satin girdle from which depended a chatelaine of silver knickknacks. The big balloon elbow sleeves, with the black lace gloves tucked up under them, and the large leghorn hat with the wired bow, completed an ensemble that was an eyeful for Richmond Street. Couldn’t help knowing that. Despising yourself a bit for the knowing and the glowing that went with it, but glowing and knowing just the same.

At Freeman Avenue the little park loomed softly in the dusk, pairs of figures strolling about beneath the trees along the ordered walks.

They sat down on a bench, and she unpinned her hat and placed it carefully on her lap; and then Kurt, by way of preamble, took up one of her hands in its black lace glove and began to bend back the fingers softly, one by one.

“This is the way I have figured it all out, Ray. The longer you wait to make up your mind, the more reasons you are going to find for not making it up. To my way of thinking, the way to reach an
important decision, in business or out of it, is not to think about a thing so long that you lose your point of view. Ever keep saying a word over and over to yourself until it lost its meaning? Well, that’s my experience on a decision. In business I think for all I’m worthwhile I’m thinking, and then I act! That’s the way I bought Ed Rokehauser’s patent in Peoria the other day. If I had stopped to turn that matter over in my mind as long as I wanted to, seeing how I had to scratch for money, I’d be turning it over yet, and somebody else would have the patent.”

“And if I don’t make up my mind, somebody else will have Kurt?”

“Now, Ray, I’d sooner cut off my tongue than have you think I meant it that way.”

“I know you didn’t, goose!” She wished he had meant it that way. She wished she was anybody except herself, sitting there in Lincoln Park with the heartbreaking task of letting Kurt know she had already reached her decision.

Fool that she was! She knew, sitting there pecking at the wired bow, and trying to find a way to tell him, what had decided her. A chance meeting with a man to whom, nine chances out of ten, she would never be more than shiksa, had decided her. And even supposing things were different. A bank clerk in a town like Cincinnati, unless he had the unusual opportunity of a Friedlander for a relative, could live and die a bank clerk. Now, Kurt here, crude as he might seem, had a future. A girl would be crazy to choose between them. Kurt already had a dandy business head on him. Kurt was her own kind. Why, for all she knew, Walter Saxel was engaged this very minute to Corinne Trauer. Of course, he had said to her … Pah—they all said! A Jewish boy talking to a shiksa said anything that came into his head. For a girl like herself, without anything to fall back upon, her home about to break up, no relatives, Kurt was a godsend, that’s what he was. Men weren’t so quick on the trigger to talk marriage to a girl if she had the reputation for being fly; and, no getting around it, men did think that about her. Kurt was a godsend, and yet, just as surely as she was sitting there, her decision persisted. Pity smote her—for Kurt,
who must now hear this decision, and for herself, because she was making it.

“Kurt, there is a great deal in what you say about the way to make up your mind to a thing. I’m a chickenhearted old coward, or I would have made up my mind long ago about us, for your sake, Kurt.”