Back STreet (12 page)

He would be a man with whom to keep young—with whom to love the good things of life. His manner of ordering a dinner, with the proper touch of wine, which he drank so conservatively and she drank not at all, his epicureanism and love of sophisticated foods, his way of buying a bunch of violets off a vendor’s tray and giving her carte blanche to go shop his mother a silk shirtwaist for her birthday, were worldly little aspects of him to strike delight to the heart.

Not that you could judge a man by the trifles of these externals; but the worldly stripe in a man, as Ray used to designate it to amused New York salesmen, made life so much gayer than life in the sauerkraut belt, where money was something to be earned solemnly and spent reverently—if at all.

Funny thing, but Walter the bank clerk came to epitomize for Ray, from the moment she clapped eyes into his gray ones, a diversified worldly world of which he was not really a part. There was something portentous about him, suggestive of the hotel lobby, the
racetrack, and even the Music Festival, where the Longworths, the Tafts, the Emerys, the Hannas, and the Warringtons could be seen in close-up through one’s opera glasses.

Then, too, Walter had been to Europe. He had taken the trip with Myron Hoffheimer, a cousin his age, as a gift from his aunt Hoffheimer, during his second-year vacation at Woodward High. He had been to Hamburg, Carlsbad, Frankfurt, Berlin, and London.

Was it any wonder, Ray used to ask herself, as she sat in public places with the picture branded against her brain, or moved through her days at the trimmings-and-findings store, or entered a house so preempted by Tagenhorst that the last vestige of Adolph was already fading out, that the new and twisting unease she was experiencing on all sides was causing her constantly to feel like crying?

Sometimes in the weeks and then the months that followed her meeting with Walter Saxel, the wish that she had never laid eyes on him would mingle with her torment.

Many the year, after it happened, Ray, with her lips twisted until they were pale snarls in her face, was to repeat over and over again to herself: What is to be, will be. It was in the cards that it should turn out this way.

The incident that justifiably or not she was always to feel had such vital bearing upon the trend of her entire life, was brought about by a remark from Walter that caused her head to spin and her legs to feel as if they had turned to water and were flowing away from her support.

It was the day of the week that she had come to dread. Saturday, which meant Walter’s evening at the Trauers’. They had lunched together at Hayden’s and there still remained time for them to make a few rounds of the oval esplanade of Fountain Square. It was a noisy promenade, set within the heart of the city’s din, every carline in town passing within a block of it, and the Tyler fountain rather futilely lifting the thin clear voice of its ornamental waters against commotion.

Presently, at Fifth Street, they would separate and go their ways, Saxel to the bank, Ray to the “Findings and Trimmings.” Would the day ever come when they would not be perpetually in the act of separating? How short those noonday periods! He had been quiet at lunch. Unusually so. What was on his mind? Something concerning her? He regarded her at times as if he would cleave with
his glance the curtain of the unspoken between them. What did he suspect? What did he know? What did he want? He wanted his cake, no doubt, like all the others, and to eat it too. The rigid rightness and conventionality of the procedure with Corinne Trauer was one thing; the freedom of passing the time with a shiksa on the side, another.

If that were true, one should despise him for it. Once a local fellow, named Willie Stamm, had said to her, “If you’re so darned nice to all us boys without caring a whoop about us, God help the one you really do fall in love with!” And here, living between Hamilton and Cincinnati all these years, had been that one. Why, he had actually attended Woodward High just three years before her cursory course there. There must have been times, think of that, when they had sat at the zoo listening to the same band-concerts on the same evenings. Perhaps, who knows, they had mingled in the same Music Hall crowds during Festival Week or ridden up and down the Ohio on the same excursion boat. And all the time, all the time, everything latent in her had been waiting. For this. For just the half-furtive act of walking with him around the esplanade of Fountain Square—of sharing him with the stoutish, blonde, secure Corinne Trauer, who on Saturday mornings was taking her piano lesson at Clara Baur’s Conservatory of Music. She would play to Walter, evenings, “Alice, Where Art Thou?” “Traumerei,” “Hungarian Rhapsody,” “Scarf Dance,” “Dance of the Fireflies,” in a bright parlor of lamps, bric-a-brac, and Honiton lace, and a sofa where the young husband of the young Corinne could relax with his head in her lap.… Thoughts like these spotted the bright day with anguish.…

And then suddenly, walking beside her, Walter said this:

“I’m staying in town tonight, Ray, and my mother is coming to the city on the eight-forty-five tomorrow. We’re having Sunday dinner at the Trauers’.”

Oh, God, then, here it came.

He had never been out-and-out frank with her. What right, he might have flared in retort to such a statement, had she to expect it? But in his way he had tried, constantly and consistently, to make
her understand how things stood. There was the feeling that conscientiously he was trying to place himself in a position where one day he could say to her, “I never concealed anything from you.”

“I see,” she said finally, in response to this statement about his mother, and looking away, because she could feel, as always, her lips crawl into a tight, ugly shape when she made retort to any one of his strained remarks about the Trauers.

Well, after all, it was high time. Strange that the Trauers had permitted it to drag on this long without demanding from him a declaration of intentions. Unless one had been made long ago. Well, what of it? One lived. One lived through such things as this. One did. One must.

“Ray, I’ve been thinking. Funny thing, but I’ve got my heart set on it. Before my mother and I go to the Trauers’ tomorrow for dinner, I’d like mighty much for my mother to meet you, Ray.”

That was when it seemed to her the very capacity to stand on her legs was flowing away from her. What was going on in this boy’s head that he was daring to confront his mother with her? Was he contemplating, as the shades of what might be a formal engagement began to close him in, the rash act of coming out in the open with his declaration of preference for Ray Schmidt? Jewish boys did not present goy girls to their parents unless … What could Ray Schmidt be to Mrs. Saxel, and vice versa, unless it was that Walter knew that their two remote orbs were about to swim together in an intermarriage?

Could it mean that happiness, actually beyond computing, lay in store?

“Walter, do you mean that?”

“Certainly. My mother likes to meet my friends. She’s nice that way, and interested. I thought I’d take her to spend tomorrow morning at the Zoo. She loves to see the animals there. Do you suppose you could manage, Ray, to meet us around the lion cages about eleven? Mother likes cubs. Suppose you just seem to happen into us. Know what I mean? No use making it seem like a set engagement.”

If, where he was concerned, she could have found it within herself to have pride, this would have been terrible.

You didn’t confront your mother all at once with a shiksa. And yet—yet it showed what forces must be at work in his brain. Walter was trying to maneuver the most delicate situation of his life. She had won in her tactics with Walter! The puzzled look in his eye, time after time, as he left her at the gate to the house on Baymiller Street! Oh, she had known what lurked there, all right. How far dared he go with this
batsimer?
She had seen the question play across his face, linger there, fade out into uncertainty. Once he, too, had walked her down Elm to the corner of George Street, pausing there apparently for the effect the propinquity of this neighborhood of elaborate women and drawn blinds might have on her. His hand at her elbow had trembled. She knew what was at him. Desire, and the impulse to dare to suggest to her what sooner or later they all suggested. She actually prayed to herself a little. Fear was on her that he would not have suggested in vain. Before his wishes, all things went down. But, somehow, she had staved it off, and the wrinkle of puzzlement between his eyes was to recur again and again. How far dared he go?

The answer lay triumphantly in his suggesting to her now that she meet his mother. She was the kind of girl to whom one introduced one’s mother.

“I’ll be there at eleven, Walter, strolling around just as if I were looking at the cubs.”

“You understand about the pretending, don’t you, Ray? In some ways my mother is more like a baby than she is my mother. I want her to know all my friends, but, at the same time, there are some things—there are always certain things, with a mother, have to be handled with kid gloves, or they can be spoiled from the start.”

Walter was being cautious with her and trying not to let her know how desperate his dilemma between her and the little fragrant pincushion of a creature out on Richmond Street. It was his last desperate move before the machinery of the Trauer-Saxel marriage began to stitch the pattern.

It struck her all in the midst of an agitation of blowing hot and cold that she must show this old woman. Oh, la, la, she would wear her gray voile over pink; with the pink velvet-ribbon borders on the
gray ruffling and the leghorn hat faced in pink and loaded with ribbon. This old lady, darling because she was his mother, would learn a thing or two about who could do most for her son. A snug, pretty little blonde, who used to be called fat-sock at school, with her rich connections, or a goy.

That old lady, down for the day from Hamilton, had a surprise coming to her.

Old lady, don’t you worry. I don’t know anything about this little Jew girl you’ve got your heart set on. She may be good as gold. So’m I, old lady, where your son is concerned, and all the things you think are going to give you conniption-fits about me aren’t going to give you them at all. I only wish you Jews baptized, because I’d be baptized. I’ll sit with you fasting on fast days, in your pew in the Plum Street Temple, and love it. I’ll love him and honor him in his own religion; and if you’ll give me half a chance, old woman, I’ll do the same for you.…

It was October, and there were leaves flying, and along the esplanade women’s skirts were blowing sharply forward, and so were the waters of the fountain, but the face she turned toward him, because of the hot flashes across it, was spangled with a tiny sweat.

“I’ll be at the lion cubs, tomorrow morning, Walter, at eleven on the dot.”

“Make it seem accidental.”

How constrained he was.

“Walter.”

“Yes?”

She wanted to say to him something like this: “I’m your happiness, Walter. I wouldn’t harm a hair on the head of that girl up there, or of your mother’s; but I’m your happiness, and don’t you ever forget it.” Of course, she said nothing of the kind. “Good-by, dear, the lion cubs at eleven.”

That Ray did not turn up at the lion cubs on Sunday morning at eleven was to mean a lifetime of reiteration of a phrase that was to grind down a groove into her heart. What is to be, will be.

Would it have made any difference? Had her failure to appear at the lion-cub cage that Sunday morning changed, in some mysterious way, the ebb and flow of her life? What if she had appeared at the cage of the lion cubs … would it have made any ultimate difference? Had there been in Walter’s heart, when he suggested her meeting his mother, anything but a casual and perhaps unexplainable desire to have her look upon the tinfoil glory of the goy he was about to renounce?

What had been in his heart, that noonday, as, dark and troubled, he paced her around the esplanade? What?

And strangely, although she was to ask, she was never to know. Chiefly, she concluded, because he himself did not know. Well, be that as it may—

On the five o’clock of the Sunday morning that she was to meet him and his mother at the lion cubs, she was awakened out of a sound sleep which it had taken her long hours of wakefulness to woo, by a noise that sounded like a small dog scratching.

At first leap of her mind into wakefulness, she thought it must be the adorable pug puppy that Walter had brought her from a street vendor two days before; but when she shot out her hand to feel for
him, there he was curled up at the foot of the bed, snoring away as fast as his tiny sides could expand.

It was Freda, crouched across the pale streak of dawn that slanted into the room like a pencil held in proper Spencerian position, who had made the sounds. What in the world? At this hour! And what a Freda!

Something terrible was wrong with that specter sitting on its knees at the foot of Ray’s bed. Here was no little Freda, cuddling up for the surreptitious talk in which she so delighted. Five o’clock in the morning meant something different. What?

“Freda, how you frightened me! Come in under the covers! What’s wrong?”

She just sat shivering in the shaft of the dawn.

“Freda, come here.”

She drew herself with a sort of bleat from the touch of Ray, who was on her feet by now, long, narrow, indefinably taller in her ruffled nightgown, her brown hair waving along her shoulders and giving her five years more of youth than the edifice of pompadour.

“What is it, child?”

Without more than the second’s preparation for it, she knew.

“Sister, come here!”

This bleating, shuddering, chattering creature, smeared with pallor, grimacing with terror, had fallen out of the cradle of her blonde and flaccid girlhood into this horrible dawn. Freda was in terrible trouble.

“Sister, come to bed. Don’t be afraid.”

“What’ll I do, Ray? What will I do?”

“You’ll come to bed and get warm.”

“Don’t. I can’t bear to be touched. I think I must be going crazy.”