Back STreet (14 page)

“Find me.”

“Running away won’t help. If anything terrible happens to Freda Tagenhorst because of you, this town will find you. I’ll find you. Your uncle, one of the respected businessmen of this town, will find you. Oh, Hugo, be a man.”

“That talk don’t scare me.”

But he was frightened, no doubt of that, the bravado seeming to ooze through his fingers, leaving them dry and inclined to pluck at one another.

“I told her that I’d help pay a doctor—and that’s more than most would do, considering I don’t believe I’m the one got her into it.…”

“You’re even lower, Hugo, than I thought. My little sister isn’t going sneaking around town risking her life and soul in the horrible kind of place where they do that horrible illegal thing. She’s going to be the kind of respectable married woman in this town that she—”

“Yah—that’s what she’s after. Smells money, somewhere. Sees a chance for sitting pretty. Using me. Well, I won’t be used. If she’s caught the way she says she is, then she’s caught. I’m willing to find the doctor.…”

“Hugo, you’re caught. Not Freda.”

“That ten-twenty-thirty talk don’t scare me.”

Ten-twenty-thirty. The phrase spun around like a pinwheel. Even he, horrid pimply boy, saw the snideness of this predicament. But that did not change matters. Life and death and all the ingredients mixed up here, passion and vice and childbirth and sin, were melodrama.…

“Trying to make small of things won’t get you anywhere, Hugo. They are not small. They are the very stuff life’s made of. You’re going to marry my sister, right away.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Don’t make me go on threatening. Can’t you see there is no way out? You’re going to marry my sister. You’re going to lead decent respectable lives together and have decent respectable children. If you try to dodge doing the honorable and upright thing now, your life is going to end, before it’s begun, in scandal, notoriety, and disgrace. And worse! I know the kind of man your uncle will be, when it comes to funny business from you. I know the kind of woman my stepmother is, when it comes to protecting Freda. I know the kind of deal you can expect from me if you let anything worse happen to my sister than has happened to her already. Come, Hugo, you’re the kind of fellow was made to walk in step—and like it.”

“You can’t scare me—”

“Maybe not. I wish I didn’t need to try, and that Freda had the
stuff in her to tell you to go straight where you belong, but she hasn’t; and so, scared or no scared, you’re coming right down to Baymiller Street with me now, and tell her you’re going to marry her. It’s costing me the most expensive engagement I ever had in my life, to see to it that you go through with what you started; but there is not five minutes between now and the time you are married that you can expect to be free of my company. See?”

Somehow he did. The gray pimpled mask of pallor that faced Ray in the sun-slashed eleven o’clock of that bright Sunday morning, did see.

The same edition of the
Enquirer
that carried the small item of the marriage of Freda Tagenhorst to Hugo Hanck, also carried, more prominently, a paragraph announcing the betrothal of Corinne, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Aaron Trauer, of Richmond Street, to Walter D. Saxel, son of Mrs. Emanuel Saxel, of Hamilton, Ohio.

Clad for the store in her modish shirtwaist and five-gored skirt, Ray read both announcements over her self-spread breakfast, the morning
Enquirer
propped up against the vinegar cruet, as she drank her coffee.

It was a wet day, filled with the dripping sounds of water running off tin gutters pouring into rainbarrels, and beating in fast, steady hiss against windowpanes. The streetlights were still burning, the Welsbach over the dining table making the daylight a gray rag. A soaked October morning, filled with the pulp of sodden leaves and blackening lawns. From the dining-room window, the side yard presented a spectacle of raked leaves, becoming pulp, and Tagenhorst’s washline, which, despite Ray’s remonstrances, she would not remove after Monday morning’s wash, crisscrossing the scene from week to week.

Tagenhorst, exhausted by a Monday which had swept her off her feet with the quick sequence of desirable events, was oversleeping. Spiciness of dead carnations lay on the air. The young couple, on a leave of six days’ absence, allowed without pay by the gas
company, and seventy-five dollars from Tagenhorst, were just about arriving at French Lick Springs, where a remotely related Tagenhorst conducted a boardinghouse within half a mile of the French Lick Springs Hotel.

A pair of adorably naughty children, cheating Tagenhorst of a wedding celebration that might easily have cost a pretty and unnecessary penny, had expedited matters by eloping! Oversleeping, a smile lay sunken into the mouth of Tagenhorst, who had removed her teeth.

Curiously, as she sat there at the breakfast table, while rain tapped, sipping her coffee and gazing over the cup-rim at the newspaper which bore the two tidings in such ironic propinquity, a smile also dragged itself along Ray’s dark-red lips.

Well, what was there to knock you skywise about that? You had known it all along. On the very evening you had first met him at the C. H. and D., he had been neatly and rightly on his way to this. It was as it should be. Now was the time to be grand about it all. It had happened. It would happen again. Worse things had been lived through. It was for the best, all her trumped-up evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Intermarriages were a risk. Just as easy for a man to make up his mind to fall in love with the right girl as with the wrong. On the other hand, why should anybody not born a Jew elect to be a Jew? People born Jews turned Gentile, but who ever heard of a Gentile turning Jew? All for the best. Probably best thing that could have happened. All for the best. Certainly for Walter’s best. But why—why always Walter? What about herself? Well, perhaps, who knows—as good fish in the ocean as ever came out of it. Perhaps some day—But to get back to Walter. Best, no doubt, for him. There was about Walter the aura of a man who would some day be rich. There would be perfectly matched pearls in the creases of Corinne’s fair neck. There would be well-dressed children and a home in Avondale, or perhaps New York. The banking Friedlanders would establish him there. Solidly right, as it should be. Madness of her to have even attempted to tinker at the gate of this mammoth tower of race. Fool! Just as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it. Buckle down now to good old common sense. Life would go on.
Rather! Today would be a crowded day at the store, due to having missed two days getting Freda and Hugo married. Oh, there was plenty to do. Plenty to fill life. What is to be, will be. Pouf!

And pouf it remained for a period long enough to sustain her over such subsequent excitements as marriage in the house, an important bid for the homestead from the owner of a small sausage factory, and Marshall’s determination to transplant his mother’s interests, such as they were, to Youngstown.

Life to be lived, and just as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it. Better! Why make life more difficult than need be? Funny thing, but in all innocence a drummer had just told her that Jews were not tolerated in certain of the better hotels along the boardwalk at Atlantic City. That was almost as bad as being black. Nothing so bad but what it could be worse. Hard enough to be born a Jew, but why break your heart because you had missed—had lost—had failed—oh, God—pouf!

There was plenty to do. She volunteered, of course, in all the high-pressure excitement, to give up her room to the young couple and move into the sewing room—the move not so simple as it sounded, considering it had been so privately her own for practically a lifetime. Then, too, Heyman Heymann, hard-pressed, had taken it into his head to clear out the jets and passementeries, and make room for a larger line of dressmaker findings. That meant clearance sales and quite a general readjustment. Then, as luck would have it, the Music Festival was on, and a drummer for a Boston sheet-music firm had planned with her, a whole year in advance, to be present in Cincinnati to attend at least two concerts with her. She had purchased seats in response to a reminding telegram from him, and there was a violet plush bell-skirt, already cut and planned, which had been lying at sewing school for weeks, waiting to be completed for this occasion, along with one of those extremely stylish little shoulder capes edged in ball chenille which were all the rage. A subdued half-mourning color combination, sniffed at by Tagenhorst in black, but the only outward manifestation Ray could endure to wear for Adolph.

Oh, there was plenty to do to keep the mind occupied! But
beneath the doings there persisted, there persisted, the lurking, hurting hope—surely he would come. He must come. It was not possible that there remained not a word to be said between them. Just some decent sort of obituary over days that were gone; some decent sort of good-bys to be said between them. But meanwhile, it was good that there was that violet plush to be finished, and the move to be made, and the confusion of the return of the bridal pair, and so many of the drummers coming to town—fall trade—anything, to keep the mind moving.

He did not come. Perhaps it was for the best. That was doubtless how he was putting it to himself. A man would make it simple for himself that way! Of course he wouldn’t come. Of course he shouldn’t come. There was already something legalized about his allegiance to the plump little girl on Richmond Street who would some day wear his pearls in the crevices of her short white neck. Life wasn’t like that, in neat closed chapters. The thing to do, loose ends to the contrary notwithstanding, was to begin another chapter. Plenty to do. What was there to the whole business, after all, except living and loving and helping? If you couldn’t love again, ever, the next thing was to help. Help Freda. Help Tagenhorst. Yes, help the bull, Marshall. Help in that absurd struggle out there, of the people to whom things blessedly mattered.…

It was strange that Kurt, who neither knew nor suspected anything of all this, should call for her that evening at closing. And it was stranger still, that as he walked home with her through the rain-washed air, and along the drying sidewalks, she should find herself telling him, gently, and in all the merciful words she could muster, that her decision not to marry him was final.

The trip to New York, buying dressmaking findings on the strength of Heymann’s sudden determination to enhance that section of the stock, accomplished more than just tide over the precariousness of days that had flattened out into the formation of rows of numbers on a calendar.

Buying dressmaking findings on the strength of Heymann’s determination to attempt a last resort, brought about the renewal of the old offer from the Greene Street firm of “Ledbetter and Scape—Ribbons, Veilings, Linings, and Dressmakers’ Findings.”

“Ever think about that offer we made you three years ago, Miss Schmidt? Still holds good.”

The salary, especially considering the more complicated living procedure the move to New York would immediately entail, was none too interesting. Fifteen dollars a week in Cincinnati, even with the weekly stipend of eight which she was now paying Tagenhorst, was one matter. Twenty dollars a week in New York, another. Nevertheless, while she contemplated nothing so drastic as even entertaining the idea of the move to a city which baffled and terrified, reiteration of the offer gave her a gratifying sense of security in the face of the unmistakable conditions in her late father’s business.

Heyman Heymann, in spite of this outward gesture of trying to resuscitate the neglected department of dressmakers’ findings, was contemplating, Ray had good reason to know, the dissolution of the
old firm with which he found himself saddled, into the name and prestige of one of the largest concerns of the kind in the Middle West, the Acme Dress Findings Company of St. Louis.

Should materialization of this incipient plan take place, what then? Would Acme take her over? St. Louis seemed a good live town, judging from the drummers from Rosenthal and Sloane, Rice Stix and Eli Walker, who occasionally dropped in. Not likely, because, with an old conservative firm like Acme, women employees were an innovation yet to be made.

Plans, it seemed, were afoot not only for dissolution of the business, but it had begun to seem apparent that the house on Baymiller Street was not, after all, to go to the owner of the small sausage factory, who had finally forfeited the option twice extended to him; but a “swap” was being eventuated for a two-family house in Youngstown, one-half of which had heretofore been occupied by Marshall and a wife who was reputed to have been cook for the Tafts.

Plans for dissolution all about, just as, with every ounce of resolution at her command, she was struggling to fit into a world that no longer seemed to interest her enough to screw up desire to face the days.

Where was her old vitality for the small fry of activities? Where the old flare for the day unto itself, the eagerness with which she met the issues of business, the next new proffered form of entertainment, the vivacity that had always been hers to expend upon the delights of modish regalia, the energy, after a day at the store, to hasten to sewing school, there to spread out her patterns, snip, stitch, and chalk until as late as midnight? And for what? The snide and now, in the nausea of realization, vulgar compensation of the drummer’s stare as she tripped past the Stag; the chuck under the chin from the escort who liked to shine in the inexpensive and reflected glory of the attention her modishness attracted?

Where were those old days, old only in the sense that they lay moldering in her memory, now that her vitality for them had dimmed?

It was difficult to drag the lids awake upon the new régime of a
life suddenly devitalized of practically every former desire. It penetrated, this vast inertia, to such literal appetites as desire for food. Breakfast became a matter of forcing down coffee against a throat closed to it; boxes of sweets (and it was a rare week that several of these easy tributes of the passing drummer did not find their way to her) lay moldering in her desk or dresser drawers. It was mysterious, the way in which the flavor had been whisked out of a manner of life that she had heretofore accepted as unquestioningly as she accepted the color of her eyes or the height of her body.