Back STreet (20 page)

It was that external self made the men with whom she now came in contact in growing numbers delight in her free-and-easy companionship, up to that inevitable time when the demand was sure to be for more than that, and then each and every one of them, feeling somehow cheated and led-on, resented her.

In appearance she was at her best. “Dressy and good-looking,” the glances of people in public places and on the streets voted her. A swell-looking girl, with whom you were proud to be seen about.

“You’re the kind of girl who misrepresents and won’t go through,” a broker once told her, when he was sufficiently in his cups to say what he was thinking, rather than to think what he was saying. “That kind of leading a man on is dishonest. I’m not out buying virtue. When I want that I go home for it.”

That was being pretty plain. That was being plain enough to start the misery crawling.…

In a way, it sometimes seemed to her rank immorality not to have wormed her way into the security of a life with Kurt or Loemen. The alternatives she chose—the life of the hotel luncheon, the Albany night boat over Sunday, provided there was the saving
decency of another girl in the party, Fifth Avenue of a Sunday morning, to the buckshot of remarks as she passed, Shanley’s of a midnight—were pretenses just as dishonest as one of these marriages would have been.

At least, it would have been easier to give for value received. There was, at any rate, the decency of honest barter in giving yourself to a man for home and keep. Your game was to buy without paying. Good times, recreation, gaieties, food and drink. The fact that she did not drink, far from reducing her sense of obligation, heightened it. The anomalous position of playing around with men who, as the broker said, could go home when they wanted virtue, was one that began to weigh, as more and more the spirits flagged, and as more and more the ability to care receded.

It was well along in the seventh year of what was becoming the unutterable staleness of the days and nights, that, walking along Wall Street one May evening, toward the office of a friend with whom she was to dine, she encountered Walter Saxel.

“This is a surprise, Ray,” he said, taking her hand slowly, regarding her slowly, and in anything but the key of surprise.

She would have supposed of herself, had she visualized this meeting, anything except what was happening.

It might have been Vine Street, after they had not met for twenty or thirty hours, instead of six and one-half years. It might have been almost anybody she was encountering there in the narrow din of Wall Street, except the one capable of bringing to her this surge of an almost unbearable excitement.

“Well, of all people!” she said, just as she would have said it to any number of others from home. “What are you doing here?”

“What am I doing here? Why, we’ve lived here for almost two years now.”

“You don’t say so,” she said, with the usual polite surprise. But inside of her, tumbling, was the chaos of the thought that for two years of days they had trod this same city, and she had not known it! Strange that her old intuition to his nearness had not taken care of that! They had been walking the same streets, breathing the same air, and, for all she knew, ridden the same streetcars, sat inside the same theaters, at least if not at the same time, within the day, the week, the month. And she had not had the miracle of understanding to sense it. Seeing him was to stir into pain again the mortal sickness at her heart. So long as he had been out there
at arm’s length—eight-hundred-miles’-length—from her pain, her predicament was something she could keep as unreal as the memory of a dream.… Now here he was, and the pains were tumbling about like acrobats.

They stepped into the shadow of the Sub-Treasury Building, and, for an hour, while the tides flowed past, talked in the tempo of those who have little time and much to say.

“I felt bad, your leaving Cincinnati as you did, Ray. Without a word.”

She was suddenly, after the six quiescent years, so hurt and bitter that she did not trust her lips to try to frame the words of a reply.

“You knew I was here, Walter?”

“Well, yes, in a way.”

“You look well, Walter. A little stouter.”

“Getting along in years. I’m the father of two.”

Without a thought for her, without a sensibility for her, without even a suggestion of awareness of the silent scream of terror she could feel dart through her as he said this, he took out a small leather case and showed her the two, their small faces bunched together. She did not look long, because all she saw was a spinning pinwheel the size of the picture.

“Fine, Walter,” she said, and returned it. “Your family here?”

He seemed to regard her in a sort of mild incredulity that she could be so unaware of the momentous.

“You didn’t know? I’m a junior partner, Friedlander-Kunz!”

It had come so soon, then! Rightly, normally, as it should. He was a young banker now. Looked it, in the well-made gray sack suit that fitted his slightly stouter figure. He was almost imperceptibly gray at the temples too, giving him somehow, to her, the artificial look of age achieved by an actor who whitens his hair.

“Oh, Walter, I’m glad!” She was. She was, even if miseries that had for so long lain half-frozen in her were suddenly rushing in quickly released streams.

“My mother died last April, Ray.”

He had suffered, and not even that had got through to her.

“Walter, dear Walter.”

“Curious thing about that, Ray. I always wanted you to know Mother.”

He could actually say that, apparently without knowledge that he was twisting her pain.

“I wanted to know her, Walter.”

“My wife’s parents died within two weeks of each other two years ago.”

So he had been through death and birth, and by now was in the sinew of settled manhood! They, he and Corinne, had the ropy, fibrous tightening-bond between them of private sorrows and the private ecstasies. Life, death, birth. Maturity was part of his general thickening. His fingers with the square tips. His polished, squared-toed shoes. His face, now that the cheeks were heavier, seeming more four-square than of old. Solid, substantial. A banker. The un-Jewish-looking Jew, already something moneyed about him. The acceptance and solidity with which he said “my wife.” Even while it smote her, and excluded her, the solidity, as always, wrung her admiration.

“You have been through a great deal, Walter.”

“Good and bad, Ray. And you?”

Her lips began to slip away from their firm tension, and she hauled them, with all her strength, back to where she could feel them smile.

“Same old Ray, I guess, Walter. Working along, living along, playing along best I can.”

Something of tenderness came out in his face, in a way she knew by heart, almost as if she could have touched each lineament of expression, before it lighted up.

“I’ve missed you, Ray,” he said, as if realizing it as they stood there.

She was conscious of her lips again and her will to keep them firm.

“And I’ve missed you, Walter. I mean—missed the way we used to have of talking over every little thing that happened. I’m like that. I like to listen to every little thing about a person—in his business—in general.”

What nonsense this, and yet her lips talked on.

“That’s true, Ray. You were always a good listener. Flatters a fellow like the dickens to be listened to. Remember the day I thought they were going to bounce me at the bank because I honored a power-of-attorney check for eleven hundred dollars after the power had lapsed?”

Did she! They had sat four hours in the C. H. and D. waiting room, while he let the last Hamilton train pull out, discussing his dilemma. She had gone home at three in the morning, leaving him to snatch sleep on the hard bench of the smoky station, and they had met again at breakfast to devise a way to cover up his predicament. Did she remember!

They stood for an hour, tearing apart the obscuring years, and Walter reconstructing, step-by-step, the processes that had brought him east.

“My wife’s mother’s brother is Felix-Arnold Friedlander, of the firm of Friedlander-Kunz, you know that of course?”

Oh no, she didn’t know that! But what she said was, “Is that so?”

“Reason they never took Aaron Trauer into the banking house was because he not only preferred his own town and his own little business, but he just out-and-out wasn’t cut out for anything else. They look on me as young blood, you see.”

Her eyes ached with the years of seeing.

“Well, anyway, seems there has always been an agreement between Felix-Arnold Friedlander and his partner Kunz, never to force an issue in order to favor a relative. Most conservative pair of fellows you ever saw! But when one of the junior partners was sent to Berlin to open a branch there, that seemed to constitute an opening that was part of the ordinary course of events, and so they sent for me.”

“Walter, you will go far.”

He would! There might be nothing of the genius of industry or high finance about Walter, but he would carry on, with munificence and a certain oriental magnificence, the traditions of so stately a house as Friedlander-Kunz. He would be a banker in whom were vested trust and respect. He would further stabilize the solidity and
stolidity of the house of Friedlander-Kunz with faithful and imitative purpose. Friedlander-Kunz had long been conspicuous in foreign loans of one nature and another. Who knows? He, Walter, might even come to have an occasional finger in the international pie and consort with diplomats upon the spending money of empires!

Walter, with his charming, gregarious manner, his inborn unction, his rather shrewd capacity to withhold a decision until just the inevitably right moment—his well-oiled mathematical bent of mind—coupled with all the ready-made power of banking paraphernalia behind him, would, in the eventuality of succession, carry firmly forward.

This much, without her being able to formulate it in words, she knew irrevocably about Walter. As they stood in the violet-and-mauve dusk that began to wind itself against the doors and windows of Wall Street, his talk with her grew lambent, more revealing, more confidentially a résumé of the past since they had met. The business ramifications of his life, since marriage. The crucial occasion of the summons to New York. The present delicate and difficult years of adjustments. The complicated fabric of international banking.

Her own elementary mathematical instinct made his talk comprehensible. Her self-taught facility in bookkeeping was the result of a talent. For years she had kept her father’s books, and Kurt’s, and part of the neighborly willingness to accommodate her with the telephone service during the Baymiller days, had been her reciprocal willingness to balance the corner grocer’s books for him every month. Even where she could not fully comprehend, she could be intelligently interested, and Walter, feeling himself heeded, let expansion take place that carried him back to the days when, for hours on end, with her capacity for interest in his affairs, she could listen without interruption.

“It’s getting chilly standing here this way, Ray. Couldn’t we, for old time’s sake, step into Procter’s for a bite of dinner?”

That she was being waited for, in an office of one of Wall Street’s new fifteen-story skyscrapers, by a broker who was to take her to
Lüchow’s, did not even occur to her. What did occur to her must have flashed into her face, because he said hastily:

“I often telephone home not to wait dinner when I am detained. Will you come? It’s been so long since we have had a talk. I feel the need of it, Ray.”

Standing there, it came over her with finality what she knew to be her inability to deny him.

The coming together of Ray Schmidt and Walter Saxel was something so gradual, so innocent of scheme or plan, that its course was unmarked by the concrete incident of reaching their conclusion.

It was impossible, looking back, for Ray to determine exactly when she reached her decision to leave Blamey’s, where she had spent six years of her life in New York. More than that, it was even difficult to go back over those conversations with Walter that had dwelt upon the feasibility of a flat.

Certainly there was in Ray, the day, some two months following the encounter, as she rode in a cab, holding on to hatboxes and minor baggage, consciousness that, in traversing the short distance from West Twenty-third Street to the redbrick apartment house on Broadway near Fifty-third Street, she was crossing the vast steppes which separate respectability from démodé. But not in the sense of any overpowering realization that she was burning bridges after her.

There had never been an instant, in the years intervening between that first meeting in front of the C. H. and D. and this sharp transition in her life brought about by the step she was now taking, that subconsciously she had not been prepared to do, not necessarily this, but whatever was wanted or desired by the one human being in the world whose wish was her law.

Even back in the Cincinnati days, Walter, she now realized, could have had this for the asking. This, or less, or more: everything,
or, as he had chosen to decide, nothing. As he would; then, as now. In fact, she caught herself thinking, one day, in the solitude to which she was to become so inured, “It is sweeter this way.” In almost any other relationship, she would have given him less. Her isolation into a corner of his life was to become more complete as affairs between them became more and more clandestine. This way, it was all or nothing. Yes, it was sweeter.…

Here was a situation that unfolded itself not by machination, but as naturally as a flower unfolds itself.

The talk about the flat had been scrappy, and chiefly, when he began to find it difficult to determine upon places for them to meet or dine, in order that their presence would not seem repetitious or conspicuous, as a means to an end. Indecision, doubts of her which had so characterized their early days, seemed to have vanished, because he said to her so simply that her heart did not even quicken by a beat: “Ray, this can’t go on. The time has come for us to have a place of our own, where I can come without all this scheming.”