Back STreet (34 page)

As a matter of fact, he had not run into Walter, whom he did not even know; and, strangely enough, while doubts, which he kept jammed down tightly in his mind throughout the years, did
sometimes pop up, the name of Walter Saxel was never associated in his mind with her. Things were as they were, with Ray. Just no telling about a woman. About all there was to it.

It made things easier if you never permitted certain thoughts even to take shape. Not that anything mattered—she was what she was—her every act another turn in the spiral of her desirability.

“Let me drive you back to Mount Clemens now and go into the Grove Hotel to visit one of my associates on business. He is there, laid up with rheumatism, and I came down to talk over some little matters with him. And then you let me drive you down to the Frontenac for dinner, and anything you say afterward.”

“Not the Frontenac tonight, Kurt. I’ve a reason for not wanting to be seen there this particular evening.”

“All right, just as you say. Take you out to Belle Isle then, and treat you to a good old-fashioned fish dinner. You’ve got to stay around here for a while, Ray, and get acquainted with God’s land.”

How good it was to be sitting there securely beside this decent, effervescent Kurt, who, beyond her imaginings, had filled out into someone personable, and who, in his middle age, bore little resemblance to the gangling fellow of earlier years. Time, or success, or both, had mellowed Kurt; put firm, genial flesh on his bones; even corrected his eyesight. Behind pince-nez that sat firmly across the unirritated bridge of his nose, the eyes now looked clear and enlarged. A new, bluff, western kind of fellow, in good, gray, checked clothes beneath his linen duster, and gray in his tan hair. How good to be sitting there with this eager, catering friend, irrestrainable in his excitement and desire to impress and please her. It made her feel as if for years she had been unbearably tired—so tired that the very withes of her being were twisted nerves being relaxed, and her mouth, which sometimes felt like a tight hard snake’s-nest, felt moist and young as a girl’s. How good.

“You’ve got to give me a whole day to take you through our plant, Ray. I want to ride you out along Woodward Avenue, too, and show you some of the prettiest homes you ever saw in your life. As I recall it, you like horse races. I don’t know much about them, but that’s a great sport hereabouts. You’re going to know there’s
such a state as Michigan on this old U. S. map before you leave it. We can show a thing or two, even to New York.”

How good. How good. Presently, in one of her semi-evening-gowns—a brown lace she had dyed and made herself—and a brown lace hat with a brown motor-veil, which she tied under the chin, they were on the drive to Belle Isle, wind in their faces and the edge of the veil snapping backward in the breeze.

“Ray, as my soul is my own, if I had the pick of surprises the world over, this one today would be my choice.”

“Kurt, I don’t know but what it would have been mine too.”

“You know, Ray—now don’t think I’m stirring up old dust, it’s going to lie just as flat as you want it to—but there is a mighty sad side to the lay of things between us. I don’t know much about your life, except what you choose to tell me, and if you don’t know by now that I’m not quizzing, you ought to; but, without asking you a single question, or caring a damn what has been, I certainly could make your life what you deserve it to be, Ray, without saying much about what I could do for myself.”

“You’re salt of the earth, Kurt, and don’t think I don’t know it.”

“Well, we won’t bury Jake tonight,” he said, and struck off on a dissertation of the Detroit land-boom that, during this period of crucial world conditions, was being held off like a lion at bay.

“Why, there’s no limit to what’s ahead for this town. Has anything been able to stop it? Not on your life!”

They dined on crayfish, as they used to in Cincinnati, asparagus with hollandaise, and nothing would do but a quart of very dry champagne, which she scarcely touched to her lips and Kurt touched not at all, except in the same mime of toasting the occasion.

“I feel twenty tonight, Ray. Besides, from the look of the thing, this may be about the last glass of wine you and me will be able to drink above the table in your old U.S.A. Yes, sir, I feel twenty tonight.”

“And I,” she felt impelled to say, “feel filled with all the years there are”; but she would have cried had she said it. And so they touched glasses in silence, and she sipped the edge of hers, and he regarded her above the untouched edge of his.

That was the beginning of a round of times with Kurt that helped fill the strangely static days. Even after Walter and Corinne had returned to the Grove, where Walter immediately resumed a second series of the treatments, there was time galore left for Kurt. For drives. For dinners at the Frontenac. Theaters and late suppers. For an inspection tour of the vast automobile plants, and luncheon served from a private kitchen in a small dining room adjoining Kurt’s fine mahogany offices.

She told Walter, one evening, during one of their rare hours from five to six, that she could get him a special-body Kurt-Sussex at cost price, through the offices of an old friend of hers, none other than Kurt Shendler himself.

“I heard he was a Cincinnatian. Then you must have known him when he was running a bicycle shop back there.”

“I sure did. He took me through his plant today. It’s incredible what he has built up for himself. Kurt is the power behind all those blocks of factories. He certainly has shown me a pleasant time.”

He was all for that, and, somewhat to her surprise, continued to exhibit a concern, not quite characteristic, for what must be the tediousness of her hours alone.

“That’s right, Ray. Don’t mope. There are only two more weeks of it, but since we cannot be together as much as we want to, try to make the best of them. Get this fellow Shendler to show you around.”

She did not know whether to be hurt or gratified at this concern. Usually, the long periods of her waiting were so taken for granted. It was one of the rutted conditions between them; exigencies of business affairs, home conditions, made the edges of Walter’s time uncertainties which one took for granted, and you cut your leisure to fit that pattern.

These few weeks somehow had been different. It was as if Walter were a little grateful to whosoever would fill her time. It was not that suspicion smote her. It was just that, within her, something stirred and feared.

“Walter, you—you know I never ask you about certain things, and if I am offending you by doing so now, you need not answer.
Why is it suddenly necessary for you to be so—well, what I mean is, in New York, and usually in Europe, you are not so tied. Why is it that, all of a sudden, you are not free even for an occasional dinner with me?”

He flushed and started to look angry, in a way she dreaded, an oxblood red flooding his neck and rising to deploy across his face, and then, suddenly changing his tactics, crossed from the window where he had been leaning looking down at the street below, to stand beside her, where she sat on the stiff hotel sofa.

“Ray, I’ve been meaning to tell you something for weeks. Should have in the beginning, but somehow I didn’t. I suppose you’re not going to like it. That isn’t going to change matters. It’s over twelve or fourteen years since, y’see? Little accident, I suppose you might call it.”

“Call what?”

“Fact is, Ray, one of those things that can happen, but, somehow, after so many years, don’t usually—fact is—Corinne is going to have a baby.”

“I see,” she said finally, between a pair of wooden clothespins for lips. “I see,” she repeated, and sat, wooden as her lips, upon the rigid sofa, toying with the tassel of a cushion.

He had the nicety not to attempt to touch or kiss her as he went out, although such a departure was without precedent. She was grateful for it, though, because there was something gathering within her that, had he approached, would have made talons of her fingers.

This was a terrible situation. In shape, a vicious circle. In substance, revolting beyond any telling.

What right had she, Ray Schmidt, to any ground whatsoever in this matter? Where did her sense of outrage, violation, smirch, come in? What was there in her relationship to this entire affair to defend her against being plunged into the mire of this predicament? “Nothing,” she cried out to herself, nothing, nothing, nothing, except somewhere, deep within her, the inability to foresee anything so gross and violating happening.

There were decencies; there were unspoken fundamental decencies that were pillars of the human structure of body, soul, and spirit. While nothing had ever been spoken between them on a subject to which she readily allotted him privacy, surely, she cried out to herself, she had been justified in allowing herself to feel safe in certain sanctities.

How dared he! Either to herself, or to—her! How dared he! That had always been one of her synthetic, home-brewed justifications. Thank God, she had only run into him again in those years after the completion of his little family. At least that made it seem less—less what? Less patently the thing it was …

All those years, all those months of days, that he had been coming to her, she had assumed to herself certain things that now, in
the mocking, shocking light of events, she should never have dared to take for granted.

Certainly these were not the things you discussed, they were not even the things you discussed with yourself; and now here, in the dreadful array of full proof, lay the ruins of her illusions, the collapse of her flimsy castle, the end of the last shred of her pretense of justification.

As she sat there, in the stuffy, sulphuric-smelling hotel room that had suddenly become to her as stripped of pretense as she herself, this much became evident: something too smirched and besmirching had happened to make the old status of things any longer endurable. How had she permitted him to tell her this thing without letting loose upon him the sense of her outrage that was almost past the bearing?

Kurt was calling for her at eight. One must climb out of the ruffled negligee and into clothing for the evening drive they had planned together, precisely as if something epochal in its pain had not hung itself onto her heart since, in a normal unassailed world of twenty-four hours ago, she had made that plan.

How had she refrained, when he said, “Corinne is going to have a baby,” from striking him across the lips that had uttered the everything unspeakable that the statement implied? She would have liked, now in retrospect, to have seen those lips trickle with blood that she had struck from them. How had she refrained from doing something in the way of force, with her body, that would have hurt him, degraded, destroyed him? How was she ever to succeed now, after having sat passive there while he threw over what universe she had been able to construct out of scraps, in conveying to him the fathomless depths of her sense of outrage? Nothing between them was any longer tenable—horror was upon her.…

That night, on the spur of the moment, for which no amount of preparation would have prepared her, she did something for which, in all her experience, there was no precedent.

For the first time in the alone years of the peculiar isolation of her position, with an amount of unrestraint that astonished her every moment that she felt her lips in full recital, she unburdened the unabridged story of her relationship with Walter. Minutely, in detail, the narrative, being born, came rushing from her lips.

She had been driving with Kurt along the paved road that led to Detroit, when he turned to her kindly: “Not feeling so well tonight, Ray? You’re so quiet.”

They were spinning past the fenced meadowlands he had pointed out to her as his own, and she put out her hand suddenly on his arm.

“Kurt, could we turn off here and get the car under one of those big trees? I want to talk to you.”

“I reckon we can, since those trees belong to me,” he said, and immediately and without surprise, which she liked in him, began maneuvering the big car onto the shoulder of turf that edged the road.

A whitish July night flowed down over the meadow, moonless, but with an unusually crowded attendance of stars. One of those nights when the Milky Way and the Dipper and Vega and Arcturus are in their brightest coinage.

“Now, what is on your mind?” he said, as, with the car’s back to the road, they sat facing an unrelieved vista of star-spangled meadow.

“Kurt, what do you think of me, anyway?”

“You know what I think of you, Ray,” he said softly, almost too softly, as if against an emotion ready to rise.

“I mean, Kurt, what are your thoughts concerning my life? What have you thought of me since you saw me in New York? What do you think of me now? About my being here. How am I here? Why?”

“I don’t let my mind dwell on the things you don’t wish to tell me.”

“Come now, Kurt, surely it must have occurred to you that there is a reason for my being out here. Surely you have heard things?”

“I have heard nothing, Ray, so help me God. This is a big world and a small world at the same time. It happens it has been a big
world where you are concerned. As to what I have thought—if I have thought anything, Ray, it has had to do with a feeling of resentment that somehow, even from what little I know of it, life hasn’t done the things for you that you deserve. The rest is none of my business. Nothing you can do, Ray, or have done, can change my opinion of you.”

“You know that I am some man’s mistress, don’t you?”

“I suppose so,” he said, looking straight ahead and frowning.

“Do you know what man’s?”

“No.”

“Shall I tell you?”

“No.”

“It will help me, Kurt—to tell you.”

“Then tell me.”

“Walter Saxel. Say something, Kurt, don’t just sit—like that.”

“What is there for me to say? I remember him, of course. You went together for a while, back there. I always used to date your meeting with him from that Sunday night you stood me up with a message from the corner telephone. But that passed out of my mind. He’s made a big record in banking, I understand.”