Back STreet (35 page)

“You never knew—more—”

“No.”

“But you suspected there was someone?”

“Dear Ray, I have tried to explain to you that always, over and above what you do, I know what you are.”

She pressed her fingers against her eyes, and for a time they sat in silence. She was not crying. Her voice came quite evenly.

“Not many women could boast having a more perfect thing than that said to them.”

“Not many deserve it.”

“Is it clear now that I’m out here with—him?”

“Yes.”

“He and his wife—he married a Miss Trauer of Cincinnati—are at the Grove.”

He sat with his lips straight, his eyes ahead, hands on the
steering wheel, the knuckles of them large and white as mushrooms in the starlight.

“We were just friends before that. It was six years after his marriage that we met again. Will it surprise you, Kurt, if I tell you that he—Walter—was the first—the last? I know—even remembering all that I once told you about myself back in the Cincinnati days—how it must sound for a woman like me to be saying this, but it’s true, Kurt. Take my word for that.”

“I do.”

“Dear Kurt, how terrible I am being to you. That wasn’t your voice. That was something squeaking up there in the tree. Say it over again in your own voice.”

“I believe you, Ray.”

“I know you do, or I wouldn’t be telling you things that I’ve never even told myself. Let’s see, where was I? You see, the thing that you probably like about me is the thing that has always made me my own enemy. It’s so hard for me to dislike people or get huffy over the things that the right kind of people dislike in the wrong kind. God knows, it is me people should feel sorry for, but it’s me that is always a little sorry for people. To me, we are such a pathetic lot. All born into a world we didn’t ask to be born into. All struggling, hurting, scheming to get a little happiness out of it before we go to square ourselves with God, or whatever it is constitutes our hereafter. It is as if we get born with more appetites than we need, just in order to spend our lives trying to curb them. I read where a doctor once said a human being can only hope to conserve his health by satisfying his appetite for food by less than one-half. Same with life. We all seem born desiring so much more than is good for us.”

“Something in that.”

“But to get back—feeling all this about people—about life—I’ve never learned to say no without its hurting me a whole lot more than the person I’ve said it to. Even the rotters, the low-downs and the no-goods I’ve met in my life, haven’t disgusted me the way they should. I’ve felt sorry for them for being so third-rate and scummy. I swear to you, silly as it sounds, many a time I’ve felt sorry for a fellow while he was insulting me. Seemed to me all the time he was just
a poor devil trying to make an escape of some kind or another. I’m funny that way, Kurt. It’s been my undoing—You listening?”

“Go on.”

“Well, that’s the way I’ve always been, and one day back in the days—yes, the very day I sent you the telephone message to the house on Baymiller Street, I met Walter!”

“It
was
him—way back there, then?”

“From the second I clapped eyes on him, Kurt, it was as if I—I’m not very good at expressing myself, but it was as if life for me had just—just begun to be life. That doesn’t say it, either. I guess what happened to me the day I met Walter was what might happen to any fool girl the day she falls in love at first sight. But with me, Kurt, I just never stopped falling. There never was a second after I clapped eyes on him that he couldn’t have had me, Kurt. It wasn’t any longer a question of good or bad, right or wrong. I had no pride. I wanted no rights.… Know what I mean, Kurt?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, I’m not trying to call a spade a silver spoon. I’m the kept woman of a married man. Only nothing—nothing can ever make it seem quite like that to me. I won’t go into what he’s been to me, or what I think I’ve been to him. I won’t dwell on the torment of knowing the part I have been playing in his relationship to his wife and family; but nothing, Kurt—I’d be lying if I said it—can ever make me believe that there was anything but sanctity of human relationship in what we brought each other. I’ve not been bad, in my relationship with Walter Saxel. I’ve loved him with a oneness that makes me at least as much his wife as—never mind that part. It’s too terrible. But with all the pain and the sin and wrongness that belong to that side of things, the husband of Corinne Saxel and Ray Schmidt—I will say it, I will—has been blessed with a perfect love. I gave him that love, Kurt. As perfect as a crystal. Do you hear that? As perfect as a crystal.”

He shuddered, with his face down in his hands—shuddered in the mild night air and hunched his shoulders as if he would retreat into them.

“Is it that terrible? Is it that horrible? It doesn’t sound that way
to me. Isn’t that incredible? It doesn’t sound that way to me. It sounds almost beautiful. I know it is beautiful, as it exists within me. As for Corinne—I’ve thought about her and their children, until it has seemed to me that my head must break in halves—and perhaps it is wrong—I guess it is—but it seems to me that the greatest wrong lies in the possibility of her ever knowing. Everything about her life has been so normal. So right. So as it should be. I haven’t even taken Walter from her. His love for her is something separate and apart. What she does not know is never going to make her unhappy. That is my prayer, Kurt—otherwise—even if his children should some day learn of it, this much I know. Nothing in his relationship with me has ever tarnished their father. I’ve helped Walter, Kurt.”

“I know that,” he said, still into his hands. “You don’t need to tell me that. I know it.”

She began to cry softly, without sobs.

“What would you say if I were to tell you, after all this, that this is the end? Something has happened—something that no longer makes anything possible. I’m leaving Walter, Kurt. Isn’t that curious? I didn’t know that, when I started out on this ride with you. I know it now.”

He swung slowly and took hold of her wrist.

“What does that mean for me?”

“For you? Why, Kurt—you darling—you mean—”

“I mean what I said years and years ago out in Cincinnati; what I said to you years ago in New York, what I am saying to you now.…”

“Kurt, if I cry the way I want to cry, it will be terrible. Don’t say anything else, I can’t—stand—it—”

Her face in her palms, he could feel her tremble, and once more he sat with his hands on the wheel, the mushrooms large and white upon them, the sea of starlight, the sea of meadow, and the sea of silence flowing ahead of them.…

It was considerably later when he did speak; and her trembling had ceased, and her hands had dropped into her lap, and her eyes, dry, were fixed on the landscape.

“Tell you what you do, Ray. No use making this any harder than it is already. Pull yourself together and take this thing easy. I’m
going to drive you back to your hotel now. My advice to you is, get yourself together and take a morning train over to Youngstown and visit Freda a bit.”

“I’ve been thinking about that identical thing, sitting here, Kurt. I’d like to see Freda and the children. Particularly Emma. I’m just hungry to see Emma. There is just one reason I can’t quite bring myself to go. You know the reason. Not on account of Freda, she doesn’t know anything from what I’ve told her, but, of course, she must guess. It’s little Emma. She—I don’t know—I don’t feel I ought to—”

“You go to Freda’s, Ray. You’ll never put anything in the way of that child, or any other, but the best. Get your bearings. Get quiet. Think. Work it all out. I’m not saying anything one way or another, except to tell you what you already know. My heart is like an open house, waiting for you. Pretty fancy speech for me, but I feel it like that. And it is a good strong fine house with all the doors and windows wide open. I want you in it this minute, more than I’ve ever wanted you in my life. Think and be quiet for a while, out there, and get your bearings on this thing. I’ll be in Youngstown in exactly seven weeks, as a delegate from our Chamber of Commerce to the opening of theirs. Before, if you want me. If I could bring you back here on the twenty-eighth day of August, married to me, I—well, there’s so many ways of saying it, but I don’t seem to be able to find one. I love you, Ray. More tonight, I think, than I have in all the years of loving you. Now don’t the idea of a few weeks’ resting and thinking and clearing up your mind visiting your folks in Youngstown strike you as fair? Think it over. There’s an idea!”

“I have thought it over, Kurt. I’m going.”

After the first sharp bolt of decision, the gathering-together of the personal belongings might have been done by someone outside herself, so far as she was conscious of fatigue or the passing of the long night that led to the dawn of the day of her departure.

Even the note to Walter, addressed after some thought, care of the clerk at the Medes Hotel, was not a composition of travail. It wrote itself glibly with that external-feeling hand of hers: “Dear Walter, This decision of mine to go to my family you will understand. I will ask you to break up things at the New York end without communication with me. That part of my life is finished. In many ways it is strange it should end this way, but not so strange as that which has brought it about. Even so, I am grateful for so much that has been. I am more at peace in my decision than I ever could have believed possible. I wish you everything good.”

That is a good letter, she thought, without tears, because it is a true letter, every word of it. She sealed the flap of the envelope along her tongue, and placed it on the top of her handbag, to be left with the clerk as she departed.

There were countless small chores. A dress at the dry cleaner’s across the street, to be called for before taking the train. Tips to be left for certain of the hotel help who would be off duty and not know of her sudden departure. The hotel porter to be dispatched to the nearby station for railroad accommodation. Her bit of fortune at
the Casino and races proved a great stroke of luck. In all, there was over four hundred dollars in her purse. Dressed in her traveling hat and suit of tan percale, she had breakfast in her room on the small table beside the windows that overlooked the street.

The sun had not yet climbed over the roofs, and a warmish furry fog hung over the scene. Dogs without collars ran along the streets. A boy with a tray of breakfast rolls balanced on his head whistled past. The Adelphi Hotel across the way was having its spittoons cleaned. The sulphuric smell of the hot curative waters came through the window screens. A rather depressing sunless morning, and yet, to the person who seemed handmaiden to Ray, that curious external self of hers, not unpleasant.

The matter of the note to Walter once behind her, the problem now presented itself whether or not to wire Freda. How dumfounded she would be. Kurt had suggested wiring. Perhaps it would be better. She filled in a blank from a pad of them on the small desk in her sitting room.

“Arrive three-twenty, Pittsburgh and Lake Erie, for a little visit. Ray.”

By then it was time to go to the train. The incredible act of performing, without consideration or connection with the doings of Walter, was about to take place. No hampering tie-up with his plans, his time, his preferences. Free. Free to go, to come, to work out her own today, tomorrow, while he, his pride, his terrible pride, stunned, a few hours later would stand beside the counter of the Hotel Medes reading the unbelievable.

How hurt and angered and unrelenting he would be. Oh, she had taken her life into her own hands all right. Even should she weaken—and weaken she not only would not, but could not—his pride would do the rest. His terrible, relentless, wounded-unto-death pride.

The person outside of herself was riding in a train that cut through fertile meadows. There was the rather absurd reality of the trainmen being obsequious, as members of train and boat crews somehow always were to her. The porter brought her a pillow and settled a stool at the foot of her parlor-car chair. The conductor,
taking up her ticket, passed the time of day and smeared his eyes over the little swell her breasts made against her shirtwaist. Grit flew against the screened window, and again the porter was at her elbow, dusting the sill and hoisting her luggage from the floor to the wire shelf overhead. The gritty dust began to settle along her lips and the backs of her gloved hands. The day rose to its noon and she could feel the back of her waist becoming damp and wrinkled from its pressure against the railroad plush. A drummer across the aisle, with his coat removed and his large soft stomach heaving under a silk shirt that showed dark splotches of perspiration, leaned over to strike up a conversation about the heat, which ended with his inviting her into the dining car for lunch. Just a few desultory remarks, mostly questions that came off the moist shelves of his lips without waiting for a reply.

“Traveling alone? Going to meet the hubby? Know anybody in Youngstown? Good town. Ever been to Jack’s Eating Place there? Doing anything tonight? That’s the second call for lunch. Feel like opening a bottle of beer with me?”

Just the most desultory replies from her, and yet he felt impelled to ask her to lunch. It struck her, as she politely refused, and lay back against her chair with her eyes closed, that the men who swam around and ogled her in public places were no longer the younger ones with straight figures, but almost all, by now, had protuberant stomachs, heavy necks, and skin that hung like the folds of an elephant. Men with high-blood-pressure records in their doctors’ offices. The younger, unprotuberant, natty men were not troublesome any more.

Rattly-bang over the rails. As she lay back, with her eyes closed, the curious, light, astonishing sense of her lack of relativity to what Walter’s plans for the day, the week, the month might be, persisted.

“I feel as if someone had died,” she told herself, “and it is too soon after for me to realize it.”

Rattly-bang—

Freda and Emma and Freda’s youngest, a boy aged nine, of such pale pigmentation that he looked albino, were at the station. She saw them from the car window, lined up along the platform, as the
train drew in, and, except for her being so nervously on the lookout, would never have recognized the little group. Whatever of change she was prepared to find in the person of her stepsister, nothing had prepared her for this. Freda was as round and as stubby as one of the Chinese-lily bulbs Ray was forever planting in bowls of pebbles. Round, after the fashion of women who let their bodies sag all day without corsets, until time to hoist them into stays for an occasion. The hoisted ridges of Freda’s flesh hung over the top of her corsets. The Freda who had been pastily pretty in her teens was middle-aged now, with fallen arches, shabby graying hair, and the fusty manner with children of one who boxes their ears frequently. Just one more of the many shabby women who move about the aisles of the marketplaces buying “seconds” of wilted vegetables, and the cheaper gristly cuts of meat, to cram into market baskets.