Back STreet (36 page)

At sight of Freda, a deep-rooted fear smote Ray. The years had been moths at the body and probably at the soul of Freda. The same years that must have eaten, in their different way, into her.

Freda’s first remark was reassuring.

“I’d have known you anywhere. You haven’t changed a bit, except I think you’re even slimmer, and, of course—yes, a little older, but not much.”

How broad and how white her voice was. It had not seemed like that in the old days, and yet here it was familiarly Freda’s own.

“Emma, here is your Aunt Ray at last. The child has been making herself sick with excitement since your telegram came. Curtis, go kiss your Aunt Ray; she has sent you so many dollar bills. Thank her.”

The boy hung back, but Emma, in a white dress that had laundered gray, came forward with her whitish eyes that almost had the look of the blind in them, lit in the same sweet way of the anticipatory blind.

Why, Freda’s children were the whitest, palest, most albino children she had ever seen. Freda and Hugo were blond, of course, but these two, they were like pale visitors from another planet. And no gainsaying it, Emma was not pretty. There was something studious though, and round-shouldered, about the little figure, something
about the pale eyes that seemed a pathetic straining; but the girl here was not even a prototype of the communion picture that Ray loved. No luster to her, not even the bright blue and white prettiness that had been her mother’s. Poor little Emma, how sweet she was, kissing her so timidly. What an ache she lodged in your heart. For that matter, poor little Curtis too, a pale sniffling boy with pipestem legs, and some of Hugo’s gangling quality to their length. Oh, the drab three dears, dulled as a looking glass dulls when you breathe on it.

“That figure, Ray! I’d have known it anywhere. You’ll never lose it. Look at me, mealsack tied in the middle.”

“Nonsense, Freda. None of us has escaped the years. Where are we going, dears? Take me to a hotel.”

“I’ve fixed it so you can stop with us. That is, if you don’t mind. Things will probably be a little different from what you’re used to. Emma sleeps on the sofa in the front room, but she’s given that up to you, and will sleep with one of her girlfriends, who lives down the street.”

“Oh, no, I couldn’t.…”

“But I like it, Aunt Ray. I love it.…”

A pang smote Ray. She had counted on the privacy of a room in a boardinghouse or hotel.

“Oh, please, Aunt Ray.”

“Of course, if you don’t think it is going to be comfortable enough, Ray—”

“Nonsense, Freda. I just don’t want to inconvenience you.”

That ended the discussion, and presently, although Ray had suggested a cab, which Freda disclaimed because of the distance, they were bobbing along on a trolley car, through the repetitious streets of Youngstown, Ray between Emma, on one side, whose hand was securely tucked into hers, and Freda on the other. Curtis on her lap, because at that hour the streetcars were packed.

Like-a-dream, like-a-dream, clattered the wheels. Sitting out here in this Middle West, Ohio town, clattering home with Freda and her children to a place that was sure to flow around her in the
warm, fetid waves of the semi-slum. Why was this grotesque circumstance taking place? What next?

Sure enough, the house, an unpainted frame, without a porch, a shutter, or an ell to break its uncompromising resemblance to an old weather-beaten packing case, was situated in a burnt and grassless yard on a street of just such houses. You entered from the side, because the front door, with a piece of lace curtain stretched across its pane, was only a sham, without hinges or lock.

So this was Freda’s castle, the castle for which the ignominy of her unspeakable maneuver of other days still lingered across the memory. It was a cramped, mean house, meanly furnished, but with certain valiant touches. Yellow-tissue roses in a cut-glass table vase. Some Japanese wind-bells that swayed in an open window.

There were only two rooms on a floor, kitchen and adjoining parlor, where Emma slept, two pockets of leftover space with slanting ceilings and high little windows upstairs, shared by the remainder of the family. No dining room, but the table was spread in the kitchen, obviously with more ado than usual.

Quick perceptions flashed over Ray as she entered. There was her mother’s silver cruet on the table. And the wooden shelf-clock with the flowers painted on the oval glass door had stood in the house on Baymiller Street ever since she could remember.

In the front room where she removed her wraps, the picture of the black and white pair of horses rearing at a zig-zag of lightning had been her father’s favorite. And that carpet hassock with the red wool button in its center, and the china plate with her father and Tagenhorst, cheek to cheek, baked into its center, stood in a rack on the mantelpiece, precisely as it had stood on the rack on the mantelpiece of the house on Baymiller Street. Those old gilded cattails—who in the world would have thought of carting them here!

Some of the old gall at the confiscation rose, but only for the passing moment. Curtis, once at home, became himself, thawing out of his rigid unease and dragging her luggage with willing hands. With the stiff bird’s-nest hat removed, and a wide apron tied around
the titillating jelled movements of her hips, some of the horrid, rigid look of pretentious poverty fell from Freda. There was still yellow in the gray of her hair, and even in the glaring gaseous interior of this poor home, something of the old hint of prettiness.

The major difficulty with the front room was that the well of staircase to the two upper rooms occupied by Freda and Hugo, Curtis and his brother Kruger, rose from the parlor, thus cutting off all hope of privacy. Unpacking a few toilet articles before going out to join Freda and the children in the cozier, brighter kitchen, a sense of discomfort set her immediately to contemplating some way out—some legitimate excuse that would not offend Freda, for getting herself a room. Curtis, loaded with the assurance born of being once more on his own ground, became the showoff, popping his head now every few minutes into the room.

“I’m double-jointed!”

(Curtis, close the door and let your Aunt Ray alone.)

“Hurry, Aunt Ray, we’re going to have chicken and rice.”

(Curtis, don’t let me have to speak to you again!)

“Aunt Ray, want to see my fox terrier?”

(What I go through with that boy! Smack! Now, will that hold you awhile?)

“Yoo-hoo, Aunt Ray, look! Jackknife. Pap lets me have it on Sundays.”

Presently, before Hugo came home from his gas-meter inspections or the older boy from his work at the brickyards, and after a peppering of Freda’s do’s and don’ts to the boy and girl that were already nerve-racking in their repetitiousness, there was time, with the dinner simmering on the stove, to sit for a bit beside Freda on a bench in the side yard.

“Well, Ray, how does it feel to be back with plain folks once more?”

“Plain folks, why, I wasn’t aware I had ever left them.”

Freda laughed in a high artificial little scale. “Well, New York, Europe, Mount Clemens don’t sound plain to me. Not if you’ve lived the plain drudging kind of life I have.”

Every word veiled, provocative, and in a curious tone of grievance.

“Did I hear you say, coming out on the streetcar, Freda, that Hugo hasn’t been so well?”

“Curtis, stop dragging that dog around, and go indoors and tell your sister not to let the oven get too hot for those biscuits. There’s nothing much the matter with Hugo, Ray, except what’s been the matter with him since the day he was born. Nothingness.”

“What do you mean?”

“What I say. Curtis, let that dog alone. Hugo’s got no force, no nothing that a man’s got to have in this day and age to get on. No wonder his uncle died leaving everything to that hellion he married. I’d rather a person would be a hellion than a nothing. That’s Hugo. Nothingness is his ailment, and there’s no way to realize what that sickness is until you’re married to it. Curtis! What’s brought you out here, Ray? Could have knocked me over, when your telegram came this morning. Funny thing, that is the first telegram has ever been delivered to this house since Mama died and Marshall wired from Toledo he couldn’t come for the funeral.”

“I just felt, Freda, as long as I was out this far Middle West, I wanted to see some of my own again.”

“M-m. Well, I’m sorry, Ray, there’s nothing much to see.”

“Why, you look all right, Freda. The children are nice. Emma’s right sweet.”

“Cur—tis, if I wasn’t sitting here talking to your Aunt Ray, I wouldn’t wait until tonight to use what is hanging on the cellar door. Yes, my children are all right, but I don’t wish it to my worst enemy, Ray, to have to contend with what I have in sickness and getting Emma’s eyes even to the stage they are now. You helped a lot there, Ray. Don’t know what we would have done without you.”

“I wish it could have been more.”

She turned like a shot on that. “Why couldn’t it? You’ve fixed yourself pretty, haven’t you?”

How much did Freda know? How much had she heard? What did she suspect? In many ways this was going to be terrible. Why—why
had she come? On Emma’s account her instinct had been against it. Yet where—else—

“I wouldn’t say that, Freda. Life has never been very lavish with me, if that’s what you mean. I’m just used to turning the trick of making a dollar go twice as far as it’s supposed to.”

“You don’t expect with your traipsing around on trips to Europe and resorts, that we’ve been thinking you have kept on with the wholesale trimming concern all these years? Maybe you don’t realize it, but you’ve never told us different.”

She had not realized that. What they thought out here in Youngstown among her own, she had never been able to marshal even in imagination.

“I guess you’re right, Freda. Things, though, have been pretty much for me what I suppose you’ve guessed.”

“What you suppose I’ve guessed? We don’t guess anything that we’re not supposed to know.”

(Tut, tut! How she and, during her lifetime, Tagenhorst must have tried to rend the veil of their ignorance concerning her.)

“Well, anyway, you can guess that there is nothing much I have to tell that would make it the occasion of a Roman holiday.”

“Are you kept?”

The question deserved its equally direct reply.

“Yes.”

The boy ran shouting down the yard with his fox terrier; behind them, in the kitchen, but well out of sound, the slender figure of Emma, at chores, moved every so often across the screened doorway. Imperceptibly it seemed to Ray there was something of tiny withdrawal in the apparently motionless figure of Freda.

“Well—I only hope that if you’ve made that kind of bed to lay on, you’ve made yourself a comfortable one.” There was resentment and grievance and bitterness and frustration in Freda’s voice. “I suppose you have had a great many er—a—er—friends. I’m not the one to cast a stone, but I suppose you’ve had—many?”

Was it possible that the privacy of her life with Walter had been as perfect as they had maneuvered it should be?

“I’ve had one, Freda, in all these years.”

“One! And you mean to tell me that one a poor man?”

Then the anonymity was true! Thank God for that. Thank God for that.

“My life with him, Freda, has been as much that of a wife as—as yours out here has been. More, perhaps. I’ve shared with him more as a Mrs. than as a mistress.”

“Well, if I went that way for a man, it would have to be for a reason, and a money reason at that. Cur—tis, stop that. What is the use taking on the shame of being a mistress if you’ve got to stand for being no more than a wife? …”

“I guess you’re right, Freda. I am like that, is the only answer I have.”

“Well, I never! So this is the bird of plumage, come home. From the fairy stories I’ve told Emma about her Aunt Ray, and her fine position in the business world, I’ve built up a mighty different picture about you. What is that address, anyway, in New York, where you receive your mail?”

“That’s my—flat, Freda.”

“Then all that you wrote about your flat is true?”

“I haven’t lied to you, any more than I thought you would want me to, about—certain things—considering Emma, the children—”

“Who is the man, Ray?”

“Does that matter?”

“I suppose it don’t, since I wouldn’t know him anyway. Man of means?”

“Yes.”

“Then why—”

“Please—I, please—”

“Well, I guess I’m old-fashioned, but it seems awful to me, Ray. It’s living in sin. It’s sin.”

(This was priceless, and you had consciously to hold your lips tight and straight.)

“Mama always used to say you weren’t the sort of girl it would ever pay to go bad. The only reason, as a rule, that a girl is ever bad,
is for what she can get out of it, and you never were the kind to get anything out of it. Em—ma, push the potatoes to the back of the stove. You’re what your father was, a
Schnucke
.”

“I guess you’re right. Only it’s over now. I’ve left him. I’m going to start over.”

The wife of Hugo swung her heavy face around, eying her with an air of positive alarm.

“You’re coming to Youngstown to live?”

“No, silly. Just to get my bearings, decide my next move, and visit you and Emma and the family. Just you wait, Freda. I can’t talk about it yet—it’s all too vague in my mind. But something good may happen. Can’t talk about it yet, but you wait.… Good things may happen to you through me.”

“You’ve got someone to marry you.…”

“Don’t make me talk about it any more, Freda. All in good time. It’s not easy. I’m hit. Terribly hit with what’s happened to me. Crushed, as the saying is; but I’ll get my bearings. I’ve a little money. Don’t worry. My coming won’t make it harder for you, perhaps even a little easier. Much easier, if I should make up my mind to jump a certain way. But don’t let’s talk any more tonight. I don’t think I can stand it. Please, Freda.”

“Mama was right. You’re a
Schnucke
, like your father.”

She sat in her wide apron, with her knees spread, looking silly and befuddled, and yet, withal, a little drawn apart, as if of fastidiousness.