Back STreet (37 page)

“I need to get my bearings, Freda. It’s been a little awful. Let me rest here quietly, a little while.…”

“Why—sure—”

“Just quietly.”

“And this,” said Freda, lumbering to her feet toward the kitchen, as she saw her husband and son open the gate below, “this is the bird of plumage come home.”

The plan of sleeping in the front room usually occupied by Emma proved not feasible. First, the lack of privacy occasioned by Hugo and the older boy, Kruger, tramping down the stairs mornings, through the parlor to the kitchen, made it objectionable, and then the idea of Emma, with her comb and brush and toothbrush and her little night dress and kimono thrown over her arm, having to dash across the street to share the bed of her friend Olga, was worrisome to Ray and, as Ray rightly suspected, to her mother. There were sons in the Werreneth family, burly drinking men, ten and twelve years the senior of Olga.

After a few days, without consulting anyone, Ray took it upon herself to go over and engage from Mrs. Werreneth, who rented rooms, her second-story back, which was adjoining the bath and had a southern exposure. It was a mean room of a wooden bed with a mosquito netting spread from a barrel-hoop over it, a chiffonier, and a strip of rug. Unnecessarily mean, it occurred to Ray, who had the four hundred dollars in her purse and would have preferred a room in a hotel. But it would have incurred the hurt and the haranguing of Freda, over her inability to provide sufficiently attractive surroundings, which haranguing invariably rebounded to Hugo and, besides, it was pleasant to be within easy accessibility to Emma, to say nothing of the fact that the revenue from her meals, which she insisted upon paying, was welcome in that pinched household.

The new arrangement made the ensuing days of the long hot July more bearable, although those of her meals which she was expected to take with the family could be trying almost beyond endurance, and for a reason which filled her with self-loathing. Freda’s older son, Kruger, an almost grotesquely slender, tall, narrow, nice-mannered boy, had an affliction which had dogged him all through childhood. His face twitched in quick heat lightnings of muscular contortions. It was something apparently which the family took for granted, scarcely noticing it. Seated at the supper table in the kitchen, the spectacle of this poor torn face was almost more than Ray could bear. The contortions in themselves were so racking to her, that even when the face was in repose, dread mounted in her. Dread for the next spasm of contortions which was sure to come. Sometimes it seemed to Ray that Hugo, too, would lay down his knife and fork as if too oppressed by the continuous torture of this spectacle to go on; but somehow things in that household did go on, automatically.

The thing about Hugo that you noticed, if you noticed anything at all, was that he, least of all, had changed with the years. Here was perfect capacity for surrender to routine and circumstance that apparently gave him immunity to the ravages of disappointment, disillusionment, and affliction.

Just as in the old days, when his marriage to Freda, once effected, was something into which he had settled without backward glance, so now the imprisonment of the years in a routine of meter-reading was something that he wore as you would wear an old glove. Comfortable, and without consciousness and without even discernible satisfaction that his account with Freda had been squared.

He was a pale, yellowish, youngish-looking man for his years, impervious, apparently, to the burning bitterness of Freda, perhaps secretly exulted by it, and himself impervious to the disappointments that had ravaged her face.

A walker in the valley of routine, fond of his children, concerned, but not vastly disturbed by their plights. An extreme example of a man who must unconsciously have established as his unphilosophical acceptance of life, “What is, is.”

Poor little Emma, in many ways she was of the pattern of her father, plodding her patient, nearsighted way at school, and often in spite of diligence falling behind, due to faulty eyes. A patient, unrebellious child, who up to her thirteenth year had known the threat of blindness, and who had accepted her release from that terror as humbly as she had endured under the shadow of darkness.

To think that one year previous to this July, she, Ray, had been living in her flat at Cape May, reveling in the preparation of fine suppers to be shared with Walter, reprimanding him lovingly for overindulgence in her cookery, walking and riding along the lovely ocean front, partaking of the forbidden fruit of late-evening strolls along the moonlit beach with Walter; and now this.

Where was Walter now? He and Corinne must be back East. What—what—what had been the outraged panorama of his mind that morning after reading her letter? She had hurt him, but not, she told herself, over and over again—lying on her wooden bed, while mosquitoes buzzed outside the netting—so outrageously, so revoltingly, as he had hurt her. His hurt to her had been more than that. It had knocked dead something within her. Hours on end, the morning through, sometimes the midday through, until Freda, or Emma, brought her over a bit of lunch on a tray under a napkin, she lay thus in gnawing retrospect.

“Something is eating you that you are not telling,” Freda blurted out, one high noon, seated on the side of Ray’s bed, watching her lift scrambled egg off the end of her fork and letting the tines click lightly against her teeth after the manner of one who eats absolutely without appetite. “You’re in some kind of a fix.”

“Why, Freda, what kind of a fix?”

“Oh, I don’t mean what you mean. But something terrible is eating you.”

Yes, something terrible, as Freda put it, was eating her. Eating her heart. Eating her will to live. Eating her will to rise to face each day. Now that the reaction following the first excitements of the new environment had set in, it was easier just to lie in the rickety room, with the hot sun sprawling all over the place, her accouterments,
much too elaborate for their surroundings, spread about, and her face, for the most part, buried in the crook of her arm.

“I’ve told you about everything there is to tell at this stage, Freda.”

“About everything?”

“Oh, except just the little things that aren’t worth telling.”

“I don’t want to seem to be pressing you, Ray. Your being here is a boon to us, you know that, but—but what are your plans?”

What are my plans?
What are my plans?
W
HAT ARE MY PLANS?

The words ran in hoops down the corridors of her mind. What—are—my—plans?

“I wish I knew, Freda. I’m just resting, relaxing. Drifting, as the saying goes, until about the twenty-eighth of August. I can’t last at it very long, for money reasons, but it’s all right for a while.”

“God, what a fool you are. Another woman would have salted away. Why, you haven’t even got a diamond ring.”

That was true. Not a bauble. Not an object of value.

“If there is any reason for a woman doing with her life what you have done with yours, it is that. And to think you could have had both. Of course, you know what has happened to Kurt Shendler. You could have had millions.”

“I do think, Freda, and think, and think, and think.”

“My God, what fools women are! I threw away my life, but at least I’ve got my children out of it.”

“I love little Emma, Freda.”

Her face hardened into a bitter mask.

“If life does to her what it’s done to her father and me, I’ll be sorry that I didn’t bear her stillborn.”

“She’s studious, Freda. Did you ever notice that about Emma?”

“Lots of good it will do her. I said to her father last night, as much to see what he would say as anything, I said, ‘Well, Hugo, Emma’s grown up now; way past working-paper age.’ ‘That’s so,’ he said. ‘That will help.’ And goes over and begins practicing on his flute. ‘That’s all you care,’ I said to him. I said, ‘Well, just for your own information, she is going to finish High if she does it over my dead body.’ By that time he’s playing his flute and I’m wasting my breath.”

“Yes, Emma is studious, Freda. When I think that I could have had the advantages of education and didn’t take them! That has always been one of my regrets. I’d like to see Emma have college, too.”

“Yes, college,” said Freda, with the mask clamping down again over her features, “about all the college she’ll ever have, or my boys, is reading the college booklets she has strewn all over the house.”

“You can’t tell. I want to help Emma get an education. Curtis and Kruger don’t seem cut out that way, but somehow Emma does. I haven’t any plans now, but it wouldn’t surprise me if, between now and the end of August, I didn’t make up my mind either to do something that I’m considering at the minute, or go back into business.”

“Say, Ray, you hold your own pretty well, but you’re not such a spring chicken that you can think about supporting anyone besides yourself.”

“I might marry, Freda. That’s one of the things that is on my mind and making me crazy with the need to decide.”

“You mean …”

“I’ve a chance to marry. A good chance.”

“A good chance. You, at your time of life, and you thinking it over.”

“I—you see—it’s like this—I don’t—it sounds funny, as you say, at this time of life, after what I’ve been through, but I don’t care for this party that way, you see, Freda. I guess, as they say in books, I don’t love him. You see?”

“Yes, I see,” said Freda, on a gust of small icy laughter that blew off the edge of her lips. “I see that there are things in this world that are too much for me. Most of life and its way of cheating mortals of its goodies is too much for me; but you—well, you take the cake for being too much for me.”

For a dreadful moment it seemed to Ray that Freda, whose laughter was splashed with a crazy high note, was going to be hysterical, but nothing of the sort. She snatched up the tray with its half-eaten omelet, and went sailing from the room, head up, and shaking her gelatinous hips in a manner calculated to emphasize the overwhelming enigma of life in general and Ray in particular.

Well, she was right. Rattle the entire situation about in the tired box of her brain as she would, hour after hour, day after day, sometimes without rising until it was time to go over to the Hancks’ for supper, the enigma of her predicament grew in oppressiveness.

Just on the basis of what she might do for Emma, made it so doubly worth considering. Sweet girl, who harbored in her heart innocence of the aunt she was daily placing higher and higher upon the pedestal of her young adoration. On the score of the young Emma, and on the score of the open-and-above-board nature of life as it was lived on this straggly street in the dull outskirts of the town, it sometimes seemed to Ray that she even envied Freda. Freda, safe and snug as the wife of the gas-meter reader, and the mother of the children of the gas-meter reader, went about her life in the open fashion that for so many years had been denied Ray. She attended Lutheran Church in that rôle, lorded it over her tradespeople, who somehow did not have toward her the subtle insolence to which Ray was sometimes subjected, and met her children on the fierce possessive basis of motherhood.

To come out in the open like that, to emerge into the easy, sanctioned institution of marriage, was to come out of the deep recesses of a mine.

Mrs. Kurt Shendler. Every time she mentally mouthed it, a thrill raced in chill down her spine, and yet the dull, lethargic days of that long, hot summer, with its reminder of war percolating in occasionally shouted extras, even to the straggling street near the gasworks, marched on, as, with her face in the crook of her arm, she lay beneath the mosquito netting, crushed with inertia.

Emma, who, during the school vacation, tended, for seven hours each day the two small children of a family five blocks away, pale, albino-white, tidy, would come in at five and delight in the business of helping Ray dress. Her nightgowns, rather simple batiste ones which she had purchased in Paris, with their microscopic handwork and ribbon rosettes, were sources of delight. The lace-bordered corsets which Ray wore pulled in tightly at the waistline with heavy pink-silk strings. Ruffled panties, rather antedated now, but which she still wore, petticoats with lace flounces, and corsetcovers of
all-over eyelet-embroidery—all to Emma part and parcel of the luxury of this tall, slender, well-formed, gray-eyed, supernally stylish relative, whose letters from time to time had borne such postmarks as New York, Paris, Aix-les-Bains, Nice, London, and Berlin.

“Aunt Ray, I think you’re just beautiful. M-m-m, let me smell that sachet-bag.”

“You can have it, child.”

“Oh, that’s the sixth present you’ve given me today. This lace petticoat by itself would be enough to make me too happy to stand it. You’ll make it so I can’t dare admire anything you have, Aunt Ray.”

“You’re a sweet child, Emma. I only wish I were in a position to give you more.”

“Why, Aunt Ray, you won’t have anything left, as it is, to pack in your trunk when you go. Only you’re not going ever, are you, Aunt Ray?”

“Why, yes, child, of course. Only not—not right away.”

Little spurts of affection were always cropping out in Emma.

“I just love to touch you, Aunt Ray. I wish every day was a hundred years long, while you are here. When I was blind, Aunt Ray, I used to dress you up all in white, and stand you right in the middle of the darkness, and then it wasn’t so bad.”

It broke her heart into flakes, the thought of those bright-blue eyes ever having been flooded with darkness. It made her so tender to her that no small wonder the child was filled with delight and adoration.

“My little dear, was it so bad?”

“I couldn’t read. I wanted to study for getting into High Preparatory. That made it bad.”

“Would you like to go to college, darling?”

“Would I! Would I! Of course, I mustn’t. Papa can’t afford it, but if only I could be a teacher. You could teach too, Aunt Ray, if you had gone in for a certificate. I’ll bet anything you could teach in any college on art. All you know about Titians and Botticellis and Murillos.”