Back STreet (39 page)

“Ed! Oh, my poor Ed! Of course I didn’t know. You’ll have to tell me all about it first chance.”

“Well, same old Ray. Give me half a chance and I’ll stand here airing my troubles to you until the crack of dawn. Run along home, girl, and meet me in the hotel lobby at eight. I’d like mighty well to tell you about that boy of mine, one of these days, if you’ll listen. Blow of my life, Ray.”

The party was all that she remembered such parties to have been back in the old days on those occasions when she had found herself in the suite of “one of the girls.” A handful of drummers in shirtsleeves, cigars oblique on their lips, and the girls, usually elaborate creatures, either in evening-dress or strictly proper negligee. A green-baize table. Drinks. Too much gaslight or electricity. A “kitty” for the elaborate supper of salads and sandwiches presently to be served, and almost invariably an upright piano in one corner for those of the girls who did “turns.”

Well, what of it? What had she to lose? Off with the old, not yet on with the new. Not yet! At least not for a few days.

Three days later there would come into town, doubtless to this very hotel, a heavy-set, sandy-colored fellow, with fine pigskin luggage and a long Kurt-Sussex car, about which a knot of pedestrians would always be gathering as it stood at the curb, while another
knot of reporters waited to interview the “Detroit automobile magnate, honor guest at Youngstown’s opening of the Chamber of Commerce.”

Under the very roof where she was now sitting playing low-ante poker, Kurt, in three days, would be unpacking his pigskin valise of its personal miscellany. Shaving-mug. Military brushes. Articles of clothing. Pajamas. There would emerge from out of the accouterments of linen duster, good checked suit, the Kurt to whom she, Ray Schmidt, must surrender.…

Curious, how suddenly, sitting there holding her five cards behind her stack of red and blue and white chips, the admission, induced by the thought of him under that very same roof, was flooding over her. Kurt, the dear good friend, was one matter. Kurt, the husband—with whom she must presently share hotel suites—

She had known once, back in the Cincinnati days, the legend of a Winton Place girl who had fled from the hotel on her wedding night and never been seen thereafter. Revulsion had put courage into the heart and wings on the feet of that girl. Revulsion would slay her, Ray, that way—revulsion of Kurt—

“I—I’m sorry,” she said, and pushed out her chips toward the center of the table. “I—I don’t think I feel very well. It’s the heat. I shouldn’t have come. Not well all day. Please—please—no, Ed. If you try to take me home, I’ll not go. I tell you I’m all right. It’s just that I’m done-up with this heat. The streetcar in front of the hotel takes me right to my door. Please let me go—alone—”

There were the usual twitterings of the girls, the offices of the men, the kindly concerns.

“Well, let me take you as far as the car, anyway.”

“No. No. I am all right, I tell you.”

“Take a swallow of that Scotch, dearie, it will brace you.”

“No, please.”

“Come, Ray, you hadn’t ought to go home alone this time of night.”

“I tell you I’m all right. It’s just the heat.”

“Suck a piece of ice, dearie.”

“Yes, thanks. I’m so sorry—everybody. Good night—all right now. Feel fine.”

How good to be alone! To be free to walk all the way home—all the miles—under the stars—alone—

In the lobby though, as she stepped out of the elevator, a figure with traveling bags in a huddle around his feet was leaning over the telephone operator’s desk.

“They must have a telephone. Tell Central the name is Hanck. Hugo Hanck. He works for the gas company. Twelve twenty-one Topeka Avenue. Do your best, miss, to check up on their telephone, or the one nearest to them. I must locate this party.”

“Here I am, Walter,” she said to him quietly. “Here I am.”

One knew better than to attempt to tamper with the stemming of tides or oceans or gales; and this thing in her for Walter was ocean and gale. It swept her and there was that. Pride, recriminations, were straws upon the tide. She knew what she was doing was unprideful and turning these weary months into waste, and yet, somehow, had not at her command the psychological tools to follow up her advantage.

She had never quite realized, even with all the weariness of the weary passage of the intervening time until she saw his back hunched there across the counter of the telephone desk, just what a dry lake-bottom life had become, and now there were gushing through her, once more, filling and warming her veins, the released streams of life.

There might be subtle ways of sex and behavior to conceal all this, but they were not her ways. She wanted no penance. The heart flowed with the pathos of his travel-stained eyes and the droop of fatigue around his mouth. And if those were not penance enough, there had been tears in his eyes that instant he had swung around to face her there at the telephone desk.

Then and there he had no terms to demand or offer, no subterfuge to attempt, or advantage to follow up.

“How could you do such a thing to me, Ray? My God, how could you?”

They were seated in an all-night oyster bar across the street from the hotel, where there would be no closing hour to restrict talk.

“Don’t ask me that, Walter, any more than you’d ask a crazed person to explain a deed.”

“I’ll never, to my dying day, forget that afternoon when I walked into the Medes and the clerk handed me your note. It’s a wonder I didn’t drop dead, Ray.”

“Oh, my poor boy! Oh, my poor boy! Oh, my dear boy!” were the phrases that were being borne along the quick stream of her inner sobbing; but she just sat twisting her hands and twisting her lips against the need not to cry there in the incandescent unprivacy of the oyster bar.

“I couldn’t have done that to you, Ray, no matter what. Whatever good my trip to Mount Clemens may have done me up to then, I returned to New York a sicker man than I left it; digestion gone, twinges back; a wreck.”

Then he had not remained. He had been shot to pieces. (Oh, my boy—my dearest boy!)

“I know now what it means to suffer like a dog in a gutter. You’ve taught me that, Ray, if it gives you any satisfaction to know it.”

It should! It must! Now was the time to follow up an advantage. An incredible undreamed advantage. He was humbled, no doubt of that. Frightened too. Walter needed her! The thing to do now was to keep a stiff upper lip against the flooding tenderness, and demand! How often the girls had said it. The more you demand, the more they respect you. It was a weakness to keep feeling the mind skid off the rail of practicality into the marsh of encroaching tenderness. Now was the moment of advantage. Demand! There were sore hurt places deep down in her heart. Time and time again, the girls, talking among themselves, had asked: “What about you? Suppose a taxicab were to run over him? What about you, who have given the best years of your life? Is your bread buttered? Has he settled on you? Is there a clause in his will? Fool! Fool! He won’t thank you. He will think less of you. Fool. Fool. Fool.”

“It’s been hell, Ray, that’s what it’s been. We took a house at Deal Beach after we got back, and the Friedlander girls joined us
with the children there. That left me free to stay in town when I wanted. To walk the streets in torment when I wanted. To go to the flat and suffer like the dog that you wanted me to be.”

The flat! Then he hadn’t broken it up. It was there, waiting. Dear, stuffy, poky little heaven—oh, my dear—

“What’s the use going into it all? I don’t know, Ray, about women. I suppose you’re within your rights. I suppose the situation was one to justify what you did. God knows, I don’t profess to understand the complicated workings of the whole business. I only know that after all these years, accommodating ourselves as we have to what is what, it seemed to me, well, it couldn’t occur to me that anything in one half of my life could have anything to do with your half. You’re there. That half is yours. It is as if for you the other half didn’t exist. My duty lies in that half just as certain as my duty lies in your half.… That’s not a bad religion, Ray. Doing my duty all round—”

(Now, now was the time! Yes, what of your obligations to me? To me who have given the best of my life. To me, who am about to continue to throw my life to the winds in order to live on the fringe of yours. What about me, Walter? Must I swallow not only the degradation, which is a lump in my throat—in my being—at this minute, but every lack of consideration as well? What about me, Walter?)

Curious that the words lay unspoken behind two lips that were splinters of wood that would not open. (What about me, Walter? Me. Me. Me.)

“I’ve been lax in lots of ways, Ray. It usually happens so with a woman as wonderful as you are. A man knows he’s not worthy and stops trying.”

(What a darling thing to say.)

“I’ve made up my mind along certain lines, though. God knows there never was a less calculating woman than you. Too little so, for your own good. But I know there are times you must have asked yourself, Ray, just what provision is there for you in my affairs? As a matter of fact, so far as my will goes, there isn’t any. Not that the thought hasn’t come to me time and time again! It’s been because
of the delicacy of the situation. How to write you into such a document. Understand? But I’m going to fix all that now, Ray. It’s not fair to you and it’s not fair to my feelings in the matter of you. Life is uncertain. You’re entitled to a sense of security in case anything should happen to me. Problem is, just how to go about it, but I’m going to see a certain lawyer in regard to it right off. That’s all that kept me shy of the whole thing this long time. Delicate matter writing you into my will. But don’t you worry, Ray. I’d as soon cut off my right hand as see you suffer.…”

“Walter, don’t go on, darling. It hurts me so. It twists the heart out of me. I don’t want anything except—oh, you’ll never know what it has been—these weeks—these months—these eternities. If I never knew it before, I know it now. Anything that is right to you, is right to me. It’s because I love you so terribly, so senselessly, I guess, that I seem to want rights, observances, conditions that I haven’t the right to want. Only go on continuing to need me in your life, Walter, as I continue to need you. That is all I have a right to ask or expect. I see that now.”

“Is it enough, Ray, that I am out here?”

“Yes, Walter.”

“That I have suffered—”

“Yes, Walter.”

“That I mean to try and do everything within reason that you need and want?”

“Yes, Walter.”

“That there are certain—er—a—aspects of life—you must have the wisdom to understand and that do not touch you at all?”

“Yes, Walter.”

“You’ve often said yourself, Ray, about—about Corinne—it’s our homemade ethics, I guess, but it always helps me—you’ve wanted as much as I, that she—she shouldn’t ever be hurt—”

“I have.”

“Then remember that, when certain feelings overtake you. It ought to be a satisfaction to you, Ray, instead of feeling as you do—”

“Oh, Walter, you don’t understand. You don’t understand.”

“Corinne is not complex, Ray. She is as nearly a happy woman
as it is possible for a woman to be, and that, in the face of the fact that you and I still have each other. Isn’t that—”

“Oh, it is! It is!”

“She has everything, so far as she knows. The deceit hurts us more than her innocence of what is going on could possibly ever hurt her. That is all we need to watch, Ray, you have said so yourself a thousand times, that we hurt no one. That may not always hold water as a text; but since I need you, Ray, with a need that is making me very humble tonight, it is better than no text.”

“It is mine too, Walter, to get what we can without hurting, only—”

“No only’s now. We’re agreed on that. It isn’t only in my daily life, Ray, that your being out of it has left such a terrible hole. I need you as my sounding board. I need to think out loud to you. In my work, in my affairs, even in matters concerning my children, it helps me make decisions to have you there—always—no matter where I am. I need you because you are not only one thing, but because you are everything, besides. Come back to me, Ray.”

She knew she was going to say it, and she was glad she was going to say it, and she wanted to hurry to say it before the tears might blur it. Madness, perhaps, to say it, but dear beyond telling in the saying.

“My dear darling, bless you for forgiving and taking me back.”

It seemed almost yesterday that she had sat embroidering, for Richard’s fourteenth birthday, the names of the states on the frame that was to contain the twenty-eight Presidents from Washington to Wilson, and now here were nearly three additional presidential terms rolled around and Richard about to be twenty-one.

This fact, combined with his impending graduation from Yale, was exciting Walter more than anything she could remember since the quick days of reorganization and immense business adjustments that had followed the Armistice.

Well, it was no small thing, this coming-of-age of the apple of Walter’s eye, a boy to be proud of, even in a family where every child had so normally thrived and developed! Irma, at nineteen, from occasional glimpses and photographs, filled with the promise of an alien, unoriental beauty that was neither Friedlander, Trauer, nor Saxel, was already carrying her small head on her shoulders as if it were a pail brimful with water. And then, across the wide gap, the five-year-old Arnold. From a newspaper-reproduction of a group portrait by Halmi, of Corinne and her children, painted when Richard was eighteen and Arnold two, Ray had cut out the heads and shoulders of all three of the children, mounting them in a small album. From time to time there were additions to this collection, particularly as Richard began to do conspicuous things on the polo- and debating-teams at college; and at sixteen, Irma’s photograph
as Celia in the Spenser School production of “As You Like It” had already appeared in the
Spur
.