Back STreet (42 page)

Long summers, with what there was of Walter arranged something like this. Occasionally, of an early Sunday morning, especially if there were houseguests at Seascape, he drove over from Rye before they were up and stirring, and sat for an hour or so, always with the door left open, beside the square table where she was constantly placing cooling soft drinks. Strained visits, with figures constantly moving across the patently left-open door, and the hot smell of sun, soft asphalt, and leather seats of parked automobiles, coming through the lace curtains.

Right! In such a summer, a dog would be a blessed touch of companionship, during days that, for tediousness, could sometimes be trying almost beyond endurance. Relief from them lay in the semiweekly trips to the city, which she took by train, there to meet Walter in the cool, shrouded seclusion of the flat, on several occasions, when it was possible to arrange his affairs so, remaining there over the period of the weekend, while the city streets lay baking and half deserted outside the drawn blinds, and the high tide of her contentment mounted to the stars.

“Walter, let me stay in town this summer. It’s easier for you to come to me here. I will wait. I do not mind the heat. Besides, it is dull and hot for me at White Plains.” She did not add, “And more dangerous.” But it did seem to her that for the sake of their brief and occasional half hours before the open door of the dingy sitting room, the chances they took for being remarked were unnecessary.

“I want you near where I am,” he said doggedly. “I’ve a sense of something like amputation when you are in another town. Part of me is missing.”

That was among the dear things said to her by him which she embalmed in her memory and kept there, as you would a flower in a cake of ice. It made the planning to go to White Plains and the arrangements by telephone for the dreary suite, and the packing away and hanging in camphor balls for a summer that was almost entirely without lure, bearable and even pleasurable. The little dog was going to be a help. He was half shaven, after the manner of French poodles, without pompons above his ankles, and an absurd tuft of pompadour, which had to be caught with a bit of ribbon, to keep a jungle of black wool out of his eyes. Jean Jacques was the name on the considerable pedigree which had come from the fancier’s; but somehow, in the memory of a little pug that was gone and of days that were gone, she found herself rechristening him Babe. For the first little while he slept in the hamper beside her, but then, one night, she wakened to find him standing on his hind legs, scratching at the sheets, to be lifted into bed with her. Thereafter he slept at her feet, always in a position so that, through the covering, the flank of his body pressed hers.

“That is a silly name, Ray,” Walter admonished her once, before he had had time to become accustomed to it. “Call him by his pedigree name or just Fido or something doggish.” She did try for a while, but quickly relapsed into Babe.

“I oughtn’t to do that,” she soliloquized before succumbing. “There is something too just-right about a person like me cooped up in a flat all day with a poodle named Babe.”

Nevertheless, before she left for the country, she was already pressing out his little hair ribbons for him, and keeping them folded
in a glove box, upon which she had outlined in pencil, and then embroidered in black-wool French knots, a poodle.

Once she caught herself talking a lingo to him that went something like this: “Muvver’s angel-sweet companion. Love oo.” And drew up sharply. God, that was awful. “I’ll sell you to the black ragman if ever I catch myself doing that again. May I die with a bubble over my mouth if I ever love you too much. You’re a galoot. Get out!”

He lay with his nose between his paws, and, regarding her, stared, and staring, blinked.

“Wait until I get you to the country, I’ll take you for real walks,” she told him, when conscience smote her at her hurried method of slipping a coat over her negligee and taking him down for a brief run up and down the sidewalk. There was less and less reason for wanting to go out, particularly as late spring set in and the streets became glaring and dusty.

Except for the special foods that needed to be personally shopped for Walter—
Schmierkäse
, gluten bread (almost his sole dietetic precaution, which he had followed since his mother’s death from diabetes), fresh caviar from a certain Madison Avenue dealer—she had learned the practice of telephoning for provisions. She had even learned the saving device of telephoning Altman’s or Lord and Taylor’s for wire shades or cretonne covering for the handkerchief boxes she had lately added to the assortment of small objects she offered, on commission, to the Women’s Exchange.

Depending largely upon the season and its propinquity to holiday time, her income from this indoor work, which in many ways was child’s play so far as actual effort was concerned, averaged about forty dollars a month. Emma, now a sophomore, with advanced standing because of summer extension-work, had written her: “Dearest Aunt Ray, You send me too much. I’ve saved enough out of what is left every month, to live one whole month without your sending me anything. Oh, Aunt Ray, I am so happy here. Señora Gomez thinks I ought to major in Spanish. I am doing so well, too, in it, and the public schools now feature it in their commercial courses, and there is a big demand for teachers
of Spanish. And just think, Aunt Ray, I have you to thank for everything.…”

Silly girl, she was not of blood kin, and yet she seemed to have the family failing of lacking either shrewd or shrewish talent in money matters. Another girl, now, would have pocketed the surplus without a word. There were three hundred dollars besides, salted away in a savings bank for Emma. It was part of the sum she had won on the New Orleans tip from Greta, and, on the strength of it, had not ventured to the local tracks any more that season.

“Dear Emma,” Ray wrote back, “I want you to take the extra money and buy yourself a nice spring outfit. The snapshot of you on the dormitory steps is good, but I do not like that middy-blouse on you. Buy yourself a good-quality coat-suit, with one of those tricorn sailor hats that are so stylish this season. I will make you two hemstitched dimity blouses with corset covers. Keep yourself neat and study hard. Remember, no one can ever take away your education, once you get it. Knowledge is power. Your loving Aunt Ray.”

She made no secret of this, reciting to Walter extracts of Emma’s little letters as they came from time to time, and showing him the snapshot of the dormitory steps. “She is not pretty, Walter, in the ordinary sense of the word, but just a fine good girl, and sweet.” It was remarkable the consistency with which his interest failed to awaken.

“That’s fine. Looks like a mighty nice girl.” Not making even the pretense of putting on his glasses, without which he had practically no reading vision left.

Sometimes it seemed to her that he was not even clear as to who Emma was. Some little niece out West, for whom she had a soft spot, was probably what lay lightly lodged in his memory when there arose the subject of Emma.

Well, it was just as well. Emma was the only concern she had that was privately her own. Emma, and now Babe. This cheeky little fellow, the poodle, was possessed of an appetite ridiculous for so small a dog. He liked cheesecake! Too cute. Yessir, ate greedily of the large Torten she was in the habit of keeping on hand
for Walter. And another thing he shared with him was his very special appetite for smelts, prepared the way they used to fry them Over-the-Rhine, in breadcrumbs and hot butter. Once she had offered him, off the tip of a fork, a Lynnhaven oyster, another preference of Walter’s, and galumph, down it had gone! Funniest little fellow.…

The move to the country that summer came a month earlier than usual, because there was some talk of Walter’s taking August to go to Aix-les-Bains for the cure. Three weeks a year at the French spa, he declared, could either drive out, or back into the recesses of his bones, for the period of the winter at least, the demon rheumatism. Corinne, of late, had been taking the treatment too, for calcium deposits along her knuckles, which caused them to pain and swell slightly.

“Walter, you eat too much rich food. I cannot watch over you at home and at banquets, but I think I’ll cut down some of your favorite meat dishes here. Those heavy steaks and pot roasts, for instance.”

“Nonsense,” he said, never able to bear the implication of his food indulgence. “I can remember digestive attacks way back in my teens, and I’ve been rheumatic since I was twenty. My father was full of it.”

“No reason you should be.”

“Don’t concern yourself about things you don’t understand, Ray. I have a doctor to advise me about my health. If you find cooking for me a hardship, come out and say so.”

She was so hurt it was a full minute before she could trust herself to reply.

“Why, Walter, I didn’t mean …”

“Of course you didn’t. You never do. Only the next time think before you speak. One would think, to hear you, that I’m a gormand.…”

“I only meant, dear …”

“It’s all right. Forget it.”

She could not. Tears pressed against her throat for the remainder of the evening, and the marvel of it was, that five minutes afterward
he was eating, with unassailed relish, the heavy rich foods she had prepared for him, and later, while she pored with him for hours over art catalogues and the annotations for a public address, her impulse persisted to stretch out her arms on the table, lay her head into them, and cry. Which she did not do.

That summer, Richard Saxel had an aluminum-colored Kurt-Sussex roadster, which he drove like a streak about the countryside, and which had come to be a familiar sight in White Plains, whizzing along, usually filled with youth, and the spray of silver sirens on its running board bleating a four-tone chord.

Rushing to her window at the first remote sound of this silver spray of noises, Ray could see the car whizz by her hotel. Frequently, too, it drew up before Doney’s Ice-Cream Parlor across the way, a resort popular with the youth of miles around. Sometimes Richard, in white flannel trousers and a pull-on sweater, would hop out, and then, off again in his car, which started almost before he was seated. He was undoubtedly the handsome one of the family, slim and far more impressive in his dark, tan beauty than Irma, who was just plump and pretty.

Sometimes the roaster was so crowded that youngsters sat piled on one another’s laps, with tennis rackets propped in clusters between them. On two occasions, Corinne, with her beautiful white waved hair uncovered and trim under a net, and her soft summer dress at variance with the sweaters and togs of the girls and boys, had been in the car. The youngsters had hopped out and stood at attention while her son helped her from the running board. They had swept her into the ice cream parlor in a little circle of deference, her son standing to hold the screen door open, and popping
in after, on a sharp slam. There had been pearls, as usual, on her placid breast, and to Ray, even from behind the lace curtains in her room of the hotel, the detail of monogram on the cushion at her empty place in the automobile, the gray felt footrest on the floor, her folded wrap of gray cloth and chinchilla thrown across the nickel bar, were testimonial, somehow, to the ordered rightness that had marked this life.

It was strange, standing behind the Nottingham-lace curtains of that snide hot room, on the snide hot street, gazing across at a car thus strewn with these inanimate objects of Corinne. She so seldom moved with the dimension of a human being, in Ray’s imagination. She was just there, pasted like a dominating paper doll in the foreground of everything pertaining to existence.

The second time that Corinne arrived at the ice cream parlor, there were Irma and Arnold also in the car. It reminded her somehow of the portrait that had once appeared in the
Times
, only, of course, they were not grouped, and the children, except Arnold, were grown, and Richard, it was fair to assume, who had worn knickerbockers back in that portrait, must now be in town with his father at the banking house.

From behind the lace curtains it was impossible to get a full glance at Arnold, whom she had never seen before. But it was difficult to conceive that the outline of a small boy in white linen knickerbockers and the sweater with some childish design down the front was the symbol of the knife that had turned and turned in her heart those years ago.…

In many ways, it was the most difficult summer of all, what with Richard rampant over the country in his Kurt-Sussex and the possibility of encountering him on all sides. If you so much as took a walk or an ice cream soda, or ventured to the beach at Rye, there was always the possibility of that silver, shining, boat-shaped car, bearing the young Richard at its prow, and, likely as not, a member or members of his family.

It made venturing away from the short radius of the town itself, an indiscretion. More and more it began to seem unlikely to Ray that here, there, everywhere, at concerts, theaters, balconies of
banquet halls, public meetings where Walter appeared, spas, European as well as American, gaming tables, casinos, streets adjoining the large hotels where the Saxels were put up, the imprint of her figure had not, by now, somehow begun to sink into the family consciousness. If not into the untroubled, pampered consciousness of Corinne herself, at least into the alert retinas of the children’s friends. This tall, gaunt, back-street figure, moving solitarily along the edges of the scene! As the unthinkable question, What would happen, if—persisted more than usual, Ray’s discretion began to overtop even Walter’s.

One night something occurred at a huge charity fête, held on the lawns of the magnificent Selfridge estates at Greenwich, that caused her heart to stop in its beat.

Plans were afoot for a nonsectarian children’s hospital at Percheon that was to surpass in size, equipment, modern scientific facilities, anything hitherto attempted in either Europe or America. Five sectarian philanthropic organizations had joined forces to form a board of trustees, of which Walter was a member. The Selfridge estates, father’s and son’s adjoining, comprised acreage of vast lawn and woodland, an ideal setting for a charity fête. Charge of admission was nominal, one dollar, although the metropolitan press spread itself at length over ten members of the Selfridge family walking out of one gate of their estate in order that they might enter another, at an entrance fee of one thousand dollars each. Ices were sold from booths; and bricks in the contemplated hospital, going like proverbial hotcakes, were hawked on all sides by young girls carrying brick-shaped coupons in baskets flung by ribbons over their shoulders. From a platform strung with lanterns, professional entertainment and speeches were offered.