Back STreet (48 page)

Once more in the New York flat, with the sheetings removed from the furniture and the scores of tiny knickknacks abroad once more over the table and mantel tops—the graduated row of imitation-ivory elephants, the gilt filigree parlor set the size of a postage stamp, the three monkeys who could not hear, see, or speak. Souvenir cups and saucers. Bisque figures. Plaster Lion of Lucerne. Gilt Eiffel Tower. Vulgar little souvenir chamber pots and naughty naked little dolls stepping into bathtubs. A layout that had not changed with the years, except that the once modern apartment building had slid back into the quiet limbo of old-fashioned walk-up. The long, dim hallways, lighted now by electric bulbs that had been superimposed on the gas-fixtures, with their pressed-leatherette wallpapers, their disinfectant smells, belonged to an era in apartment-house building that was as dated as bustles or hitching posts.

Not-so-tenderloin flats, some wag had christened the somber old five-storied red-brick relic of the early era of apartment buildings. That would have seemed strange to Ray, had she heard it, because, as a matter of fact, precious little of the old fancy feeling to the place survived; precious little of the old visiting back and forth,
with coats flung on over wrappers. Except for one or two families, and there were family tenants now, with whom she had bowing acquaintance as she passed their doorways on her way to take the Babe for an airing, and a Mrs. Hopper on the top floor, with whom she occasionally went to the races, the days of easy informality were gone.

It made time a little longer and a little lonelier, and the closer confinement which she practiced, as the result of what would always remain to her the calamity of the interview with Richard, a little more trying.

The Babe and solitaire helped, and also a new kindness in Walter, which made the horrid occurrence in that back-street hotel at Aix as definite a milestone in their relationship as the affair at Youngstown.

“You overestimate things, Ray,” he assured her when she complained of a nervousness induced by too much indoors. “I don’t say go show yourself in the first tier of the Metropolitan Opera House, but there is no reason why you cannot go about practically as you have always done. Not to occasions of which I happen to be a part, anymore, but you’ve plenty of leeway left. That is the trouble with you women. Logic doesn’t come naturally to you.”

“I do overdo it, I know. And now that Irma is married you’d think I’d feel a little easier, wouldn’t you? But curious thing is, I just have a horror of one of these days walking into her and her husband.”

“You leave any worrying there is to be done about my children to me. Don’t you worry either that another one of them will ever interfere. Richard has reason to know now that this domain of my life is mine! There is only one worry we need have, Ray. Hurting her—would be a calamity.”

“But, Walter—”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

She had never discussed with him what had transpired that day between her and Richard. She had never been able to deduce how much he knew of what a wagging world knew. She had not even
been told of what must have been his subsequent interview with his son. It was as if an unmade bed had been spread over with a smoothed coverlet.

“I’m nervous, Walter. I smoke too much, but it helps,” was as much as she could ever bring herself to say on opening the subject.

Once or twice this had evoked discussion, quickly laid by him. For the most part, except for the almost insane confinement to home, actually maneuvering to do her marketing and walking out with the Babe after dark, and sometimes, for days on end, not even venturing that far, but tipping the West Indian hallboy to take out the Babe, she kept up a pretty good front all right. And, no doubt about it, as if cognizant of all this, Walter was gentler.

“Never you mind, Ray. This much I’ve made up my mind to. This coming summer we’re going to take that Switzerland trip together; ours every minute of the time, just the way I’ve been planning it for years. This summer it is coming off. Arnold doesn’t seem to want to go to camp again, and his mother has about decided to go with him and the Friedlander aunts to the Canadian Rockies. While they’re on that trip it will be three weeks at Aix and two weeks in Switzerland for us. Pretty nice?”

“Oh, Walter—pretty nice! Heaven!” This plan, perennially made, perennially broken, was perennially a fresh one of no antecedent.

“I want Arnold to see America, first. Richard and Irma had skied in the Alps and motored in the Dolomites before ever they saw the Rockies. Arnold is more American in lots of ways than his brother. Can’t so much as get him on a Shetland pony, no matter how much he may admire the polo trophies his brother has won; but he’s got his heart set on riding ranges and ranches, and for a little boy that started out to be delicate and too sensitive, we feel pretty fine about that. Corinne is going to stop off with him at some of those Mexican ranches—no dude ones, either. Arnold may not develop into a polo player, but I sometimes suspect him of being just a bit poetic. Fine, if he doesn’t let it throw him out of balance.”

But just the same, it seemed to Ray she had never seen him
more prideful than he was that same autumn, when Richard’s polo team, a Long Island country-club aggregation of which he was captain, won an important international amateur match.

“It’s not only because it is a distinguished polo victory, but the boy is part of his horse. Good Lord, even his mother, who turns her head away most of the time for fear he’ll crash, sat motionless through the match. Wish you didn’t feel so squeamish about appearing around places, Ray. Like for you to have seen that boy ride.”

She should have liked it too, although even to visualize herself there, was to induce nervousness almost unbearable.

Irma and her husband would have been there, and young Arnold, whom she had never seen except as a small child that day in the automobile at White Plains. And Corinne.

Why, my whole destiny hangs on the chance of somebody happening to say within her hearing: “There she is. Saxel’s shadow!” Every second, every hour, every day her destiny was hanging on that possible eventuality. That was what made the nervousness something to be jammed back like a jack in its box. What if Corinne should come to know? What if? What then? A thousand times a week she asked herself that question. What then? What terrible, indomitable, admirable, cruel, relentless clan-thing would rise in Walter then? The gates of his race would swing together, once the issue came, shutting him and Corinne in, and her out, just as they had swung twenty-five years ago, when there came thundering the need of decision between a Trauer and a Schmidt.

Fear made it easy to be cautious almost to the point of fanaticism. “You’ll make yourself sick,” Mrs. Hopper was always admonishing her, on those occasions when she came importuning her to accompany her to the races, or here and there about the town. Matinées. Luncheon at the hotels. Motion-picture theaters. “Too much confinement indoors softens the bones—and the character. Humans weren’t made to live like that. I’d like to see myself huck in the house for any man.…”

Sometimes, never betting more than five or ten dollars, and not
infrequently coming home with a killing that amounted to forty or fifty, she did bestir herself to accompany Mrs. Hopper, who drove a small roadster manufactured by the firm for which her “friend” was city manager.

Warm afternoons at Belmont Park or Aqueduct were pleasant. You came to know dozens of the women habitués by sight. There were the bright, gilded followers of the stereotyped variety, who wrote substantial bets and sent them down by the commissioners who circulated the grandstand between events, as aids chiefly to the women, who were not allowed to go into the betting paddocks.

But, for the most part, the women habitués who frequented the races as a matter of livelihood and routine were, with exceptions, rather a plucked-looking lot. Women with rouged wrinkles, large, silver-plated mesh bags, and about their eyes and lips, somehow, a look of fever.

“You cannot beat this game,” they were fond of confiding to one another, as, day after day, season after season, year after year, city after city, they continued to foster the feverish dream of one day beating it.

One day, three or four of them went home with Mrs. Hopper in her roadster, and because, when they arrived, her flat was infested with painters, they adjourned to Ray’s, where she served beer and homemade cinnamon-rolls and some of the imported cervelat sausage she kept on hand for Walter.

They sat about the table, five of them, in their bird’s-nest hats, face-veils, feather boas, and their silver-plated mesh bags clutched, even while they drank. It was easy company.

It’s a goddam game to even eke a living out of.

If I could sew a straight seam I’d rather dressmake than follow the best horse running.

The son-of-a-bitch knew his tip had been scratched when he sold it to me.

Ladies, that jockey wasn’t even sweating at the armpits.…

Glancing up as she sat there drinking beer and eating cervelat with them, she saw the mirror above the mantelpiece reflecting the scene with merciless fidelity. A circle of withering women with
faces that crawled with lines. Women whose gallantly assembled plumage was brighter than their eyes or skins. And of them, so that she in no particular wise stood out differentiated, except for the still impeccable grace of her carriage, Ray herself.

“I am one of these. I must look like one of these women who all seem to have the lean faces of birds with bright eyes and wet broken feathers. I look like a bird. I am necky and beaky and terribly bright-haired, like these women. Why should I be any different? …”

Nevertheless, when they left, she began to tinker about with her hair, preparing a complicated shampoo and henna-rinse, which she had learned to administer to herself after an expensive series of instructions at a hairdressing parlor.

There must be some way to avoid the harsh greenish glitter to dyed graying hair when what you merely wanted was to dye it back to its original tints.

Next evening, for the first time, Walter observed: “Are you blondining your hair? Looks like the devil. Why do you women, the minute you get along a little in years, think you need to turn blonde?”

She wanted to say: “But, Walter, if I didn’t do that I would be gray. You wouldn’t want that, would you?”

Somehow, though, she could not bring herself to tell him that, and so she just sat and glittered.

It was around this period that there came a letter from Emma.

“Dearest Aunt Ray. Commencement is May twenty-seventh. I know it will please you to know that I graduate cum laude and already have a teaching-position in the first-year Spanish and history department of the high school of Newcastle, which is a town of about fifteen thousand inhabitants, not far from Indianapolis, and said to be in a very fine agricultural belt. The salary is sixty-five dollars a month to start, but that is more than it sounds, because I am informed by the Teachers’ Agency that splendid room and board can be obtained in one of the first-class private homes of the town for seven dollars a week.

“I know it will make you very happy, after all you have done for me, to see me not only beginning to be in a position to help Mama
and Papa and the children, but some day to repay you, dear Aunt Ray, for all you have done.

“Oh, Aunt, if only you could come to my commencement and see me graduate! I think that would make me the happiest girl in the world. We are a class of twenty-two, and it is to be quite an unusual commencement this year, because Shendler Hall is to be dedicated, and Mr. Kurt Shendler, the automobile magnate who donated it and who has done so much for the college, is to be present, and we are all looking forward to a stirring occasion.

“Thank you again for the extra twenty-five dollars you sent me last month, dear Aunt. Mama is coming and perhaps Curtis, because knowing you would want me to, I sent her that money for the trip.

“Oh, Aunt Ray, do try and come. Your appreciative niece, Emma.”

Why not? The prospect caught her up in a gale of excitement. See Emma graduate! Kurt would be there. Dear old Kurt, for whom she had not a regret; only the warm desire for the thrill of reunion with a dear friend. He had written her in that vein after the debacle of her behavior at Youngstown. “I understand and shall always regard you as my friend,” he had written. And he would. That was Kurt all over. The idea of attending Emma’s commencement grew, and made her somehow feel ashamed of the eagerness that crowded over her.

It would be spring at Miami, and from the booklets and pamphlets which Emma had sent her from time to time, beautiful old trees lined the brick walks, and the college buildings themselves were ivy-grown, and she cudgeled her brain to remember whether it was Students’ Hall at Miami or one of the institutions in the scores of catalogues she had pored over during the period when Richard was making choice of a university, that had a superb oak tree with an iron fence around it and a brass plate attached, proclaiming this fine old veteran to be over one hundred and fifty years old.

There would be girls in white dresses under black cap and gown, and boys in those absurd little dots of caps, and she would share
with Freda the distinction of having claim to the sweet Emma Hanck, who was graduating cum laude.

“Walter,” she asked him, after he had finished declaiming into the mirror an address which she had assembled and typed for him to deliver before a large noonday organization of Newark businessmen, “Walter, would you mind if I went out to Miami to Emma’s graduation?”

“Went where?”

It was as if he could never identify, at first mention, this niece.

“Emma. Emma Hanck. My stepsister’s girl. She’s graduating from Miami, cum laude. I’d kind of like to go, Walter.”

“It’s all right with me,” he said briskly. And then, as if the idea had penetrated after the words, paused and regarded her.

“Leave me?”

“Silly, just for four or five days.”

“Why, of course.” But even as he spoke, something in his voice was dropping. “Just you go.”