Back STreet (5 page)

Was there ever a man of Schmidt’s grotesque innocence? Sex was something that caused two people to marry, in order to enjoy desires that were thus legitimized.

Some day Ray would marry. Until then, complications, if they happened at all, were something that occurred to other people’s children, and in the headlines of newspapers, from which Ray was somehow immune.

The way in which he sat there, informing her that an old roué, sixty if a day, married, a grandfather, had been sniffing around for the purpose of taking her to the baseball, the races, the bowling-alley, or Over-the-Rhine! Was there ever such insulation from certain realizations of life? It made you wonder that he had ever reached the point of marriage himself. His mind must have worked so simply. If at all.

A man had natural desires. He married a woman, usually with fewer of those desires, but acquiescence. Then home, reproduction, and family. Irregularities in this scheme were something that occurred, the town was filled with them, of course, but outside the wide arc of general conformity. Ray would marry the regular way. He hoped not soon. At least, he would have hoped, if underneath the thick cuticle of complacency anything about these taken-for-granted aspects of life had been called to his attention.

“Papa,” she said suddenly, placing her hand over his, “Papa, do you ever think of me and the MacQuirks of this world?”

His lack of understanding was so complete that he reconstructed what he had heard into what he thought she meant.

“He hung around the store, waiting, went over to the Stag, and then dropped in again to see if you had come back. He was looking
for good company,” said Adolph Schmidt, and regarded his daughter with the crinkles in his forehead moving up and down. His way of laughing.

For a moment her energy quailed before the magnitude of his imperturbability.

“Papa, now listen.”

He pinched her cheek.

“Now listen. I want to ask you something. Terribly.”

“
Und so weiter.
”

“I sometimes get to thinking, Father. I sometimes get to thinking what this town must think of me.”

“This town?”

“Yes. The men around it and the men who come to it from other towns.”

“What should they think?”

“Well, what would you think, Pa, say if you were MacQuirk or Prothero or just any one of a dozen boys who hang around the Stag a lot? What would you think if you were one of those fellows, and I was a girl like me? Just a regular Cincinnati girl, born and raised here, Lutheran, going to school here, living at home with my folks, going down to the business since my second year High and—well, running around the way I do. What would you think?”

“Think?” he said, and leaned over to enclose each cheek in a pinch of his chubby thumb and forefinger. “I’d think I was a lucky man to get the company of Ray Schmidt.”

“What else would you think?”

“I’d think I’d never seen a girl I think so fine and pretty.”

“Papa, try not to be yourself when you think. Just think as if you were Mac or Prothero or a fellow loafing outside the Stag.”

“That is nonsense. How can I think what I would think, if it was not me thinking?”

“Would you think I was a bad girl, Pa? Fly, or dirty?”

He looked at her for the first time with something like a shocked attention and paused in the act of biting down into pumpernickel.

“
Was sagst du?
”

“You know. That I wasn’t—good?”

His face fell into pleats of helplessness, his jaw loosened, his eyes became the mute pleading ones of a spaniel.

“You want to make me talk nonsense?”

“But, Pa, did it ever occur to you that perhaps, as Tagenhorst says, you trust me too much?”

“A woman trying to make a good stepmother of herself don’t dare to trust for fear it will look careless.”

“Doesn’t it occur to you, Pa, that all these fellows who take me out—Over-the-Rhine—Hayden’s—races—that some of them, most of them, maybe all, except home boys like Kurt, look at me as if I were—just so much flesh, Papa? Flesh that perhaps they can sleep with.…”

He made a noise of strangulation and began to twist his neck in its low halter of a collar like a turtle giving evidence of distress in its shell.

“What are you talking about? You want to make me crazy? Has anything happened that makes you want to make me crazy?” He began to make small crying sounds in a manner she had never beheld except on a day she dimly remembered, when the oblong shadow of her mother’s bier had lain down the center of the very room in which they were sitting. Soft bleats of sound that somehow corresponded with the falling of his face into the loose laps of flesh. She wanted to hush him, at any price, back into his unassailed complacency.

“Can’t you take a joke, Father?”

“Don’t ever,” he said to her in almost the first admonition she could remember, “don’t ever let me hear you talk like that again. Don’t ever.”

“I was only foolish, Papa,” she repeated, against the flash of something she had seen dart in among the pleats of his face. “For goodness’ sakes, don’t have a conniption fit over nothing.”

Ugly joking. What had got into this girl who was his daughter and yet at the same time reminded him of his mother, who had died forty years before in Mainz? What in the world had got into her? Women got nerves.…

“Drink this coffee, Father, and forget it.”

Funny thing had happened to him. Felt as if he had just had a chill. Perhaps he had.

“I think maybe I’ve caught a cold.”

“Tagenhorst ought not to bank the fire before she goes up to bed. She ought to know you mustn’t sit around in the cold. You tell her, Pa. She won’t take it from me.”

“Don’t ever talk ugly like this to me again, Ray.”

“Papa dear, I won’t,” she said, and crossed over and stood behind his chair and placed her lips to the smooth dome of his head, feeling all over again her impulse to cry over him. “Come up to bed.”

He creaked out of his chair, still unable to be certain that his curious unease had been chill.

“I forgot to tell you Fred Hecker was here after supper to know if you will ride with him on his tandem out to the zoo Sunday morning.”

“I can’t. I promised Kurt I’d go over to the shop with him Sunday morning and balance his books. Did I tell you Kurt and Eddie Winton are trying to rent a store in Poorman’s Block, and sell bicycles as well as repair them? Sounds good, doesn’t it, Pa?”

“That is sound. Like Kurt. There’s a big future in bicycles, the way everybody has got the bug for running around quick, as if almost everything in life wouldn’t keep until a little later.”

“I wonder how many in this town would believe, Pa, that Kurt Shendler is the only fellow who has ever, in my whole life, asked me to marry him.…”

He turned to regard her, as he limped his great overweight body out of that dining room of gaslit murk, into which swam greasily a black-oak sideboard freighted with pressed glass, a wire flowerpot stand of half-asphyxiated geraniums, a flock of ten black-oak chairs around a table still spread with a supper cloth upon which there were stains.

“Don’t fiddle around waiting for something better than Kurt, when it’s just like life to hand you something worse. I’m right, daughter?”

She leaned over to kiss him, as he grasped the newel post for the first slow hoist of his vast body up the stairway.

“Good night,
Schnucke
,” she said, giving him a boost for the first step, which seemed too hard for him.

That was the night, peacefully, without so much as a rattle of breathing loud enough to awaken Tagenhorst, that Adolph Schmidt, dearly beloved husband of Cora Tagenhorst Schmidt, father of Ray Schmidt, stepfather of Freda and Marshall Tagenhorst, died in his sleep.

“Papa wouldn’t have wanted it this way, if he could have foreseen how things would turn out,” was the sole comment Ray was ever to make on her predicament of sharing so little in her father’s leavings.

The transaction of making over the homestead to Tagenhorst had seemed fair enough when it happened. She had put her savings of twenty-five hundred dollars into the business at a time when the advance in rental was embarrassing Schmidt acutely. That, then, was right and fair; and Ray herself had been instrument to running back and forth to the lawyer in Sixth Street with deed and document, and there had been two journeys with Tagenhorst to the offices to sign the transferal of the deeds.

It was what happened subsequently that made the division galling, because, after the house, the estate of Adolph Schmidt resolved itself into something like this: five hundred dollars benefit from a local Turnverein society; household effects too negligible for listing; a considerable array of business debts, amounting to well over three thousand dollars; a practically new rubber-tired surrey which he had taken over in lieu of a debt five years previous and kept stored in the loft of a neighbor against the day when he should feel in the position to append to it a good chestnut mare; gold lockets, rings, chains, and a watch that had been Lena Schmidt’s; a business that proved to be worth precisely the life of its owner.

Legally, had it been thinkable to contest for them, there were
rights for Ray lying about even among this rather barren débris of her father’s estate; but the desire was not for the exercise of her prerogatives, but for peace.

“You’re a fool, Ray,” said the more intimate of the friends who were watching it happen. “Tagenhorst won’t think any more of you for being so easygoing. Don’t let her walk off with the situation.”

“Let her have it. Papa would hate to see us squabbling over what little he left. Anyhow, now that he’s gone—everything’s gone.…”

“But your mother’s bedroom set. That old-fashioned stuff is worth a lot.”

“Let her have it.”

“But she thinks you don’t know any better.”

“Let her think.”

“Well, in your mother’s lifetime she always gave me to understand that some day she wanted me to have that hand-painted piano scarf I notice the widow has whisked out of sight.”

“Let her have it.…”

No, Papa wouldn’t have wanted it that way, if ever it had even occurred to him to make a will.

“You are welcome to make this your home as long as you like,” had been Tagenhorst’s retort to this sole observation of Ray’s.

As long as you like! As long as you like in the house in which you have been born. Why, in that narrow wooden house on Baymiller Street, with its two plane-trees out along the whitened coping, its long parlor windows opening onto the porch, the front yard the shape of an oblong bedspread, fenced off from the sidewalk in iron scrollwork, the elephant-ear bed in that front yard and the hydrant to which you attached the hose, Ray had first opened her eyes.

Lena Schmidt had borne her in that house, and sickened in that house, and died in it while Ray was still playing with the big-sized doll that even now sat stiffly in one of Ray’s little-girl chairs in the parlor. She could remember this mother in two outstanding ovals of memory chiefly because every portrait of her mother extant—a brooch painted on porcelain, a crayon enlargement that had once hung in the dining room—had been in the shape of a mournful sort of “O.” Another memory with an oval etched bitingly into it, was
that of her mother sitting in a cane rocker in the bedroom later to be occupied by Schmidt and Tagenhorst, coughing with her handkerchief to her lips, and then holding it away to regard, with her dark ruby-colored mouth opened to the shape of an appalled oval, the bright-red stain upon it.

It was not only the oval, appalled mouth that lay etched in Ray’s memory, it was the way in which the round, stretched eyes had traveled to Ray, the child, sitting there in her little rocker, with the bisque doll clasped in her arms.

It was Lena Schmidt’s first agonized look of realization that she must part from this child.

To be told in such a house that you were welcome to make it your home as long as you liked! Even in the years when Adolph rented the house to Tagenhorst, and he and his daughter had continued on as boarders, it had seemed to remain primarily the house of the Schmidts. The name chiseled into the little square hitching-stone at the curb had never been changed. “SCHMIDT.” After the marriage of Schmidt and Tagenhorst, even the small restraints of the years of tenancy under Tagenhorst, the landlady, were minimized still more under her régime as Mrs. Schmidt the second. Once more, now, she kept her towels and toothbrush in the bathroom instead of carrying them back each time into her room. There was no longer need for tying up the small bundle of her and her father’s clothes every Monday morning to be called for by Libby, a colored washerwoman. Family washing was once more done in the Schmidt kitchen, Ray’s and her father’s along with Tagenhorst’s and Freda’s.

To be told in half a dozen subtle ways, as they sat around the dining-room table the Sunday morning after the funeral of Schmidt—Ray, Freda, Tagenhorst, and a son Marshall, a Tagenhorst offspring of her former marriage who had suddenly materialized from Youngstown—that she was welcome to remain in a home that had suddenly and surely slipped from under her!

Papa would be turning in his grave, could he behold Tagenhorst, sitting there in curlpapers and the blue challis wrapper which she had dyed black, hurting her so!

Not that it really mattered so devastatingly, as she put it bitterly
to herself, that, as things were working out, practically everything became his widow’s. Rather, it was the principle of the thing.

Come right down to it, one could not call this much of a dilemma. On one of her recent buying trips to New York, she had been offered out-and-out, right there on the spot, a position with the firm of Ledbetter and Scape, a well-known concern on Greene Street, from which she had bought passementeries. For that matter, right there at home she had been given to understand, by no other than the head of the department who was her friend and liked to buy her steaks at the Burnet House, that should she ever decide to leave her father’s business, a position at Pogue’s could be arranged.

No, it was not her failure to come in for any share of patrimony that mattered so much, there were various avenues of livelihood open, but it was this sense of somehow being alien to his death. This Tagenhorst sitting there had the rights. The widow, who had only had the last years of his darling life, sitting there in black challis and curlpapers, vested with first place!