Back STreet (54 page)

“Good of you, Ed. Mighty good.”

“My proposition is as separate as hell from the little thing I did for you at the track. I’ve got a flat on Vine Street, Ray, over Ryan’s, nobody’s business but my own—private as hell for a night—”

“Oh, Ed, let that part go. I’m not like that.”

“The hell you’re not!”

“—anymore.”

“All right with me. You kind of got me for the minute—the way you always in the old days kind of got every man that ever looked at you—for the minute.”

Later, when there were drinks in the rear of Kessler’s, he stunned her with the horridness of a kiss the shape of two moist liver-colored lips pasted against the back of her neck.

“I must go,” she said, freeing herself, and trying to keep her mouth from crawling of disgust.

“Don’t let me detain you,” said Ed, making a slow, enormous wink at Mary. “But it’s bedfellow-time.…”

She got out of the soiled clatter of talk that followed that one,
and took a streetcar to her hotel in Fourth Street. There, for the remainder of the night, she packed, bathed the Babe, washed her own hair, and sat in a henna-pack until dawn.…

Whenever possible, in her almost routinized cycle of following the races, she omitted Latonia, because of its immediate proximity to Cincinnati. The old town, changed, rejuvenated, modernized, refurbished in those years since its umbrageous hills had closed in her universe, was always her dread.

Here, in the streets of the plateaued city through which the Ohio passed, cutting into Latonia on its southern flank, were the graves of the footsteps of her youth. Asphalt had supplanted the cobbles, gone was the famous old pulsing artery of the canal, plated over now with the smooth face of a boulevard, and, along the streets, scarcely a face that was familiar, and in which she, in return stirred a memory.

In the few times of her return, not once had she found the courage to wander her way past the house on Baymiller. The old store of Adolph Schmidt was now part of the site of a fifteen-story office-building, and Over-the-Rhine mere legend.

One evening she did take the Zoo-Eden trolley car, alighting at the top of the incline for the view of the city which, from the eminence of the Rookwood Pottery, spreads itself like a smoky fan. A city cupped in the amphitheater formed by hilltops, a city of low, smoky, thriving industry, shot with tall buildings, flung with bridges, and long since animated from the small München-like placidity of thirty years ago to this quickened metropolis of Chamber of Commerce buildings, City Hall, Armory, Music Hall, Art Museum, Art Academy, United States government-buildings, hotels, theaters, apartment houses, business blocks, clubhouses, hospitals, churches, schools, and hereditary estates of old families with honored ancestors.

The thought smote her, standing there on the hilltop, that even old Adolph had contributed to the regality of this self-styled Queen City. No appeal on behalf of the Turnverein, the Public Sing, the Music Fest or Opera, had ever found him unresponsive. Back in the days of Adolph, who could sit in Moerlein’s beer-garden and keep
time with his old head to the strains of Gounod, the Schmidts had done their part in helping create the impulse to crown these hilltops with the glory of art and music.

Adolph and Lena Schmidt, whose markless graves she could not muster herself to seek out, had pressed their obscure, unhonored strength into the community impulse to lift this Cincinnati from the level of its canals.

Sense of their memories dishonored, sense of shame, recollections both sweet and bitter, were what kept her face averted most of the time she was in Cincinnati, and grateful that nine times out of ten what few faces she did recognize did not in turn recognize her. Memories padded around this town at practically every turn.

There was a curb at the C. H. and D. depot.…

“It was not to be,” repeated over and over again, once more had a way of making everything seem easier.

The first day back in New York, after a morning of purchasing a steamship ticket on a one-class boat called the
American Farmer
, of rushing the Babe to a veterinarian’s for a badly inflamed eye, and of trying futilely to locate Mrs. Cleveland of the Columbus Avenue apartment, who had moved, taking with her the old valises that for years had been stored with her, a letter reached her by way of general delivery.

It was from Emma, written just one week previously, and it seemed to Ray, as she read it, that heartache could be more than a figure of speech. The heart could literally hurt. Hers did, in a pain across her left breast.

“Dearest Aunt Ray: Something, sweet Aunt Ray, that I have prayed not to have to tell you is happening to me. It is no good to tell Mother or Father or the boys. They have all they can do as it is, even with my help. But, oh, darling, my eyes! It’s cataract this time, over the left. It’s all milky now and, dearest, when I close my right eye, I can’t see at all. And I’m frightened. And to think it should happen right at the beginning of my teaching year. And I love it so! And they’re so good to me here. The eye doctor in Newcastle says the chances are excellent for an operation’s clearing it up. But it will mean half a year out—and expense. I wouldn’t ask you, dearest of
aunts, better-to-me-than-any-one-in-the-world. But you’ve always been so good. You saved me once. Save me again. I know in your gay life of travel and excitement it won’t mean so much to you in the way of sacrifice as it will mean happiness and salvation to me. Sweet Aunt, help me.… Emma.”

In the moment of receiving that letter she could have laid down her life against the pain of that child. It was as if every bone in her body hurt so that she could feel the outline of her skeleton burning against the flesh.

Those big bright-blue eyes of Emma, that somehow, behind their slightly enlarged irises, had the look of blue flowers under water. An immemorial cry of the old for its young rang through her pain. “And I live on, tired, old, no-good me, healthy and sound, while her sweet eyes are filled with milkiness.…”

Give? Her impulse, standing there in the musty hurry of the general-delivery section of the post office, was to flee to this stricken child—her sweet eyes that were innocent. That was what made the pain so all but unbearable. They were such innocent eyes, Emma’s were, to be fuddled with cataract.…

A passerby, in sporty plus-fours, seeing her bent over her stocking, extracting something, gave her a rude dig in the thigh purposely. There was her handkerchief, containing seven one-hundred-dollar bills, besides the sixty-odd dollars and the steamship ticket in her purse.

No use speculating. Five hundred of it would have to go in a money order to Emma. One might speculate as to whether she could afford an outside or an inside steamship-room, as she had that morning, or whether it would pay to insert an advertisement in the
Times
to try and locate Mrs. Cleveland and the suitcase, but over the destiny of Emma’s eyes … The money order that finally went to her was for six hundred.

No use pretending, though, that it did not matter. It did, and it mattered terribly. Not so much to her plans. The only appreciable difference, for the moment, was that she changed the outside to an inner room, thirty-eight dollars refund on that, and did not insert the advertisement for the missing Mrs. Cleveland and the suitcase.

But the something that had lifted with the advent of one
thousand dollars was squatting back on her chest. Swept, with the stroke of the pen that signed the money order for Emma, was the sense of the new security of days that were to be spent in the quasi-seclusion of the small French spa that would fold her into the inexpensive placidity—a placidity, drenched in memories, that at the same time would hold out to her, during season, the one means of livelihood for which, these days, alas, these years, she seemed qualified.

No two ways about it, the change mattered, terrifyingly. It gave one a sense of scare, sailing away with that familiar sense of the narrowing margin.

Live dangerously, the old bookmaker who had ceased pinching her thighs and who was always carrying about, in his pockets, small editions of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, and pamphlets on religion and science, was forever intoning to belligerents about to lose their gambling nerve. Live dangerously.

The snug security of the life at Aix simply was not to be, at least not for the present. Perhaps all for the best. The headiness of the phrase, “Live dangerously,” the elixir of the air of the nine days at sea, made it seem almost providentially for the best. Why not?

Live dangerously. The waving of this phrase helped to give the trip, to which there was to be the finality of residence abroad, the flavor of adventure. If only things could be made to matter again, it would be easy to live dangerously. No use talking; by instinct, by temperament, hers was the nature to crave the very things from which she had been planning deliberately to fold herself away.

Why, if she only conjured up that old exuberant will to live, one could never tell. Poor little Emma’s eyes might be an ill wind blowing her good! Nice, Monte Carlo, Vichy—

Play conservatively, but know when to take your dangerous chance! Dress well. Move about. Hordes of glamorous women moved mysteriously through the gilded shades of these spas. And on a hairpin, mind you, many a one of them. More likely than not, countless of them eked out their glamor by way of living dangerously.…

One day, in the solitude of the cabin she shared with a teacher of English in the Berlitz School of Languages in Paris, who had not
exchanged a dozen words with her during the voyage, she began a soliloquy which she addressed into the mirror over the collapsible washbowl.

“I am thin and a little gaunt and tragic-looking and the teeth are not so bad anymore and there is a place in Paris where I hear they have a perfect henna-system. People will stare and wonder about me if I dress rightly.”

Now and again the peripatetic women of the racing fields had told her that. You look interesting. Dress the part.

Walter had never wanted that. And rightly, of course. It had been so necessary through the years to move like a piece of detached background against the same background. But now—in order to live at all, one must trump up the impulse to live dangerously.…

She found herself with a phrase on her hands that had magic to the ear all right, but would not analyze. As she lay in her berth, what mental excitement she had been able to scare up during the day died down, and she began to cry or laugh or both, hands compressed rigidly against her mouth for fear of awakening the Berlitz teacher, who slept in a chin strap, and, in the dim night-light of the blue ceiling bulb, looked as if she were stretched on a morgue slab.

Live dangerously, when her hair was streaked in three colors and would no longer hold even the semblance of dye, and her teeth, two sardonic horseshoes mounted on very pink rubber, were in a water tumbler with a handkerchief tied around it to conceal its contents from her cabin mate. Live dangerously, when she had overheard the steward refer to her as the old bird who shared Cabin 67 with the English teacher.

Oh, yes, live dangerously, when men no longer even glanced up as you passed them on the deck, and when, the night of the ship’s little farewell dinner, she had put on her brown net evening dress with the spangled bolero, the low-cut bodice made her feel like one of those female impersonators.

The breasts, drying, left you flat, like a man.

Live dangerously! “Oh, my God,” she said, rolling over and away from the spectacle of the English teacher in the chin-mask, “don’t make me laugh!”

In Aix, as a matter of course, families occupied the same house for fifty, eighty, or a hundred years, and in the meaner of the houses, the smell of the mold of those years was on the stairs and in the upholstery. In the pension of Madame Papatou, which stood like a narrow soldier with arms jammed to his sides, between a novelty store where they sold glass paperweights, with views of Aix embalmed into them, and one of the shops where you purchased cotton-flannel pajamas to wear to the Thermal Establishment, this same smell of must and of dust was kicked out of every one of the seventeen steps you mounted to the second floor.

It smelled, this old house, as if it were alive and had a body odor. Douse her room as she would with eau de cologne, and her pillow with dried lavender to be purchased by the centime, the smell of the corridors and the walls persisted, like live breath. It was a decayed breath, too, filled with old teeth. A horrid way of thinking about it, but then it was that horrid, living at Pension Papatou.

First of all, the walls were all scarred with torn places in the papering, the way she remembered it in a People’s Theatre production of “The Two Orphans” in Cincinnati. Lath and plaster showed through and, in the first year, Ray purchased, at a shop where they sold Anderson “seconds,” a print of Henner’s nude figure that hangs in the Louvre, “Femme Lisant.”

Emma would have chosen, she thought to herself while selecting
it, the moody bit of “Roman Coliseum by Moonlight,” or Botticelli’s “Springtime.” “Funny thing, I’m just common.”

The Henner hung over the naked laths of her high-ceilinged room at the top of the third flight of stairs, and sucked in the odors and became part of the decayed-tooth yellow of Papatou’s.

This yellowish tinge, which alike attacked the ancient teeth of the Babe, the linen on the beds, the drinking water, and finally the very flesh, Ray, as she worriedly inspected the aging tints of the backs of her hands and the fronts of her thighs, attributed to “something in the air.” “It’s this low altitude kind of creates a mold on you.…”

Maybe.

Madame Papatou was yellow too, but in a ropy vigorous way that was magnificent. Her squat face, bold in its lineaments as that of an American Indian, was tough as shoe leather. By birth Italian, by marriage Greek, by profession of twenty-eight years a bath attendant at the Thermal Establishment, she was as many-visaged as a totem pole.

There was the craven face she wore when engaged in the massaging, spraying, spanking, soaping, toweling processes she practiced on the American and English women who rode to and from the hotels to the bath in shrouded sedan-chairs; there was the venomous face she wore when a tip fell foul of expectations, and rage transcending greed, was capable of tearing a ten-franc note to bits with her teeth, and spitting it after the donor. There was the spying, suspicious, God-help-you face she wore for Papatou, whose fat hands loved the feel of fat women, and who was as oily as one of the sardelles he held by the tail and swallowed whole. There was the carved walnut of a face she wore for her boarders, and the oleaginous one she wore for her priest.