Back STreet (7 page)

In the sense that his predilection for mechanics, his aversion for salt meat, his talent for organization, and his inborn interest in ways and means of moving about this earth, were part and parcel of his personality, so was his consciousness that in Ray was his woman.

He saw her as wife in a home of his making. Her hands were in the clay of which his life was to be molded. She was the woman to be in and out among his days, in and out of his doorways, of his bed, and her sweet curved waist and the acquiescing eyes, kind beyond any telling, and the generosity that seemed to envelop her in an ebullience, were the very grain and texture of his future which contained her.

And now this passing of her father, who had sort of died in his tracks, of placid routine, and over whose daughter was powdered some of his benign personality, was sure to have the effect of drawing her more surely into the web of his life.

He wanted to take her, as she sat there beside his desk, poring over his slovenly accountings, and bend back her head until he could feel the warmth of the golden glow off her face onto the flesh of his own, and let her tears, which he knew were in a knot beneath her smile, run warm against his flesh.

He had, it is true, held her close and long, one twilight hour, in a sequestered glen at Eden Park, where they had bicycled for a picnic supper. Passion had raced in him, and his lips had dragged her cheek, and his breathing had fanned the glow that he felt emanating from her. He explained to her later, when his lips would carry words, that it had been the overwhelming passion of a man for the woman he would make his wife. She had been acquiescent in a way that had puzzled him. It was as if he had left her untouched by his vigor, unimpressed by his force, but pleased with the knowledge that she had given him pleasure. He had the feeling, watching
her, that she was regarding his lips, as they coined the phrase of his proposal of marriage to her, with the fascinated attention of a child.

He had not, somehow, even with her large indulgence, dared to follow it up. In fact, he could not be quite sure that she had heard. Now, in her new loneliness, there was that which gave him courage. There was a droop to coveted, stylish Ray Schmidt this day, as he sat beside her, hearing with mock humility the storm of her mock reproaches for his untidy bookkeeping.

“What in the world is this six dollars and twenty cents? Is it against Eddy Slayback or the Eddy Steam Fittings Company? Honestly now, Kurt, I ask to know! Who could tell from the way you’ve made this entry?”

“Don’t potter over the books today, Ray.”

“Say, Beanpole, I’se goin’ to lay you across my knee if you doan behaive.…”

At twenty-seven, before he had filled out to what astonishingly was to be mild corpulency, Kurt was six feet tall and weighed one hundred and eighteen pounds. It was the lankiness of early overgrowth, because he had been that six feet back in the days when his parents had still lived and conducted their small tobacconist shop on Sixth Street, and he had run his first errands as boy-of-all-work for Miller’s Carriage and Coach Company, at Sixth and Sycamore streets.

“Let those books go, Ray.”

“But, Kurt—”

“I want to talk to you. Haven’t had much chance since—since your old man went out. You must know how I feel about anything that hits you.…”

“Don’t make me cry, Kurt,” she said, looking away from him. “I cry easy—yet.”

“It’s a funny thing to say, but I’d like it if you cried, Ray.”

She sat swallowing.

“Papa was everything I had.”

“Don’t say that!”

“I mean—I can never be as all right to anybody as I was to him. He just—liked me—terribly for what I was or wasn’t. Didn’t matter. And nobody knows better than I do what I wasn’t.”

“You can have consolation, Ray, that you never gave the old gentleman a day’s worry in your life. You’ve got no regrets.”

“I know better,” she said, and began to mark crosses on a piece of blotting paper. “But anyway, it helps to know that Pa never felt troubled enough about me to sit down and try and figure me out.”

“I’ve figured you out, Ray, but I don’t care why you do things. I just know that if you do them, they’re right. For me, anyhow.”

“If I could figure out for myself why I do things, maybe I’d have enough sense not to do them.”

“You’re gay by nature, Ray.”

“Gay? Gay as my Aunt Hanna’s black bonnet. I’m not gay, Kurt. I’m an old sick cat at heart.”

“Ray, I just hate to hear you say that.”

“I’ve got a hurt in me as big as a hen’s egg. Always had it. Born with it. Don’t know what it’s about, but it’s in me.”

“Marry me, Ray.”

“Remember the last time you said that to me?”

“Yes, but I didn’t think you even listened.”

“Will it surprise you, Kurt, if I tell you that no man has ever asked me to do that before?”

“You’re so head-and-shoulders above every one of them. I’m the only one who has the conceited nerve.”

“ ’Tisn’t that, Kurt, and you know it.”

“Well, then, every fellow in this town, or that ever comes to it, is crazy—except me.”

“Every man in this town, or that ever comes to it, figures he can have me anyway, Kurt.”

“I wish—I wish you hadn’t said that, Ray.”

“It’s true.”

“Well, anyway, I wish it like the very devil, that you hadn’t said that.”

“You know it’s true.”

He rose abruptly and walked over to the grimy window and stood looking down on a sooty agglomeration of old bicycle junk, while she sat with her clasped hands held motionless.

He came back presently and stood with his feet planted far apart.

“It isn’t true, is it, that they—can have you?”

“No.”

He swung her into his arms then, and kissed her again and again on the mouth.

“You mustn’t do that, Kurt.”

“Why?”

No reason, except that she usually said that.

“Aren’t you mine?”

“You mustn’t do that.”

“You made me feel sick just now. Just as sick as a man can feel.”

“I know I did, Kurt. It hurt me to say it.”

“Then why did you?”

“It’s true.”

“Didn’t you just say it wasn’t?”

“I mean it’s true that they think those things.”

“The man who thinks them from now on has me to contend with.”

“Funny thing, Kurt, but I’ve always been like that.”

“Like what?”

“Too free—easygoing—”

“You’re too big-minded always to be sniffing around the p’s and q’s of every little thing you do.”

“There’s not a nice girl in this town would be sitting up here in this deserted loft with you of a Sunday morning, Kurt.”

“Shows you’re big-minded!”

“Shows I don’t watch out for my own good.”

“You certainly don’t do that, Ray.”

“I am what I am. I simply cannot always be figuring out what I do, as if I was too good to be doing this or that. I can’t feel I’m that important, Kurt. I guess I have no dignity.”

“You won’t feel that way about things when you’ve a home of your own, Ray.”

“Reckon not, Kurt?”

“I know not,” he said, and kissed her again.

“The way I feel now, Kurt—so confused—I don’t know how I feel.”

“Is it any wonder? Guess the old woman up at the house doesn’t make things any easier for you.”

“She’s all right.”

“According to how you look at things.”

“She’s his widow. A woman may not ever have been much more to a man than his widow, even during his lifetime, but after his death there can be dignity and profit in being his widow.”

“I guess they’re hogging everything.”

“Not much to hog; and what there is, they’re welcome to.”

“That’s about the way I look at it. Makes me feel more as if you belonged to me, Ray. I want to take you, now that you’re kind of stunned and hurt, and baby you, and get myself in some sort of a position to marry you.”

“That’s wonderful, Kurt,” she said, and placed her hand on his knee and regarded him with the gray eyes that were washed in what to him was to remain indescribable sweetness.

“The shop isn’t yielding yet, Ray. Won’t be until I’ve cleared the debt to Osterlitz for backing me. But next year I expect to begin drawing out. This is the makings of a real going concern, Ray, and our future is ahead of us. The bicycle is here to stay! I’ll be riding you around in a landaulet, one of these days, on bicycle-money, Mrs. Shendler.”

“Me married?”

“Why not?”

“Kurt, will you feel hurt if I tell you something?”

“The only way you can hurt me, Ray, is to break my heart with a two-letter word. Don’t say that word to me.”

“Kurt, no man has ever kissed me so that it really mattered.”

“You haven’t been waked up.”

“Go along, Kurt. I’ve been about more than most.”

“The other will come.”

“That’s what I am afraid of.”

“I’ll love you into making it come.”

“What if it should come after I’d married you? The caring for someone, I mean. I know myself so well, Kurt. I’m all the way or zero. God help the man I fall in love with.”

“You can’t frighten me off that way. Living and loving and building as we go, maybe I won’t have time to patronize the same tailors those salesmen and brokers around town do, but I’m going to make you money, honey, one of these days, big money, mark my word, and I’m not caring if you love me little, just so you love me long.”

“You’re sure, Kurt, it’s not because I’m down? What would you say if I told you I’ve got good reason to believe there’s a place for me in the trimming department at Pogue’s? I don’t know that I told you that on my last trip to New York I had quite an offer from a firm we’ve been buying from for years.… If things happen so that the business goes on the sandbar, I know where to turn, Kurt.”

“There’s not a doubt in my mind that, let alone, you’ll go down in the history of this town as one of its first crack business girls. But you’re going to quit it and go down in the history of my life instead.”

“We’ll let it ride for a while, Kurt. You’re not ready. I’m shot to pieces. I need to get my bearings. Meanwhile, you’re free. I’m free. How’s that? Fair enough.”

“Not for long though, Ray. I’ll be on my own, before you can say cock robin.”

“I’d be a fool to let it be for long.”

“I love you,” he said, and kissed her again and again on the mouth that had been kissed again and again.

“Now what about that six-dollar-and-twenty-cent entry, Kurt, was it against Eddy Slayback or the Eddy Steam Fittings Company?”

It was strange and difficult and often heartbreaking, after a meeting of creditors had averted receivership, and one Heyman Heymann, formerly of Middletown, who held two notes that practically plastered the entire holding, had stepped in to recruit what he could of the assets.

The arrangement with Ray was one which provided that she remain only long enough to acquaint the new owner with the multitude of small intricacies of a new business. But there was something pathetic about his dread of being left alone with this little white elephant which he suddenly found on his hands. He seemed to have a horror of being left alone with it. His way of seeming to make sure that Ray would not desert and leave him to the strange mercies of this strange phenomenon, his new business, was to manage to be about as little as possible, leaving responsibility of decision and transaction to her.

The affiliation with Heymann was in the main pleasant. He was a corpulent middle-aged Hebrew of twenty years’ excellent business standing in Middletown, who had succumbed, when this opportunity to take over a Cincinnati business presented itself, to the pressure of a wife and marriageable daughter and migrated to the opportunities of the larger city.

His financial dependence upon the business was negligible. He owned the building in Middletown that had housed his button
factory before he had retired from it actively, and was reputed to have further real-estate holdings in Hamilton. Be that as it may, he was a less generous man than Adolph had been, imposing, from the very first day of his taking-over, small new restrictions that were prohibitive to Ray.

For instance, the long narrow old store, lined with boxes to its ceiling and flanked by counters stacked with more boxes, was at best but dingy lure to either wholesale or retail trade.

Heymann’s habit was to follow the departure of each customer by jerking the chain dangling from the Welsbach lights over the counters, and reduce the store to a kind of gloom, which could flow over and in turn reduce Ray to a depression that soaked her into disinterestedness. Heymann saved the backs of old envelopes for scratch paper, curtailed what he regarded as waste of twine and wrapping papers, cut down in minor and enlarged in major ways that doubtless attested to his astuteness over and above old Adolph’s; but somehow the new little economies, so unpracticed by her father, filled her with nostalgia, kept the hurt in her stirring and seeming to move about behind her bosom.

The old habits of routine went on just as before. Willie Meyer, ancient nitwit about town, still did the chores of scrubbing up and deliveries. The same old stream of traveling salesmen dropped in, and, to a large extent, so did the same, if diminishing, clientele.

Heymann was not the man to inject “new blood”; but rather, new conservatisms. Same old “Schmidt’s,” the stylish Ray, handsome in mourning, still dominating the old establishment, moving among the dusty boxes, each one of them identified, as to content, by a button or tassel or bit of jet or braid pasted on one end.

You dropped in to see Ray Schmidt when you checked into town, at the Burnet House, St. Nicholas, Stag, or the Grand Hotel, just as naturally as you delved into Over-the-Rhine for a bock of Moerlein, Hauck, or Hudepohl. It did not matter whether you dealt in dry goods, wet goods, implements, luxuries, or commodities, you knew Ray for the town’s tony girl.

Curious, but to Kurt, who except for the line of graphite under his fingernails wore his blue serge with almost the nattiness of a
drummer, all this was a source of pride. Her desirability, now, somehow, that the close and homely truth of her had been revealed to him that morning in his repair-loft, was emphasized by the class of men who were eager to be seen out with Ray.