Back STreet (8 page)

A tony girl who had them all guessing, but who could be relied upon to take care of herself.

If sometimes beneath his gay acquiescence to their suspended sort of relationship, fear smote Kurt, it was laid by the practical streak that dominated everything he said and thought.

“There isn’t a marrying man in the lot of them.”

Ray knew that too, and used to smile a lot about it to Kurt.

“Mark Steinberg and several other New York stockbrokers are on for the races. Dollar looks like a dime to them, Mark’s Silver Boy is running at Latonia. Look for the handsome brunette in black surah silk and a yellow chrysanthemum, sitting beside Mark in his black-and-yellow wire-wheeled trap with the tandem horses. That’ll be me, Kurt, helping Mark forget he’s a grandpap.”

And so it went, after the death of Adolph, for the most part as it had gone before, except, after a dreadful fashion, in no wise as it had gone before.

No matter how right eventually, things could never now quite have their flavor back. Never.

It was usually around the low-ebb hour of dawn that, awakening after a habit that had become troublesome to her, realization would pounce upon Ray, causing her to lie trembling and miserable while day climbed slowly over the roofs of Baymiller Street. Early-morning depressions which, as she lay there on the bed in which her mother had died, could make rising to face another day almost more than she could bear. To find that the death of Adolph was not a nightmare, and that she was lying there on the wedding-bed of her parents, now loaned to her through the largesse of Tagenhorst, was to make it a touch of bitter pain. To be sure, she paid her board, twenty out of the fifty dollars a month she now earned in the store, where by the same devastation of death she had become an outsider; but her universe had slipped suddenly, like land, sliding into a sea of bewilderment.

To think! Papa, sitting there so normally over coffee boiled with milk and sugar in it! And then, two evenings later, lying boxed, his face that had always been swept by heavy breathing, lying covered by a wooden lid, like merchandise on a store-shelf.

Elementary wonder at death’s impartiality was out over Ray. Adolph could conceivably be dead to Tagenhorst or Freda, but to have left her like that. Without a word! Without a look back. With the passing of her mother, there had been only the rather terrified awe of the child. But Adolph had come so far into life with her. And she had not even closed his eyes in death, or seen to it what kind of socks he wore in his coffin. He had been borne, horizontal, bobbing, on the six broadcloth shoulders of six Turnverein members, out of the front door, carried tilted, down the front steps and along the red-painted brick walk, to a hearse with wooden plumes on its four corners. Adolph had gone to God without so much as a backward glance at his daughter left alone among the strangers—Tagenhorst, Heymann, Freda, and Marshall.

As she lay on her bed in the dark hours before dawn, half awake and half submerged under the depression that made these slow awakenings her horror, it required all her energy to force herself to rise to face the days.

Risen, and with the normal circumstances of the morning taking shape, she found that depression, in a large measure, lifted, and life became a matter of rushing ahead of who was sure to monopolize it, into the bathroom, buttoning into your shoes, buckling into your corset, looping and swirling at your pompadour, hooking, hitching into your petticoats, corset-cover, shirtwaist, and skirt, boiling your egg, and usually eating it standing beside the kitchen stove, and then bolting for the car if the weather was bad, or, if it was fine, leading your bicycle out from under the hall stairs.

Usually on Sunday morning, these indeterminate months following the death of Adolph, when the house was plastered with a “For Sale” sign and Marshall appeared now every fortnight or so from Youngstown in the capacity of advisor to his mother, Freda stole into bed beside Ray.

There was talk of moving to Youngstown, where, it developed,
Marshall had an eye to a coal business of his own, everything of course subservient to the disposal of the house, so that it might be a comfortable widow who could one of these days turn her face toward setting herself and her son up in business in the nearby town.

The prospect, however, was clouded somewhat for both Tagenhorst and her daughter by the uncertainty into which matters were further thrown by the failure of Hugo Hanck to precipitate his attentions to Freda by an offer of marriage.

“Ray,” trebled Freda, one of those Sunday mornings when she had climbed from her mother’s bed and padded across the hall into Ray’s, “what is adultery?”

“Why, Freda Tagenhorst, what’s on your mind?”

“What is adultery?”

“You know as well as I do.”

“Honestly, Ray, I don’t. Of course I know it is something bad, but I don’t know what.”

“You know your Commandments, don’t you? You’ve gone to Sunday school all your life.”

“Yes, but I don’t mean the thou-shalt-not kind of adultery they talk about in the Bible. I mean real adultery right here in Cincinnati.”

After all, what a child she was, lying there pink and soft and strangely kitten-like, her flaxen braids across the pillow and her softy young breasts breathing of the little excitement her question seemed to inspire.

“Adultery, Freda, is not being true to the person to whom you are married.”

“Oh, then it isn’t just something that any man can commit against a girl?”

“Yes, any man who is not true to his wife commits it.”

“I mean if he isn’t married.…”

“Why, no, Baby. What a silly you are.”

“Ray?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know that nuns are awful bad?”

“No.”

“Well, they are. There’s a girl in my class named Katy Schwa-baker, who went to a convent-school. She says … Oh, you ought to hear what she says about—”

“Stop filling your ears with such. It’s all talk made up by dirty-minded girls with nothing on their minds but nastiness.”

“And you know what she says, Ray? She says you can make a man marry you by pretending you’re going to have a baby.”

“Freda, you deserve to have your mouth washed with lye and soap.”

“But you have to be bad before you can pretend that, don’t you?”

“Why do you think such things?”

“
You
think them, only you don’t say them.”

“I do not.”

“You do so! With all the men running after you, how can you help thinking about what makes them do it?”

There was something to that, only Freda’s foul-mouthed little manner of suggesting it made it loathsome. Naturally her thoughts sometimes turned to the riddle of the unanimity of the male reaction toward her. Yet who would believe, Freda least of all, how seldom, considering, such scuttling little rats of sex-thoughts as her stepsister’s darted through her own brain? There was something latent and fearful and wonderful—something dangerous and shot with the glory of being alive—in this constant teasing sense of the mystery of sex. Ray sensed that, of course. What girl didn’t? You couldn’t help thinking sometimes of the something in you that you knew was there latent, but which up to now had never been really stirred by the touch of a man. With Freda, now, it was different. She was a seething hotbed of forbidden flickers of passion. Darts of desire, in the form of the ugly questions, were constantly on her lips. How in the world expect to make Freda, lying there beside her, believe that she, Ray, did not harbor the same secret and forbidden thoughts that had been bandied among the girls in the locker room at Freda’s parochial school?

What good did it do to try to make her understand that some
of her lascivious questions were couched in a phraseology that was absolutely ununderstandable to Ray?

“Don’t know what I mean? Oh no, you don’t know. If I know as much as I do—how much must you know!”

How much must Ray know! The question tormented Freda. How good was Ray? How bad? How did she handle men? Had she ever …? How fly was she really? Except on her trips to New York and the visit to the St. Louis annual exposition that she had once made with her father, there had never been a night which Ray had not spent in the house on Baymiller Street. Staying out all night was part of it when girls were supposed to be bad. Probably, as Tagenhorst said, “Ray had it behind her ears.” What was it kept the toniest men hotfooting after Ray, if it wasn’t—that? What was it, but that, gave a girl the name of being fly? Girls didn’t let themselves get that reputation just for the good dinners and shows that were in it. Why, most of the men Ray ran with were married men and would cut her dead if they met her with their wives or daughters. Just how fly was Ray? Where did it get her? Kurt Shendler, a bicycle-mechanic, was the only fellow in town on the level with her. A tony girl like Ray having to wind up and marry a domestic product like Kurt! What was the mystery of Ray? Was it possible that she had no realization of the importance of sitting herself pretty? Or was it that she had some bee in her bonnet that would fool them all? Or would she be content to become the mistress of one of the town’s big men or one of those New York traveling fellows or brokers who were always after her? Not for Freda. Marriage. Security. Freedom from the bickering thraldom of Tagenhorst, and now, with the few dollars from the sale of the house in the offing, the threat of having Marshall and his family within range. Marriage.

“Ray, would you like to be married?”

“Of course I would, to Mr. Right.”

“How do you get Mr. Right?”

“How do I know, not having got him?”

“Why not Kurt? Or are you out for a big gun, or if you had a good chance would you just—just—live—”

“Freda!”

“I want to be married more than anything, and I’m not ashamed to say it.”

“And so you should, honey. If you are as sweet on Hugo as he seems to be on you.…”

“Last night he took Sadie Kisterwell to the Music Festival. He can’t get away from me that way. He can’t get away from me a-tall.”

The flaxen little Freda, lying there beside her, sent a quiver through the bed then, of the movement of her body. The quiver of a woman whose fury is beginning to be stirred.…

One Sunday evening during this same month, which was a humid May of premature heat, Ray, who had dined with a drummer at Mecklenburg’s Summer Garden, a popular family resort out on Highland Avenue, found herself being importuned to accompany him to the station where he was to take a C. H. and D. train for Dayton.

“Come as far as the depot with me, Ray. It will cheer me on my way.”

“But, Bakeless, it’s so hot, and I hate the smell of train smoke.”

“Yes, but think what you will be doing for a poor wretch who has to take the trip in this heat.”

As a matter of fact, there was an additional reason for Ray’s disinclination to accompany Bakeless to the station. Kurt, who had been away in Peoria for the greater part of a week, on a matter that had to do with going into partnership with a pair of brothers who had a patent on a gasoline-driven bicycle, was due at the house that evening at eight. Bakeless’s train left at eight-fifteen, so there would be nobody at home to receive Kurt. Tagenhorst had hired a surrey for the afternoon, and with Freda and Marshall and Hugo Hanck had driven up to Hamilton to visit a crony there. A deserted house would greet Kurt.

“I have to get home, Bakeless.”

“You’re the darnedest! You know a man wants to be with you
more than anything, and then you make him sit up on his hind legs and beg for every little thing.”

They were standing on the sidewalk outside of Mecklenburg’s during this debate. In the heliotrope dusk, even the brick sidewalks gave off a faint heat-glow, and under her black sailor hat there was a film of moisture that not even the prepared chalk she used as face powder could keep under.

True, as she had realized as she put it on, her black-and-white-check coat-suit was too warm for the day. But its nattiness was simply not to be withstood. She had made it herself at dressmaking-school. The skirt, shirred up slightly along a front gore, was the new smart suit-length of one inch from the ground in front and slight drag behind. The coat, tapering into a faultless eighteen inches at the waist, flared at the hips just sufficiently to reveal a gleam of red sateen lining. A high stock, held with a gold horseshoe, completed the stylish effect. Sporty, but not horsy, had been her estimate before her mirror.

When she and Bakeless, who represented a New York buggy concern, had walked into Mecklenburg’s, along its gravel-floored garden to a table under an ailanthus-tree, the crowd of Sunday-evening patrons had noted her to the tips of her scalloped-topped shoes.

The tony Ray Schmidt. Style.

It had been worth the scratching sense of discomfort the heavy cloth entailed; but now, out on the heated sidewalk, it seemed to Ray she could scarcely wait to be home and free of the unseasonable weight of her clothing.

“This weather takes it out of me, Bakeless.”

“So you won’t come along as far as the depot?”

He was a middle-aged, slightly rotund fellow, shiningly, too shiningly, groomed, from the tips of his toothpick shoes to the dyed mustache which he frequently attended with a pocket-comb. A valued territory man, of twenty-five years’ standing with his firm, and an established clientele in Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, and Kansas.

“It isn’t exactly that I won’t go, Bakeless. Don’t put it that way.”

“I’ll even go you one better, Ray. What say to coming all the
way along? You and me could have Monday and Tuesday in Dayton. There’s an idea.…”

“I’ll go with you one year from today.”

“There you go again. Darnedest girl for letting a man know where he’s at. Well, anyway, it isn’t going to hurt you to take me as far as the depot. Come, here’s a couple going to dismiss a hansom. Hey, cabby, how much to C. H. and D.?”

She sighed her acquiescence, her eyes smiling, but troubled with the thought of Kurt smoking an impatient pipe, as he waited on the deserted porch.

It was cooler driving, bobbing along over cobblestones that flung them together and apart. Warmed with Rhine wine, conscious of her nearness, he became immediately amorous.