Back STreet

by Fannie Hurst

  “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.

  “Every time I come to this town, I say to myself, the one thing that gives it tone is Ray Schmidt.”

  “Nit.”

  “True as I’m sitting here. I’ve good Cincinnati accounts, but the best account of them all, Ray Schmidt!” Under the wooden apron of the hansom cab, his hand, a dimpled one with an island of black hair on it, poked a forefinger into the hole of her kid glove.

  “If I wasn’t a married man …”

  Here it was again!

  “But the way people like you and me look at these things is broad-minded. I’m not a small man. The nicest little flat in the world would be none too good for a girl like you. What say?”

  The way to retort, as Tagenhorst would put it, was to haul off and slap his bluish jowl. Well, she wasn’t built that way. This traveling man sitting there making illicit proposal to her, his heavy hand sliding off and on her knee, was just part of the pitiable sordidness of so much of life. He was trying to squeeze his joy out of the none too joyful business of being drummer for a firm which dealt in surreys, traps, runabouts, cabs, and coaches. Of course he was being disloyal to vows and decencies and to his wife. But the fault seemed not so much his as it was the routinized scheme which permitted a man’s life to become a matter of surrey-upholstery, aging wives, Pullman cars, forbidden desires, and receding ideals.

  There was something vaster and more reprehensible and more soul-sickening than this lascivious-looking drummer who needed his face slapped. It was the scheme of things to which, bobbing along in the hansom cab, they were both more or less helpless parties. There were those, of course, who triumphed, and they became the great, good, wise ones of the earth. But that did not mean that somehow, terribly, the story of the mortalness of clay was any the less poignant. If only she were not sorry for Bakeless.

  “My life’s been all a compromise between what I wanted and what I got, Ray. You would be one thing I wanted—and got.”

  “Why,” she wanted to shout at him, “why do you dare to put to me a proposition that you would not broach to a single girl in this town except those who live on George Street? What is there about me makes a man feel I’m the kind a man can ask to be his mistress? An old dodo grandpap like you! Tell me. I want to know, in order that I may know this strange poor me, myself!”

  She did nothing of the sort, but withdrew her hand gently, and made a move at him.

  “That’s the way you feel now.”

  He caught her cheeks between his thumb and forefinger.

  “Don’t make those girl-I-left-behind-me eyes! I don’t want to leave you behind me. If you escape me once more, I’m going to advertise in The Cincinnati Enquirer personal column: ‘Will brunette in black sailor hat and checkered suit who ate supper at Mecklenburg’s last Sunday night please let me know where I get off with her?’ ”

  Ray (to herself): “Where do I get off? Where do I get off?”

  “Look! I want to give you something, Miss Ray. Little present I picked up yesterday at Hershey’s. Bought it for my oldest girl. You know, I’d kind of like to give it to you.”

  “No, no, Bakeless!”

  Men did not usually refer to their daughters.…

  “I’d kind of like for you to have it, Ray.”

  He produced from a waistcoat-pocket a box containing a small silver human foot, meant to dangle from a fob or neck-chain.

  “Why, Bakeless, you take that right along back to New York to your—to her.”

  “I’ll get her something in Dayton. Take it.”

  “You’re a dear!”

  “What do I get?” he said, and puckered his lips.

  She kissed him, as they bobbed along in the gathering darkness.

  “That’s right. Pay Papa.”

  “That wasn’t pay.”

  “You’re right. That’s what I like about you. Never feel you’re bleeding a man. Give me another.”

  “Not here, Bakeless, right in front of the Burnet House.”

  “Think over my little proposition, Miss Ray. I’ll be back in three months. New York is a big town and I’ll tuck you away in it as snug as you please. I’m telling you, Ray, I’m not small.”

  Now was the time to slap him resoundingly across that blue jowl.

  “Put your arms around me, honey, for I’ve got a lot of money, love me little, love me long.”

  “Let me out here too, Bakeless! You don’t need to send me home in this cab. I’ll take the Colerain Avenue car.”

  It was there, at the curb of the C. H. and D. depot, that she met for the first time Walter Saxel, who, with satchel in hand, was making for the hansom cab which she and Bakeless were vacating.

  “Hello, there, Bakeless. Don’t mind if I take your cab, do you?”

  “Honored, as they say in the classics. Saxel, want you to meet a tony little friend of mine. Ray Schmidt. Ever met, you two? Might ride her up a ways, Saxel,” called Bakeless over one shoulder, as he dashed for his train.

  “Your way is my way,” said Saxel, and stood aside for her to mount back into the cab.

  It was to occur to her countless times in later years that the first words he ever said to her, five of them, rev
ersed, so as to apply to her, were to become the slogan for the rest of her life.

  “Your way is my way, Walter,” was born into her subconsciousness that hot May evening toward the close of a century, as she stood at the curb in front of the C. H. and D. station, looking for the first time into the face of a young man whose heavy black eyebrows were the shape of Mercury-wings.

  8

  “Why do you want to go home?” he said, after an introductory argument as to destination. “You can always go there.”

  She laughed the first laugh of what was to be her perpetual delight in his smallest saying. Kurt lay on her mind, but remotely now.

  “I’ll have to telephone. The store at our corner has a Kincloch. One of the boys there will take a message across to the house for me to somebody waiting on the porch and tell him I can’t be home.”

  “That is precisely what corner stores are for.”

  “Do you always get what you want this easily?” She usually said that, when responding to the importunings for the many favors she had to yield.

  “I have never wanted anything this badly, so I don’t know.”

  There was a sticky, pleasant quality about his voice, as if it wanted to cling.

  “Tell you how we are going to do it. I’m going to break my supper engagement too, only I’ll have to write a note and send it out by messenger. We’ll drop off here at the Burnet House, and get ourselves fed. Hungry?”

  Time and time again in later years she was to recall to him this evening, when she followed up, within the hour, a meal at Mecklenburg’s which had more than satiated her, with double sirloin steak, accordion potatoes, and tutti-frutti ice cream at the Burnet House.

  “Funny that I’ve never seen you around town,” she said to him across a table in a dining room of heavy drape and crystal chandelier. A candle burned under a pink shade, and women in dolmans, with bare shoulders rising broadly from their eighteen-inch waists, and aigrets waving in their high psyches, arrived and departed across the heavily carpeted floors. The men were a miscellaneous lot. A few of them in black broadcloth and white planks of shirt front, but most of them like Saxel, in their sack suits and derby hats.

  “Fact of the matter is, Ray—you don’t mind if I call you Ray, do you?—I live in Hamilton. Ever been to Hamilton?”

  Had she ever been to Hamilton? Ask Nat Paisley over at Niles Tool Works if she had ever been to Hamilton. Or Otto Kugel, or Phil Dinninger. Ever been to Hamilton? How’s Stengel’s? And the St. Charles, and Mosler Safe Works? Where did he buy the necktie he was wearing? Strauss’s. Ever been to Lindenwood Grove? Did she know Hamilton?

  “Well, that’s fine. I live there alone with my mother in the same house I was born.”

  She was right. The thought had struck her from the very first that he might be Jewish. Yessir, he was one of those high-class Jewish boys. The mother determined it. They lived at home, those Jewish fellows did. They stuck. Catch one of those high-class Jewish boys behaving like Marshall and never showing up around his mother, years on end, until there was something in it for him. Those gray eyes and that nice shiny black hair and the little mustache were what gave the hint, although he might just as easily have been Italian.

  “So you live in Hamilton?”

  “Guess that’s the way you’d put it, but I work down in the city. Clerk in the First National.”

  The thought trailed through her mind: “First bank clerk I’ve ever known. Nice. Clean.”

  “Takes me a full hour coming and going. About the only man out of Hamilton who does that. My next move, I guess, will be to try and pry my mother out of the old house and move her down to the city. Girl like you makes a man realize what he’s missing in a small town.”

  “Oh yes, I know all about you fellows and what you miss!” Those high-class Jewish boys were all of a stripe. Ray had known one. Arthur Metzger, lived on Richmond Street where so many of the high-class ones dwelt. Father owned Metzger Jewelry Store on Vine. Arthur one of the best fellows in the world. Not a suave, good-looking type like this one. Beaky. But a good spender. Kind of boy who gave a girl the best of everything. Best seats, best shows. Drove his own phaeton, and, in Ray’s case, always deplored the fact that she did not drink the champagnes and other wines he was eager to provide for her.

  But one night, in a burst of confidence, he told her what she had long suspected. With the Jewish fellows of his class, girls were divided into two classes—“shiksas” and the girls they would marry. Ray was a “shiksa.” Out of his class and out of his faith and out of his reckoning, except as the kind of girl on whom you could sow a wild oat. He taught her a few phrases like “shiksa.” Goy. Batsimer. It was his great joke to make her repeat these words that sat so oddly on her lips.

  “What are you, Ray? Go on, say it again. It sounds cute.”

  “I’m a goy.”

  But something leaden as anything she had ever felt in her life dropped heavily into her conscience, as she sat there in the Burnet House opposite Walter Saxel.

  “I ran down to the city this evening after spending Sunday up in Hamilton with my mother, in order to visit a friend of mine on Richmond Street.”

  “A girl?”

  “A young lady.”

  Of course. One of those well-to-do Jews in the stone fronts on Richmond Street. If a fellow like Saxel called on one of those girls, you just bet it was a “young lady.” Ray classified as “goy.”

  “Don’t let me detain you.”

  “Now, Ray, was that nice?”

  “It wasn’t. I’m sorry. Funny, now. Known you about forty minutes and feel jealous because you’re not spending the evening with me.”

  “Well, sir, you’ll think I’m talking through my hat, but I’m going to do something I never did in my life before. Call up a girl like Corinne Trauer at the last minute and tell her I can’t come along until later.”

  “Corinne Trauer! I know her! She’s been in our store. Blonde. Pretty. Kind of fat. She and her mother buy trimmings from us.”

  “That’s Corinne. Her uncle is Felix-Arnold Friedlander, of Friedlander-Kunz, the New York bankers. Her mother was a Friedlander.”

  There was that solid thing again.

  “What if she were to find out you were wasting your time sitting around the Burnet House with a shiksa?”

  He threw back his head and laughed. “Where did you get that?”

  “Oh, I may be a goy, but I know what shiksa means.”

  “You’re a darling. But I didn’t know the map of Jerusalem was on my face.”

  “It isn’t. You might be Eyetalian.” She knew better than that! Italian, of course, but everyone around her pronounced it as if it were spelled Eyetalian.

  “Then how did you know?”

  “The way you talk about living up in Hamilton with your mother.”

  “Do you have to belong to the Plum Street Temple in order to live at home with your mother?”

  “No, but you boys are almost all that way. I even knew a boxer once, Butch Horowitz, rough as anything, who used to have a special place at all the armory-bouts for his mother, and used to take her traveling with a special cooking outfit for her special foods. It’s nice. I like it.”

  “Ray, I want to see a lot of you.”

  “You’ve a funny way of showing it.”

  “Why? You mean because I have to show up at the Trauers’ later in the evening?”

  “Not saying.”

  “You’re a sensible girl. You ought to understand a thing like that.”

  “I do. It’s just—I don’t know what’s come over me.”

  “It’s because you like me, Ray. I like you. If you don’t want me to go to the Trauers’, I am not going to the Trauers’.”

  “But I do.”

  “But I thought you just said—”

  “Never mind what I just said. I live just three blocks from Richmond Street where the Trauers live. You can take a Colerain car with me.”

  “But I am all ready to telephone that I can’t
make it at all tonight.”

  “You don’t do things that way.”

  “Why do you say that?” he said half querulously.

  “Because you don’t. You’re solid. I like it.”

  “Too deep for me,” he said, and ran his hand over the thatch of his smooth black hair and took up the waiter’s check. High-class Jewish fellows did things well. A good substantial dinner, for which unfortunately she had no appetite. The offer of Sauterne, which she declined, and then light Moerlein’s beer for him. Not a foolish spender. Those boys weren’t. He added up the dinner check and picked up a ten-cent piece off the plate when the change came, leaving a twenty-five-cent tip. Plenty, but not too much. Just right. A boy couldn’t afford many Burnet House dinners on a bank-clerk’s salary. Poor fellow, and she had forced her dinner too. Well, it wouldn’t happen again. Plenty of excellent eating-places Over-the-Rhine, less than half the price. She had seen the check with the worried tip of an eye. Cassolette of lobster, forty cents; double sirloin steak, sixty cents; tutti-frutti ice cream, twenty cents. One dollar and twenty cents for dinner for two. Ruinous!

  He suggested a cab. She would not hear of it.

  “Colerain car goes by my door and right by your corner.”

  “All right, then, if it makes you feel any better.…”

  “It does. I don’t believe in throwing away.”

  “If you aren’t the mightiest nicest girl! I’m going to see a lot of you. Only you haven’t told me much about yourself. Guess you live at home and all that?”

  He did not guess anything of the sort. It was his way of finding out that she did not live at home. Thank goodness, though, the truth of it was that she lived at home as much as any Trauer, Moss, Strauss, or Littauer girl of Richmond Street. She knew them all. They came into the store, usually with their mothers. Good dressers. Good but cautious spenders. Knew values. On summer evenings you could see them sitting out on their stoops, talking from house to house. Well-kept, secure homes, with immaculate whitened copings and the shoulders of upholstered furniture in summer covers showing through the open windows. Well-kept, secure families, with surreys or smart little traps at the curb.