Back STreet

by Fannie Hurst

  If the persistence of her various pressures upon him made him nervous and even unnerved him, and her lack of playfulness, as she grew older, her almost insane indulgence of her children, her tiny snobberies, her limitless faithfulness, her impeccable motherhood, her unassailable righteousness and conspicuous virtue, continued to drive him more and more surely and more and more securely to the less exacting atmosphere of a woman who also fed him well and loved him not wisely but well, the fact remained that in the house on Fifty-third Street there resided, in virtue, the fitting complement for the growing solidarity of his life, his importance as a conspicuous citizen and high type of Jew, his success, his philanthropies, art-interests, and expanding ambitions.

  It was difficult, indeed impossible, to explain, even to oneself, the tremendousness of trifles. Never, in this flat, “Ray, are you tired?” but, “Ray, I am tired.” Never, “Is it convenient for you, Ray, to hold dinner until eight tonight?” but, “Ray, have dinner at eight.” Never, “Are you depressed?” but, “I am depressed.” Never, “Can you?” but, “I cannot.” Never, “Do you prefer?” but, “I prefer.”

  As he repeatedly said to her—and for some reason it pained her to hear it—she fitted him like an old glove.

  The nearest she ever came to voicing some of the unconscious bitterness that on occasion would surge against him, was once when she said to him, quite playfully, “That is because I guess always I must be content to walk skulking along the back streets of your life.” And he, who was notoriously quick to take offense, had sulked days after this.

  “Why, Walter, I meant what I said, but I’m not complaining. I like it. Suppose I do walk the back streets of your life. I love them because they are your life.”

  He could turn sulky with a suddenness that never ceased to terrify, past master that she was at placating.

  “I despise veiled discontent. I would much rather you would come out with what you have to say.”

  “With what I have to say! Walter, silly, what in the world could I have to say in that respect?”

  “That is precisely what I cannot understand. I cannot see much back street connected with all the comfort you need, a trip to Europe every couple of years. The fact that you cannot travel on the same ship with me or live in the same hotels, seems hardly to need discussion. I—”

  “That is just sort of what I meant by back streets, Walter. Nothing more. Of course it is wonderful going to Europe, but I, being piggy, would so love it if things were different, so piggy could cross on the same ship with you and not live in pensions around the corner from her Walter’s hotel. That’s all I meant.…”

  “I see. In order to make things more thoroughly impossible and even more dangerous than they are?”

  “Silly. Did I say anything like that? I was just trying to imagine what it would be like if we didn’t have to do it this way. That’s all I meant, Walter.”

  He was difficult to placate; and, strangely enough, the tactics she employed to bring him round were precisely the ones he employed with Corinne when something petty had incurred her displeasure which, in its way, was as quick off the trigger with Walter, as his could be with Ray.

  Often it occurred to him, as she sat humbled before him, coaxing, placating, how strange it was that his methods in coaxing his wife out of a mood of real or fancied wrong could be so identical with hers.

  “Walter, I love you. Say that you love me.”

  “Just let me alone for a while, Ray. I need to be alone.”

  Rigidly he could withstand her importunings for a period of hours, submitting with averted face to her touch, to her pressure, to her chirpings and her pleadings. “Walter, if you really loved me you could not hold out against me this way.”

  His capacity to remain silent was eternally baffling to her.

  “Walter, sometime I’m going to try and get angry with you and stay that way, if only I could.…”

  “I am not angry.”

  “You are!”

  “You are what you are, that’s all, and nothing can change you.”

  “But, Walter, I only meant …”

  “ ‘Back streets of my life.’ Do you think it’s pleasant or easy for me? A man in my position? Lies. Evasions. Fears. My children growing up. My affairs more and more in the public eye. It is danger every instant, and now I suppose you want a pair of marble front stairs on which to air the situation.”

  Was this the Walter who could be so suave—the Walter who practiced after-dinner speeches in this very room, after she had typed them on the machine she had recently acquired and mastered as a surprise to him? Was this the Walter she had seen ride up the avenue in high hat and a big Packard car, in the wake of some distinguished visiting personage who was being conducted to the mayor by the Citizens’ Committee? This snarling petty boy with the angry tan darkening his face.

  “Oh, Walter, how can you think such things?”

  “If you had any conception of what it means to live day and night the kind of life that could ruin you!”

  Why hadn’t she the pride to throw his freedom in his lap? Hundreds of times that question had moved tormentingly in her breast, and each time her sole response had been to wind her arms about his neck, coax his reluctant eyes around to hers, placate him with every method at her command.

  “Walter, isn’t our love worth it?”

  “I suppose it is, or I couldn’t go on.”

  “You know it is.”

  “I don’t know anything.”

  “Walter, darling, you know it is.”

  “All right, anything you say.”

  This mood was terrible to her. Impenetrable, sometimes for hours.

  “I’ll go now.”

  “Walter, not this way. I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t sleep. Don’t leave this way.”

  “Well,” resignedly, “what do you want me to do?”

  “Smile. Be bright. Be sweet.”

  “Oh, I see. Smile because you feel as you do about the back-st—”

  “Walter, if you don’t stop putting words into my mouth that I didn’t say, I’m going to treat you the way you would treat your little Irma if she were naughty, and stand you right over there in the corner. Darling, don’t you know that the back streets with you are more than Heaven would be with anybody else? I’m happier here than I would be sitting in the first row of your box at the opera. I’ve had lovelier times in my little pension in the rue Cambon in Paris than anybody could have at the Crillon with you. I love the little ships I cross on and the flat I live in and everything about everything—Walter—darling—”

  His resistance gave way, reluctantly, but surely. Reconciliation, when it did come, swept him, on a wave of contrition, into her arms.

  “You shouldn’t torture me, Ray.”

  “Oh, my darling, I’d cut off my right hand first.”

  “You are my everything.”

  “And you are mine.”

  “Everything I have the strength or the purpose to do dates right back to you. I wouldn’t have the courage to face this terrible game called success, without you.”

  “Oh, Walter, one minute I’m way down in the cellar and a danger and drain on you, and the next minute you put me up there on a pedestal. I’d rather be somewhere in the middle. It’s safer.”

  “I can’t ever place you high enough. There is not an hour in the day that I am not leaning on you, even if it is one of the days we don’t meet. It isn’t only your advice about everything pertaining to my life, Ray. It’s more than that. It’s the knowledge that there is one person capable of something utterly selfless and unselfish where I am concerned. No children to come between, no social considerations, no worldly ambitions, no money-grabbing, no family politics, no consideration but me.…”

  (Me-Me-Me-Me-Me-Me-Me-Me-Me-Me.)

  “I love you, Walter.”

  “I love you, Ray.”

  “Say it again.”

  “I love you, Ray.”

  “I love you, Walter, I love you.”
/>   30

  It should be said for Walter that his part in a drama that was to be played against the background of economics, diplomacy, philanthropy, and ultimately the war, international affairs, arms, armistice, and finance of high and intricate order, was to lodge in his mind as nothing short of phenomenon and accident of circumstance.

  Long before America made formal entry into the World War, the firm of Friedlander-Kunz had already established conspicuous precedent for what was consistently to remain its policy throughout the holocaust years.

  On the other hand, even when Ray had occasion to sit in the vast, red, gold-filled mouth of the Metropolitan Opera House, and listen to Walter attempt to inflame an audience that had been gathered there in the name of affiliated charity, of which he was a vice president, or as in later years, when she was to behold him seated on a dais beside men upon whose judgment the destiny of America in world war was to be decided, there seemed nothing incongruous in this evidence of his place in the affairs of men.

  Not once, upon the occasion of Walter’s active part in one of the largest drives in the history of organized charities, did it strike Ray, that afternoon in the Metropolitan Opera House, that it might be a far cry from the remote, diminished-looking little citizen with the authority to plead from that immense stage for the financial cooperation of the nation, back to the black-haired, gray-eyed youth she had first encountered on the coping of the C. H. and D. railroad station in Cincinnati. His place seemed rightly here among men of weight in the affairs of state and finance.

  From where Ray sat, these men of weight were specks, animated shirtfronts, dots for features, reminding her in formation, of Lew Dockstader’s minstrels. Only Walter emerged for her, the lineaments of his face filled with clarity, his address of flowing lucidity to her, partly, it is true, because she had composed and rewritten it time over again, on her typewriter.

  Even the detail of his small black tie was apparent to her across the vast depth of auditorium. She had retied it for him, finally removed it, pressed, and retied it to a nicety.

  Walter’s was not an impassioned speech. Mayor Mitchel, Otto Kahn, Felix Warburg, John Finley, had previously moved the audience to tears, cheers, and checks. Walter’s, on the other hand, was a careful and studied compendium of statistics and laboriously accrued facts which he had placed in a sheaf on the typewriter in Ray’s apartment just twenty-four hours previous. Infant mortality. Aged Blind. Crippled Catholic children. Protestant Big Sisters. Jewish Juvenile Delinquency. The paper he was reading was her careful compilation of statistics, reports, budgets, pertaining to the sectarian charities of the city.

  She wished passionately, sitting there bending forward to lose no sound, that he need not have to read it. Part of the success of his predecessors lay in the gesture of conviction, the moist eye, the booming and diminuendo voice. Walter’s voice almost droned through his material. Walter, who could not bear to see a thinly clad child shiver, or encounter an elderly beggar! In the flat before the mirror, there had seemed to her to be the forthright qualities of vigor and passion in his voice. And now here, suddenly, before the thousands, something in Walter failed to project itself.

  “Read, Walter, as if the needy poor were standing in hordes behind you, egging you on. Read, Walter, as if your own babies were undernourished and thinly clad and you were pleading for them.”

  All very well and good within the well-warmed crowded little room that was so benign to him at all times. There, his voice did boom, and his eye command; but here, in the impersonal vastness, that voice became the recitative one of the statistician, his impassioned plea took on the key of faint harangue, and the audience began to squirm. There was no showmanship in Walter’s manner of address, which by its very nature needed, in order to challenge response, to be shot out of the cannon of a personality.

  With a sense of frenzied futility, sitting there in the balcony, her hands white at the knuckles, Ray felt his poorly projected fervor and yearned for the power to somehow divert it into ringing blasts against a slipping audience.

  Years later, before a war audience, in that same auditorium where hundreds of thousands of dollars were to be raised in a Victory Drive, he was to fail her even more devastatingly than now; was to hold back the self, which before the mirror in her flat, could sometimes seem to rise to impassioned oratorical heights.

  How innocent Corinne seemed of all of Ray’s kind of raging travail at the parade of his inadequacies.

  In the third box to the right of the first tier, as if they were sitting for a portrait of “Mrs. Walter D. Saxel and children,” were Corinne, Richard, and Irma. Corinne in a small mink toque with aigrets, a handsome mink jacket thrown open, and a shower of lace flowing among her two strings of pearls on her small high bust. Every inch the prideful, secure wife, the impeccable mother, the entrenched, the chaste, the normal. Everything had happened right in its place and in its order and as it should be, to Corinne. It always would. Life would see to that. Walter would see to that. Even her children were already grouped about her in a small barricade. Richard, gawkier even than when last she had spied him at the occasion of Walter’s helping to officiate at Flag Day exercises. A tall, supine young fellow, strangely unlike either Corinne or Walter, but said to resemble the Frankfurt-am-Main Friedlanders. Irma, in the plump fair image of her mother, a fan of lovely yellow curls, spread as if drying in the sun along her lace collar.

  They were like a dream, down there in that box, so snugly partitioned by brass and red velvet, a warm fragrant dream of security and solidity, a dream tinctured with nightmare. There were, in addition, two distant cousins in that box. Strong, lean, aquiline maiden women, with strong dark hair mixed with gray, and heavily decked out in the beautiful twenty-two carat gold-scrolled jewelry of the period. They were Hanna and Jennie Friedlander, maidens of vast inheritances, and, according to many a humorous recital by Walter, pests in the Saxel household. But nonetheless they were part in the solidarity. The entrenchment of Corinne. The entrenchment of the Friedlanders. Of the Saxels. Of the race.

  How different the falling away of her own family had been. It was more than a month after Tagenhorst’s death that little Emma had written Ray, thanking her for a ten-dollar check for an Easter gift, and adding, almost by way of postscript, the serious accident to her grandmother of a fall over a porch-rail while shaking a rug, the indirect results of which were so ultimately cause of her death. Even though she sent money to her people, as she constantly did, with the gleanings of her racing, china painting, and sofa-pillow money, and kept what contacts with them she could, by way of letters, small gifts, the solidarity was lacking. The superb solidarity of clan, which, with a paradoxical insistency, was something to admire, even while it continued to crush and defeat her.

  There was, to be sure, her pride in Emma. The never-ceasing thrill of “Aunt Ray” with which her lusterless little letters began. Emma, from her photograph in first-communion dress and veil, was blonde, pasty, terribly nearsighted behind thick lenses, but, withal, a source of pride to Ray that could reduce her to the impulse of tears. There was strange solace and inner satisfaction in standing before the cabinet photograph of Emma in her communion dress and bouquet of carnations, and letting unshed tears obscure her into Ray’s dim idealization of what Emma should be. Not frail and pasty and weak-eyed, but, through the blessing of tears, lovelier than loveliness. But even this rather vicarious yearning of a stepaunt over a stepniece was not quite the thing which you could almost trace by a dotted line, as they did in comic strips, from the calm safe eyes of Corinne to the figure of Walter, framed in the huge proscenium.

  Damn them. Curse them. Bless them. These solid Jews. These sticklers for one another. These tight units of kith and kin, which are more ostracizing than ostracized. How they did for one another! The charities of Jews in the name of Jews! Honor thy father and thy mother and the old and the broken ones of the tribe. All denominations, of course, gave by way of charities, to their own; but, somehow, it seemed th
e Jews who, self-conscious with past pain, gave more bountifully, to spare their own future pain. Already, before he was fifty, Walter’s name was well to the fore of practically every large charity in the name of his people. By the time he was fifty, the Corinne Saxel Wing in the Mount of Olives Hospital was completed. By the time he was fifty-three, he would have given away his first million. You could count them off, too, the Jews who, like Walter, the country over, were giving in the name of the solidarity.

  Try to break in. Try to crash the gate of Jewishness. That dotted line from the eye of her there in the box, surrounded by the indescribable wealth of his children, to the eye of him there in the proscenium, no larger than a raisin, but filled with the mysterious mucus of family solidity.

  Yes, even defeated by it, ostracized by it, she could not look upon the calm little-dowager prettiness of Corinne—whose hair, whitening, made her lovelier—and not thrill, and at the same time, paradoxically, maddeningly, not feel bitter, rankling, hurting, and soiled.

  That was the part, this last, this feeling of smirch, that one never dared quite to meet.

  Leaving the opera house, crushed into the crush, as so many times she had grown accustomed to nestling herself in the anonymity of the throng, at piers, at theaters, in hotel lobbies, in various public places, there they were! Corinne, the Misses Friedlander, Richard, Irma, almost close enough to touch. She could in fact have reached out and tapped Walter as he joined them. The crowd milled and detained them. There was a bright flush on Walter’s cheekbones, and his children reached out to him, and his women laid hands upon him, and there were handshakes from those who knew him and from those who ventured to extend the stranger’s hand of congratulation.

  More and more, as the public aspect of his life claimed him, he insisted upon Ray’s presence in the throng. It made subsequent discussion so much more vitally their common interest if she had heard his address, witnessed the same play or opera, been present at the same ceremony, or attended the same art show or auction. She had learned to be clever about this last, comparing art catalogues, digging out the history of paintings at the public library, inspecting the collection at close range long before the day of sale.