Back STreet

by Fannie Hurst

  Yes, much of what he said was true. She realized it now. Ever since, through the eyes of Walter, she had beheld Irma and young Poole going off alone, or in groups, to see Richard excel in polo, or skiing at Lake Placid, or dancing in the new ballroom that stretched across the top floor of the Poole town house, the dream of this ultimate alliance had nested in her mind.

  As Walter had constructed him in her mind’s eye, the eldest child of Mordecai Poole, a chip off the block of a father as renowned in the affairs of Jewry, humanitarianism, philanthropy, art patronage and industry as a Straus, Warburg, or Marshall would add to the already firm structure of the house of Saxel the completion of a tower, and mortar, with a kind of impenetrability that had never failed to awe as much as it had defeated her, that solidarity of a race in which, vagaries of social ambition to the contrary notwithstanding, the clan impulse would not die.

  It was right and fitting that a Saxel should marry a Poole. She beheld Irma, through the vicarious mirror of her father’s eyes, in an after-war era that was beginning to be littered with the truck of such phrases as “flapper” and “jazz-baby,” moving along to the syncopated rhythm of her time, into a destiny as sure and smug and normal as Corinne’s. Irma, whose burning, youthful, and at one time really bitter determination to transcend, with the assault of money, certain ostracisms which were galling to her, had been a tempest all right; but tempest in a teacup it had turned out to be. With Corinne, in whom the daughter had aroused ambitions remote to her, the same was true. With the advent of young Mordecai II all that was strangely quiescent now, canceled, as it were. Irma, whose smug Teutonic prettiness was in the image of her mother’s, would marry, even as her mother before her, young, well, and within the clan. There would be issue—issue of Walter’s issue.

  How passionately she, Ray, had desired that marriage, now came over her in a kind of slow anger. Why? In order that the wall which, over twenty years ago, had closed him in, might continue to shut her out. Why? In order that for Corinne, who had everything, there might be even more of the abundance that had filled her arms with children—an abundance that lay crusted in pearls along her plump throat, and which, all unconsciously, was borne out in the dowager perfection of her smug manner.

  Why need she desire for Corinne further endowment to the already bursting granaries of her life? Why was she, seated there, in the snide back-street quarters that were typical of the usual mounting he gave her, being barked at for a seemingly inadvertent remark she had made about this impending marriage?

  “To hear you talk, one would think I had gone out to make the match.”

  “No, Walter, no. I only meant …”

  “You only meant! You only meant somehow to make it appear that what I wished for the girl was to find her a rich husband and marry her off.”

  “No, no, Walter.”

  “When, as a matter of fact, it is obnoxious to me. The whole business. No complaint against Mordecai, he’s a fine young fellow. But she’s too young. Let her wait a few years. I want her at home with her mother and me. It isn’t that I don’t think this chap is good enough for her. I don’t think anybody is good enough for her.”

  “You’re right, Walter. But the real time for the right marriage is when two young people decide for themselves. You did.”

  He gave her a look at that, as deep, as mystifying, as filled with turgid depths as the pool of unclarified pain she had always carried in her heart concerning a certain Sunday morning and its consequences.

  “Well, anyway—she is the dearest thing, Ray. I don’t want to seem to say it, because she is mine, but—Irma is the dearest thing.…”

  “You darling,” she said, feeling her eyes fill, and yet somehow sitting carefully away from him, as he stood teetering on spread feet before the window that looked out upon the courtyard with its tin umbrellas.

  But the coming of the young people and the subsequent arrival of Mordecai Poole, senior, and his young and second wife, from Carlsbad, put an abrupt end to the rather easily managed scheme of things which had been possible up to then. The Saxel-Friedlander-Poole party now occupied a fine old building, also hotel property, known as the Villa, set well beyond the formal gardens of the Bernasçon, and usually given over to visiting royalty, the Prime Minister of England, personages and their entourages from various lands, who occupied it from time to time during season.

  Here, even to the meals, which were served to piping-hot perfection from the hotel kitchens, the party took up a sort of carnival family life, sufficient unto themselves, yet in evidence everywhere—Mordecai Poole, senior, whose resemblance to Bismarck was striking, and his handsome young Viennese wife, driving through the town in a buff-colored, special-body Kurt-Sussex touring car that was conspicuous even for Aix-les-Bains; everywhere, too, you encountered the engaged couple, driving, walking, golfing, or, straight as needles on their mounts, galloping along the bridle paths; everywhere Friedlanders, playing bridge on gala afternoons on the elaborate terraces of the Hotel Splendide, motoring with newly arrived cousins, the Dreyfouses of Frankfurt-am-Main, gathering before lunch in large animated groups around the mineral springs; evenings, the party, or segments of it, flooding the Casino, dining there, on gala nights, at-large special tables, or playing at chemin-de-fer or baccarat with consistent conservatism.

  Even young Mordecai II took his winnings up to a point as he took his losses up to a point, and quit. Safety there for Irma. Security.

  This much, through the peepholes afforded between heads and shoulders, Ray, on those now rare occasions when she ventured into the Casino at all, had observed from the outer fringe of rooms where the women played lotto and the minors and petty guests played boule for stakes that were infantile—to which gambling frontiers she now confined herself.

  Saxels, Friedlanders, Pooles everywhere! It made the days, when she dared not venture to the springs or the band concert or along the streets or into the Casino gardens to sip an ice or frappéd liqueur, long again and dull again and empty of Walter.

  It caused the old creeping inertia to grip. It once more afforded time for the writing of long letters to Emma, describing what she could of the historic significance of her surroundings, culled chiefly from the folders in railroad offices; stitching blouses for her by hand, and, on occasional pickings from the Casino, tucking a bill or a trinket into a letter, to supplement the year’s remittance for college budget, which long before had been sent her out of combined proceeds from the Women’s Exchange and a season at the races that had yielded a slightly credit side.

  A summer hitherto all too fleeting seemed suddenly to pause and stand still. There were evenings now, when, deciding against the possible indiscretion of public appearance, she did not even climb out of her negligee into the evening dress required as a badge of admission to the Casino, but had dinner served in the room, where the Babe, leaping into her lap, could yap for each tidbit as it was temptingly held up, before the descent.

  Sometimes, for want of the knowledge of French which would have helped her exchange a little patter with the femme-de-chambre who spread her bed, the waiter who spread her table, or the petits bourgeois who inhabited this little hotel, so snugly removed from the haunts of the American and English, whole days passed without more than a friendly pantomime with those who served her, or the sound of her own voice admonishing and caressing the day-long doings of the Babe.

  In many ways, these long days, wrapped in silence, stagnant with caution, recalled the desolation of that summer at Mount Clemens. Only this, after the weeks of drives through leafy nocturnal roads, the forays into the Casino, there to literally rub shoulders with Walter, the pleasant meanderings through afternoons that were fairly sure to be clear of the possibility of encounters, came with a sense of depressing contrast. She found herself committing the cardinal sin of wishing the passing of time. By noon, it seemed already mid-afternoon. The evenings, up there in the stuffy seclusion of the pair of rooms, could seem to stand stock-still, so that frequently to forestall t
hem she dressed, in something cool for the street, so that she could have her dinner in the courtyard at a table from which the tin umbrella had been removed, and afterward stroll the immediate neighborhood with the Babe on his leash.

  It was during this period, literally to kill time and make less tedious the performance of consuming that after-dinner period, that she set about to cultivate her lagging habit of smoking. There was something about the gesture of sitting beside a demitasse, the smoke coming in two thin streams of exhalation from her nostrils, that manufactured a sense of well-being. According to law and order, you had dined well, wined well, and were at peace with yourself and your world.

  At peace. Sitting there in the courtyard, smoking, little groups of people in unintelligible conversation about her, the lights of the Casino beginning to glow against the sky, what beat against her solitude was not a heart at peace. It was more the weight of a small killed bird swinging there, whose wounds had hurt it terribly before it died.

  Oh, everything was as it should be. The weight at her heart was not resentment, it was ache. It was right of Walter to meticulously absent himself these days following the announcement of the betrothal of his daughter. No one quicker than she to realize the folly of a careless move. Besides, demands were upon him.

  On the last evening she had ventured into the Casino, she had seen him through a remote doorway sitting in the garden over cigars and Chartreuse in profound and animated conversation with the elder Poole and Meyer Friedlander of Frankfurt. From the concentrated and always nervous look on Walter’s face, she could tell that their discussion had to do with some form of high finance of banking. A screwed expression invariably came into his features when he spoke of the banking house whose traditions he was succeeding in carrying alone. The look of a man not sufficiently sure of himself, or the stability of his achievement, to relax. The look of a man who suspects his success to be bigger than he is.

  Of course it was right she should not see him during these carnival times of the gathering of the magnificence of the Saxels, the Friedlanders, and the Pooles.

  One evening he did manage to leave the baccarat table for an hour and hurry down the side street to her hotel. She had been bathing the Babe and, seated on the bedroom floor beside a tin tub of soapy water, was engaged in rubbing him dry with an old Turkish towel. Somehow, the spectacle of her there in an old red challis negligee, with the lacy sleeves pinned up to her elbows and the hair down over her eyes so that she had constantly to blow it upward with her pursed lips, made him tender and in one of the moods when he could be considerate. She was darting quickly into fresh clothes, whisking the tub out of sight and adjusting the room back into the immaculate kind of order in which she liked always to greet him.

  “Stay the way you are, Ray. Dry the little fellow on the floor. Don’t move. I like it.”

  She sank back on her knees and heels.

  “Walter, I had no idea you could get away.”

  “Neither had I. Couldn’t, I guess. Just came. It’s the women who are making it this way. No need in the world to call together a league of nations because two young people have got themselves engaged to be married.”

  “You poor dear tired one. Let me get you something cool to drink. Luckily I took the precaution to buy a piece of ice today.”

  He waved her back to her position on her knees on the floor. “Stay that way. I like it.”

  “Why, Walter,” she said, looking up at him through eyes that were filled with a sense of his mood of tenderness, but full of unease because she realized that the strand of her hair down over her eyes was a gray one which she had a way of keeping tucked out of sight, “I think you’re paying me a compliment.”

  “I don’t know about that, but I do know that it rests me to be here—like this—quiet—little—nobody trying to get anywhere—nobody straining with an ambition, or holding a gun to your head and trying to force you to have a good time. If I had my way, I’d stay here for a month, Ray, with you—and rest—now—like this—”

  “You wouldn’t, darling,” she said, thinking of the discomforts of her mode of living, and then walking over, on her knees, to where he sat on the edge of the bed, and beginning to stroke his hands which were limp on his lap. “But it’s nice of you to think that you would. You’re fed up.”

  He made a quick, horizontal cutting-stroke across his throat: “To here.”

  “It will soon be over.”

  “Can’t be too soon for me. The gabble. Good Lord, the gabble of the women. Their insanity after things. The doilies! What in God’s name is it, creates madness in women for doilies the moment there is a marriage on the horizon. The doily brigade. Corinne’s mother was the same way. I remember we were launched in our first housekeeping enterprise on a sea of doilies. I want to be quiet. I can be quiet here with you.”

  “My dear …”

  “Now, mark my word, Ray. It’s a promise to myself. Next year, just you and I are coming abroad somewhere. Just you and I. It can be managed. Some place high and cool and simple and clean and away from feverish people. Switzerland! A chalet that looks out over snow-capped mountains. Peasants. Cows. Eagle-nests. Blue ice. Green pastures. It’s coming to me, Ray. I need it.”

  Even as warmth flowed over her and she laid lips to the hand stretched over his knee, there was that old rhythm at her again, insistent as the click of wheels along rails. I. I. I. I. I. I. It’s coming to me. I need it. What about her? The days of the weeks of the months of years of the stuffiness of indoor routine in the stale air of the chromo interiors with which he provided her. What about the need in her that she felt most keenly when she peered over a wall into a garden, or through a window into a roomful of free-and-easy human beings enjoying free-and-easy social intercourse. What about her? The years of the days with a string to each of them. The hours-on-end of waiting for the beck or the call. The walking in the shadow. The lurking up the side streets. The loneliness that was filled with so many dreads and fears and cautions. What about me? What about me? What about me?

  But, instead, she sat there with her lips that were laid close to his hand making little pacifying-sounds that must have been sedative, because presently, without protest, he let her rise and tuck a pillow under his head, lower a light, and prepare him a soft drink of fresh limes, a touch of almond-oil, and grenadine, for which she had brought the almond-oil from America.

  “Ah, fine! Beats all your French liqueurs and Haute Sauterne. This tastes like me in carpet slippers.”

  He was right. How sweet and sure and snug and bright it would be, back there in the flat which was recalled to him by the taste of a drink he had so frequently imbibed there. For that matter, how sweet and right to be here—alone together, with every danger shut out, and dear, warm, rutted habits theirs to enjoy.

  “Take off your coat, dearest; you’re warm.”

  “I must go back. They’ll miss me. I’m playing fifty-fifty baccarat with old Poole.”

  “Oh, Walter, I had hoped …”

  “No. Besides, Corinne has an idea I’m neglecting the Fraus from Frankfurt. There’s a trip to Annecy planned for early tomorrow.…”

  She held out his hat, wanting to say: “What about me? It’s been six days of just sitting here alone. It’s not that I’m complaining, I understand so well, but sometimes, sitting here alone in the stuffiness, the fear comes over me—honestly, the fear of getting crazy with the sameness of this suspense.… Take me to Switzerland now, Walter! I need the change. It’s coming to me.” Of course, she said nothing of the sort.

  “I’ll be waiting, dear.”

  At midnight, against her discretion, but of a restlessness and unutterable weariness of solitude that was born afresh out of her own hatred of seeing him go, she climbed, a little tiredly, into a brown lace evening dress, drew her hair in a new-fashioned part at the side, which she had adopted since fashion’s decree against the pompadour, threw on a chiffon scarf, and hurried out through the dark side streets that converged into the brighter one
surrounding the Casino.

  The way into the lotto rooms and the tables of the minors and petty gamesters was from a side street, separate from the grand entrance through the gardens, where the line of motorcars, motor busses, taxicabs, and horse-drawn vehicles was constant.

  For an hour she stood at one of the five-franc boule tables, placing one-franc pieces until she had lost twenty. Then for another hour, fascinated as always, she stood watching the small ebb and flow of these backwater tables. Small fry at small stakes. Pastime of the unadventurously inclined. A different picture from the weaving magnificence of the grand salons beyond, where men and women in a single evening lost or won sums which represented fortunes.

  And yet it caught her even here. The same lure that used to capture her fancy back at the hazard tables in the back rooms, Over-the-Rhine.

  “If I had money, I’m afraid I’d be a big gambler,” she once told Walter.

  “If you had money you might fly away from me,” had been his strange retort. Strange, and yet later, trying to analyze it, she used it often to explain to herself much that otherwise would have been unexplainable, the penury of his attitude toward her.

  As she stood there, watching the petty ebb and flow of the franc, the eager greedy hands of the reaching women, which somehow could appear so much more greedy than the reaching hands of the men, desire to play caused her to feel along the edges of her empty spangled purse for a coin which might by chance have clung to the chamois lining.

  One ached to be part of that high-tension moment when the boule-ball, high-strung as a coloratura’s reach for C, skedaddled into place. Ball-bearinged little demon of destiny! The red became one’s destiny. The franc piece on the red became one’s destiny. One’s destiny became the franc. Destiny swung with that skedaddling ball. Planets swung. You swung. Ah, blah!

  There were no coins left in her purse, but a gray-haired denizen of her hotel, who looked like an illustrated version of a boulevardier on his uppers, tossed two francs over his shoulder without so much as looking back, as if thus to propitiate the stroke of luck that had just swept him twenty.