In a recurrence of her surprising concern of the day before Mrs. Condon
declined to leave her dearest Linda alone; and, their arms caught
together in a surging affection, they walked down Fifth Avenue toward
the hairdresser's. There was a diffused gray sparkle of sunlight--it
was early for the throngs--through which they passed rapidly to the
accompaniment of a rapid eager chatter. Linda wore a deep smooth camel's
hair cape, over which her intense black hair poured like ink, and her
face was shaded by a dipping green velvet hat. Her mother, in one of
the tightly cut suits she affected, had never been more like a perfect
companion.
They saw, in the window of a store for men, a set of violent purple
wool underwear, and barely escaped hysterics at the thought of Mr. Moses
Feldt in such a garb. They giggled idiotically at the spectacle of a
countryman fearfully making the sharp descent from the top of a lurching
omnibus. And then, when they had reached the place of Mrs. Condon's
appointment, stopped at the show of elaborately waved hair on wax heads
and chose which, probably, would resemble the elder and which, in a very
short while now, Linda.
There was an impressive interior, furnished in gray panels and silvery
wood; and the young woman at the desk was more surprisingly waved than
anything they had yet seen. M. Joseph would be ready almost immediately;
and in the meanwhile Mrs. Condon could lay aside her things in
preparation for the hair to be washed. She did this while Linda followed
every movement with the deepest interest.
At the back of the long room was a succession of small alcoves, each
with an important-looking chair and mirror and shelves, a white basin,
water-taps and rubber tubes. Settled, in comfort, Mrs. Condon's hair was
spread out in a bright metal tray fastened to the back of the chair, and
the attendant, a moist tired girl in a careless waist, sprayed the short
thick gold-colored strands.
“My,” she observed, “what some wouldn't give for your shade! Never been
touched, I can see, either. A lady comes in with real Titian, but yours
is more select. It positively is Lillian Russell.” While she talked
her hands sped with incredible rapidity and skill. “The gentlemen don't
notice it; of course not; oh, no! There was a girl here, a true blonde,
but she didn't stay long--her own car, yes, indeed. Married her right
out of the establishment. There wasn't any nonsense to her.
“So this is your little girl! I'd never have believed it. Not that she
hasn't a great deal of style, a great deal--almost, you might say, like
an Egyptian. In the movies last night; her all over. It's a type that
will need studying. Bertha Kalich. But for me--”
Already, Linda saw, this part of the operation was done. The girl
wheeled into position a case that had a fan and ring of blue flickering
flames, and a cupped tube through which hot air was poured over her
mother's head. M. Joseph strutted in, a small carefully dressed man with
a diminutive pointed gray beard and formal curled mustache. He spoke
with what Linda supposed was a French accent, and his manners, at least
to them, were beautiful. But because the girl had not put out the blue
flames quickly enough he turned to her with a voice of quivering rage.
It was so unexpected, in the middle of his bowing and smooth assurances,
that Linda was startled, and had to think about him all over. The result
of this was a surprising dislike; she hated, even, to see him touch her
mother, as he unnecessarily did in directing them into the enclosure for
the permanent wave.
The place itself filled her with the faint horror of instruments and the
unknown. Above the chair where Mrs. Condon now sat there was a circle
in the ceiling like the base of a chandelier and hanging down from it
on twisted green wires were a great number of the strangest things
imaginable: they were as thick as her wrist, but round, longer and
hollow, white china inside and covered with brown wrapping. The wires
of each, she discovered, led over a little wheel and down again to
a swinging clock-like weight. In addition to this there were strange
depressing handles on the wall by a dial with a jiggling needle and
clearly marked numbers.
The skill of the girl who had washed her mother's hair, however, was
slight compared with M. Joseph's dexterity. The comb flashed in his
white narrow hands; in no time at all every knot was urged out into a
shining smoothness. “Just the front?” he inquired. Not waiting for
Mrs. Condon's reply, he detached a strand from the mass over her brow,
impaled it on a hairpin, while he picked up what might have been a thick
steel knitting-needle with one end fastened in the middle of a silver
quarter. The latter, it developed, had a hole in it, through which he
drew the strand of hair, and then wrapped it with an angry tightness
about the long projection.
At this exact moment a new girl, but tired and moist, appeared, took a
hank of white threads from a dressing-table, and tied that separate lock
firmly. This, Linda counted, was repeated fifteen times; and when it was
accomplished she was unable to repress a nervous laughter. Really, her
mother looked too queer for words: the long rigid projections stood out
all over her head like--like a huge pincushion; no, it was a porcupine.
Mrs. Condon smiled in uncertain recognition of her daughter's mirth.
Then Linda's attention followed M. Joseph to a table against a
partition, where he secured a white cotton strip from a film of them
soaking in a shallow tray, took up some white powder on the blade of
a dessert knife and transferred it to the strip. This he wrapped and
wrapped about the hair fastened on a spindle, tied it in turn, and
dragged down one of the brown objects on wires, which, to Linda's
great astonishment, fitted precisely over the cotton-bound hair. Again,
fifteen times, M. Joseph did this, fastening each connection with the
turn of a screw. When so much was accomplished her mother's hair, it
seemed, had grown fast to the ceiling in a tangle of green ends. It was
the most terrifying spectacle Linda had ever witnessed. Obscure thoughts
of torture, of criminals executed by electricity, froze her in a set
apprehension.
The hair-dresser stepped over to the dials on the wall, and, with a
sharp comprehensive glance at his apparatus, moved a handle as far as it
would go. Nothing immediately happened, and Linda gave a relaxing sigh
of relief. M. Joseph, however, became full of a painful attention.
X
He brought into view an unsuspected tube, with a cone of paper at its
end, and bent over her mother, directing a stream of cold air against
her head. “How do you feel?” he asked, with, Linda noticed, a startling
loss of his first accent. Mrs. Condon so far felt well enough.
Then, before Linda's startled gaze, every single one of the fifteen
imprisoning tubes began to steam with an extraordinary vigor; not only
did they steam, like teapots, but drops of water formed and slowly slid
over her mother's face. If the process appeared weird at the beginning,
now it was utterly fantastic.
The little white vapor spurts played about Mrs. Condon's dripping
countenance; they increased rather than diminished; actually it
resembled a wrecked locomotive she had once seen. “How are you?” M.
Joseph demanded nervously. “Is it hot anywhere?” With a sudden gesture
she replied in a shaking voice, “Here.”
Instantly he was holding the paper cone with its cold air against her
scalp, and the heat was subdued. He glanced nervously at his watch, and
Mrs. Condon managed to ask, “How long?”
“Twenty minutes.”
Dangerous as the whole proceeding seemed nothing really happened, and
Linda's fears gradually faded into a mere curiosity and interest. A
curtain hung across the door to the rest of the establishment, but it
had been brushed partly aside; and she could see, in the compartment
they had vacated, another man bending with waving irons over the
liberated mass of a woman's hair. He was very much like M. Joseph, but
he was younger and had only a dark scrap of mustache. As he caught up
the hair with a quick double twist he leaned very close to the woman's
face, whispering with an expression that never changed, an expression
like that of the wax heads in the show-case. He bent so low that Linda
was certain their cheeks had touched. She pondered at length over this,
gazing now at the man beyond and now at M. Joseph flitting with the
cold-air tube about her mother; wondering if, when she grew older, she
would like a hair-dresser's cheek against hers. Linda decided not. The
idea didn't shock her, the woman in the other space plainly liked
it; still she decided she wouldn't. A different kind of man, she told
herself, would be nicer.
Her thoughts were interrupted by a sharp, unpleasant odor--the odor of
scorched hair; and she was absolutely rigid with horror at an agonized
cry from her mother.
“It's burning me terribly,” the latter cried. “Oh, I can't stand it.
Stop! Stop!”
M. Joseph, as white as plaster, rushed to the wall and reversed the
handle, and Mrs. Condon started from the chair, her face now streaming
with actual tears; but before she could escape the man threw himself on
her shoulders.
“You mustn't move,” he whispered desperately, “you'll tear your hair
out. I tell you no harm's been done. Everything is all right. Please,
please don't cry like that. It will ruin my business. There are others
in the establishment. Stop!” he shook her viciously.
Linda had risen, terrorized; and Mrs. Condon, with waving plucking
hands, was sobbing an appeal to be released. “My head, my head,” she
repeated. “I assure you”--the man motioned to a pallid girl to hold her
in the chair. With a towel to protect his hand he undid a screw,
lifted off the cap and untwisted the cotton from a bound lock of hair;
releasing it, in turn, from the spindle it fell forward in a complete
corkscrew over Mrs. Condon's face.
“Do you see!” he demanded. “Perfect. I give you my word they'll all be
like that. The cursed heat ran up on me,” he added in a swift aside to
his assistant. “Has Mrs. Bellows gone? Who's still in the place? Here,
loose that binding ... thank God, that one is all right, too.”
Together they unfastened most of the connections, and a growing fringe
of long remarkable curls marked Mrs. Condon's pain-drawn and dabbled
face. Linda sobbed uncontrollably; but perhaps, after all, nothing
frightful had happened. Her poor mother! Then fear again tightened about
her heart at the perturbed expression that overtook the hair-dresser.
He was trying in vain to remove one of the caps. She caught enigmatic
words--“the borax, crystallized ... solid. It would take a plumber ...
have to go.”
The connection was immovable. Even in her suffering Mrs. Condon implored
M. Joseph to save her hair. Nothing, however, could be done; he admitted
it with pale lips. The thing might be chiseled off; in the end he tried
to force a release and the strand, with a renewal of Mrs.
Condon's agony--now, in the interest of her appearance, heroically
withstood--snapped short in the container.
Rapidly recovering her vigor, she launched on a tirade against M. Joseph
and his permanent waving establishment--Linda had never before heard her
mother talk in such a loud brutal manner, nor use such heated unpleasant
words, and the girl was flooded with a wretched shame. Still another
lock, it was revealed, had been ruined, and crumbled to mere dust in its
owner's fingers.
“The law will provide for you,” she promised.
“Your hair was dyed,” the proprietor returned vindictively. “The girl
who washed it will testify. Every one is warned against the permanent if
their hair has been colored. So it was at your own risk.”
“My head's never been touched with dye,” Mrs. Condon shrilly answered.
“You lying little ape. And well does that young woman know it. She
complimented me herself on a true blonde.” The girl had, too, right
before Linda.
“You ought to be thrashed out of the city.”
“Your money will be given back to you,” M. Joseph told her.
Outside they found a taxi, and sped back to their hotel. Above, Mrs.
Condon removed her hat; and, before the uncompromising mirror, studied
her wrecked hair--a frizzled vacancy was directly over her left
brow--and haggard face. When she finally turned to Linda, her manner,
her words, were solemn.
“I'm middle-aged,” she said.
A dreary silence enveloped them sitting in the dark reception-room while
Mrs. Condon restlessly shredded unlighted cigarettes on the floor. She
had made no effort to repair the damages to her appearance, and when the
telephone bell sharply sounded, she reached out in a slovenly negligence
of manner. Linda could hear a blurred articulation and her mother
answering listlessly. The latter at last said: “Very well, at seven
then; you'll stop for us.” She hung up the receiver, stared blankly at
Linda, and then went off into a harsh mirth. “Oh, my God!” she cried;
“the old ladies' home!”