"I thought you didn't have one," Jo would say.
"I haven't. I never go to dances."
Jo would pass a futile hand over the top of his head, as was his way
when disturbed. "I just thought you'd like one. I thought every girl
liked a fan. Just," feebly, "just to--to have."
"Oh, for pity's sake!"
And from Eva or Babe, "I've _got_ silk stockings, Jo." Or, "You brought
me handkerchiefs the last time."
There was something selfish in his giving, as there always is in any
gift freely and joyfully made. They never suspected the exquisite
pleasure it gave him to select these things; these fine, soft, silken
things. There were many things about this slow-going, amiable brother of
theirs that they never suspected. If you had told them he was a dreamer
of dreams, for example, they would have been amused. Sometimes,
dead-tired by nine o'clock, after a hard day downtown, he would doze
over the evening paper. At intervals he would wake, red-eyed, to a
snatch of conversation such as, "Yes, but if you get a blue you can wear
it anywhere. It's dressy, and at the same time it's quiet, too." Eva,
the expert, wrestling with Carrie over the problem of the new spring
dress. They never guessed that the commonplace man in the frayed old
smoking-jacket had banished them all from the room long ago; had
banished himself, for that matter. In his place was a tall, debonair,
and rather dangerously handsome man to whom six o'clock spelled evening
clothes. The kind of a man who can lean up against a mantel, or propose
a toast, or give an order to a man-servant, or whisper a gallant speech
in a lady's ear with equal ease. The shabby old house on Calumet Avenue
was transformed into a brocaded and chandeliered rendezvous for the
brilliance of the city. Beauty was there, and wit. But none so beautiful
and witty as She. Mrs.--er--Jo Hertz. There was wine, of course; but no
vulgar display. There was music; the soft sheen of satin; laughter. And
he the gracious, tactful host, king of his own domain--
"Jo, for heaven's sake, if you're going to snore go to bed!"
"Why--did I fall asleep?"
"You haven't been doing anything else all evening. A person would think
you were fifty instead of thirty."
And Jo Hertz was again just the dull, gray, commonplace brother of three
well-meaning sisters.
Babe used to say petulantly, "Jo, why don't you ever bring home any of
your men friends? A girl might as well not have any brother, all the
good you do."
Jo, conscience-stricken, did his best to make amends. But a man who has
been petticoat-ridden for years loses the knack, somehow, of comradeship
with men. He acquires, too, a knowledge of women, and a distaste for
them, equaled only, perhaps, by that of an elevator-starter in a
department store.
Which brings us to one Sunday in May. Jo came home from a late Sunday
afternoon walk to find company for supper. Carrie often had in one of
her school-teacher friends, or Babe one of her frivolous intimates, or
even Eva a staid guest of the old-girl type. There was always a Sunday
night supper of potato salad, and cold meat, and coffee, and perhaps a
fresh cake. Jo rather enjoyed it, being a hospitable soul. But he
regarded the guests with the undazzled eyes of a man to whom they were
just so many petticoats, timid of the night streets and requiring escort
home. If you had suggested to him that some of his sisters' popularity
was due to his own presence, or if you had hinted that the more
kittenish of these visitors were palpably making eyes at him, he would
have stared in amazement and unbelief.
This Sunday night it turned out to be one of Carrie's friends.
"Emily," said Carrie, "this is my brother, Jo." Jo had learned what to
expect in Carrie's friends. Drab-looking women in the late thirties,
whose facial lines all slanted downward.
"Happy to meet you," said Jo, and looked down at a different sort
altogether. A most surprisingly different sort, for one of Carrie's
friends. This Emily person was very small, and fluffy, and blue-eyed,
and sort of--well, crinkly looking. You know. The corners of her mouth
when she smiled, and her eyes when she looked up at you, and her hair,
which was brown, but had the miraculous effect, somehow, of being
golden.
Jo shook hands with her. Her hand was incredibly small, and soft, so
that you were afraid of crushing it, until you discovered she had a firm
little grip all her own. It surprised and amused you, that grip, as does
a baby's unexpected clutch on your patronizing forefinger. As Jo felt it
in his own big clasp, the strangest thing happened to him. Something
inside Jo Hertz stopped working for a moment, then lurched sickeningly,
then thumped like mad. It was his heart. He stood staring down at her,
and she up at him, until the others laughed. Then their hands fell
apart, lingeringly.
"Are you a school-teacher, Emily?" he said.
"Kindergarten. It's my first year. And don't call me Emily, please."
"Why not? It's your name. I think it's the prettiest name in the world."
Which he hadn't meant to say at all. In fact, he was perfectly aghast to
find himself saying it. But he meant it.
At supper he passed her things, and stared, until everybody laughed
again, and Eva said acidly, "Why don't you feed her?"
It wasn't that Emily had an air of helplessness. She just made you feel
you wanted her to be helpless, so that you could help her.
Jo took her home, and from that Sunday night he began to strain at the
leash. He took his sisters out, dutifully, but he would suggest, with a
carelessness that deceived no one, "Don't you want one of your girl
friends to come along? That little What's-her-name--Emily, or something.
So long's I've got three of you, I might as well have a full squad."
For a long time he didn't know what was the matter with him. He only
knew he was miserable, and yet happy. Sometimes his heart seemed to ache
with an actual physical ache. He realized that he wanted to do things
for Emily. He wanted to buy things for Emily--useless, pretty, expensive
things that he couldn't afford. He wanted to buy everything that Emily
needed, and everything that Emily desired. He wanted to marry Emily.
That was it. He discovered that one day, with a shock, in the midst of a
transaction in the harness business. He stared at the man with whom he
was dealing until that startled person grew uncomfortable.
"What's the matter, Hertz?"
"Matter?"
"You look as if you'd seen a ghost or found a gold mine. I don't know
which."
"Gold mine," said Jo. And then, "No. Ghost."
For he remembered that high, thin voice, and his promise. And the
harness business was slithering downhill with dreadful rapidity, as the
automobile business began its amazing climb. Jo tried to stop it. But he
was not that kind of business man. It never occurred to him to jump out
of the down-going vehicle and catch the up-going one. He stayed on,
vainly applying brakes that refused to work.
"You know, Emily, I couldn't support two households now. Not the way
things are. But if you'll wait. If you'll only wait. The girls
might--that is, Babe and Carrie--"
She was a sensible little thing, Emily. "Of course I'll wait. But we
mustn't just sit back and let the years go by. We've got to help."
She went about it as if she were already a little matchmaking matron.
She corraled all the men she had ever known and introduced them to Babe,
Carrie, and Eva separately, in pairs, and en masse. She arranged parties
at which Babe could display the curl. She got up picnics. She stayed
home while Jo took the three about. When she was present she tried to
look as plain and obscure as possible, so that the sisters should show
up to advantage. She schemed, and planned, and contrived, and hoped; and
smiled into Jo's despairing eyes.
And three years went by. Three precious years. Carrie still taught
school, and hated it. Eva kept house, more and more complainingly as
prices advanced and allowance retreated. Stell was still Babe, the
family beauty; but even she knew that the time was past for curls.
Emily's hair, somehow, lost its glint and began to look just plain
brown. Her crinkliness began to iron out.
"Now, look here!" Jo argued, desperately, one night. "We could be happy,
anyway. There's plenty of room at the house. Lots of people begin that
way. Of course, I couldn't give you all I'd like to at first. But maybe,
after a while--"
No dreams of salons, and brocade, and velvet-footed servitors, and satin
damask now. Just two rooms, all their own, all alone, and Emily to work
for. That was his dream. But it seemed less possible than that other
absurd one had been.
You know that Emily was as practical a little thing as she looked
fluffy. She knew women. Especially did she know Eva, and Carrie, and
Babe. She tried to imagine herself taking the household affairs and the
housekeeping pocketbook out of Eva's expert hands. Eva had once
displayed to her a sheaf of aigrettes she had bought with what she saved
out of the housekeeping money. So then she tried to picture herself
allowing the reins of Jo's house to remain in Eva's hands. And
everything feminine and normal in her rebelled. Emily knew she'd want to
put away her own freshly laundered linen, and smooth it, and pat it. She
was that kind of woman. She knew she'd want to do her own delightful
haggling with butcher and vegetable peddler. She knew she'd want to muss
Jo's hair, and sit on his knee, and even quarrel with him, if necessary,
without the awareness of three ever-present pairs of maiden eyes and
ears.
"No! No! We'd only be miserable. I know. Even if they didn't object. And
they would, Jo. Wouldn't they?"
His silence was miserable assent. Then, "But you do love me, don't you,
Emily?"
"I do, Jo. I love you--and love you--and love you. But, Jo, I--can't."
"I know it, dear. I knew it all the time, really. I just thought, maybe,
somehow--"
The two sat staring for a moment into space, their hands clasped. Then
they both shut their eyes, with a little shudder, as though what they
saw was terrible to look upon. Emily's hand, the tiny hand that was so
unexpectedly firm, tightened its hold on his, and his crushed the absurd
fingers until she winced with pain.
That was the beginning of the end, and they knew it.
Emily wasn't the kind of girl who would be left to pine. There are too
many Jo's in the world whose hearts are prone to lurch and then thump at
the feel of a soft, fluttering, incredibly small hand in their grip. One
year later Emily was married to a young man whose father owned a large,
pie-shaped slice of the prosperous state of Michigan.
That being safely accomplished, there was something grimly humorous in
the trend taken by affairs in the old house on Calumet. For Eva married.
Of all people, Eva! Married well, too, though he was a great deal older
than she. She went off in a hat she had copied from a French model at
Fields's, and a suit she had contrived with a home dressmaker, aided by
pressing on the part of the little tailor in the basement over on
Thirty-first Street. It was the last of that, though. The next time they
saw her, she had on a hat that even she would have despaired of copying,
and a suit that sort of melted into your gaze. She moved to the North
Side (trust Eva for that), and Babe assumed the management of the
household on Calumet Avenue. It was rather a pinched little household
now, for the harness business shrank and shrank.
"I don't see how you can expect me to keep house decently on this!" Babe
would say contemptuously. Babe's nose, always a little inclined to
sharpness, had whittled down to a point of late. "If you knew what Ben
gives Eva."
"It's the best I can do, Sis. Business is something rotten."
"Ben says if you had the least bit of--" Ben was Eva's husband, and
quotable, as are all successful men.
"I don't care what Ben says," shouted Jo, goaded into rage. "I'm sick of
your everlasting Ben. Go and get a Ben of your own, why don't you, if
you're so stuck on the way he does things."
And Babe did. She made a last desperate drive, aided by Eva, and she
captured a rather surprised young man in the brokerage way, who had made
up his mind not to marry for years and years. Eva wanted to give her her
wedding things, but at that Jo broke into sudden rebellion.
"No, sir! No Ben is going to buy my sister's wedding clothes,
understand? I guess I'm not broke--yet. I'll furnish the money for her
things, and there'll be enough of them, too."
Babe had as useless a trousseau, and as filled with extravagant
pink-and-blue and lacy and frilly things as any daughter of doting
parents. Jo seemed to find a grim pleasure in providing them. But it
left him pretty well pinched. After Babe's marriage (she insisted that
they call her Estelle now) Jo sold the house on Calumet. He and Carrie
took one of those little flats that were springing up, seemingly over
night, all through Chicago's South Side.
There was nothing domestic about Carrie. She had given up teaching two
years before, and had gone into Social Service work on the West Side.
She had what is known as a legal mind, hard, clear, orderly, and she
made a great success of it. Her dream was to live at the Settlement
House and give all her time to the work. Upon the little household she
bestowed a certain amount of grim, capable attention. It was the same
kind of attention she would have given a piece of machinery whose
oiling and running had been entrusted to her care. She hated it, and
didn't hesitate to say so.
Jo took to prowling about department store basements, and household
goods sections. He was always sending home a bargain in a ham, or a sack
of potatoes, or fifty pounds of sugar, or a window clamp, or a new kind
of paring knife. He was forever doing odd little jobs that the janitor
should have done. It was the domestic in him claiming its own.
Then, one night, Carrie came home with a dull glow in her leathery
cheeks, and her eyes alight with resolve. They had what she called a
plain talk.
"Listen, Jo. They've offered me the job of first assistant resident
worker. And I'm going to take it. Take it! I know fifty other girls
who'd give their ears for it. I go in next month."
They were at dinner. Jo looked up from his plate, dully. Then he glanced
around the little dining-room, with its ugly tan walls and its heavy
dark furniture (the Calumet Street pieces fitted cumbersomely into the
five-room flat).
"Away? Away from here, you mean--to live?"
Carrie laid down her fork. "Well, really, Jo! After all that
explanation."
"But to go over there to live! Why, that neighborhood's full of dirt,
and disease, and crime, and the Lord knows what all. I can't let you do
that, Carrie."
Carrie's chin came up. She laughed a short little laugh. "Let me! That's
eighteenth-century talk, Jo. My life's my own to live. I'm going."
And she went. Jo stayed on in the apartment until the lease was up. Then
he sold what furniture he could, stored or gave away the rest, and took
a room on Michigan Avenue in one of the old stone mansions whose decayed
splendor was being put to such purpose.
Jo Hertz was his own master. Free to marry. Free to come and go. And he
found he didn't even think of marrying. He didn't even want to come or
go, particularly. A rather frumpy old bachelor, with thinning hair and a
thickening neck. Much has been written about the unwed, middle-aged
woman; her fussiness, her primness, her angularity of mind and body. In
the male that same fussiness develops, and a certain primness, too. But
he grows flabby where she grows lean.
Every Thursday evening he took dinner at Eva's, and on Sunday noon at
Stell's. He tucked his napkin under his chin and openly enjoyed the
home-made soup and the well-cooked meats. After dinner he tried to talk
business with Eva's husband, or Stell's. His business talks were the
old-fashioned kind, beginning:
"Well, now, looka here. Take, f'rinstance your raw hides and leathers."
But Ben and George didn't want to take f'rinstance your raw hides and
leathers. They wanted, when they took anything at all, to take golf, or
politics, or stocks. They were the modern type of business man who
prefers to leave his work out of his play. Business, with them, was a
profession--a finely graded and balanced thing, differing from Jo's
clumsy, downhill style as completely as does the method of a great
criminal detective differ from that of a village constable. They would
listen, restively, and say, "Uh-uh," at intervals, and at the first
chance they would sort of fade out of the room, with a meaning glance at
their wives. Eva had two children now. Girls. They treated Uncle Jo with
good-natured tolerance. Stell had no children. Uncle Jo degenerated, by
almost imperceptible degrees, from the position of honored guest, who is
served with white meat, to that of one who is content with a leg and one
of those obscure and bony sections which, after much turning with a
bewildered and investigating knife and fork, leave one baffled and
unsatisfied.
Eva and Stell got together and decided that Jo ought to marry.
"It isn't natural," Eva told him. "I never saw a man who took so little
interest in women."
"Me!" protested Jo, almost shyly. "Women!"
"Yes. Of course. You act like a frightened school boy."
So they had in for dinner certain friends and acquaintances of fitting
age. They spoke of them as "splendid girls." Between thirty-six and
forty. They talked awfully well, in a firm, clear way, about civics, and
classes, and politics, and economics, and boards. They rather terrified
Jo. He didn't understand much that they talked about, and he felt humbly
inferior, and yet a little resentful, as if something had passed him by.
He escorted them home, dutifully, though they told him not to bother,
and they evidently meant it. They seemed capable, not only of going home
quite unattended, but of delivering a pointed lecture to any highwayman
or brawler who might molest them.