Right here there should be something said about Fanny Brandeis. And yet,
each time I turn to her I find her mother plucking at my sleeve. There
comes to my mind the picture of Mrs. Brandeis turning down Norris Street
at quarter to eight every morning, her walk almost a march, so firm and
measured it was, her head high, her chin thrust forward a little, as a
fighter walks, but not pugnaciously; her short gray skirt clearing the
ground, her shoulders almost consciously squared. Other Winnebago women
were just tying up their daughters' pigtails for school, or sweeping the
front porch, or watering the hanging baskets. Norris Street residents
got into the habit of timing themselves by Mrs. Brandeis. When she
marched by at seven forty-five they hurried a little with the tying of
the hair bow, as they glanced out of the window. When she came by again,
a little before twelve, for her hasty dinner, they turned up the fire
under the potatoes and stirred the flour thickening for the gravy.
Mrs. Brandeis had soon learned that Fanny and Theodore could manage
their own school toilettes, with, perhaps, some speeding up on the part
of Mattie, the servant girl. But it needed her keen brown eye to detect
corners that Aloysius had neglected to sweep out with wet sawdust, and
her presence to make sure that the counter covers were taken off and
folded, the outside show dusted and arranged, the windows washed, the
whole store shining and ready for business by eight o'clock. So Fanny
had even learned to do her own tight, shiny, black, shoulder-length
curls, which she tied back with a black bow. They were wet, meek, and
tractable curls at eight in the morning. By the time school was out
at four they were as wildly unruly as if charged with electric
currents--which they really were, when you consider the little dynamo
that wore them.
Mrs. Brandeis took a scant half hour to walk the six blocks between
the store and the house, to snatch a hurried dinner, and traverse the
distance to the store again. It was a program that would have killed a
woman less magnificently healthy and determined. She seemed to thrive on
it, and she kept her figure and her wit when other women of her age grew
dull, and heavy, and ineffectual. On summer days the little town often
lay shimmering in the heat, the yellow road glaring in it, the red
bricks of the high school reflecting it in waves, the very pine knots
in the sidewalks gummy and resinous with heat, and sending up a pungent
smell that was of the woods, and yet stifling. She must have felt an
almost irresistible temptation to sit for a moment on the cool, shady
front porch, with its green-painted flower boxes, its hanging fern
baskets and the catalpa tree looking boskily down upon it.
But she never did. She had an almost savage energy and determination.
The unpaid debts were ever ahead of her; there were the children to be
dressed and sent to school; there was the household to be kept up; there
were Theodore's violin lessons that must not be neglected--not after
what Professor Bauer had said about him.
You may think that undue stress is being laid upon this driving force
in her, upon this business ability. But remember that this was fifteen
years or more ago, before women had invaded the world of business by the
thousands, to take their place, side by side, salary for salary, with
men. Oh, there were plenty of women wage earners in Winnebago, as
elsewhere; clerks, stenographers, school teachers, bookkeepers. The
paper mills were full of girls, and the canning factory too. But here
was a woman gently bred, untrained in business, left widowed with two
children at thirty-eight, and worse than penniless--in debt.
And that was not all. As Ferdinand Brandeis' wife she had occupied a
certain social position in the little Jewish community of Winnebago.
True, they had never been moneyed, while the others of her own faith
in the little town were wealthy, and somewhat purse-proud. They had
carriages, most of them, with two handsome horses, and their houses
were spacious and veranda-encircled, and set in shady lawns. When the
Brandeis family came to Winnebago five years before, these people had
waited, cautiously, and investigated, and then had called. They were
of a type to be found in every small town; prosperous, conservative,
constructive citizens, clannish, but not so much so as their city
cousins, mingling socially with their Gentile neighbors, living well,
spending their money freely, taking a vast pride in the education of
their children. But here was Molly Brandeis, a Jewess, setting out
to earn her living in business, like a man. It was a thing to stir
Congregation Emanu-el to its depths. Jewish women, they would tell you,
did not work thus. Their husbands worked for them, or their sons, or
their brothers.
“Oh, I don't know,” said Mrs. Brandeis, when she heard of it. “I seem
to remember a Jewess named Ruth who was left widowed, and who gleaned in
the fields for her living, and yet the neighbors didn't talk. For that
matter, she seems to be pretty well thought of, to this day.”
But there is no denying that she lost caste among her own people. Custom
and training are difficult to overcome. But Molly Brandeis was too
deep in her own affairs to care. That Christmas season following her
husband's death was a ghastly time, and yet a grimly wonderful one, for
it applied the acid test to Molly Brandeis and showed her up pure gold.
The first week in January she, with Sadie and Pearl, the two clerks,
and Aloysius, the boy, took inventory. It was a terrifying thing,
that process of casting up accounts. It showed with such starkness how
hideously the Brandeis ledger sagged on the wrong side. The three women
and the boy worked with a sort of dogged cheerfulness at it, counting,
marking, dusting, washing. They found shelves full of forgotten stock,
dust-covered and profitless. They found many articles of what is known
as hard stock, akin to the plush album; glass and plated condiment
casters for the dining table, in a day when individual salts and
separate vinegar cruets were already the thing; lamps with straight
wicks when round wicks were in demand.
They scoured shelves, removed the grime of years from boxes, washed
whole battalions of chamber sets, bathed piles of plates, and bins of
cups and saucers. It was a dirty, back-breaking job, that ruined the
finger nails, tried the disposition, and caked the throat with
dust. Besides, the store was stove-heated and, near the front door,
uncomfortably cold. The women wore little shoulder shawls pinned over
their waists, for warmth, and all four, including Aloysius, sniffled for
weeks afterward. That inventory developed a new, grim line around Mrs.
Brandeis' mouth, and carved another at the corner of each eye. After it
was over she washed her hair, steamed her face over a bowl of hot water,
packed two valises, left minute and masterful instructions with Mattie
as to the household, and with Sadie and Pearl as to the store, and was
off to Chicago on her first buying trip. She took Fanny with her, as
ballast. It was a trial at which many men would have quailed. On the
shrewdness and judgment of that buying trip depended the future of
Brandeis' Bazaar, and Mrs. Brandeis, and Fanny, and Theodore.
Mrs. Brandeis had accompanied her husband on many of his trips to
Chicago. She had even gone with him occasionally to the wholesale houses
around La Salle Street, and Madison, and Fifth Avenue, but she had
never bought a dollar's worth herself. She saw that he bought slowly,
cautiously, and without imagination. She made up her mind that she would
buy quickly, intuitively. She knew slightly some of the salesmen in
the wholesale houses. They had often made presents to her of a vase,
a pocketbook, a handkerchief, or some such trifle, which she accepted
reluctantly, when at all. She was thankful now for these visits. She
found herself remembering many details of them. She made up her mind,
with a canny knowingness, that there should be no presents this time, no
theater invitations, no lunches or dinners. This was business, she told
herself; more than business--it was grim war.
They still tell of that trip, sometimes, when buyers and jobbers and
wholesale men get together. Don't imagine that she came to be a woman
captain of finance. Don't think that we are to see her at the head of
a magnificent business establishment, with buyers and department heads
below her, and a private office done up in mahogany, and stenographers
and secretaries. No, she was Mrs. Brandeis, of Brandeis' Bazaar, to the
end. The bills she bought were ridiculously small, I suppose, and the
tricks she turned on that first trip were pitiful, perhaps. But they
were magnificent too, in their way. I am even bold enough to think that
she might have made business history, that plucky woman, if she had had
an earlier start, and if she had not, to the very end, had a pack of
unmanageable handicaps yelping at her heels, pulling at her skirts.
It was only a six-hour trip to Chicago. Fanny Brandeis' eyes, big enough
at any time, were surely twice their size during the entire journey of
two hundred miles or more. They were to have lunch on the train! They
were to stop at an hotel! They were to go to the theater! She would have
lain back against the red plush seat of the car, in a swoon of joy, if
there had not been so much to see in the car itself, and through the car
window.
“We'll have something for lunch,” said Mrs. Brandeis when they were
seated in the dining car, “that we never have at home, shall we?”
“Oh, yes!” replied Fanny in a whisper of excitement.
“Something--something queer, and different, and not so very healthy!”
They had oysters (a New Yorker would have sniffed at them), and chicken
potpie, and asparagus, and ice cream. If that doesn't prove Mrs.
Brandeis was game, I should like to know what could! They stopped at
the Windsor-Clifton, because it was quieter and less expensive than the
Palmer House, though quite as full of red plush and walnut. Besides,
she had stopped at the Palmer House with her husband, and she knew how
buyers were likely to be besieged by eager salesmen with cards, and with
tempting lines of goods spread knowingly in the various sample-rooms.
Fanny Brandeis was thirteen, and emotional, and incredibly receptive
and alive. It is impossible to tell what she learned during that Chicago
trip, it was so crowded, so wonderful. She went with her mother to the
wholesale houses and heard and saw and, unconsciously, remembered. When
she became fatigued with the close air of the dim showrooms, with their
endless aisles piled with every sort of ware, she would sit on a
chair in some obscure corner, watching those sleek, over-lunched,
genial-looking salesmen who were chewing their cigars somewhat wildly
when Mrs. Brandeis finished with them. Sometimes she did not accompany
her mother, but lay in bed, deliciously, until the middle of the
morning, then dressed, and chatted with the obliging Irish chamber maid,
and read until her mother came for her at noon.
Everything she did was a delightful adventure; everything she saw had
the tang of novelty. Fanny Brandeis was to see much that was beautiful
and rare in her full lifetime, but she never again, perhaps, got
quite the thrill that those ugly, dim, red-carpeted, gas-lighted hotel
corridors gave her, or the grim bedroom, with its walnut furniture and
its Nottingham curtains. As for the Chicago streets themselves, with
their perilous corners (there were no czars in blue to regulate traffic
in those days), older and more sophisticated pedestrians experienced
various emotions while negotiating the corner of State and Madison.
That buying trip lasted ten days. It was a racking business, physically
and mentally. There were the hours of tramping up one aisle and down the
other in the big wholesale lofts. But that brought bodily fatigue only.
It was the mental strain that left Mrs. Brandeis spent and limp at the
end of the day. Was she buying wisely? Was she over-buying? What did
she know about buying, anyway? She would come back to her hotel at six,
sometimes so exhausted that the dining-room and dinner were unthinkable.
At such times they would have dinner in their room another delicious
adventure for Fanny. She would try to tempt the fagged woman on the bed
with bits of this or that from one of the many dishes that dotted the
dinner tray. But Molly Brandeis, harrowed in spirit and numbed in body,
was too spent to eat.
But that was not always the case. There was that unforgettable night
when they went to see Bernhardt the divine. Fanny spent the entire
morning following standing before the bedroom mirror, with her hair
pulled out in a wild fluff in front, her mother's old marten-fur
scarf high and choky around her neck, trying to smile that slow, sad,
poignant, tear-compelling smile; but she had to give it up, clever
mimic though she was. She only succeeded in looking as though a pin were
sticking her somewhere. Besides, Fanny's own smile was a quick, broad,
flashing grin, with a generous glint of white teeth in it, and she
always forgot about being exquisitely wistful over it until it was too
late.
I wonder if the story of the china religious figures will give a wrong
impression of Mrs. Brandeis. Perhaps not, if you will only remember this
woman's white-lipped determination to wrest a livelihood from the world,
for her children and herself. They had been in Chicago a week, and she
was buying at Bauder & Peck's. Now, Bauder & Peck, importers, are known
the world over. It is doubtful if there is one of you who has not been
supplied, indirectly, with some imported bit of china or glassware, with
French opera glasses or cunning toys and dolls, from the great New York
and Chicago showrooms of that company.
Young Bauder himself was waiting on Mrs. Brandeis, and he was frowning
because he hated to sell women. Young Bauder was being broken into the
Chicago end of the business, and he was not taking gracefully to the
process.
At the end of a long aisle, on an obscure shelf in a dim corner, Molly
Brandeis' sharp eyes espied a motley collection of dusty, grimy
china figures of the kind one sees on the mantel in the parlor of
the small-town Catholic home. Winnebago's population was two-thirds
Catholic, German and Irish, and very devout.
Mrs. Brandeis stopped short. “How much for that lot?” She pointed to the
shelf. Young Bauder's gaze followed hers, puzzled. The figures were from
five inches to a foot high, in crude, effective blues, and gold, and
crimson, and white. All the saints were there in assorted sizes, the
Pieta, the cradle in the manger. There were probably two hundred or
more of the little figures. “Oh, those!” said young Bauder vaguely. “You
don't want that stuff. Now, about that Limoges china. As I said, I can
make you a special price on it if you carry it as an open-stock pattern.
You'll find----”
“How much for that lot?” repeated Mrs. Brandeis.
“Those are left-over samples, Mrs. Brandeis. Last year's stuff. They're
all dirty. I'd forgotten they were there.”
“How much for the lot?” said Mrs. Brandeis, pleasantly, for the third
time.
“I really don't know. Three hundred, I should say. But----”
“I'll give you two hundred,” ventured Mrs. Brandeis, her heart in her
mouth and her mouth very firm.
“Oh, come now, Mrs. Brandeis! Bauder & Peck don't do business that way,
you know. We'd really rather not sell them at all. The things aren't
worth much to us, or to you, for that matter. But three hundred----”
“Two hundred,” repeated Mrs. Brandeis, “or I cancel my order, including
the Limoges. I want those figures.”
And she got them. Which isn't the point of the story. The holy figures
were fine examples of foreign workmanship, their colors, beneath
the coating of dust, as brilliant and fadeless as those found in the
churches of Europe. They reached Winnebago duly, packed in straw and
paper, still dusty and shelf-worn. Mrs. Brandeis and Sadie and Pearl sat
on up-ended boxes at the rear of the store, in the big barn-like room in
which newly arrived goods were unpacked. As Aloysius dived deep into the
crate and brought up figure after figure, the three women plunged them
into warm and soapy water and proceeded to bathe and scour the entire
school of saints, angels, and cherubim. They came out brilliantly fresh
and rosy.
All the Irish ingenuity and artistry in Aloysius came to the surface
as he dived again and again into the great barrel and brought up the
glittering pieces.
“It'll make an elegant window,” he gasped from the depths of the hay,
his lean, lengthy frame jack-knifed over the edge. “And cheap.” His
shrewd wit had long ago divined the store's price mark. “If Father
Fitzpatrick steps by in the forenoon I'll bet they'll be gone before
nighttime to-morrow. You'll be letting me do the trim, Mrs. Brandeis?”
He came back that evening to do it, and he threw his whole soul into it,
which, considering his ancestry and temperament, was very high voltage
for one small-town store window. He covered the floor of the window with
black crepe paper, and hung it in long folds, like a curtain, against
the rear wall. The gilt of the scepters, and halos, and capes showed up
dazzlingly against this background. The scarlets, and pinks, and blues,
and whites of the robes appeared doubly bright. The whole made a picture
that struck and held you by its vividness and contrast.
Father Fitzpatrick, very tall and straight, and handsome, with his
iron-gray hair and his cheeks pink as a girl's, did step by next morning
on his way to the post-office. It was whispered that in his youth Father
Fitzpatrick had been an actor, and that he had deserted the footlights
for the altar lights because of a disappointment. The drama's loss was
the Church's gain. You should have heard him on Sunday morning, now
flaying them, now swaying them! He still had the actor's flexible voice,
vibrant, tremulous, or strident, at will. And no amount of fasting or
praying had ever dimmed that certain something in his eye--the something
which makes the matinee idol.
Not only did he step by now; he turned, came back; stopped before the
window. Then he entered.
“Madam,” he said to Mrs. Brandeis, “you'll probably save more souls with
your window display than I could in a month of hell-fire sermons.” He
raised his hand. “You have the sanction of the Church.” Which was the
beginning of a queer friendship between the Roman Catholic priest and
the Jewess shopkeeper that lasted as long as Molly Brandeis lived.
By noon it seemed that the entire population of Winnebago had turned
devout. The figures, a tremendous bargain, though sold at a high profit,
seemed to melt away from the counter that held them.
By three o'clock, “Only one to a customer!” announced Mrs. Brandeis. By
the middle of the week the window itself was ravished of its show. By
the end of the week there remained only a handful of the duller and less
desirable pieces--the minor saints, so to speak. Saturday night Mrs.
Brandeis did a little figuring on paper. The lot had cost her two
hundred dollars. She had sold for six hundred. Two from six leaves four.
Four hundred dollars! She repeated it to herself, quietly. Her mind
leaped back to the plush photograph album, then to young Bauder and his
cool contempt. And there stole over her that warm, comfortable glow born
of reassurance and triumph. Four hundred dollars. Not much in these
days of big business. We said, you will remember, that it was a pitiful
enough little trick she turned to make it, though an honest one. And--in
the face of disapproval--a rather magnificent one too. For it gave to
Molly Brandeis that precious quality, self-confidence, out of which is
born success.