By spring Mrs. Brandeis had the farmer women coming to her for their
threshing dishes and kitchenware, and the West End Culture Club for
their whist prizes. She seemed to realize that the days of the general
store were numbered, and she set about making hers a novelty store.
There was something terrible about the earnestness with which she
stuck to business. She was not more than thirty-eight at this time,
intelligent, healthy, fun-loving. But she stayed at it all day. She
listened and chatted to every one, and learned much. There was about her
that human quality that invites confidence.
She made friends by the hundreds, and friends are a business asset.
Those blithe, dressy, and smooth-spoken gentlemen known as traveling men
used to tell her their troubles, perched on a stool near the stove, and
show her the picture of their girl in the back of their watch, and asked
her to dinner at the Haley House. She listened to their tale of woe,
and advised them; she admired the picture of the girl, and gave some
wholesome counsel on the subject of traveling men's lonely wives; but
she never went to dinner at the Haley House.
It had not taken these debonair young men long to learn that there was a
woman buyer who bought quickly, decisively, and intelligently, and that
she always demanded a duplicate slip. Even the most unscrupulous could
not stuff an order of hers, and when it came to dating she gave no
quarter. Though they wore clothes that were two leaps ahead of the
styles worn by the Winnebago young men--their straw sailors were likely
to be saw-edged when the local edges were smooth, and their coats were
more flaring, or their trousers wider than the coats and trousers of
the Winnebago boys--they were not, for the most part, the gay dogs that
Winnebago's fancy painted them. Many of them were very lonely married
men who missed their wives and babies, and loathed the cuspidored
discomfort of the small-town hotel lobby. They appreciated Mrs.
Brandeis' good-natured sympathy, and gave her the long end of a deal
when they could. It was Sam Kiser who had begged her to listen to
his advice to put in Battenberg patterns and braid, long before the
Battenberg epidemic had become widespread and virulent.
“Now listen to me, Mrs. Brandeis,” he begged, almost tearfully. “You're
a smart woman. Don't let this get by you. You know that I know that a
salesman would have as much chance to sell you a gold brick as to sell
old John D. Rockefeller a gallon of oil.” Mrs. Brandeis eyed his samples
coldly. “But it looks so unattractive. And the average person has
no imagination. A bolt of white braid and a handful of buttons--they
wouldn't get a mental picture of the completed piece. Now, embroidery
silk----”
“Then give 'em a real picture!” interrupted Sam. “Work up one of these
water-lily pattern table covers. Use No. 100 braid and the smallest
buttons. Stick it in the window and they'll tear their hair to get
patterns.”
She did it, taking turns with Pearl and Sadie at weaving the great, lacy
square during dull moments. When it was finished they placed it in
the window, where it lay like frosted lace, exquisitely graceful and
delicate, with its tracery of curling petals and feathery fern sprays.
Winnebago gazed and was bitten by the Battenberg bug. It wound itself up
in a network of Battenberg braid, in all the numbers. It bought
buttons of every size; it stitched away at Battenberg covers, doilies,
bedspreads, blouses, curtains. Battenberg tumbled, foamed, cascaded over
Winnebago's front porches all that summer. Listening to Sam Kiser had
done it.
She listened to the farmer women too, and to the mill girls, and to the
scant and precious pearls that dropped from the lips of the East End
society section. There was something about her brown eyes and her
straight, sensible nose that reassured them so that few suspected the
mischievous in her. For she was mischievous. If she had not been I think
she could not have stood the drudgery, and the heartbreaks, and the
struggle, and the terrific manual labor.
She used to guy people, gently, and they never guessed it. Mrs. G.
Manville Smith, for example, never dreamed of the joy that her patronage
brought Molly Brandeis, who waited on her so demurely. Mrs. G. Manville
Smith (nee Finnegan) scorned the Winnebago shops, and was said to send
to Chicago for her hairpins. It was known that her household was run on
the most niggardly basis, however, and she short-rationed her two maids
outrageously. It was said that she could serve less real food on more
real lace doilies than any other housekeeper in Winnebago. Now, Mrs.
Brandeis sold Scourine two cents cheaper than the grocery stores, using
it as an advertisement to attract housewives, and making no profit on
the article itself. Mrs. G. Manville Smith always patronized Brandeis'
Bazaar for Scourine alone, and thus represented pure loss. Also she
my-good-womaned Mrs. Brandeis. That lady, seeing her enter one day with
her comic, undulating gait, double-actioned like a giraffe's, and her
plumes that would have shamed a Knight of Pythias, decided to put a stop
to these unprofitable visits.
She waited on Mrs. G. Manville Smith, a dangerous gleam in her eye.
“Scourine,” spake Mrs. G. Manville Smith.
“How many?”
“A dozen.”
“Anything else?”
“No. Send them.”
Mrs. Brandeis, scribbling in her sales book, stopped, pencil poised. “We
cannot send Scourine unless with a purchase of other goods amounting to
a dollar or more.”
Mrs. G. Manville Smith's plumes tossed and soared agitatedly. “But my
good woman, I don't want anything else!”
“Then you'll have to carry the Scourine?”
“Certainly not! I'll send for it.”
“The sale closes at five.” It was then 4:57.
“I never heard of such a thing! You can't expect me to carry them.”
Now, Mrs. G. Manville Smith had been a dining-room girl at the old Haley
House before she married George Smith, and long before he made his money
in lumber.
“You won't find them so heavy,” Molly Brandeis said smoothly.
“I certainly would! Perhaps you would not. You're used to that sort of
thing. Rough work, and all that.”
Aloysius, doubled up behind the lamps, knew what was coming, from the
gleam in his boss's eye.
“There may be something in that,” Molly Brandeis returned sweetly.
“That's why I thought you might not mind taking them. They're really not
much heavier than a laden tray.”
“Oh!” exclaimed the outraged Mrs. G. Manville Smith. And took her plumes
and her patronage out of Brandeis' Bazaar forever.
That was as malicious as Molly Brandeis ever could be. And it was
forgivable malice.
Most families must be described against the background of their homes,
but the Brandeis family life was bounded and controlled by the store.
Their meals and sleeping hours and amusements were regulated by it.
It taught them much, and brought them much, and lost them much. Fanny
Brandeis always said she hated it, but it made her wise, and tolerant,
and, in the end, famous. I don't know what more one could ask of any
institution. It brought her in contact with men and women, taught her
how to deal with them. After school she used often to run down to the
store to see her mother, while Theodore went home to practice. Perched
on a high stool in some corner she heard, and saw, and absorbed. It
was a great school for the sensitive, highly-organized, dramatic little
Jewish girl, for, to paraphrase a well-known stage line, there are just
as many kinds of people in Winnebago as there are in Washington.
It was about this time that Fanny Brandeis began to realize, actively,
that she was different. Of course, other little Winnebago girls' mothers
did not work like a man, in a store. And she and Bella Weinberg were the
only two in her room at school who stayed out on the Day of Atonement,
and on New Year, and the lesser Jewish holidays. Also, she went to
temple on Friday night and Saturday morning, when the other girls she
knew went to church on Sunday. These things set her apart in the little
Middle Western town; but it was not these that constituted the real
difference. She played, and slept, and ate, and studied like the
other healthy little animals of her age. The real difference was
temperamental, or emotional, or dramatic, or historic, or all four. They
would be playing tag, perhaps, in one of the cool, green ravines that
were the beauty spots of the little Wisconsin town.
They nestled like exquisite emeralds in the embrace of the hills, those
ravines, and Winnebago's civic surge had not yet swept them away in a
deluge of old tin cans, ashes, dirt and refuse, to be sold later for
building lots. The Indians had camped and hunted in them. The one under
the Court Street bridge, near the Catholic church and monastery, was
the favorite for play. It lay, a lovely, gracious thing, below the
hot little town, all green, and lush, and cool, a tiny stream dimpling
through it. The plump Capuchin Fathers, in their coarse brown robes,
knotted about the waist with a cord, their bare feet thrust into
sandals, would come out and sun themselves on the stone bench at the
side of the monastery on the hill, or would potter about the garden.
And suddenly Fanny would stop quite still in the midst of her tag game,
struck with the beauty of the picture it called from the past.
Little Oriental that she was, she was able to combine the dry text of
her history book with the green of the trees, the gray of the church,
and the brown of the monk's robes, and evolve a thrilling mental picture
therefrom. The tag game and her noisy little companions vanished. She
was peopling the place with stealthy Indians. Stealthy, cunning, yet
savagely brave. They bore no relation to the abject, contemptible, and
rather smelly Oneidas who came to the back door on summer mornings, in
calico, and ragged overalls, with baskets of huckleberries on their
arm, their pride gone, a broken and conquered people. She saw them wild,
free, sovereign, and there were no greasy, berry-peddling Oneidas among
them. They were Sioux, and Pottawatomies (that last had the real Indian
sound), and Winnebagos, and Menomonees, and Outagamis. She made
them taciturn, and beady-eyed, and lithe, and fleet, and every other
adjectival thing her imagination and history book could supply. The
fat and placid Capuchin Fathers on the hill became Jesuits, sinister,
silent, powerful, with France and the Church of Rome behind them. From
the shelter of that big oak would step Nicolet, the brave, first among
Wisconsin explorers, and last to receive the credit for his hardihood.
Jean Nicolet! She loved the sound of it. And with him was La Salle,
straight, and slim, and elegant, and surely wearing ruffles and plumes
and sword even in a canoe. And Tonty, his Italian friend and fellow
adventurer--Tonty of the satins and velvets, graceful, tactful, poised,
a shadowy figure; his menacing iron hand, so feared by the ignorant
savages, encased always in a glove. Surely a perfumed g---- Slap! A rude
shove that jerked her head back sharply and sent her forward, stumbling,
and jarred her like a fall.
“Ya-a-a! Tag! You're it! Fanny's it!”
Indians, priests, cavaliers, coureurs de bois, all vanished. Fanny would
stand a moment, blinking stupidly. The next moment she was running
as fleetly as the best of the boys in savage pursuit of one of her
companions in the tag game.
She was a strange mixture of tomboy and bookworm, which was a mercifully
kind arrangement for both body and mind. The spiritual side of her was
groping and staggering and feeling its way about as does that of any
little girl whose mind is exceptionally active, and whose mother is
unusually busy. It was on the Day of Atonement, known in the Hebrew as
Yom Kippur, in the year following her father's death that that side of
her performed a rather interesting handspring.
Fanny Brandeis had never been allowed to fast on this, the greatest and
most solemn of Jewish holy days Molly Brandeis' modern side refused
to countenance the practice of withholding food from any child for
twenty-four hours. So it was in the face of disapproval that Fanny,
making deep inroads into the steak and fried sweet potatoes at supper on
the eve of the Day of Atonement, announced her intention of fasting from
that meal to supper on the following evening. She had just passed her
plate for a third helping of potatoes. Theodore, one lap behind her in
the race, had entered his objection.
“Well, for the land's sakes!” he protested. “I guess you're not the only
one who likes sweet potatoes.”
Fanny applied a generous dab of butter to an already buttery morsel, and
chewed it with an air of conscious virtue.
“I've got to eat a lot. This is the last bite I'll have until to-morrow
night.”
“What's that?” exclaimed Mrs. Brandeis, sharply.
“Yes, it is!” hooted Theodore.
Fanny went on conscientiously eating as she explained.
“Bella Weinberg and I are going to fast all day. We just want to see if
we can.”
“Betcha can't,” Theodore said.
Mrs. Brandeis regarded her small daughter with a thoughtful gaze. “But
that isn't the object in fasting, Fanny--just to see if you can. If
you're going to think of food all through the Yom Kippur services----”
“I sha'n't?” protested Fanny passionately. “Theodore would, but I
won't.”
“Wouldn't any such thing,” denied Theodore. “But if I'm going to play
a violin solo during the memorial service I guess I've got to eat my
regular meals.”
Theodore sometimes played at temple, on special occasions. The
little congregation, listening to the throbbing rise and fall of this
fifteen-year-old boy's violin playing, realized, vaguely, that here was
something disturbingly, harrowingly beautiful. They did not know that
they were listening to genius.
Molly Brandeis, in her second best dress, walked to temple Yom Kippur
eve, her son at her right side, her daughter at her left. She had made
up her mind that she would not let this next day, with its poignantly
beautiful service, move her too deeply. It was the first since her
husband's death, and Rabbi Thalmann rather prided himself on his
rendition of the memorial service that came at three in the afternoon.
A man of learning, of sweetness, and of gentle wit was Rabbi Thalmann,
and unappreciated by his congregation. He stuck to the Scriptures
for his texts, finding Moses a greater leader than Roosevelt, and
the miracle of the Burning Bush more wonderful than the marvels of
twentieth-century wizardy in electricity. A little man, Rabbi Thalmann,
with hands and feet as small and delicate as those of a woman. Fanny
found him fascinating to look on, in his rabbinical black broadcloth
and his two pairs of glasses perched, in reading, upon his small hooked
nose. He stood very straight in the pulpit, but on the street you saw
that his back was bent just the least bit in the world--or perhaps it
was only his student stoop, as he walked along with his eyes on the
ground, smoking those slender, dapper, pale brown cigars that looked as
if they had been expressly cut and rolled to fit him.
The evening service was at seven. The congregation, rustling in silks,
was approaching the little temple from all directions. Inside, there was
a low-toned buzz of conversation. The Brandeis' seat was well toward
the rear, as befitted a less prosperous member of the rich little
congregation. This enabled them to get a complete picture of the room in
its holiday splendor. Fanny drank it in eagerly, her dark eyes soft
and luminous. The bare, yellow-varnished wooden pews glowed with the
reflection from the chandeliers. The seven-branched candlesticks on
either side of the pulpit were entwined with smilax. The red plush
curtain that hung in front of the Ark on ordinary days, and the red
plush pulpit cover too, were replaced by gleaming white satin edged with
gold fringe and finished at the corners with heavy gold tassels. How the
rich white satin glistened in the light of the electric candles! Fanny
Brandeis loved the lights, and the gleam, and the music, so majestic,
and solemn, and the sight of the little rabbi, sitting so straight and
serious in his high-backed chair, or standing to read from the great
Bible. There came to this emotional little Jewess a thrill that was not
born of religious fervor at all, I am afraid.
The sheer drama of the thing got her. In fact, the thing she had set
herself to do to-day had in it very little of religion. Mrs. Brandeis
had been right about that. It was a test of endurance, as planned.
Fanny had never fasted in all her healthy life. She would come home from
school to eat formidable stacks of bread and butter, enhanced by brown
sugar or grape jelly, and topped off with three or four apples from the
barrel in the cellar. Two hours later she would attack a supper of fried
potatoes, and liver, and tea, and peach preserve, and more stacks of
bread and butter. Then there were the cherry trees in the back yard, and
the berry bushes, not to speak of sundry bags of small, hard candies
of the jelly-bean variety, fitted for quick and secret munching during
school. She liked good things to eat, this sturdy little girl, as did
her friend, that blonde and creamy person, Bella Weinberg. The two girls
exchanged meaningful glances during the evening service. The Weinbergs,
as befitted their station, sat in the third row at the right, and Bella
had to turn around to convey her silent messages to Fanny. The
evening service was brief, even to the sermon. Rabbi Thalmann and his
congregation would need their strength for to-morrow's trial.
The Brandeises walked home through the soft September night, and the
children had to use all their Yom Kippur dignity to keep from scuffling
through the piled-up drifts of crackling autumn leaves. Theodore went to
the cellar and got an apple, which he ate with what Fanny considered
an unnecessary amount of scrunching. It was a firm, juicy apple, and it
gave forth a cracking sound when his teeth met in its white meat. Fanny,
after regarding him with gloomy superiority, went to bed.
She had willed to sleep late, for gastronomic reasons, but the mental
command disobeyed itself, and she woke early, with a heavy feeling.
Early as it was, Molly Brandeis had tiptoed in still earlier to look at
her strange little daughter. She sometimes did that on Saturday mornings
when she left early for the store and Fanny slept late. This morning
Fanny's black hair was spread over the pillow as she lay on her back,
one arm outflung, the other at her breast. She made a rather startlingly
black and white and scarlet picture as she lay there asleep. Fanny
did things very much in that way, too, with broad, vivid, unmistakable
splashes of color. Mrs. Brandeis, looking at the black-haired,
red-lipped child sleeping there, wondered just how much determination
lay back of the broad white brow. She had said little to Fanny about
this feat of fasting, and she told herself that she disapproved of it.
But in her heart she wanted the girl to see it through, once attempted.
Fanny awoke at half past seven, and her nostrils dilated to that most
exquisite, tantalizing and fragrant of smells--the aroma of simmering
coffee. It permeated the house. It tickled the senses. It carried with
it visions of hot, brown breakfast rolls, and eggs, and butter. Fanny
loved her breakfast. She turned over now, and decided to go to sleep
again. But she could not. She got up and dressed slowly and carefully.
There was no one to hurry her this morning with the call from the foot
of the stairs of, “Fanny! Your egg'll get cold!”
She put on clean, crisp underwear, and did her hair expertly. She
slipped an all-enveloping pinafore over her head, that the new silk
dress might not be crushed before church time. She thought that Theodore
would surely have finished his breakfast by this time. But when she came
down-stairs he was at the table. Not only that, he had just begun his
breakfast. An egg, all golden, and white, and crisply brown at the
frilly edges, lay on his plate. Theodore always ate his egg in a
mathematical sort of way. He swallowed the white hastily first, because
he disliked it, and Mrs. Brandeis insisted that he eat it. Then he would
brood a moment over the yolk that lay, unmarred and complete, like an
amber jewel in the center of his plate. Then he would suddenly plunge
his fork into the very heart of the jewel, and it would flow over his
plate, mingling with the butter, and he would catch it deftly with
little mops of warm, crisp, buttery roll.
Fanny passed the breakfast table just as Theodore plunged his fork into
the egg yolk. She caught her breath sharply, and closed her eyes. Then
she turned and fled to the front porch and breathed deeply and windily
of the heady September Wisconsin morning air. As she stood there, with
her stiff, short black curls still damp and glistening, in her best
shoes and stockings, with the all-enveloping apron covering her sturdy
little figure, the light of struggle and renunciation in her face, she
typified something at once fine and earthy.
But the real struggle was to come later. They went to temple at ten,
Theodore with his beloved violin tucked carefully under his arm. Bella
Weinberg was waiting at the steps.
“Did you?” she asked eagerly.
“Of course not,” replied Fanny disdainfully. “Do you think I'd eat old
breakfast when I said I was going to fast all day?” Then, with sudden
suspicion, “Did you?”
“No!” stoutly.
And they entered, and took their seats. It was fascinating to watch the
other members of the congregation come in, the women rustling, the men
subdued in the unaccustomed dignity of black on a week day. One glance
at the yellow pews was like reading a complete social and financial
register. The seating arrangement of the temple was the Almanach de
Gotha of Congregation Emanu-el. Old Ben Reitman, patriarch among the
Jewish settlers of Winnebago, who had come over an immigrant youth, and
who now owned hundreds of rich farm acres, besides houses, mills and
banks, kinged it from the front seat of the center section. He was a
magnificent old man, with a ruddy face, and a fine head with a shock of
heavy iron-gray hair, keen eyes, undimmed by years, and a startling and
unexpected dimple in one cheek that gave him a mischievous and boyish
look.
Behind this dignitary sat his sons, and their wives, and his daughters
and their husbands, and their children, and so on, back to the Brandeis
pew, third from the last, behind which sat only a few obscure families
branded as Russians, as only the German-born Jew can brand those whose
misfortune it is to be born in that region known as hinter-Berlin.
The morning flew by, with its music, its responses, its sermon in
German, full of four- and five-syllable German words like Barmherzigkeit
and Eigentumlichkeit. All during the sermon Fanny sat and dreamed and
watched the shadow on the window of the pine tree that stood close to
the temple, and was vastly amused at the jaundiced look that the square
of yellow window glass cast upon the face of the vain and overdressed
Mrs. Nathan Pereles. From time to time Bella would turn to bestow upon
her a look intended to convey intense suffering and a resolute though
dying condition. Fanny stonily ignored these mute messages. They
offended something in her, though she could not tell what.
At the noon intermission she did not go home to the tempting dinner
smells, but wandered off through the little city park and down to the
river, where she sat on the bank and felt very virtuous, and spiritual,
and hollow. She was back in her seat when the afternoon service was
begun. Some of the more devout members had remained to pray all through
the midday. The congregation came straggling in by twos and threes.
Many of the women had exchanged the severely corseted discomfort of the
morning's splendor for the comparative ease of second-best silks.
Mrs. Brandeis, absent from her business throughout this holy day, came
hurrying in at two, to look with a rather anxious eye upon her pale and
resolute little daughter.
The memorial service was to begin shortly after three, and lasted almost
two hours. At quarter to three Bella slipped out through the side aisle,
beckoning mysteriously and alluringly to Fanny as she went. Fanny looked
at her mother.
“Run along,” said Mrs. Brandeis. “The air will be good for you. Come
back before the memorial service begins.” Fanny and Bella met, giggling,
in the vestibule.
“Come on over to my house for a minute,” Bella suggested. “I want
to show you something.” The Weinberg house, a great, comfortable,
well-built home, with encircling veranda, and a well-cared-for lawn, was
just a scant block away. They skipped across the street, down the block,
and in at the back door. The big sunny kitchen was deserted. The house
seemed very quiet and hushed. Over it hung the delicious fragrance of
freshly-baked pastry. Bella, a rather baleful look in her eyes, led the
way to the butler's pantry that was as large as the average kitchen.
And there, ranged on platters, and baking boards, and on snowy-white
napkins, was that which made Tantalus's feast seem a dry and barren
snack. The Weinberg's had baked. It is the custom in the household of
Atonement Day fasters of the old school to begin the evening meal, after
the twenty-four hours of abstainment, with coffee and freshly-baked
coffee cake of every variety. It was a lead-pipe blow at one's
digestion, but delicious beyond imagining. Bella's mother was a famous
cook, and her two maids followed in the ways of their mistress. There
were to be sisters and brothers and out-of-town relations as guests at
the evening meal, and Mrs. Weinberg had outdone herself.
“Oh!” exclaimed Fanny in a sort of agony and delight.
“Take some,” said Bella, the temptress.
The pantry was fragrant as a garden with spices, and fruit scents,
and the melting, delectable perfume of brown, freshly-baked dough,
sugar-coated. There was one giant platter devoted wholly to round, plump
cakes, with puffy edges, in the center of each a sunken pool that was
all plum, bearing on its bosom a snowy sifting of powdered sugar.
There were others whose centers were apricot, pure molten gold in
the sunlight. There were speckled expanses of cheese kuchen, the
golden-brown surface showing rich cracks through which one caught
glimpses of the lemon-yellow cheese beneath--cottage cheese that had
been beaten up with eggs, and spices, and sugar, and lemon. Flaky crust
rose, jaggedly, above this plateau. There were cakes with jelly, and
cinnamon kuchen, and cunning cakes with almond slices nestling side by
side. And there was freshly-baked bread--twisted loaf, with poppy seed
freckling its braid, and its sides glistening with the butter that had
been liberally swabbed on it before it had been thrust into the oven.
Fanny Brandeis gazed, hypnotized. As she gazed Bella selected a plum
tart and bit into it--bit generously, so that her white little teeth met
in the very middle of the oozing red-brown juice and one heard a little
squirt as they closed on the luscious fruit. At the sound Fanny quivered
all through her plump and starved little body.
“Have one,” said Bella generously. “Go on. Nobody'll ever know. Anyway,
we've fasted long enough for our age. I could fast till supper time if
I wanted to, but I don't want to.” She swallowed the last morsel of
the plum tart, and selected another--apricot, this time, and opened her
moist red lips. But just before she bit into it (the Inquisition could
have used Bella's talents) she selected its counterpart and held it out
to Fanny. Fanny shook her head slightly. Her hand came up involuntarily.
Her eyes were fastened on Bella's face.
“Go on,” urged Bella. “Take it. They're grand! M-m-m-m!” The first bite
of apricot vanished between her rows of sharp white teeth. Fanny shut
her eyes as if in pain. She was fighting the great fight of her life.
She was to meet other temptations, and perhaps more glittering ones, in
her lifetime, but to her dying day she never forgot that first battle
between the flesh and the spirit, there in the sugar-scented pantry--and
the spirit won. As Bella's lips closed upon the second bite of apricot
tart, the while her eye roved over the almond cakes and her hand still
held the sweet out to Fanny, that young lady turned sharply, like a
soldier, and marched blindly out of the house, down the back steps,
across the street, and so into the temple.
The evening lights had just been turned on. The little congregation,
relaxed, weary, weak from hunger, many of them, sat rapt and still
except at those times when the prayer book demanded spoken responses.
The voice of the little rabbi, rather weak now, had in it a timbre
that made it startlingly sweet and clear and resonant. Fanny slid very
quietly into the seat beside Mrs. Brandeis, and slipped her moist
and cold little hand into her mother's warm, work-roughened palm. The
mother's brown eyes, very bright with unshed tears, left their perusal
of the prayer book to dwell upon the white little face that was smiling
rather wanly up at her. The pages of the prayer book lay two-thirds or
more to the left. Just as Fanny remarked this, there was a little moment
of hush in the march of the day's long service. The memorial hour had
begun.
Little Doctor Thalmann cleared his throat. The congregation stirred a
bit, changed its cramped position. Bella, the guilty, came stealing in,
a pink-and-gold picture of angelic virtue. Fanny, looking at her, felt
very aloof, and clean, and remote.
Molly Brandeis seemed to sense what had happened.
“But you didn't, did you?” she whispered softly.
Fanny shook her head.
Rabbi Thalmann was seated in his great carved chair. His eyes were
closed. The wheezy little organ in the choir loft at the rear of the
temple began the opening bars of Schumann's Traumerei. And then, above
the cracked voice of the organ, rose the clear, poignant wail of a
violin. Theodore Brandeis had begun to play. You know the playing of
the average boy of fifteen--that nerve-destroying, uninspired scraping.
There was nothing of this in the sounds that this boy called forth
from the little wooden box and the stick with its taut lines of catgut.
Whatever it was--the length of the thin, sensitive fingers, the turn of
the wrist, the articulation of the forearm, the something in the brain,
or all these combined--Theodore Brandeis possessed that which makes for
greatness. You realized that as he crouched over his violin to get his
cello tones. As he played to-day the little congregation sat very still,
and each was thinking of his ambitions and his failures; of the lover
lost, of the duty left undone, of the hope deferred; of the wrong that
was never righted; of the lost one whose memory spells remorse. It felt
the salt taste on its lips. It put up a furtive, shamed hand to dab at
its cheeks, and saw that the one who sat in the pew just ahead was doing
likewise. This is what happened when this boy of fifteen wedded his bow
to his violin. And he who makes us feel all this has that indefinable,
magic, glorious thing known as Genius.
When it was over, there swept through the room that sigh following
tension relieved. Rabbi Thalmann passed a hand over his tired eyes, like
one returning from a far mental journey; then rose, and came forward
to the pulpit. He began, in Hebrew, the opening words of the memorial
service, and so on to the prayers in English, with their words of
infinite humility and wisdom.
“Thou hast implanted in us the capacity for sin, but not sin itself!”
Fanny stirred. She had learned that a brief half hour ago. The service
marched on, a moving and harrowing thing. The amens rolled out with a
new fervor from the listeners. There seemed nothing comic now in the way
old Ben Reitman, with his slower eyes, always came out five words behind
the rest who tumbled upon the responses and scurried briskly through
them, so that his fine old voice, somewhat hoarse and quavering now,
rolled out its “Amen!” in solitary majesty. They came to that gem of
humility, the mourners' prayer; the ancient and ever-solemn Kaddish
prayer. There is nothing in the written language that, for sheer drama
and magnificence, can equal it as it is chanted in the Hebrew.
As Rabbi Thalmann began to intone it in its monotonous repetition of
praise, there arose certain black-robed figures from their places and
stood with heads bowed over their prayer books. These were members of
the congregation from whom death had taken a toll during the past year.
Fanny rose with her mother and Theodore, who had left the choir loft to
join them. The little wheezy organ played very softly. The black-robed
figures swayed. Here and there a half-stifled sob rose, and was crushed.
Fanny felt a hot haze that blurred her vision. She winked it away, and
another burned in its place. Her shoulders shook with a sob. She felt
her mother's hand close over her own that held one side of the book.
The prayer, that was not of mourning but of praise, ended with a final
crescendo from the organ, The silent black-robed figures were seated.
Over the little, spent congregation hung a glorious atmosphere of
detachment. These Jews, listening to the words that had come from the
lips of the prophets in Israel, had been, on this day, thrown back
thousands of years, to the time when the destruction of the temple was
as real as the shattered spires and dome of the cathedral at Rheims.
Old Ben Reitman, faint with fasting, was far removed from his everyday
thoughts of his horses, his lumber mills, his farms, his mortgages. Even
Mrs. Nathan Pereles, in her black satin and bugles and jets, her
cold, hard face usually unlighted by sympathy or love, seemed to feel
something of this emotional wave. Fanny Brandeis was shaken by it. Her
head ached (that was hunger) and her hands were icy. The little Russian
girl in the seat just behind them had ceased to wriggle and squirm, and
slept against her mother's side. Rabbi Thalmann, there on the platform,
seemed somehow very far away and vague. The scent of clove apples and
ammonia salts filled the air. The atmosphere seemed strangely wavering
and luminous. The white satin of the Ark curtain gleamed and shifted.
The long service swept on to its close. Suddenly organ and choir burst
into a paeon. Little Doctor Thalmann raised his arms. The congregation
swept to its feet with a mighty surge. Fanny rose with them, her face
very white in its frame of black curls, her eyes luminous. She raised
her face for the words of the ancient benediction that rolled, in its
simplicity and grandeur, from the lips of the rabbi:
“May the blessing of the Lord our God rest upon you all. God bless thee
and keep thee. May God cause His countenance to shine upon thee and be
gracious unto thee. May God lift up His countenance unto thee, and grant
thee peace.”
The Day of Atonement had come to an end. It was a very quiet, subdued
and spent little flock that dispersed to their homes. Fanny walked out
with scarcely a thought of Bella. She felt, vaguely, that she and this
school friend were formed of different stuff. She knew that the bond
between them had been the grubby, physical one of childhood, and that
they never would come together in the finer relation of the spirit,
though she could not have put this new knowledge into words.
Molly Brandeis put a hand on her daughter's shoulder.
“Tired, Fanchen?”
“A little.”
“Bet you're hungry!” from Theodore.
“I was, but I'm not now.”
“M-m-m--wait! Noodle soup. And chicken!”
She had intended to tell of the trial in the Weinberg's pantry. But now
something within her--something fine, born of this day--kept her from
it. But Molly Brandeis, to whom two and two often made five, guessed
something of what had happened. She had felt a great surge of pride, had
Molly Brandeis, when her son had swayed the congregation with the magic
of his music. She had kissed him good night with infinite tenderness and
love. But she came into her daughter's tiny room after Fanny had gone to
bed, and leaned over, and put a cool hand on the hot forehead.
“Do you feel all right, my darling?”
“Umhmph,” replied Fanny drowsily.
“Fanchen, doesn't it make you feel happy and clean to know that you were
able to do the thing you started out to do?”
“Umhmph.”
“Only,” Molly Brandeis was thinking aloud now, quite forgetting that
she was talking to a very little girl, “only, life seems to take
such special delight in offering temptation to those who are able to
withstand it. I don't know why that's true, but it is. I hope--oh, my
little girl, my baby--I hope----”
But Fanny never knew whether her mother finished that sentence or not.
She remembered waiting for the end of it, to learn what it was her
mother hoped. And she had felt a sudden, scalding drop on her hand where
her mother bent over her. And the next thing she knew it was morning,
with mellow September sunshine.