Theodore had been gone six years. His letters, all too brief, were
events in the lives of the two women. They read and reread them. Fanny
unconsciously embellished them with fascinating details made up out of
her own imagination.
“They're really triumphs of stupidity and dullness,” she said one day
in disgust, after one of Theodore's long-awaited letters had proved
particularly dry and sparse. “Just think of it! Dresden, Munich,
Leipsic, Vienna, Berlin, Frankfurt! And from his letters you would never
know he had left Winnebago. I don't believe he actually sees anything
of these cities--their people, and the queer houses, and the streets.
I suppose a new city means nothing to him but another platform, another
audience, another piano, all intended as a background for his violin. He
could travel all over the world and it wouldn't touch him once. He's got
his mental fingers crossed all the time.”
Theodore had begun to play in concert with some success, but he wrote
that there was no real money in it yet. He was not well enough known. It
took time. He would have to get a name in Europe before he could attempt
an American tour. Just now every one was mad over Greinert. He was
drawing immense audiences. He sent them a photograph at which they
gasped, and then laughed, surprisedly. He looked so awfully German, so
different, somehow.
“It's the way his hair is clipped, I suppose,” said Fanny. “High, like
that, on the temples. And look at his clothes! That tie! And his pants!
And that awful collar! Why, his very features look German, don't they? I
suppose it's the effect of that haberdashery.”
A month after the photograph, came a letter announcing his marriage.
Fanny's quick eye, leaping ahead from line to line, took in the facts
that her mind seemed unable to grasp. Her name was Olga Stumpf. (In the
midst of her horror some imp in Fanny's brain said that her hands would
be red, and thick, with a name like that.) An orphan. She sang. One of
the Vienna concert halls, but so different from the other girls. And he
was so happy. And he hated to ask them for it, but if they could cable a
hundred or so. That would help. And here was her picture.
And there was her picture. One of the so-called vivacious type of
Viennese of the lower class, smiling a conscious smile, her hair
elaborately waved and dressed, her figure high-busted, narrow-waisted;
earrings, chains, bracelets. You knew that she used a heavy scent. She
was older than Theodore. Or perhaps it was the earrings.
They cabled the hundred.
After the first shock of it Molly Brandeis found excuses for him. “He
must have been awfully lonely, Fanny. Often. And perhaps it will steady
him, and make him more ambitious. He'll probably work all the harder
now.”
“No, he won't. But you will. And I will. I didn't mind working for
Theodore, and scrimping, and never having any of the things I wanted,
from blouses to music. But I won't work and deny myself to keep a great,
thick, cheap, German barmaid, or whatever she is in comfort. I won't!”
But she did. And quite suddenly Molly Brandeis, of the straight, firm
figure and the bright, alert eye, and the buoyant humor, seemed to lose
some of those electric qualities. It was an almost imperceptible letting
down. You have seen a fine race horse suddenly break and lose his stride
in the midst of the field, and pull up and try to gain it again, and go
bravely on, his stride and form still there, but his spirit broken? That
was Molly Brandeis.
Fanny did much of the buying now. She bought quickly and shrewdly, like
her mother. She even went to the Haley House to buy, when necessary, and
Winnebagoans, passing the hotel, would see her slim, erect figure in one
of the sample-rooms with its white-covered tables laden with china,
or glassware, or Christmas goods, or whatever that particular salesman
happened to carry. They lifted their eye-brows at first, but, somehow,
it was impossible to associate this girl with the blithe, shirt-sleeved,
cigar-smoking traveling men who followed her about the sample-room,
order book in hand.
As time went on she introduced some new features into the business,
and did away with various old ones. The overflowing benches outside the
store were curbed, and finally disappeared altogether. Fanny took charge
of the window displays, and often came back to the store at night to
spend the evening at work with Aloysius. They would tack a piece
of muslin around the window to keep off the gaze of passers-by, and
together evolve a window that more than made up for the absent show
benches.
This, I suppose, is no time to stop for a description of Fanny Brandeis.
And yet the impulse to do so is irresistible. Personally, I like to
know about the hair, and eyes, and mouth of the person whose life I am
following. How did she look when she said that? What sort of expression
did she wear when this happened? Perhaps the thing that Fanny Brandeis
said about herself one day, when she was having one of her talks with
Emma McChesney, who was on her fall trip for the Featherbloom Petticoat
Company, might help.
“No ballroom would ever be hushed into admiring awe when I entered,” she
said. “No waiter would ever drop his tray, dazzled, and no diners in a
restaurant would stop to gaze at me, their forks poised halfway, their
eyes blinded by my beauty. I could tramp up and down between the tables
for hours, and no one would know I was there. I'm one of a million women
who look their best in a tailor suit and a hat with a line. Not that I
ever had either. But I have my points, only they're blunted just now.”
Still, that bit of description doesn't do, after all. Because she had
distinct charm, and some beauty. She was not what is known as the Jewish
type, in spite of her coloring. The hair that used to curl, waved
now. In a day when coiffures were a bird's-nest of puffs and curls and
pompadour, she wore her hair straight back from her forehead and wound
in a coil at the neck. Her face in repose was apt to be rather lifeless,
and almost heavy. But when she talked, it flashed into sudden life, and
you found yourself watching her mouth, fascinated. It was the key to
her whole character, that mouth. Mobile, humorous, sensitive, the
sensuousness of the lower lip corrected by the firmness of the upper.
She had large, square teeth, very regular, and of the yellow-white tone
that bespeaks health. She used to make many of her own clothes, and she
always trimmed her hats. Mrs. Brandeis used to bring home material and
styles from her Chicago buying trips, and Fanny's quick mind adapted
them. She managed, somehow, to look miraculously well dressed.
The Christmas following Theodore's marriage was the most successful
one in the history of Brandeis' Bazaar. And it bred in Fanny Brandeis a
lifelong hatred of the holiday season. In years after she always tried
to get away from the city at Christmas time. The two women did the work
of four men. They had a big stock on hand. Mrs. Brandeis was everywhere
at once. She got an enormous amount of work out of her clerks, and they
did not resent it. It is a gift that all born leaders have. She herself
never sat down, and the clerks unconsciously followed her example. She
never complained of weariness, she never lost her temper, she never lost
patience with a customer, even the tight-fisted farmer type who doled
their money out with that reluctance found only in those who have wrung
it from the soil.
In the midst of the rush she managed, somehow, never to fail to grasp
the humor of a situation. A farmer woman came in for a doll's head,
which she chose with incredible deliberation and pains. As it was being
wrapped she explained that it was for her little girl, Minnie. She had
promised the head this year. Next Christmas they would buy a body for
it. Molly Brandeis's quick sympathy went out to the little girl who was
to lavish her mother-love on a doll's head for a whole year. She saw the
head, in ghastly decapitation, staring stiffly out from the cushions of
the chill and funereal parlor sofa, and the small Minnie peering in to
feast her eyes upon its blond and waxen beauty.
“Here,” she had said, “take this, and sew it on the head, so Minnie'll
have something she can hold, at least.” And she had wrapped a pink
cambric, sawdust-stuffed body in with the head.
It was a snowy and picturesque Christmas, and intensely cold, with the
hard, dry, cutting cold of Wisconsin. Near the door the little store
was freezing. Every time the door opened it let in a blast. Near the big
glowing stove it was very hot.
The aisles were packed so that sometimes it was almost impossible to
wedge one's way through. The china plates, stacked high, fairly melted
away, as did the dolls piled on the counters. Mrs. Brandeis imported
her china and dolls, and no store in Winnebago, not even Gerretson's big
department store, could touch them for value.
The two women scarcely stopped to eat in the last ten days of the
holiday rush. Often Annie, the girl who had taken Mattie's place in the
household, would bring down their supper, hot and hot, and they would
eat it quickly up in the little gallery where they kept the sleds,
and doll buggies, and drums. At night (the store was open until ten or
eleven at Christmas time) they would trudge home through the snow, so
numb with weariness that they hardly minded the cold. The icy wind cut
their foreheads like a knife, and made the temples ache. The snow, hard
and resilient, squeaked beneath their heels. They would open the front
door and stagger in, blinking. The house seemed so weirdly quiet and
peaceful after the rush and clamor of the store.
“Don't you want a sandwich, Mother, with a glass of beer?”
“I'm too tired to eat it, Fanny. I just want to get to bed.”
Fanny grew to hate the stock phrases that met her with each customer. “I
want something for a little boy about ten. He's really got everything.”
Or, “I'm looking for a present for a lady friend. Do you think a plate
would be nice?” She began to loathe them--these satiated little boys,
these unknown friends, for whom she must rack her brains.
They cleared a snug little fortune that Christmas. On Christmas Eve they
smiled wanly at each other, like two comrades who have fought and bled
together, and won. When they left the store it was nearly midnight.
Belated shoppers, bundle-laden, carrying holly wreaths, with strange
handles, and painted heads, and sticks protruding from lumpy brown paper
burdens, were hurrying home.
They stumbled home, too spent to talk. Fanny, groping for the keyhole,
stubbed her toe against a wooden box between the storm door and the
inner door. It had evidently been left there by the expressman or a
delivery boy. It was a very heavy box.
“A Christmas present!” Fanny exclaimed. “Do you think it is? But it must
be.” She looked at the address, “Miss Fanny Brandeis.” She went to the
kitchen for a crowbar, and came back, still in her hat and coat. She
pried open the box expertly, tore away the wrappings, and disclosed a
gleaming leather-bound set of Balzac, and beneath that, incongruously
enough, Mark Twain.
“Why!” exclaimed Fanny, sitting down on the floor rather heavily. Then
her eye fell upon a card tossed aside in the hurry of unpacking. She
picked it up, read it hastily. “Merry Christmas to the best daughter in
the world. From her Mother.”
Mrs. Brandeis had taken off her wraps and was standing over the
sitting-room register, rubbing her numbed hands and smiling a little.
“Why, Mother!” Fanny scrambled to her feet. “You darling! In all that
rush and work, to take time to think of me! Why--” Her arms were around
her mother's shoulders. She was pressing her glowing cheek against
the pale, cold one. And they both wept a little, from emotion, and
weariness, and relief, and enjoyed it, as women sometimes do.
Fanny made her mother stay in bed next morning, a thing that Mrs.
Brandeis took to most ungracefully. After the holiday rush and strain
she invariably had a severe cold, the protest of the body she had
over-driven and under-nourished for two or three weeks. As a patient she
was as trying and fractious as a man, tossing about, threatening to get
up, demanding hot-water bags, cold compresses, alcohol rubs. She fretted
about the business, and imagined that things were at a stand-still
during her absence.
Fanny herself rose early. Her healthy young body, after a night's sleep,
was already recuperating from the month's strain. She had planned a
real Christmas dinner, to banish the memory of the hasty and unpalatable
lunches they had had to gulp during the rush. There was to be a turkey,
and Fanny had warned Annie not to touch it. She wanted to stuff it and
roast it herself. She spent the morning in the kitchen, aside from an
occasional tip-toeing visit to her mother's room. At eleven she found
her mother up, and no amount of coaxing would induce her to go back to
bed. She had read the papers and she said she felt rested already.
The turkey came out a delicate golden-brown, and deliciously crackly.
Fanny, looking up over a drumstick, noticed, with a shock, that her
mother's eyes looked strangely sunken, and her skin, around the jaws and
just under the chin, where her loose wrapper revealed her throat, was
queerly yellow and shriveled. She had eaten almost nothing.
“Mother, you're not eating a thing! You really must eat a little.”
Mrs. Brandeis began a pretense of using knife and fork, but gave it up
finally and sat back, smiling rather wanly. “I guess I'm tireder than
I thought I was, dear. I think I've got a cold coming on, too. I'll
lie down again after dinner, and by to-morrow I'll be as chipper as a
sparrow. The turkey's wonderful, isn't it? I'll have some, cold, for
supper.”
After dinner the house felt very warm and stuffy. It was crisply cold
and sunny outdoors. The snow was piled high except on the sidewalks,
where it had been neatly shoveled away by the mufflered Winnebago sons
and fathers. There was no man in the Brandeis household, and Aloysius
had been too busy to perform the chores usually considered his work
about the house. The snow lay in drifts upon the sidewalk in front of
the Brandeis house, except where passing feet had trampled it a bit.
“I'm going to shovel the walk,” Fanny announced suddenly. “Way around
to the woodshed. Where are those old mittens of mine? Annie, where's the
snow shovel? Sure I am. Why not?”
She shoveled and scraped and pounded, bending rhythmically to the work,
lifting each heaping shovelful with her strong young arms, tossing it to
the side, digging in again, and under. An occasional neighbor passed
by, or a friend, and she waved at them, gayly, and tossed back their
badinage. “Merry Christmas!” she called, again and again, in reply to a
passing acquaintance. “Same to you!”
At two o'clock Bella Weinberg telephoned to say that a little party of
them were going to the river to skate. The ice was wonderful. Oh, come
on! Fanny skated very well. But she hesitated. Mrs. Brandeis, dozing on
the couch, sensed what was going on in her daughter's mind, and roused
herself with something of her old asperity.
“Don't be foolish, child. Run along! You don't intend to sit here and
gaze upon your sleeping beauty of a mother all afternoon, do you? Well,
then!”
So Fanny changed her clothes, got her skates, and ran out into the snap
and sparkle of the day. The winter darkness had settled down before she
returned, all glowing and rosy, and bright-eyed. Her blood was racing
through her body. Her lips were parted. The drudgery of the past three
weeks seemed to have been blotted out by this one radiant afternoon.
The house was dark when she entered. It seemed very quiet, and close,
and depressing after the sparkle and rush of the afternoon on the river.
“Mother! Mother dear! Still sleeping?”
Mrs. Brandeis stirred, sighed, awoke. Fanny flicked on the light. Her
mother was huddled in a kimono on the sofa. She sat up rather dazedly
now, and stared at Fanny.
“Why--what time is it? What? Have I been sleeping all afternoon? Your
mother's getting old.”
She yawned, and in the midst of it caught her breath with a little cry
of pain.
“What is it? What's the matter?”
Molly Brandeis pressed a hand to her breast. “A stitch, I guess. It's
this miserable cold coming on. Is there any asperin in the house? I'll
dose myself after supper, and take a hot foot bath and go to bed. I'm
dead.”
She ate less for supper than she had for dinner. She hardly tasted the
cup of tea that Fanny insisted on making for her. She swayed a little as
she sat, and her lids came down over her eyes, flutteringly, as if the
weight of them was too great to keep up. At seven she was up-stairs, in
bed, sleeping, and breathing heavily.
At eleven, or thereabouts, Fanny woke up with a start. She sat up in
bed, wide-eyed, peering into the darkness and listening. Some one was
talking in a high, queer voice, a voice like her mother's, and yet
unlike. She ran, shivering with the cold, into her mother's bedroom. She
switched on the light. Mrs. Brandeis was lying on the pillow, her eyes
almost closed, except for a terrifying slit of white that showed
between the lids. Her head was tossing to and fro on the pillow. She was
talking, sometimes clearly, and sometimes mumblingly.
“One gross cups and saucers... and now what do you think you'd like for
a second prize... in the basement, Aloysius... the trains... I'll see
that they get there to-day... yours of the tenth at hand...”
“Mother! Mother! Molly dear!” She shook her gently, then almost roughly.
The voice ceased. The eyes remained the same. “Oh, God!” She ran to the
back of the house. “Annie! Annie, get up! Mother's sick. She's out of
her head. I'm going to 'phone for the doctor. Go in with her.”
She got the doctor at last. She tried to keep her voice under control,
and thought, with a certain pride, that she was succeeding. She ran
up-stairs again. The voice had begun again, but it seemed thicker now.
She got into her clothes, shaking with cold and terror, and yet thinking
very clearly, as she always did in a crisis. She put clean towels in
the bathroom, pushed the table up to the bed, got a glass of water,
straightened the covers, put away the clothes that the tired woman
had left about the room. Doctor Hertz came. He went through the usual
preliminaries, listened, tapped, counted, straightened up at last.
“Fresh air,” he said. “Cold air. All the windows open.” They rigged up
a device of screens and sheets to protect the bed from the drafts. Fanny
obeyed orders silently, like a soldier. But her eyes went from the face
on the pillow to that of the man bent over the bed. Something vague,
cold, clammy, seemed to be closing itself around her heart. It was
like an icy hand, squeezing there. There had suddenly sprung up that
indefinable atmosphere of the sick-room--a sick-room in which a fight is
being waged. Bottles on the table, glasses, a spoon, a paper shade over
the electric light globe.
“What is it?” said Fanny, at last. “Grip?--grip?”
Doctor Hertz hesitated a moment. “Pneumonia.”
Fanny's hands grasped the footboard tightly. “Do you think we'd better
have a nurse?”
“Yes.”
The nurse seemed to be there, somehow, miraculously. And the morning
came. And in the kitchen Annie went about her work, a little more
quietly than usual. And yesterday seemed far away. It was afternoon; it
was twilight. Doctor Hertz had been there for hours. The last time he
brought another doctor with him--Thorn. Mrs. Brandeis was not talking
now. But she was breathing. It filled the room, that breathing; it
filled the house. Fanny took her mother's hand, that hand with the
work-hardened palm and the broken nails. It was very cold. She looked
down at it. The nails were blue. She began to rub it. She looked up into
the faces of the two men. She picked up the other hand--snatched at it.
“Look here!” she said. “Look here!” And then she stood up. The vague,
clammy thing that had been wound about her heart suddenly relaxed. And
at that something icy hot rushed all over her body and shook her. She
came around to the foot of the bed, and gripped it with her two hands.
Her chin was thrust forward, and her eyes were bright and staring. She
looked very much like her mother, just then. It was a fighting face. A
desperate face.
“Look here,” she began, and was surprised to find that she was only
whispering. She wet her lips and smiled, and tried again, forming the
words carefully with her lips. “Look here. She's dying--isn't she? Isn't
she! She's dying, isn't she?”
Doctor Hertz pursed his lips. The nurse came over to her, and put a hand
on her shoulder. Fanny shook her off.
“Answer me. I've got a right to know. Look at this!” She reached forward
and picked up that inert, cold, strangely shriveled blue hand again.
“My dear child--I'm afraid so.”
There came from Fanny's throat a moan that began high, and poignant, and
quavering, and ended in a shiver that seemed to die in her heart. The
room was still again, except for the breathing, and even that was less
raucous.
Fanny stared at the woman on the bed--at the long, finely-shaped head,
with the black hair wadded up so carelessly now; at the long, straight,
clever nose; the full, generous mouth. There flooded her whole being a
great, blinding rage. What had she had of life? she demanded fiercely.
What? What? Her teeth came together grindingly. She breathed heavily
through her nostrils, as if she had been running. And suddenly she began
to pray, not with the sounding, unctions thees and thous of the Church
and Bible; not elegantly or eloquently, with well-rounded phrases, as
the righteous pray, but threateningly, hoarsely, as a desperate woman
prays. It was not a prayer so much as a cry of defiance---a challenge.
“Look here, God!” and there was nothing profane as she said it. “Look
here, God! She's done her part. It's up to You now. Don't You let her
die! Look at her. Look at her!” She choked and shook herself angrily,
and went on. “Is that fair? That's a rotten trick to play on a woman
that gave what she gave! What did she ever have of life? Nothing! That
little miserable, dirty store, and those little miserable, dirty people.
You give her a chance, d'You hear? You give her a chance, God, or
I'll----”
Her voice broke in a thin, cracked quaver. The nurse turned her around,
suddenly and sharply, and led her from the room.