"I can't. The girls'll be swarming in any minute. I can't get you
anywheres but lunch. It's the first thirty minutes of your time I've
asked in five years, Kess--is that little enough? Let Cissie show
Keokuk the blouses till we get back. It's something, Kess, I can't put
off. Kess, please!"
Her face was so close to him and so eager that he turned to back out.
"Wait for me at the Thirty-first Street entrance," he said, "and I'll
shoot you across to Rinehardt's."
She caught up her small silk hand-bag and ran out toward the elevators.
Down in Thirty-first Street a wave of heat met, almost overpowering her.
New York, enervated from sleepless nights on fire-escapes and in
bedrooms opening on areaways, moved through it at half-speed, hugging
the narrow shade of buildings. Infant mortality climbed with the
thermometer. In Fifth Avenue, cool, high bedrooms were boarded and
empty. In First Avenue, babies lay naked on the floor, snuffing out for
want of oxygen.
Across that man-made Grand Cañon men leap sometimes, but seldom. Mothers
whose babies lie naked on the floor look out across it, damning.
Out into this flaying heat Miss Becker stepped gingerly, almost
immediately rejoined by Mr. Leon Kessler, crowningly touched with the
correct thing in straw sailors.
"Get a move on," he said, guiding her across the soft asphalt.
In Rinehardt's, one of a thousand such _Rathskeller_ retreats designed
for a city that loves to dine in fifteen languages, the noonday cortège
of summer widowers had not yet arrived. Waiters moved through the dim,
pink-lit gloom, dressing their tables temptingly cool and white,
dipping ice out from silver buckets into thin tumblers.
They seated themselves beneath a ceiling fan, Miss Becker's
taffy-colored scallops stirring in the scurry of air.
"Lordy!" she said, closing her eyes and pressing her finger-tips against
them, "I wish I could lease this spot for the summer!"
He pushed a menu-card toward her. "What'll you have? There's plenty
under the 'ready to serve.'"
She peeled out of her white-silk gloves.
"Some cold cuts and a long ice-tea."
He ordered after her and more at length, then lighted a cigarette.
"Well?" he said, waving out a match.
She leaned forward, already designing with her fork on the table-cloth.
"Kess, can you guess?"
"Come on with it!"
"Have you--noticed anything?"
"Say, I'd have a sweet time keeping up with you girls!"
She looked at him now evenly between the eyes.
"You kept up with me pretty close for three years, didn't you?"
"Say, you knew what you were doing!"
"I--I'm not so sure of that by a long shot. I--I was fed up with the
most devilish kind of promises there are. The kind you was too smart to
put in words or--or in writing. You--you only looked 'em."
"I suppose you was kidnapped one dark and stormy night while the
villain pursued you, eh? Is that it?"
"Oh, what's the use--rehashing! After that time at Atlantic City
and--and then the--flat, it--it just seemed the way I felt about you
then--that nothing you wanted could be wrong. I guess I knew what I was
doing all right, or, if I didn't, I ought to have. I was rotten--or I
couldn't have done it, I guess. Only, deep inside of me I was waiting
and banking on you like--like poor little Cissie is now. And you knew
it; you knew it all them three years."
"Say, did you get me over here to--"
"I only hope to God when you're done with Cissie you'll--"
"You let me take care of my own affairs. If it comes right down to it,
there's a few things I could tell you, girl, that ain't so easy to
listen to. Let's get off the subject while the going's good."
"Oh, anybody that plays as safe as you--"
He raised his voice, shoving back his chair. "Well, if you want me to
clear out of this place quicker than you can bat your eye, you just--"
"No, no, Kess! 'Sh-h-h-h!"
"If there ever was a girl in my place had a square deal, that girl's
been you."
"'Square deal!' Because after I held on and--ate out my heart for three
years, you didn't--take away my job, too? Somebody ought to pin a
Carnegie medal on you!"
"You've held down a twenty-dollar-a-week job season in and season out,
when there've been times it didn't even pay for the ink it took to
write you on the pay-roll."
"There's nothing I ever got out of you I didn't earn three times over."
"A younger figure than yours is getting to be wouldn't hurt the line
any, you know. It's because I make it a rule not to throw off the old
girls when their waist-lines begin to spread that makes you so grateful,
is it? There's not a firm in town keeps on a girl after she begins to
heavy up. If you got to know why I took you off the dress line and put
you in the wraps, it's because I seen you widening into a thirty-eight,
and a darn poor one at that. I can sell two wraps off Cissie to one off
you. You're getting hippy, girl, and, since you started the subject, you
can be darn glad you know where your next week's salary's coming from."
She was reddening so furiously that even her earlobes, their tips
escaping beneath the turban, were tinged.
"Maybe I--I'm getting hippy, Kess; but it'll take more than anything you
can ever do for me to make up for--"
"Gad!" he said, flipping an ash in some disgust, "I wish I had a
ten-cent piece for every one since!"
"Oh," she cried, her throat jerking, "you eat what you just said! You
eat it, because you know it ain't so!"
"Now look here," he said, straightening up suddenly, "I don't know what
your game is, but if you're here to stir up the old dust that's been
laid for five years--"
"No, no, Kess! It's only that--what I got to tell you--I--it makes a
difference, I--"
"What?"
"There's nothing in these years since, I swear to God, or in the years
before, that I got to be ashamed of!"
"All right! All right!"
"If ever a girl came all of a sudden to her senses, it was me. If ever a
girl has lived a quiet life, picking herself up and brushing the dust
off, it's been me. Oh, I don't say I 'ain't been entertained by the
trade--I didn't dodge my job--but it's been a straight kind of a
time--straight!"
"I'm not asking for an alibi, Becker. What's the idea?"
"Kess," she said, leaning forward, with tears popping out in her eyes,
"I.W. Goldstone has asked me to marry him."
He laid down his roll in the act of buttering it, gazing across at her
with his knife upright in his hand.
"Huh?"
"Night before last, Kess, in the poppy-room at Shalif's."
"Are you crazy?"
"It's the God's truth, Kess. He's begging me for an answer by to-night,
before he goes back home."
"I.W. Goldstone, of Goldstone & Auer, ladies' wear?"
She nodded, her hand to her throat.
"Well, I'll be strung up!"
"He--he says, Kess, it's been on his mind for a year and a half, ever
since his spring trip a year ago. He wants to take me back with him,
Kess, home."
"Whew!" said Mr. Kessler, wiping his brow and the back of his collar.
"You're no more surprised than me, Kess. I--I nearly fell off the
Christmas tree."
"Good Lord! Why, his wife--he had her in the store it seems yesterday!"
"She's been dead four years and seven months, Kess."
"Old I.W. and you!"
"He's only fifty-two, Kess; I'm thirty-four."
"I.W. Goldstone!"
"I know it. I can't realize it, neither."
"Why, he's worth two hundred thousand, if he's worth a cent!"
"I know it, Kess."
"The old man's stringing you, girl. His kind stop, look, and listen."
"He's not stringing me! I tell you he's begging me to marry him and go
back home with him. He's even told his--daughter about me."
"Good Lord--little Effie! I was out there once when she was a kid.
Stopped off on my way to Hot Springs. They live in a kind of
park--Forest Park Street or something or other. Why, I've done business
with Goldstone & Auer for fifteen years, and my father before me!
Good Lord!"
"What'll I do, Kess?"
"So that's the size of the fish you went out and landed!"
"I didn't! I didn't! He's been asking me out the last three trips, and
post-cards in between, but I never thought nothing of it."
"Why, he can't get away with this!"
"Why?"
"They won't stand for it out in that Middle West town. He's the head of
a big business. He's got a grown daughter."
"He's got her fixed, Kess--settled on her."
"Hattie Becker, Mrs. I.W. Goldstone! Gad! can you beat it? Can't you
just see me, when I come out to St. Louis pretty soon, having dinner out
at Mrs. I.W. Goldstone's house? Say, am I seeing things?"
"What'll I do, Kess? What'll I do?"
"I tell you that you can't get away with it, girl. The old man's getting
childish; they'll have to have him restrained. Why, the woman he was
married to for twenty years, Lenie Goldstone, never even seen a
skirt-dance. I remember once he brought her to New York and then
wouldn't let her see a cabaret show. He won't even buy sleeveless models
for his French room."
"I tell you, Kess, he'll take me to Jersey to-morrow and marry me, if I
give the word."
"Not a chance!"
"I tell you yes. That's why I got to see you. I got to tell him
to-night, Kess. He--goes back to-morrow."
He regarded her slowly, watching her throat where it throbbed.
"Well, what are you going to do?"
"I--I don't know."
"Where do you stand with him? Sweet sixteen and never been kissed?"
"He--he don't ask questions, Kess. I--I'm his ideal, he says, of
the--kind of--woman can take up for him where his wife left off. He says
we're alike in everything but looks, and that a man who was happy in
marriage like him can't be happy outside of it. He--he's sized up pretty
well the way I live, and--and--he knows I don't expect too much out of
life no more. Just a quiet kind of team-work, he puts it--pulling
together fifty-fifty, and somebody's hand to hold on to when old fellow
Time hits you a whack in the knees from behind. But he ain't old when he
talks that way, Kess; he--he's beautiful to me."
"Does he wear a mask when he makes love?"
"He's got a fine face."
"So that's the way you're playing it, is it? Love-stuff?"
"Oh, I've had all the love-stuff knocked out of me. Three years of
eating out my heart is about all the love-stuff I can handle for a
while. He don't want that in a woman. I don't want it in him. He's just
a plain, good man I never in my life could dream of having. A good home
in a good town where life ain't like a red-eyed devil ready to hit in
deep between the shoulder-blades. I know why he says he can see his wife
in me. He knows I'm the kind was cut out for that kind of life--home and
kitchen and my own parsley in my own back yard. He knows, if he marries
me, carpet slippers seven nights in the week is my speed. I never want
to see a 'roof,' or a music-show, or a cabaret again to the day I die.
He knows I'll fit in home like a goldfish in its bowl. Life made a
mistake with me, and it's going to square itself. It's fate, Kess;
that's what it is--fate!"
She clapped her hands to her face, sobbing down into them.
He glanced about him in quick and nervous concern.
"Pull yourself together there, Becker; we're in a public place."
"If only I could go to him and tell him."
"Well, you can't."
"It's not you that keeps me. Only, I know that with his kind of man and
at his age, a woman is--is one thing or another and that ends it. With a
grown daughter, he wouldn't--couldn't--he's too set in his ways to know
how it was with me--and--what'll I do, Kess?"
"Say, I'm not going to stand in your light, if that's what's eating you.
If you can get away with it, I don't wish you nothing but well. Looks to
me like all right, if you want to make the try. I'll even come and break
bread with you when I go out to see my Middle West trade pretty soon.
That's the kind of a hairpin I am."
"It's like I keep saying to myself, Kess. If--if he'd ask me anything,
it--it would be different. He--he says he never felt so satisfied that a
woman had the right stuff in her. And I have! There's nothing in the
world can take that away from me. I can give him what he wants. I know I
can. Why, the way I'll make up to that little girl out there and love
her to death! I ask so little, Kess--just a decent life and rest--peace.
I'm tired. I want to let myself get fat. I'm built that way, to get fat.
It was nothing but diet gave me the anaemia last summer. He says he
wants me to plump out. Perfect thirty-six don't mean nothing in his life
except for the trade. No more rooming-houses with the kitchenette in the
bath-room. A kitchen, he says, Kess, half the size of the show-room,
with a butler's pantry. He likes to play pinochle at night, he says,
next to the sitting-room fire. He tried to learn me the rules of the
game the other night in the poppy-room. It's easy. His first wife was
death on flowers. She used to train roses over their back fence. He
loved to see her there. He wants me to like to grow them. He wants to
take me back to a home of my own and peace, where life can't look to a
girl like a devil with horns. He wants to take me home. What'll I do,
Kess? Please, please, what'll I do?"
He was rather inarticulate, but reached out to pat her arm. "Go--to
it--girl, and--God bless you!"
* * * * *
Forest Park Boulevard comes in sootily, smokestacks, gas-tanks, and
large areas of scarred vacant lots boding ill enough for its destiny.
But after a while, where Taylor Avenue bisects, it begins to retrieve
itself. Here it is parked down its center, a narrow strip set out in
shrubs, and on either side, traffic, thus divided, flows evenly up and
down a macadamized roadway. In summer the shrubs thicken, half
concealing one side of Forest Park Boulevard from its other. Houses
suddenly take on detached and architectural importance, often as not a
gravel driveway dividing lawns, and out farther still, where the street
eventually flows into Forest Park, the Italian Renaissance invades,
somebody's rococo money's worth.
I.W. Goldstone's home, so near the park that, in spring, the smell of
lilacs and gasolene hovers over it, pretends not to period or dynasty.
Well detached, and so far back from the sidewalk that interlocking trees
conceal its second-story windows, an alcove was frankly a bulge on its
red-brick exterior. Where the third-floor bath-room, an afterthought,
led off the hallway, it jutted out, a shingled protuberance on the left
end of the house. A tower swelled out of its front end, and all year
round geraniums and boxed climbing vines bloomed in its three stories.
Across a generous ledge of veranda, more vines grew quite furiously,
reaching their height and then growing down upon themselves. Behind
those vines, and so cunningly concealed by them that not even the white
wrapper could flash through to the passerby, Mrs. I.W. Goldstone, in a
chair that would rock rhythmically with her, loved to sit in the first
dusk of evening, pleasantly idle. A hose twirling on the lawn spun up
the smell of green, abetted by similar whirlings down the wide vista of
adjoining lawns. Occasionally, a prideful and shirt-sleeved landed
proprietor wielded his own hose, flushing the parched sidewalk or
shooting spray against hot bricks that drank in thirstily.
As Mrs. Goldstone rocked she smiled, tilting herself backward off the
balls of her feet. The years had cropped out in her suddenly,
surprisingly, and with a great deal of geniality. The taffy cast to her
hair had backslid to ashes of roses. Uncorseted and in the white
wrapper, she was quite frankly widespread, her hips fitting in tight
between the chair-arms, and her knees wide.
A screen door snapped sharply shut on its spring, Mr. I.W. Goldstone
emerging. There was a great rotundity to his silhouette, the generous
outward curve to his waist-line giving to his figure a swayback
erectness, the legs receding rather short and thin from the bay of
waistcoat.
"Hattie?"
"Here I am, I.W."
"I looped up the sweet-peas."
"Good!"
He sat down beside her, wide-kneed, too, the smooth top of his head and
his shirt sleeves spots in the darkness.
"Get dressed a little, Hattie, and I'll get out the car and ride you out
to Forest Park Highlands."
She slowed, but did not cease to rock.
"It's so grand at home this evening, I.W. I'm too comfortable to even
dress myself."
He felt for her hand in the gloom; she put it out to him.
"You huck home too much, Hattie."
"I guess I do, honey; but it's like I can never get enough of it. The
first year I was a home body, and the second and third year I'm two
of 'em."
"That's something you'll never hear me complain of in a woman. There's
a world of good in the woman who loves her home."
"It's not that, I.W. It's because I--I never dreamed that there
was anything like this coming to me. To live around in rooms, year
in and year out, in the lonesomest town in the world, and then, all
of a sudden, a home of your own and a hubby of your own and a daughter
of your own, why--I dunno--sometimes when I think of them days it's
like life was a big red devil with horns and a tail that I'd got away
from. Why, if it was to get me again, I--I dunno, honey, I
dunno--I--just--dunno."
"You're a good woman, Hattie, and you deserve all that's coming to you.
I wish it was more."
"And you're a good man--they don't come no better."
"I'm satisfied with my bargain."
"And me with mine, honey, if--if you don't mind the talk."
"S-ay, this town would talk if you cut its tongue out."
"You're my nice old hubby!"
"If I ever was a little uneasy it was in the beginning, Hattie--the
girl--those things don't always turn out."
"It's her as much as me, I.W. She's the sweetest little thing."
"Never seen the like the way you took hold, though. I'll bet there's not
one woman in a hundred could have worked it out easier."
"That's right--kid me to death."
"'Kid,' she says, the minute I tell her the truth."
"Put on your cap, I.W.; it's getting damp."
He felt under the chair-cushions, drawing out and adjusting a black
skull-cap.
"Want to go to the picture-show awhile, Hattie?"
"No. When Lizzie's done the dishes, I want to set some dough."
"Let's walk, then, a little. I ate too much supper."
"Just in the side yard, I.W. It's a shame the way I don't dress
evenings."
"S-ay, in your own home, shouldn't you have your own comfort? You can
take it from me, Hattie, no matter what Effie tells you, you're twice
the looking woman with some skin on your bones. I want my wife when she
sits down to table she should not look blue-faced when the gravy is
passed. Maybe it's not the style, but if it suits your old man, we
should worry who else it suits."
"It's not right, I.W., but I love it--this feeling at home for--for
good." She rose out of the low mound she had made in the chair, tucking
up the white wrapper at both sides. "Come; let's walk in the side yard."
A narrow strip of asphalt ran across the housefrontage, turning in a
generous elbow and then back the depth of the lot. They paced it quietly
in the gloom, arm in arm, and their voices under darkness.
"Next month is my New York trip. All of a sudden Effie begs I should
take her. We'll all go. What you say, Hattie? It'll do us good."
"You take the kid, I.W. Lizzie needs watching. Yesterday I had to make
her do the whole butler's pantry over. She just naturally ain't clean."
"You got such luck with your roses, Hattie; it's wonderful!"
They were beneath a climbing bush of them that ran along, glorifying a
wooden fence.