Back STreet (25 page)

“Thought you’d die? Why? That’s not like you.”

“I know it, Walter. Just seems like I hate to meet people anymore.”

“Now, that’s nonsense.”

“I know it is. I’m not ashamed of anything.…”

“Of course you’re not.”

“If I had to do it all over again I wouldn’t change things. It’s just that I’m getting right sensitive about silly nothings. I’d rather stick right here at home, Walter, where even if you’re not here, your things are hanging on pegs. Here, where you eat. Here, where your chair stands beside the table.”

He was moved at that, and pinched her cheek. “Goosie.”

“I guess I am.” She wanted to cry. But she would no more have given way before him! She knew his masculine dread and susceptibility to tears. Corinne cried. Walter was not sympathetic to tears. He always said, “Bawl.” Besides, it needed only one glance at him to know that he was bristling with something to tell. That was why his glance half slid as she talked. He was not so much listening as waiting. He was like a small boy, she thought, her indulgence flowing over her sense of hurt. He is waiting for me to ask what is on his mind.

“There’s a girl,” he said, when she sprang back from his arms, grasped him by the shoulders, and said:

“What’s on your mind, darling?”

He felt for a cigar. She was before him, bounding over to his humidor, withdrawing one, lighting it, and passing it from her lips to his.

“You smoke too,” he said, and lighted her a cigarette. It amused him to see her pull awkwardly and feel with the tip of her tongue for tobacco crumbs.

It burned in her sullenly upon occasion that smoking was something he not only would not tolerate in his wife, but would be proud to be reactionary where her preciousness was concerned. Queer mysterious differentiation that she was apparently always to suffer in the minds of men. Even in the mind of this one.

“Ready now for a good long listen?”

“In a second.”

She had been peeling him a huge yellow apple, removing the rind in one long curlicue. This she whisked out of sight.

“Now,” she said, and wound her arms around his neck and lay with her ear to his heart. “Now what?”

How safe it was there. How good. How warming. “Tell me what is on your mind, darling.”

“Ray,” he said, and withdrew his cigar, regarding its moist end for a full half-minute before resuming, “something mighty important is about to happen to me.”

“You mean the Guaranty Loan is going through?”

“Now, either let me or you do the talking.”

“I’m sorry.”

He continued to regard the end of his cigar. There was gray in his hair by now, and she wanted to reach up and stroke it, but, not quite daring, lay tense and waiting.

“Looks to me, Ray, as if my wife’s uncle, Felix-Arnold Friedlander, is getting ready to put his house in order. He’s a sick man. Diabetes and complications. Wouldn’t be surprised if he isn’t beginning to make up his mind that his active days are numbered. He sent for me today to have lunch with him. Important things are about to happen in the firm, Ray.”

“Walter, you don’t mean …”

“I do.”

“But Mr. Kunz …”

“That’s just the point. Kunz is no spring chicken, either. Ultimately he plans to retire, too. Oh, not today, or tomorrow; but, looking ahead, from what I was able to understand, that seems to be the picture.”

“Then you mean …”

“I don’t mean anything that isn’t as plain as the nose on your face. It looks to me as if I’m directly in line. In fact, from what was said in that office today, without coming right out in so many words, and from what I understand was said at last directors’ meeting, I don’t see how I’m going to escape it.”

“I just don’t know what to say, Walter.”

“Don’t say anything until it happens. There are alive and kicking men in between me and the post at the minute, but I am giving you an idea of what may happen.”

“I always knew some day—of course. But to think there is out-and-out talk about it already.”

“Not exactly. Don’t misunderstand. It is just the nearest the old gentleman has ever come to putting a card on the table. Talked and beat around the bush at that. Kept harping on the two foreign loans I’ve been telling you about. That’s not all. I’m going to France.”

It seemed to her, lying there, that everything about her just stopped. Her heart, its beat. Her blood, its course in her veins. The noises and sounds of everyday life, including Walter’s voice against her eardrums. This was vacuum. Lying there against Walter’s heart, conscious that “I’m going to France” had been said, and yet not hearing it any more.

“Felix-Arnold Friedlander seems to think I’m the man to swing the deal from that end. And I—well, sir, Ray, I don’t know whether I feel so set up, or so bowled over that my wits have deserted me. I came straight here from the bank. A man’s got to think. Out loud. Anyway, that’s what I need to do, if I can pull myself together.”

Walter was frightened. She could feel him tremble. Walter needed to be bolstered.

“What this amounts to, Ray, is out-and-out international banking. If I go over there, I’m mixing myself up with the history of two small kingdoms. Pretty small ones, but nations on their own. Now, rather than tackle a thing like this if I don’t feel up to it in experience, now is the time for me to come out like a man and say, ‘Look here, Uncle Felix, this is all very fine, but I’m not ready!’ ”

(Yes. Yes. Yes. Stay with me, Walter. Don’t outgrow me. Stay with me.) He was frightened of his life. She would have given everything to be able to reach out her hand and say to him: “Stay back with me, Walter. You will fail. In this snug, sure little nest of our enormous compatibility, be content.”

But Walter would not fail. He would succeed in the way the slow, the plodding, the bitterly tenacious, and the unbrilliant can succeed. Properly guided, always properly guided with the
well-established pattern of procedure of the house of Friedlander-Kunz within eye-and-mind grasp, he would succeed.

“You will succeed, Walter.” (One did not add: “Properly guided, you will plod to achievement. But it will be your grim desire, rather than your talent, that will succeed.”) “You will succeed, Walter.”

He caught her wrists.

“Does it seem that way to you, Ray? Sometimes it seems to me you know me better than myself.”

“I know you will succeed.”

“To hear you say that is worth everything.”

“You need not worry about your lack of experience. You are the one to make use of the experience of others.…”

“What do you mean by that?” he asked, a quick cloud chasing the satisfaction across his face.

“Why, darling, that you will climb higher on the underpinnings that others have already erected.” (Neither did she add: “Because you are emulator, not creator.”)

“I know how long my arm is. I will not try to stretch beyond its reach.”

Exactly! Said better than she could have, even had she dared.

“Never make a move, on your way up, Walter, anyway until you get the knack of walking in a high place, without consulting someone who is wiser than you are. You’ll get that knack, Walter. This is a high place compared to the old days, and see how gradually you have been climbing up the mountain almost without knowing it. Watch the other men who have succeeded before you, in your kind of work. Watch. Take their advice up to the point where you believe in it, and from there on use your brain as if you had two of them. One for and one against. May the best of your two brains win.”

“I think you will have to be my other brain, Ray.”

“You’ll succeed, Walter.”

He had never been so tender with her. Stamina revived in him, until he became cocksure, pretentious, and more than ever the small boy.

“I love you, Ray. Don’t know what I’d do without you. You give
me nerve. You give me confidence. I’ll show them. I’ve never really let off steam. Ever observe that about me, Ray? I’m the sort who goes slowly until the right moment, and then bingo!”

(Who goes slowly until the right moment! What about the Guaranty Trust case? It was like holding back horses to keep him from plunging into what would have been that terrible mistake. Oh, Walter!) Of course, though, one said nothing of the sort.

“You saw the way I handled the Guaranty case. Another temperament would have snapped up the first offer and made the mistake of his young life. Did I? Not me!”

(How she had prevailed and even forced upon him the policy of watchful waiting! Had caused him, in fact, to reverse, by wire, an important decision of impulse.)

“I’m going to be a force in the banking world, Ray. Governments will have to reckon with me. Why, if you look at it in a certain way, an entire little principality depends on the way my mind works in the next few weeks. That’s the way my wife’s uncle put it. ‘Handle this thing your own way, my boy.’ I’ve a level head, Ray, if I do say so myself, and I know how to keep it square on my shoulders.” (Her phrase, this last.)

“Corinne, now, doesn’t quite understand. She’s all impulse, ambitious for the children, ambitious for me, for the home, and naturally she only sees the immediate result. That’s what I love in you, Ray. Your level head. Sometimes, after I’ve talked with you and got my bearings, I see myself as I am. Now, take today; came here scared out of my wits, admit it, but feel now as if I could go over there across the Atlantic and make terms with high government moguls as if I were one of them myself. Kiss me, Ray. I love you.”

“Oh, my dear. Oh, my dear, dear!” she said. “How terrible never to be able to find words to tell you how much I love you.”

“Darling, what can there be sinful in loving you as much as I do, so long as no one else is really hurt by it?”

How they salved and salved themselves on this philosophy which she had concocted for them out of his and her darts of spiritual neuralgia.

“That is my credo. To live so as to hurt no one else. Otherwise
all is fair.” (Her phrase.) “I could stay here,” he said, in the drugged way he had of talking when his creature-satisfaction was soon to demand completion in her arms, “and let life and international banking and success flow past me like so much water.”

She knew that he could not; but thinking of the brownstone house on Lexington Avenue, with its two nurses in uniform, and the three carriages and phaeton, and the implacable stone front to the banking house, and the way his name stood already in tiny type in the extreme northeast corner of the letterhead stationery of Friedlander-Kunz, the miracle of having him there all to herself smote her simultaneously with both fear and ecstasy.

He would be going away, sailing away. The days would be each an empty dice-box out of which every cube of meaning had fallen. Days and days—her lips would not frame the words to ask how many of them; and, as was often the case between them, which invariably they fondly noted, he replied to her unspoken question.

“I know what is on your mind, dearest. It won’t be long. I’ll be back by the end of August.”

This was only May! Even his short trips had been almost unbearable; and now this! She felt her lips twisting and hid them against his coat.

“If only it were possible to take you with me.”

He was thinking that there would be Corinne, too, to please. And, strangely, it smote him that leaving his small tender young fowl of a wife would be a deep pang all its own. Two women from whom it would not be easy to be away. There was a prank of circumstance for you! Caring for two such different women in two such different ways. As if life were not already sufficiently complex. Corinne would cry and hang about his neck with those tender arms of hers that felt almost as if the soft flesh were stuffed with a loose mash of farina instead of bone and sinew. They were as relaxed-feeling, those arms, as the paws of a very young puppy. They gave you somehow the feeling of wanting to pinch them. Yes, Corinne would cry. Her Uncle Felix had at first suggested that she accompany him, and then had seemed to reconsider it on the basis of the brevity of the trip. Another time. It would have been pleasant
having Corinne along. Corinne would be all right to have along, but Ray, now, would be a godsend! What joy she would take in making everything easier.…

“The time will fly, sweetheart, and next trip you shall come along.”

She sat with her hands loose and dead-looking in her lap.

“Yes, of course.”

“I want you to do some reading up for me while I’m away. Spend lots of time at the library, the way you did for me on the history of banking in Georgia, that time we were negotiating for the state loan. That will fill your time.”

“Yes, of course.”

“You won’t get into mischief, my sweet?”

The question was rhetorical, and absurd, and he knew it and she knew it; and they laughed and came together in their constantly recurring embrace. Mischief! Mischief, when it was difficult for her even so much as to put foot into a world that flowed on the outside of their private happiness. Mischief! The mischief of counting the days. Dear, dear heart. Dear, dear darling. She was embarrassed at the rush of these terms of endearment to her lips, and half the time she restrained them. It was just enough to lie there and cry inwardly at what was about to befall her, and soak in the sweet moments that were at hand.

He continued to be so tender to her that night, that a sudden fear smote her that persons might intuitively act like that before a catastrophe or a death that was imminent. Walter’s death, or hers! That was nonsense. His talk was of a future, which, if she was not to share publicly, she was at least to help create.

All night she lay in his arms, and the tide of their ecstasies rose to its peak and receded, leaving them bathed in something stranger and sweeter than peace. When dawn broke, it was he who lay in her arms, the small boy—asleep.

That was the year, coming on the heels of President Roosevelt’s great journey through the States, which saw the beginning of the Russo-Japanese War, the opening of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition at St. Louis, rainy-day skirts, the Baltimore fire, Fletcherism, lingerie shirtwaists, cigarette coupons, the ratification of the Panama Canal Treaty, and Phoebe Snow.