Gaslight Sonatas - Fannie Hurst
The door swung back then, revealing a just-lighted parlor, opening, without
introduction of hall, from the sidewalk.
"Well, if it ain't Hanna Burkhardt! What you doin' out this kind of a
night? Come in. Kittie's dryin' her hair in the kitchen. Used to be she
could sit on it, and it's ruint from the scorchin' curlin'-iron. I'll call
her. Sit down, Hanna. How's Burkhardt? I'll call her. Oh, Kittie! Kit-tie,
Hanna Burkhardt's here to see you."
In the wide flare of the swinging lamp, revealing Mrs. Scogin's parlor
of chromo, china plaque, and crayon enlargement, sofa, whatnot, and wax
bouquet embalmed under glass, Mrs. Burkhardt stood for a moment, blowing
into her cupped hands, unwinding herself of shawl, something Niobian in her
gesture.
"Yoo-hoo--it's only me, Kit! Shall I come out?"
"Naw--just a minute; I'll be in."
Mrs. Scogin seated herself on the edge of the sofa, well forward, after the
manner of those who relax but ill to the give of upholstery. She was like a
study of what might have been the grandmother of one of Rembrandt's studies
of a grandmother. There were lines crawling over her face too manifold for
even the etcher's stroke, and over her little shriveling hands that were
too bird-like for warmth. There is actually something avian comes with the
years. In the frontal bone pushing itself forward, the cheeks receding, and
the eyes still bright. There was yet that trenchant quality in Mrs. Scogin,
in the voice and gaze of her.
"Sit down, Hanna."
"Don't care if I do."
"You can lean back against that chair-bow."
"Hate to muss it."
"How's Burkhardt?"
"All right."
"He's been made deacon--not?"
"Yeh."
"If mine had lived, he'd the makin' of a pillar. Once label a man with hard
drinkin', and it's hard to get justice for him. There never was a man had
more the makin' of a pillar than mine, dead now these sixteen years and
molderin' in his grave for justice."
"Yes, Mrs. Scogin."
"You can lean back against that bow."
"Thanks."
"So Burkhardt's been made deacon."
"Three years already--you was at the church."
"A deacon. Mine went to his grave too soon."
"They said down at market to-day, Mrs. Scogin, that Addie Fitton knocked
herself against the woodbin and has water on the knee."
"Let the town once label a man with drinkin', and it's hard to get justice
for him."
"It took Martha and Eda and Gessler's hired girl to hold her in bed with
the pain."
"Yes, yes," said Mrs. Scogin, sucking in her words and her eyes seeming to
strain through the present; "once label a man with drinkin'."
Kittie Scogin Bevins entered then through a rain of bead portieres.
Insistently blond, her loosed-out hair newly dry and flowing down over a
very spotted and very baby-blue kimono, there was something soft-fleshed
about her, a not unappealing saddle of freckles across her nose, the eyes
too light but set in with a certain feline arch to them.
"Hello, Han!"
"Hello, Kittie!"
"Snowing?"
"No."
"Been washing my hair to show it a good time. One month in this dump and
they'd have to hire a hearse to roll me back to Forty-second Street in."
"This ain't nothing. Wait till we begin to get snowed in!"
"I know. Say, you c'n tell me nothing about this tank I dunno already. I
was buried twenty-two years in it. Move over, ma."
She fitted herself into the lower curl of the couch, crossing her hands at
the back of her head, drawing up her feet so that, for lack of space, her
knees rose to a hump.
"What's new in Deadtown, Han?"
"'New'! This dump don't know we got a new war. They think it's the old
Civil one left over."
"Burkhardt's been made a deacon, Kittie."
"O Lord! ma, forget it!" Mrs. Scogin Bevins threw out her hands to Mrs.
Burkhardt in a wide gesture, indicating her mother with a forefinger, then
with it tapping her own brow. "Crazy as a loon! Bats!"
"If your father had--"
"Ma, for Gossakes--"
"You talk to Kittie, Hanna. My girls won't none of 'em listen to me no
more. I tell 'em they're fightin' over my body before it's dead for this
house and the one on Ludlow Street. It's precious little for 'em to be
fightin' for before I'm dead, but if not for it, I'd never be gettin' these
visits from a one of 'em."
"Ma!"
"I keep tellin' her, Kittie, to stay home. New York ain't no place for a
divorced woman to set herself right with the Lord."
"Ma, if you don't quit raving and clear on up to bed, I'll pack myself out
to-night yet, and then you'll have a few things to set right with the Lord.
Go on up, now."
"I--"
"Go on--you hear?"
Mrs. Scogin went then, tiredly and quite bent forward, toward a flight of
stairs that rose directly from the parlor, opened a door leading up into
them, the frozen breath of unheated regions coming down.
"Quick--close that door, ma!"
"Come to see a body, Hanna, when she ain't here. She won't stay at home,
like a God-fearin' woman ought to."
"Light the gas-heater up there, if you expect me to come to bed. I'm used
to steam-heated flats, not barns."
"She's a sassy girl, Hanna. Your John a deacon and hers lies molderin' in
his grave, a sui--"
Mrs. Scogin Bevins flung herself up, then, a wave of red riding up her
face.
"If you don't go up--if you--don't! Go--now! Honest, you're gettin' so luny
you need a keeper. Go--you hear?"
The door shut slowly, inclosing the old figure. She relaxed to the couch,
trying to laugh.
"Luny!" she said. "Bats! Nobody home!"
"I like your hair like that, Kittie. It looks swell."
"It's easy. I'll fix it for you some time. It's the vampire swirl. All the
girls are wearing it."
"Remember the night, Kit, we was singin' duets for the Second Street
Presbyterian out at Grody's Grove and we got to hair-pullin' over whose
curls was the longest?"
"Yeh. I had on a blue dress with white polka-dots."
"That was fifteen years ago. Remember Joe Claiborne promised us a real
stage-job, and we opened a lemonade-stand on our front gate to pay his
commission in advance?"
They laughed back into the years.
"O Lord! them was days! Seems to me like fifty years ago."
"Not to me, Kittie. You've done things with your life since then. I
'ain't."
"You know what I've always told you about yourself, Hanna. If ever there
was a fool girl, that was Hanna Long. Lord! if I'm where I am on my voice,
where would you be?"
"I was a fool."
"I could have told you that the night you came running over to tell me."
"There was no future in this town for me, Kit. Stenoggin' around from one
office to another. He was the only real provider ever came my way."
"I always say if John Burkhardt had shown you the color of real money! But
what's a man to-day on just a fair living? Not worth burying yourself in
a dump like this for. No, sirree. When I married Ed, anyways I thought I
smelled big money. I couldn't see ahead that his father'd carry out his
bluff and cut him off. But what did you have to smell--a feed-yard in a
hole of a town! What's the difference whether you live in ten rooms like
yours or in four like this as long as you're buried alive? A girl can
always do that well for herself after she's took big chances. You could be
Lord knows where now if you'd 'a' took my advice four years ago and lit out
when I did."
"I know it, Kit. God knows I've eat out my heart with knowin' it!
Only--only it was so hard--a man givin' me no more grounds than he does.
What court would listen to his stillness for grounds? I 'ain't got
grounds."
"Say, you could 'a' left that to me. My little lawyer's got a factory where
he manufactures them. He could 'a' found a case of incompatibility between
the original turtle-doves."
"God! His stillness, Kittie--like--"
"John Burkhardt would give me the razzle-dazzle jimjams overnight, he
would. That face reminds me of my favorite funeral."
"I told him to-night, Kittie, he's killin' me with his deadness. I ran out
of the house from it. It's killin' me."
"Why, you poor simp, standing for it!"
"That's what I come over for, Kit. I can't stand no more. If I don't talk
to some one, I'll bust. There's no one in this town I can open up to. Him
so sober--and deacon. They don't know what it is to sit night after night
dyin' from his stillness. Whole meals, Kit, when he don't open his mouth
except, 'Hand me this; hand me that'--and his beard movin' up and down so
when he chews. Because a man don't hit you and gives you spending-money
enough for the little things don't mean he can't abuse you with--with just
gettin' on your nerves so terrible. I'm feelin' myself slip--crazy--ever
since I got back from Cincinnati and seen what's goin' on in the big towns
and me buried here; I been feelin' myself slip--slip, Kittie."
"Cincinnati! Good Lord! if you call that life! Any Monday morning on
Forty-second Street makes Cincinnati look like New-Year's Eve. If you call
Cincinnati life!"
"He's small, Kittie. He's a small potato of a man in his way of livin'. He
can live and die without doin' anything except the same things over and
over again, year out and year in."
"I know. I know. Ed was off the same pattern. It's the Adalia brand. Lord!
Hanna Long, if you could see some of the fellows I got this minute paying
attentions to me in New York, you'd lose your mind. Spenders! Them New
York guys make big and spend big, and they're willing to part with the
spondoolaks. That's the life!"
"I--You look it, Kit. I never seen a girl get back her looks and keep 'em
like you. I says to him to-night, I says, 'When I look at myself in the
glass, I wanna die.'"
"You're all there yet, Hanna. Your voice over here the other night was
something immense. Big enough to cut into any restaurant crowd, and that's
what counts in cabaret. I don't tell anybody how to run his life, but if
I had your looks and your contralto, I'd turn 'em into money, I would.
There's forty dollars a week in you this minute."
Mrs. Burkhardt's head went up. Her mouth had fallen open, her eyes
brightening as they widened.
"Kit--when you goin' back?"
"To-morrow a week, honey--if I live through it."
"Could--you help me--your little lawyer--your--"
"Remember, I ain't advising--"
"Could you, Kit, and to--to get a start?"
"They say it of me there ain't a string in the Bijou Cafe that I can't pull
my way."
"Could you, Kit? Would you?"
"I don't tell nobody how to run his life, Hanna. It's mighty hard to advise
the other fellow about his own business. I don't want it said in this town,
that's down on me, anyways, that Kit Scogin put ideas in Hanna Long's
head."
"You didn't, Kit. They been there. Once I answered an ad. to join a county
fair. I even sent money to a vaudeville agent in Cincinnati. I--"
"Nothing doing in vaudeville for our kind of talent. It's cabaret where the
money and easy hours is these days. Just a plain little solo act--contralto
is what you can put over. A couple of 'Where Is My Wandering Boy To-night'
sob-solos is all you need. I'll let you meet Billy Howe of the Bijou.
Billy's a great one for running in a chaser act or two."
"I--How much would it cost, Kittie, to--to--"
"Hundred and fifty done it for me, wardrobe and all."
"Kittie, I--Would you--"
"Sure I would! Only, remember, I ain't responsible. I don't tell anybody
how to run his life. That's something everybody's got to decide for
herself."
"I--have--decided, Kittie."
At something after that stilly one-o'clock hour when all the sleeping
noises of lath and wainscoting creak out, John Burkhardt lifted his head to
the moving light of a lamp held like a torch over him, even the ridge
of his body completely submerged beneath the great feather billow of an
oceanic walnut bedstead.
"Yes, Hanna?"
"Wake up!"
"I been awake--"
She set the lamp down on the brown-marble top of a wash-stand, pushed back
her hair with both hands, and sat down on the bed-edge, heavily breathing
from a run through deserted night's streets.
"I gotta talk to you, Burkhardt--now--to-night."
"Now's no time, Hanna. Come to bed."
"Things can't go on like this, John."
He lay back slowly.
"Maybe you're right, Hanna. I been layin' up here and thinkin' the same
myself. What's to be done?"
"I've got to the end of my rope."
"With so much that God has given us, Hanna--health and prosperity--it's a
sin before Him that unhappiness should take root in this home."
"If you're smart, you won't try to feed me up on gospel to-night!"
"I'm willin' to meet you, Hanna, on any proposition you say. How'd it be
to move down to Schaefer's boardin'-house for the winter, where it'll be
a little recreation for you evenings, or say we take a trip down to
Cincinnati for a week. I--"
"Oh no," she said, looking away from him and her throat throbbing. "Oh no,
you don't! Them things might have meant something to me once, but you've
come too late with 'em. For eight years I been eatin' out my heart with
'em. Now you couldn't pay me to live at Schaefer's. I had to beg too long
for it. Cincinnati! Why, its New-Year's Eve is about as lively as a real
town's Monday morning. Oh no, you don't! Oh no!"
"Come on to bed, Hanna. You'll catch cold. Your breath's freezin'."
"I'm goin'--away, for good--that's where--I'm goin'!"
Her words threatened to come out on a sob, but she stayed it, the back of
her hand to her mouth.
Her gaze was riveted, and would not move, from a little curtain above the
wash-stand, a guard against splashing crudely embroidered in a little
hand-in-hand boy and girl.
"You--you're sayin' a good many hasty things to-night, Hanna."
"Maybe."
He plucked at a gray-wool knot in the coverlet.
"Mighty hasty things."
She turned, then, plunging her hands into the great suds of feather bed,
the whole thrust of her body toward him.
"'Hasty'! Is eight years hasty? Is eight years of buried-alive hasty? I'm
goin', John Burkhardt; this time I'm goin' sure--sure as my name is Hanna
Long."
"Goin' where, Hanna?"
"Goin' where each day ain't like a clod of mud on my coffin. Goin' where
there's a chance for a woman like me to get a look-in on life before she's
as skinny a hex at twenty-seven as old lady Scog--as--like this town's full
of. I'm goin' to make my own livin' in my own way, and I'd like to see
anybody try to stop me."
"I ain't tryin', Hanna."
She drew back in a flash of something like surprise.
"You're willin', then?"
"No, Hanna, not willin'."
"You can't keep me from it. Incompatibility is grounds!"
The fires of her rebellion, doused for the moment, broke out again, flaming
in her cheeks.
He raised himself to his elbow, regarding her there in her flush, the
white line of her throat whiter because of it. She was strangely, not
inconsiderably taller.
"Why, Hanna, what you been doin' to yourself?"
Her hand flew to a new and elaborately piled coiffure, a half-fringe of
curling-iron, little fluffed out tendrils escaping down her neck.
"In--incompatibility is grounds."
"It's mighty becomin', Hanna. Mighty becomin'."
"It's grounds, all right!"
"'Grounds'? Grounds for what, Hanna?"
She looked away, her throat distending as she swallowed.
"Divorce."
There was a pause, then so long that she had a sense of falling through its
space.
"Look at me, Hanna!"
She swung her gaze reluctantly to his. He was sitting erect now, a kind of
pallor setting in behind the black beard.
"Leggo!" she said, loosening his tightening hand from her wrists. "Leggo;
you hurt!"
"I--take it when a woman uses that word in her own home, she means it."
"This one does."
"You're a deacon's wife. Things--like this are--are pretty serious with
people in our walk of life. We--'ain't learned in our communities yet not
to take the marriage law as of God's own makin'. I'm a respected citizen
here."
"So was Ed Bevins. It never hurt his hide."
"But it left her with a black name in the town."
"Who cares? She don't."
"It's no good to oppose a woman, Hanna, when she's made up her mind; but
I'm willin' to meet you half-way on this thing. Suppose we try it again.
I got some plans for perkin' things up a bit between us. Say we join the
Buckeye Bowling Club, and--"
"No! No! No! That gang of church-pillars! I can't stand it, I tell you; you
mustn't try to keep me! You mustn't! I'm a rat in a trap here. Gimme a few
dollars. Hundred and fifty is all I ask. Not even alimony. Lemme apply.
Gimme grounds. It's done every day. Lemme go. What's done can't be undone.
I'm not blamin' you. You're what you are and I'm what I am. I'm not blamin'
anybody. You're what you are, and God Almighty can't change you. Lemme go,
John; for God's sake, lemme go!"
"Yes," he said, finally, not taking his eyes from her and the chin
hardening so that it shot out and up. "Yes, Hanna; you're right. You got to
go."
* * * * *
The skeleton of the Elevated Railway structure straddling almost its entire
length, Sixth Avenue, sullen as a clayey stream, flows in gloom and crash.
Here, in this underworld created by man's superstructure, Mrs. Einstein,
Slightly Used Gowns, nudges Mike's Eating-Place from the left, and on the
right Stover's Vaudeville Agency for Lilliputians divides office-space
and rent with the Vibro Health Belt Company. It is a kind of murky drain,
which, flowing between, catches the refuse from Fifth Avenue and the
leavings from Broadway. To Sixth Avenue drift men who, for the first time
in a Miss-spending life, are feeling the prick of a fraying collar. Even
Fifth Avenue is constantly feeding it. A _couturier's_ model gone hippy; a
specialty-shop gone bankrupt; a cashier's books gone over. Its shops are
second-hand, and not a few of its denizens are down on police records as
sleight-of-hand. At night women too weary to be furtive turn in at its
family entrances. It is the cauldron of the city's eye of newt, toe of
frog, wool of bat, and tongue of dog. It is the home of the most daring
all-night eating-places, the smallest store, the largest store, the
greatest revolving stage, the dreariest night court, and the drabest night
birds in the world.
War has laid its talons and scratched slightly beneath the surface of Sixth
Avenue. Hufnagel's Delicatessen, the briny hoar of twenty years upon it,
went suddenly into decline and the hands of a receiver. Recruiting
stations have flung out imperious banners. Keeley's Chop-House--Open
All Night--reluctantly swings its too hospitable doors to the
one-o'clock-closing mandate.
To the New-Yorker whose nights must be filled with music, preferably jazz,
to pass Keeley's and find it dark is much as if Bacchus, emulating the
newest historical rogue, had donned cassock and hood. Even that half of
the evening east of the cork-popping land of the midnight son has waned at
Keeley's. No longer a road-house on the incandescent road to dawn, there is
something hangdog about its very waiters, moving through the easy maze of
half-filled tables; an orchestra, sheepish of its accomplishment, can lift
even a muted melody above the light babel of light diners. There is a
cabaret, too, bravely bidding for the something that is gone.
At twelve o'clock, five of near-Broadway's best breed, in woolly anklets
and wristlets and a great shaking of curls, execute the poodle-prance to
half the encores of other days. May Deland, whose ripple of hip and droop
of eyelid are too subtle for censorship, walks through her hula-hula dance,
much of her abandon abandoned. A pair of _apaches_ whirl for one hundred
and twenty consecutive seconds to a great bang of cymbals and seventy-five
dollars a week. At shortly before one Miss Hanna de Long, who renders
ballads at one-hour intervals, rose from her table and companion in
the obscure rear of the room, to finish the evening and her cycle with
"Darling, Keep the Grate-Fire Burning," sung in a contralto calculated to
file into no matter what din of midnight dining.
In something pink, silk, and conservatively V, she was a careful
management's last bland ingredient to an evening that might leave too
Cayenne a sting to the tongue.
At still something before one she had finished, and, without encore,
returned to her table.
"Gawd!" she said, and leaned her head on her hand. "I better get me a job
hollerin' down a well!"
Her companion drained his stemless glass with a sharp jerking back of the
head. His was the short, stocky kind of assurance which seemed to say,
"Greater securities hath no man than mine, which are gilt-edged."
Obviously, Mr. Lew Kaminer clipped his coupons.
"Not so bad," he said. "The song ain't dead; the crowd is."
"Say, they can't hurt my feelin's. I been a chaser-act ever since I hit the
town."
"Well, if I can sit and listen to a song in long skirts twelve runnin'
weeks, three or four nights every one of 'em, take it from me, there's a
whistle in it somewhere."
"Just the same," she said, pushing away her glass, "my future in this
business is behind me."
He regarded her, slumped slightly in his chair, celluloid toothpick
dangling. There was something square about his face, abetted by a
parted-in-the-middle toupee of great craftsmanship, which revealed itself
only in the jointure over the ears of its slightly lighter hair with the
brown of his own. There was a monogram of silk on his shirt-sleeve, of gold
on his bill-folder, and of diamonds on the black band across the slight
rotundity of his waistcoat.
"Never you mind, I'm for you, girl," he said.
There was an undeniable taking-off of years in Miss de Long. Even the very
texture of her seemed younger and the skin massaged to a new creaminess,
the high coiffure blonder, the eyes quicker to dart.
"Lay off, candy kid," she said. "You're going to sugar."
"Have another fizz," he said, clicking his fingers for a waiter.
"Anything to please the bold, bad man," she said.
"You're a great un," he said. "Fellow never knows how to take you from one
minute to the next."
"You mean a girl never knows how to take you."
"Say," he said, "any time anybody puts anything over on you!"
"And you?"
"There you are!" he cried, eying her fizz. "Drink it down; it's good for
what ails you."
"Gawd!" she said. "I wish I knew what it was is ailin' me!"
"Drink 'er down!"
"You think because you had me goin' on these things last night that
to-night little sister ain't goin' to watch her step. Well, watch her watch
her step," Nevertheless, she drank rather thirstily half the contents of
the glass. "I knew what I was doin' every minute of the time last night,
all righty. I was just showin' us a good time."
"Sure!"
"It's all right for us girls to take what we want, but the management don't
want nothing rough around--not in war-time."
"Right idea!"
"There's nothing rough about me, Lew. None of you fellows can't say that
about me. I believe in a girl havin' a good time, but I believe in her
always keepin' her self-respect. I always say it never hurt no girl to keep
her self-respect."
"Right!"
"When a girl friend of mine loses that, I'm done with her. That don't get a
girl nowheres. That's why I keep to myself as much as I can and don't mix
in with the girls on the bill with me, if--"
"What's become of the big blond-looker used to run around with you when you
was over at the Bijou?"
"Me and Kit ain't friends no more."
"She was some looker."
"The minute I find out a girl ain't what a self-respectin' girl ought to be
then that lets me out. There's nothin' would keep me friends with her. If
ever I was surprised in a human, Lew, it was in Kittie Scogin. She got me
my first job here in New York. I give her credit for it, but she done it
because she didn't have the right kind of a pull with Billy Howe. She done
a lot of favors for me in her way, but the minute I find out a girl ain't
self-respectin' I'm done with that girl every time."
"That baby had some pair of shoulders!"
"I ain't the girl to run a friend down, anyway, when she comes from my home
town; but I could tell tales--Gawd! I could tell tales!" There was new
loquacity and a flush to Miss de Long. She sipped again, this time almost
to the depth of the glass. "The way to find out about a person, Lew, is to
room with 'em in the same boardin'-house. Beware of the baby stare is all I
can tell you. Beware of that."
"That's what _you_ got," he said, leaning across to top her hand with his,
"two big baby stares."
"Well, Lew Kaminer," she said, "you'd kid your own shadow. Callin' me a
baby-stare. Of all things! Lew Kaminer!" She looked away to smile.
"Drink it all down, baby-stare," he said, lifting the glass to her lips.
They were well concealed and back away from the thinning patter of the
crowd, so that, as he neared her, he let his face almost graze--indeed
touch, hers.
She made a great pretense of choking.
"O-oh! burns!"
"Drink it down-like a major."
She bubbled into the glass, her eyes laughing at him above its rim.
"Aw gone!"
He clicked again with his fingers.
"Once more, Charlie!" he said, shoving their pair of glasses to the
table-edge.
"You ain't the only money-bag around the place!" she cried, flopping down
on the table-cloth a bulky wad tied in one corner of her handkerchief.
"Well, whatta you know about that? Pay-day?"
"Yeh-while it lasts. I hear there ain't goin' to be no more cabarets or
Camembert cheese till after the war."