________________________________________________
_ Right here there should be something said about Fanny
Brandeis. And yet, each time I turn to her I find her
mother plucking at my sleeve. There comes to my mind the
picture of Mrs. Brandeis turning down Norris Street at
quarter to eight every morning, her walk almost a march, so
firm and measured it was, her head high, her chin thrust
forward a little, as a fighter walks, but not pugnaciously;
her short gray skirt clearing the ground, her shoulders
almost consciously squared. Other Winnebago women were just
tying up their daughters' pigtails for school, or sweeping
the front porch, or watering the hanging baskets. Norris
Street residents got into the habit of timing themselves by
Mrs. Brandeis. When she marched by at seven forty-five they
hurried a little with the tying of the hair bow, as they
glanced out of the window. When she came by again, a little
before twelve, for her hasty dinner, they turned up the fire
under the potatoes and stirred the flour thickening for the
gravy.
Mrs. Brandeis had soon learned that Fanny and Theodore could
manage their own school toilettes, with, perhaps, some
speeding up on the part of Mattie, the servant girl. But it
needed her keen brown eye to detect corners that Aloysius
had neglected to sweep out with wet sawdust, and her
presence to make sure that the counter covers were taken off
and folded, the outside show dusted and arranged, the
windows washed, the whole store shining and ready for
business by eight o'clock. So Fanny had even learned to do
her own tight, shiny, black, shoulder-length curls, which
she tied back with a black bow. They were wet, meek,
and tractable curls at eight in the morning. By the time
school was out at four they were as wildly unruly as if
charged with electric currents--which they really were, when
you consider the little dynamo that wore them.
Mrs. Brandeis took a scant half hour to walk the six blocks
between the store and the house, to snatch a hurried dinner,
and traverse the distance to the store again. It was a
program that would have killed a woman less magnificently
healthy and determined. She seemed to thrive on it, and she
kept her figure and her wit when other women of her age grew
dull, and heavy, and ineffectual. On summer days the little
town often lay shimmering in the heat, the yellow road
glaring in it, the red bricks of the high school reflecting
it in waves, the very pine knots in the sidewalks gummy and
resinous with heat, and sending up a pungent smell that was
of the woods, and yet stifling. She must have felt an
almost irresistible temptation to sit for a moment on the
cool, shady front porch, with its green-painted flower
boxes, its hanging fern baskets and the catalpa tree looking
boskily down upon it.
But she never did. She had an almost savage energy and
determination. The unpaid debts were ever ahead of her;
there were the children to be dressed and sent to school;
there was the household to be kept up; there were Theodore's
violin lessons that must not be neglected--not after what
Professor Bauer had said about him.
You may think that undue stress is being laid upon this
driving force in her, upon this business ability. But
remember that this was fifteen years or more ago, before
women had invaded the world of business by the thousands, to
take their place, side by side, salary for salary, with men.
Oh, there were plenty of women wage earners in Winnebago, as
elsewhere; clerks, stenographers, school teachers,
bookkeepers. The paper mills were full of girls, and the
canning factory too. But here was a woman gently bred,
untrained in business, left widowed with two children at
thirty-eight, and worse than penniless--in debt.
And that was not all. As Ferdinand Brandeis' wife she had
occupied a certain social position in the little Jewish
community of Winnebago. True, they had never been moneyed,
while the others of her own faith in the little town were
wealthy, and somewhat purse-proud. They had carriages, most
of them, with two handsome horses, and their houses were
spacious and veranda-encircled, and set in shady lawns.
When the Brandeis family came to Winnebago five years
before, these people had waited, cautiously, and
investigated, and then had called. They were of a type to
be found in every small town; prosperous, conservative,
constructive citizens, clannish, but not so much so as their
city cousins, mingling socially with their Gentile
neighbors, living well, spending their money freely, taking
a vast pride in the education of their children. But here
was Molly Brandeis, a Jewess, setting out to earn her living
in business, like a man. It was a thing to stir
Congregation Emanu-el to its depths. Jewish women, they
would tell you, did not work thus. Their husbands worked
for them, or their sons, or their brothers.
"Oh, I don't know," said Mrs. Brandeis, when she heard of
it. "I seem to remember a Jewess named Ruth who was left
widowed, and who gleaned in the fields for her living, and
yet the neighbors didn't talk. For that matter, she seems
to be pretty well thought of, to this day."
But there is no denying that she lost caste among her own
people. Custom and training are difficult to overcome. But
Molly Brandeis was too deep in her own affairs to care.
That Christmas season following her husband's death was
a ghastly time, and yet a grimly wonderful one, for it
applied the acid test to Molly Brandeis and showed her up
pure gold.
The first week in January she, with Sadie and Pearl, the two
clerks, and Aloysius, the boy, took inventory. It was a
terrifying thing, that process of casting up accounts. It
showed with such starkness how hideously the Brandeis ledger
sagged on the wrong side. The three women and the boy
worked with a sort of dogged cheerfulness at it, counting,
marking, dusting, washing. They found shelves full of
forgotten stock, dust-covered and profitless. They found
many articles of what is known as hard stock, akin to the
plush album; glass and plated condiment casters for the
dining table, in a day when individual salts and separate
vinegar cruets were already the thing; lamps with straight
wicks when round wicks were in demand.
They scoured shelves, removed the grime of years from boxes,
washed whole battalions of chamber sets, bathed piles of
plates, and bins of cups and saucers. It was a dirty, back-
breaking job, that ruined the finger nails, tried the
disposition, and caked the throat with dust. Besides, the
store was stove-heated and, near the front door,
uncomfortably cold. The women wore little shoulder shawls
pinned over their waists, for warmth, and all four,
including Aloysius, sniffled for weeks afterward.
That inventory developed a new, grim line around Mrs.
Brandeis' mouth, and carved another at the corner of each
eye. After it was over she washed her hair, steamed her
face over a bowl of hot water, packed two valises, left
minute and masterful instructions with Mattie as to the
household, and with Sadie and Pearl as to the store, and was
off to Chicago on her first buying trip. She took Fanny
with her, as ballast. It was a trial at which many men
would have quailed. On the shrewdness and judgment of that
buying trip depended the future of Brandeis' Bazaar, and
Mrs. Brandeis, and Fanny, and Theodore.
Mrs. Brandeis had accompanied her husband on many of his
trips to Chicago. She had even gone with him occasionally
to the wholesale houses around La Salle Street, and Madison,
and Fifth Avenue, but she had never bought a dollar's worth
herself. She saw that he bought slowly, cautiously, and
without imagination. She made up her mind that she would
buy quickly, intuitively. She knew slightly some of the
salesmen in the wholesale houses. They had often made
presents to her of a vase, a pocketbook, a handkerchief, or
some such trifle, which she accepted reluctantly, when at
all. She was thankful now for these visits. She found
herself remembering many details of them. She made up her
mind, with a canny knowingness, that there should be no
presents this time, no theater invitations, no lunches or
dinners. This was business, she told herself; more than
business--it was grim war.
They still tell of that trip, sometimes, when buyers and
jobbers and wholesale men get together. Don't imagine that
she came to be a woman captain of finance. Don't think that
we are to see her at the head of a magnificent business
establishment, with buyers and department heads below her,
and a private office done up in mahogany, and stenographers
and secretaries. No, she was Mrs. Brandeis, of Brandeis'
Bazaar, to the end. The bills she bought were ridiculously
small, I suppose, and the tricks she turned on that first
trip were pitiful, perhaps. But they were magnificent too,
in their way. I am even bold enough to think that she might
have made business history, that plucky woman, if she had
had an earlier start, and if she had not, to the very end,
had a pack of unmanageable handicaps yelping at her heels,
pulling at her skirts.
It was only a six-hour trip to Chicago. Fanny Brandeis'
eyes, big enough at any time, were surely twice their size
during the entire journey of two hundred miles or more.
They were to have lunch on the train! They were to stop at
an hotel! They were to go to the theater! She would have
lain back against the red plush seat of the car, in a swoon
of joy, if there had not been so much to see in the car
itself, and through the car window.
"We'll have something for lunch," said Mrs. Brandeis when
they were seated in the dining car, "that we never have at
home, shall we?"
"Oh, yes!" replied Fanny in a whisper of excitement.
"Something--something queer, and different, and not so very
healthy!"
They had oysters (a New Yorker would have sniffed at them),
and chicken potpie, and asparagus, and ice cream. If that
doesn't prove Mrs. Brandeis was game, I should like to know
what could! They stopped at the Windsor-Clifton, because it
was quieter and less expensive than the Palmer House, though
quite as full of red plush and walnut. Besides, she had
stopped at the Palmer House with her husband, and she knew
how buyers were likely to be besieged by eager salesmen with
cards, and with tempting lines of goods spread knowingly in
the various sample-rooms.
Fanny Brandeis was thirteen, and emotional, and incredibly
receptive and alive. It is impossible to tell what she
learned during that Chicago trip, it was so crowded, so
wonderful. She went with her mother to the wholesale houses
and heard and saw and, unconsciously, remembered. When she
became fatigued with the close air of the dim showrooms,
with their endless aisles piled with every sort of ware, she
would sit on a chair in some obscure corner, watching those
sleek, over-lunched, genial-looking salesmen who were
chewing their cigars somewhat wildly when Mrs. Brandeis
finished with them. Sometimes she did not accompany her
mother, but lay in bed, deliciously, until the middle of the
morning, then dressed, and chatted with the obliging Irish
chamber maid, and read until her mother came for her at
noon.
Everything she did was a delightful adventure; everything
she saw had the tang of novelty. Fanny Brandeis was to see
much that was beautiful and rare in her full lifetime, but
she never again, perhaps, got quite the thrill that those
ugly, dim, red-carpeted, gas-lighted hotel corridors gave
her, or the grim bedroom, with its walnut furniture and its
Nottingham curtains. As for the Chicago streets themselves,
with their perilous corners (there were no czars in blue to
regulate traffic in those days), older and more
sophisticated pedestrians experienced various emotions while
negotiating the corner of State and Madison.
That buying trip lasted ten days. It was a racking
business, physically and mentally. There were the hours of
tramping up one aisle and down the other in the big
wholesale lofts. But that brought bodily fatigue only. It
was the mental strain that left Mrs. Brandeis spent and limp
at the end of the day. Was she buying wisely? Was she
over-buying? What did she know about buying, anyway? She
would come back to her hotel at six, sometimes so exhausted
that the dining-room and dinner were unthinkable. At such
times they would have dinner in their room another delicious
adventure for Fanny. She would try to tempt the fagged
woman on the bed with bits of this or that from one of the
many dishes that dotted the dinner tray. But Molly
Brandeis, harrowed in spirit and numbed in body, was too
spent to eat.
But that was not always the case. There was that
unforgettable night when they went to see Bernhardt the
divine. Fanny spent the entire morning following standing
before the bedroom mirror, with her hair pulled out in a
wild fluff in front, her mother's old marten-fur scarf high
and choky around her neck, trying to smile that slow, sad,
poignant, tear-compelling smile; but she had to give it up,
clever mimic though she was. She only succeeded in looking
as though a pin were sticking her somewhere. Besides,
Fanny's own smile was a quick, broad, flashing grin, with a
generous glint of white teeth in it, and she always forgot
about being exquisitely wistful over it until it was too
late.
I wonder if the story of the china religious figures will
give a wrong impression of Mrs. Brandeis. Perhaps not, if
you will only remember this woman's white-lipped
determination to wrest a livelihood from the world, for her
children and herself. They had been in Chicago a week, and
she was buying at Bauder & Peck's. Now, Bauder & Peck,
importers, are known the world over. It is doubtful if
there is one of you who has not been supplied, indirectly,
with some imported bit of china or glassware, with French
opera glasses or cunning toys and dolls, from the great New
York and Chicago showrooms of that company.
Young Bauder himself was waiting on Mrs. Brandeis, and he
was frowning because he hated to sell women. Young Bauder
was being broken into the Chicago end of the business, and
he was not taking gracefully to the process.
At the end of a long aisle, on an obscure shelf in a dim
corner, Molly Brandeis' sharp eyes espied a motley
collection of dusty, grimy china figures of the kind one
sees on the mantel in the parlor of the small-town Catholic
home. Winnebago's population was two-thirds Catholic,
German and Irish, and very devout.
Mrs. Brandeis stopped short. "How much for that lot?" She
pointed to the shelf. Young Bauder's gaze followed hers,
puzzled. The figures were from five inches to a foot high,
in crude, effective blues, and gold, and crimson, and
white. All the saints were there in assorted sizes, the
Pieta, the cradle in the manger. There were probably two
hundred or more of the little figures.
"Oh, those!" said young Bauder vaguely. "You don't want
that stuff. Now, about that Limoges china. As I said, I
can make you a special price on it if you carry it as an
open-stock pattern. You'll find----"
"How much for that lot?" repeated Mrs. Brandeis.
"Those are left-over samples, Mrs. Brandeis. Last year's
stuff. They're all dirty. I'd forgotten they were there."
"How much for the lot?" said Mrs. Brandeis, pleasantly, for
the third time.
"I really don't know. Three hundred, I should say.
But----"
"I'll give you two hundred," ventured Mrs. Brandeis, her
heart in her mouth and her mouth very firm.
"Oh, come now, Mrs. Brandeis! Bauder & Peck don't do
business that way, you know. We'd really rather not sell
them at all. The things aren't worth much to us, or to you,
for that matter. But three hundred----"
"Two hundred," repeated Mrs. Brandeis, "or I cancel my
order, including the Limoges. I want those figures."
And she got them. Which isn't the point of the story. The
holy figures were fine examples of foreign workmanship,
their colors, beneath the coating of dust, as brilliant and
fadeless as those found in the churches of Europe. They
reached Winnebago duly, packed in straw and paper, still
dusty and shelf-worn. Mrs. Brandeis and Sadie and Pearl sat
on up-ended boxes at the rear of the store, in the big barn-
like room in which newly arrived goods were unpacked. As
Aloysius dived deep into the crate and brought up figure
after figure, the three women plunged them into warm and
soapy water and proceeded to bathe and scour the entire
school of saints, angels, and cherubim. They came out
brilliantly fresh and rosy.
All the Irish ingenuity and artistry in Aloysius came to the
surface as he dived again and again into the great barrel
and brought up the glittering pieces.
"It'll make an elegant window," he gasped from the depths of
the hay, his lean, lengthy frame jack-knifed over the edge.
"And cheap." His shrewd wit had long ago divined the
store's price mark. "If Father Fitzpatrick steps by in the
forenoon I'll bet they'll be gone before nighttime to-
morrow. You'll be letting me do the trim, Mrs. Brandeis?"
He came back that evening to do it, and he threw his whole
soul into it, which, considering his ancestry and
temperament, was very high voltage for one small-town store
window. He covered the floor of the window with black crepe
paper, and hung it in long folds, like a curtain, against
the rear wall. The gilt of the scepters, and halos, and
capes showed up dazzlingly against this background. The
scarlets, and pinks, and blues, and whites of the robes
appeared doubly bright. The whole made a picture that
struck and held you by its vividness and contrast.
Father Fitzpatrick, very tall and straight, and handsome,
with his iron-gray hair and his cheeks pink as a girl's, did
step by next morning on his way to the post-office. It was
whispered that in his youth Father Fitzpatrick had been an
actor, and that he had deserted the footlights for the altar
lights because of a disappointment. The drama's loss was
the Church's gain. You should have heard him on Sunday
morning, now flaying them, now swaying them! He still had
the actor's flexible voice, vibrant, tremulous, or strident,
at will. And no amount of fasting or praying had ever
dimmed that certain something in his eye--the something
which makes the matinee idol.
Not only did he step by now; he turned, came back; stopped
before the window. Then he entered.
"Madam," he said to Mrs. Brandeis, "you'll probably save
more souls with your window display than I could in a month
of hell-fire sermons." He raised his hand. "You have the
sanction of the Church." Which was the beginning of a queer
friendship between the Roman Catholic priest and the Jewess
shopkeeper that lasted as long as Molly Brandeis lived.
By noon it seemed that the entire population of Winnebago
had turned devout. The figures, a tremendous bargain,
though sold at a high profit, seemed to melt away from the
counter that held them.
By three o'clock, "Only one to a customer!" announced Mrs.
Brandeis. By the middle of the week the window itself was
ravished of its show. By the end of the week there remained
only a handful of the duller and less desirable pieces--the
minor saints, so to speak. Saturday night Mrs. Brandeis did
a little figuring on paper. The lot had cost her two
hundred dollars. She had sold for six hundred. Two from
six leaves four. Four hundred dollars! She repeated it to
herself, quietly. Her mind leaped back to the plush
photograph album, then to young Bauder and his cool
contempt. And there stole over her that warm, comfortable
glow born of reassurance and triumph. Four hundred dollars.
Not much in these days of big business. We said, you will
remember, that it was a pitiful enough little trick she
turned to make it, though an honest one. And--in the face
of disapproval--a rather magnificent one too. For it gave
to Molly Brandeis that precious quality, self-confidence,
out of which is born success. _
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