________________________________________________
_ "You can come down now. They're all here, I guess. Doctor
Thalmann's going to begin." Fanny, huddled in a chair in
her bedroom, looked up into the plump, kindly face of the
woman who was bending over her. Then she stood up,
docilely, and walked toward the stairs with a heavy,
stumbling step.
"I'd put down my veil if I were you," said the neighbor
woman. And reached up for the black folds that draped
Fanny's hat. Fanny's fingers reached for them too,
fumblingly. "I'd forgotten about it," she said. The heavy
crape fell about her shoulders, mercifully hiding the
swollen, discolored face. She went down the stairs. There
was a little stir, a swaying toward her, a sibilant murmur
of sympathy from the crowded sitting-room as she passed
through to the parlor where Rabbi Thalmann stood waiting,
prayer book in hand, in front of that which was covered with
flowers. Fanny sat down. A feeling of unreality was strong
upon her. Doctor Thalmann cleared his throat and opened the
book.
After all, it was not Rabbi Thalmann's funeral sermon that
testified to Mrs. Brandeis's standing in the community. It
was the character of the gathering that listened to what he
had to say. Each had his own opinion of Molly Brandeis, and
needed no final eulogy to confirm it. Father Fitzpatrick
was there, tall, handsome, ruddy, the two wings of white
showing at the temples making him look more than ever like a
leading man. He had been of those who had sat in what he
called Mrs. Brandeis's confessional, there in the quiet
little store. The two had talked of things
theological and things earthy. His wit, quick though it
was, was no match for hers, but they both had a humor sense
and a drama sense, and one day they discovered, queerly
enough, that they worshiped the same God. Any one of these
things is basis enough for a friendship. Besides, Molly
Brandeis could tell an Irish story inimitably. And you
should have heard Father Fitzpatrick do the one about Ikey
and the nickel. No, I think the Catholic priest, seeming to
listen with such respectful attention, really heard very
little of what Rabbi Thalmann had to say.
Herman Walthers was there, he of the First National Bank of
Winnebago, whose visits had once brought such terror to
Molly Brandeis. Augustus G. Gerretson was there, and three
of his department heads. Emil Bauer sat just behind him.
In a corner was Sadie, the erstwhile coquette, very subdued
now, and months behind the fashions in everything but baby
clothes. Hen Cody, who had done all of Molly Brandeis's
draying, sat, in unaccustomed black, next to Mayor A. J.
Dawes. Temple Emmanu-el was there, almost a unit. The
officers of Temple Emanu-el Ladies' Aid Society sat in a
row. They had never honored Molly Brandeis with office in
the society--she who could have managed its business,
politics and social activities with one hand tied behind
her, and both her bright eyes shut. In the kitchen and on
the porch and in the hallway stood certain obscure people--
women whose finger tips stuck out of their cotton gloves,
and whose skirts dipped ludicrously in the back. Only Molly
Brandeis could have identified them for you. Mrs. Brosch,
the butter and egg woman, hovered in the dining-room
doorway. She had brought a pound of butter. It was her
contribution to the funeral baked meats. She had deposited
it furtively on the kitchen table. Birdie Callahan, head
waitress at the Haley House, found a seat just next to
the elegant Mrs. Morehouse, who led the Golf Club crowd. A
haughty young lady in the dining-room, Birdie Callahan, in
her stiffly starched white, but beneath the icy crust of her
hauteur was a molten mass of good humor and friendliness.
She and Molly Brandeis had had much in common.
But no one--not even Fanny Brandeis--ever knew who sent the
great cluster of American Beauty roses that had come all the
way from Milwaukee. There had been no card, so who could
have guessed that they came from Blanche Devine. Blanche
Devine, of the white powder, and the minks, and the
diamonds, and the high-heeled shoes, and the plumes, lived
in the house with the closed shutters, near the freight
depot. She often came into Brandeis' Bazaar. Molly
Brandeis had never allowed Sadie, or Pearl, or Fanny or
Aloysius to wait on her. She had attended to her herself.
And one day, for some reason, Blanche Devine found herself
telling Molly Brandeis how she had come to be Blanche
Devine, and it was a moving and terrible story. And now her
cardless flowers, a great, scarlet sheaf of them, lay next
the chaste white roses that had been sent by the Temple
Emanu-el Ladies' Aid. Truly, death is a great leveler.
In a vague way Fanny seemed to realize that all these people
were there. I think she must even have found a certain grim
comfort in their presence. Hers had not been the dry-eyed
grief of the strong, such as you read about. She had wept,
night and day, hopelessly, inconsolably, torturing herself
with remorseful questions. If she had not gone skating,
might she not have seen how ill her mother was? Why hadn't
she insisted on the doctor when her mother refused to eat
the Christmas dinner? Blind and selfish, she told herself;
blind and selfish. Her face was swollen and distorted now,
and she was thankful for the black veil that shielded
her. Winnebago was scandalized to see that she wore no
other black. Mrs. Brandeis had never wanted Fanny to wear
it; she hadn't enough color, she said. So now she was
dressed in her winter suit of blue, and her hat with the
pert blue quill. And the little rabbi's voice went on and
on, and Fanny knew that it could not be true. What had all
this dust-to-dust talk to do with any one as vital, and
electric, and constructive as Molly Brandeis. In the midst
of the service there was a sharp cry, and a little stir, and
the sound of stifled sobbing. It was Aloysius the merry,
Aloysius the faithful, whose Irish heart was quite broken.
Fanny ground her teeth together in an effort at self-
control.
And so to the end, and out past the little hushed,
respectful group on the porch, to the Jewish cemetery on the
state road. The snow of Christmas week was quite virgin
there, except for that one spot where the sexton and his men
had been at work. Then back at a smart jog trot through the
early dusk of the winter afternoon, the carriage wheels
creaking upon the hard, dry snow. And Fanny Brandeis said
to herself (she must have been a little light-headed from
hunger and weeping):
"Now I'll know whether it's true or not. When I go into the
house. If she's there she'll say, `Well Fanchen! Hungry?
Oh, but my little girl's hands are cold! Come here to the
register and warm them.' O God, let her be there! Let her
be there!"
But she wasn't. The house had been set to rights by brisk
and unaccustomed hands. There was a bustle and stir in the
dining-room, and from the kitchen came the appetizing odors
of cooking food. Fanny went up to a chair that was out of
its place, and shoved it back against the wall where it
belonged. She straightened a rug, carried the waste basket
from the desk to the spot near the living-room table where
it had always served to hide the shabby, worn place in
the rug. Fanny went up-stairs, past The Room that was once
more just a comfortable, old fashioned bedroom, instead of a
mysterious and awful chamber; bathed her face, tidied her
hair, came down-stairs again, ate and drank things hot and
revivifying. The house was full of kindly women.
Fanny found herself clinging to them--clinging desperately
to these ample, broad-bosomed, soothing women whom she had
scarcely known before. They were always there, those women,
and their husbands too; kindly, awkward men, who patted her
shoulder, and who spoke of Molly Brandeis with that
sincerity of admiration such as men usually give only to
men. People were constantly popping in at the back door
with napkin-covered trays, and dishes and baskets. A
wonderful and beautiful thing, that homely small-town
sympathy that knows the value of physical comfort in time of
spiritual anguish.
Two days after the funeral Fanny Brandeis went back to the
store, much as her mother had done many years before, after
her husband's death. She looked about at the bright, well-
stocked shelves and tables with a new eye--a speculative
eye. The Christmas season was over. January was the time
for inventory and for replenishment. Mrs. Brandeis had
always gone to Chicago the second week in January for the
spring stock. But something was forming in Fanny Brandeis's
mind--a resolve that grew so rapidly as to take her breath
away. Her brain felt strangely clear and keen after the
crashing storm of grief that had shaken her during the past
week.
"What are you going to do now?" people had asked her,
curious and interested. "Is Theodore coming back?"
"I don't know--yet." In answer to the first. And, "No.
Why should he? He has his work."
"But he could be of such help to you."
"I'll help myself," said Fanny Brandeis, and smiled a
curious smile that had in it more of bitterness and less of
mirth than any smile has a right to have.
Mrs. Brandeis had left a will, far-sighted business woman
that she was. It was a terse, clear-headed document, that
gave "to Fanny Brandeis, my daughter," the six-thousand-
dollar insurance, the stock, good-will and fixtures of
Brandeis' Bazaar, the house furnishings, the few pieces of
jewelry in their old-fashioned setting. To Theodore was
left the sum of fifteen hundred dollars. He had received
his share in the years of his musical education.
Fanny Brandeis did not go to Chicago that January. She took
inventory of Brandeis' Bazaar, carefully and minutely. And
then, just as carefully and minutely she took stock of Fanny
Brandeis. There was something relentless and terrible in
the way she went about this self-analysis. She walked a
great deal that winter, often out through the drifts to the
little cemetery. As she walked her mind was working,
working. She held long mental conversations with herself
during these walks, and once she was rather frightened to
find herself talking aloud. She wondered if she had done
that before. And a plan was maturing in her brain, while
the fight went on within herself, thus:
"You'll never do it, Fanny. You're not built that way."
"Oh, won't I! Watch me! Give me time."
"You'll think of what your mother would have done under the
same conditions, and you'll do that thing."
"I won't. Not unless it's the long-headed thing to do. I'm
through being sentimental and unselfish. What did it bring
her? Nothing!"
The weeks went by. Fanny worked hard in the store, and
bought little. February came, and with the spring her
months of private thinking bore fruit. There came to Fanny
Brandeis a great resolve. She would put herself in a high
place. Every talent she possessed, every advantage, every
scrap of knowledge, every bit of experience, would be used
toward that end. She would make something of herself. It
was a worldly, selfish resolve, born of a bitter sorrow, and
ambition, and resentment. She made up her mind that she
would admit no handicaps. Race, religion, training, natural
impulses--she would discard them all if they stood in her
way. She would leave Winnebago behind. At best, if she
stayed there, she could never accomplish more than to make
her business a more than ordinarily successful small-town
store. And she would be--nobody. No, she had had enough of
that. She would crush and destroy the little girl who had
fasted on that Day of Atonement; the more mature girl who
had written the thesis about the paper mill rag-room; the
young woman who had drudged in the store on Elm Street. In
her place she would mold a hard, keen-eyed, resolute woman,
whose godhead was to be success, and to whom success would
mean money and position. She had not a head for
mathematics, but out of the puzzling problems and syllogisms
in geometry she had retained in her memory this one
immovable truth:
A straight line is the shortest distance between two points.
With her mental eye she marked her two points, and then,
starting from the first, made directly for the second. But
she forgot to reckon with the law of tangents. She forgot,
too, how paradoxical a creature was this Fanny Brandeis
whose eyes filled with tears at sight of a parade--just the
sheer drama of it--were the marchers G. A. R. veterans,
school children in white, soldiers, Foresters, political
marching clubs; and whose eyes burned dry and bright as she
stood over the white mound in the cemetery on the state
road. Generous, spontaneous, impulsive, warm-hearted,
she would be cold, calculating, deliberate, she told
herself.
Thousands of years of persecution behind her made her quick
to appreciate suffering in others, and gave her an innate
sense of fellowship with the downtrodden. She resolved to
use that sense as a searchlight aiding her to see and
overcome obstacles. She told herself that she was done with
maudlin sentimentality. On the rare occasions when she had
accompanied her mother to Chicago, the two women had found
delight in wandering about the city's foreign quarters.
When other small-town women buyers snatched occasional
moments of leisure for the theater or personal shopping,
these two had spent hours in the ghetto around Jefferson and
Taylor, and Fourteenth Streets. Something in the sight of
these people--alien, hopeful, emotional, often grotesque--
thrilled and interested both the women. And at sight of an
ill-clad Italian, with his slovenly, wrinkled old-young
wife, turning the handle of his grind organ whilst both
pairs of eyes searched windows and porches and doorsteps
with a hopeless sort of hopefulness, she lost her head
entirely and emptied her limp pocketbook of dimes, and
nickels, and pennies. Incidentally it might be stated that
she loved the cheap and florid music of the hand organ
itself.
It was rumored that Brandeis' Bazaar was for sale. In the
spring Gerretson's offered Fanny the position of buyer and
head of the china, glassware, and kitchenware sections.
Gerretson's showed an imposing block of gleaming plate-glass
front now, and drew custom from a dozen thrifty little towns
throughout the Fox River Valley. Fanny refused the offer.
In March she sold outright the stock, good-will, and
fixtures of Brandeis' Bazaar. The purchaser was a thrifty,
farsighted traveling man who had wearied of the road
and wanted to settle down. She sold the household
goods too--those intimate, personal pieces of wood and cloth
that had become, somehow, part of her life. She had grown
up with them. She knew the history of every nick, every
scratch and worn spot. Her mother lived again in every
piece. The old couch went off in a farmer's wagon. Fanny
turned away when they joggled it down the front steps and
into the rude vehicle. It was like another funeral. She
was furious to find herself weeping again. She promised
herself punishment for that.
Up in her bedroom she opened the bottom drawer of her
bureau. That bureau and its history and the history of
every piece of furniture in the room bore mute testimony to
the character of its occupant; to her protest against things
as she found them, and her determination to make them over
to suit her. She had spent innumerable Sunday mornings
wielding the magic paint brush that had transformed the
bedroom from dingy oak to gleaming cream enamel. She sat
down on the floor now, before the bureau, and opened the
bottom drawer.
In a corner at the back, under the neat pile of garments,
was a tightly-rolled bundle of cloth. Fanny reached for it,
took it out, and held it in her hands a moment. Then she
unrolled it slowly, and the bundle revealed itself to be a
faded, stained, voluminous gingham apron, blue and white.
It was the kind of apron women don when they perform some
very special household ritual--baking, preserving, house
cleaning. It crossed over the shoulders with straps, and
its generous fullness ran all the way around the waist. It
was discolored in many places with the brown and reddish
stains of fruit juices. It had been Molly Brandeis' canning
apron. Fanny had come upon it hanging on a hook behind the
kitchen door, after that week in December. And at sight of
it all her fortitude and forced calm had fled. She had
spread her arms over the limp, mute, yet speaking thing
dangling there, and had wept so wildly and uncontrollably as
to alarm even herself.
Nothing in connection with her mother's death had power to
call up such poignant memories as did this homely, intimate
garment. She saw again the steamy kitchen, deliciously
scented with the perfume of cooking fruit, or the
tantalizing, mouth-watering spiciness of vinegar and
pickles. On the stove the big dishpan, in which the jelly
glasses and fruit jars, with their tops and rubbers, bobbed
about in hot water. In the great granite kettle simmered
the cooking fruit Molly Brandeis, enveloped in the familiar
blue-and-white apron, stood over it, like a priestess,
stirring, stirring, slowly, rhythmically. Her face would be
hot and moist with the steam, and very tired too, for she
often came home from the store utterly weary, to stand over
the kettle until ten or eleven o'clock. But the pride in it
as she counted the golden or ruby tinted tumblers gleaming
in orderly rows as they cooled on the kitchen table!
"Fifteen glasses of grape jell, Fan! And I didn't mix a bit
of apple with it. I didn't think I'd get more than ten.
And nine of the quince preserve. That makes--let me see--
eighty-three, ninety-eight--one hundred and seven
altogether."
"We'll never eat it, Mother."
"You said that last year, and by April my preserve cupboard
looked like Old Mother Hubbard's."
But then, Mrs. Brandeis was famous for her preserves, as
Father Fitzpatrick, and Aloysius, and Doctor Thalmann, and a
dozen others could testify. After the strain and flurry of
a busy day at the store there was something about this
homely household rite that brought a certain sense of rest
and peace to Molly Brandeis.
All this moved through Fanny Brandeis's mind as she sat with
the crumpled apron in her lap, her eyes swimming with hot
tears. The very stains that discolored it, the faded blue
of the front breadth, the frayed buttonhole, the little
scorched place where she had burned a hole when trying
unwisely to lift a steaming kettle from the stove with the
apron's corner, spoke to her with eloquent lips. That apron
had become a vice with Fanny. She brooded over it as a
mother broods over the shapeless, scuffled bit of leather
that was a baby's shoe; as a woman, widowed, clings to a
shabby, frayed old smoking jacket. More than once she had
cried herself to sleep with the apron clasped tightly in her
arms.
She got up from the floor now, with the apron in her hands,
and went down the stairs, opened the door that led to the
cellar, walked heavily down those steps and over to the
furnace. She flung open the furnace door. Red and purple
the coal bed gleamed, with little white flame sprites
dancing over it. Fanny stared at it a moment, fascinated.
Her face was set, her eyes brilliant. Suddenly she flung
the tightly-rolled apron into the heart of the gleaming
mass. She shut her eyes then. The fire seemed to hold its
breath for a moment. Then, with a gasp, it sprang upon its
food. The bundle stiffened, writhed, crumpled, sank, lay a
blackened heap, was dissolved. The fire bed glowed red and
purple as before, except for a dark spot in its heart.
Fanny shivered a little. She shut the furnace door and went
up-stairs again.
"Smells like something burning--cloth, or something," called
Annie, from the kitchen.
"It's only an old apron that was cluttering up my--my bureau
drawer."
Thus she successfully demonstrated the first lesson in the
cruel and rigid course of mental training she had mapped out
for herself.
Leaving Winnebago was not easy. There is something about a
small town that holds you. Your life is so intimately
interwoven with that of your neighbor. Existence is so
safe, so sane, so sure. Fanny knew that when she turned the
corner of Elm Street every third person she met would speak
to her. Life was made up of minute details, too trivial for
the notice of the hurrying city crowds. You knew when Milly
Glaenzer changed the baby buggy for a go-cart. The youngest
Hupp boy--Sammy--who was graduated from High School in June,
is driving A. J. Dawes's automobile now. My goodness, how
time flies! Doeppler's grocery has put in plate-glass
windows, and they're getting out-of-season vegetables every
day now from Milwaukee. As you pass you get the coral glow
of tomatoes, and the tender green of lettuces. And that
vivid green? Fresh young peas! And in February. Well!
They've torn down the old yellow brick National Bank, and in
its place a chaste Greek Temple of a building looks rather
contemptuously down its classic columns upon the farmer's
wagons drawn up along the curb. If Fanny Brandeis' sense of
proportion had not been out of plumb she might have realized
that, to Winnebago, the new First National Bank building was
as significant and epochal as had been the Woolworth
Building to New York.
The very intimacy of these details, Fanny argued, was
another reason for leaving Winnebago. They were like
detaining fingers that grasped at your skirts, impeding your
progress.
She had early set about pulling every wire within her reach
that might lead, directly or indirectly, to the furtherance
of her ambition. She got two offers from Milwaukee retail
stores. She did not consider them for a moment. Even a
Chicago department store of the second grade (one of those
on the wrong side of State Street) did not tempt her. She
knew her value. She could afford to wait. There was
money enough on which to live comfortably until the right
chance presented itself. She knew every item of her
equipment, and she conned them to herself greedily:
Definite charm of manner; the thing that is called
magnetism; brains; imagination; driving force; health;
youth; and, most precious of all, that which money could not
buy, nor education provide--experience. Experience, a
priceless weapon, that is beaten into shape only by much
contact with men and women, and that is sharpened by much
rubbing against the rough edges of this world.
In April her chance came to her; came in that accidental,
haphazard way that momentous happenings have. She met on
Elm Street a traveling man from whom Molly Brandeis had
bought for years. He dropped both sample cases and shook
hands with Fanny, eying her expertly and approvingly, and
yet without insolence. He was a wise, road-weary, skillful
member of his fraternity, grown gray in years of service,
and a little bitter. Though perhaps that was due partly to
traveling man's dyspepsia, brought on by years of small-town
hotel food.
"So you've sold out."
"Yes. Over a month ago."
"H'm. That was a nice little business you had there. Your
ma built it up herself. There was a woman! Gosh!
Discounted her bills, even during the panic."
Fanny smiled a reflective little smile. "That line is a
complete characterization of my mother. Her life was a
series of panics. But she never lost her head. And she
always discounted."
He held out his hand. "Well, glad I met you." He picked up
his sample cases. "You leaving Winnebago?"
"Yes."
"Going to the city, I suppose. Well you're a smart girl.
And your mother's daughter. I guess you'll get along all
right. What house are you going with?"
"I don't know. I'm waiting for the right chance. It's all
in starting right. I'm not going to hurry."
He put down his cases again, and his eyes grew keen and
kindly. He gesticulated with one broad forefinger.
"Listen, m' girl. I'm what they call an old-timer. They
want these high-power, eight-cylinder kids on the road these
days, and it's all we can do to keep up. But I've got
something they haven't got--yet. I never read anybody on
the Psychology of Business, but I know human nature all the
way from Elm Street, Winnebago, to Fifth Avenue, New York."
"I'm sure you do," said Fanny politely, and took a little
step forward, as though to end the conversation.
"Now wait a minute. They say the way to learn is to make
mistakes. If that's true, I'm at the head of the class.
I've made 'em all. Now get this. You start out and
specialize. Specialize! Tie to one thing, and make
yourself an expert in it. But first be sure it's the right
thing."
"But how is one to be sure?"
"By squinting up your eyes so you can see ten years ahead.
If it looks good to you at that distance--better, in fact,
than it does close by--then it's right. I suppose that's
what they call having imagination. I never had any. That's
why I'm still selling goods on the road. To look at you I'd
say you had too much. Maybe I'm wrong. But I never yet saw
a woman with a mouth like yours who was cut out for
business--unless it was your mother--And her eyes were
different. Let's see, what was I saying?"
"Specialize."
"Oh, yes. And that reminds me. Bunch of fellows in the
smoker last night talking about Haynes-Cooper. Your mother
hated 'em like poison, the way every small-town
merchant hates the mail-order houses. But I hear they've
got an infants' wear department that's just going to grass
for lack of a proper head. You're only a kid. And they
have done you dirt all these years, of course. But if you
could sort of horn in there--why, say, there's no limit to
the distance you could go. No limit! With your brains and
experience."
That had been the beginning. From then on the thing had
moved forward with a certain inevitableness. There was
something about the vastness of the thing that appealed to
Fanny. Here was an organization whose great arms embraced
the world. Haynes-Cooper, giant among mail-order houses,
was said to eat a small-town merchant every morning for
breakfast.
"There's a Haynes-Cooper catalogue in every farmer's
kitchen," Molly Brandeis used to say. "The Bible's in the
parlor, but they keep the H. C. book in the room where they
live."
That she was about to affiliate herself with this house
appealed to Fanny Brandeis's sense of comedy. She had heard
her mother presenting her arguments to the stubborn farmer
folk who insisted on ordering their stove, or dinner set, or
plow, or kitchen goods from the fascinating catalogue. "I
honestly think it's just the craving for excitement that
makes them do it," she often said. "They want the thrill
they get when they receive a box from Chicago, and open it,
and take off the wrappings, and dig out the thing they
ordered from a picture, not knowing whether it will be right
or wrong."
Her arguments usually left the farmer unmoved. He would
drive into town, mail his painfully written letter and order
at the post-office, dispose of his load of apples, or
butter, or cheese, or vegetables, and drive cheerfully back
again, his empty wagon bumping and rattling down the
old corduroy road. Express, breakage, risk, loyalty to his
own region--an these arguments left him cold.
In May, after much manipulation, correspondence, two
interviews, came a definite offer from the Haynes-Cooper
Company. It was much less than the State Street store had
offered, and there was something tentative about the whole
agreement. Haynes-Cooper proffered little and demanded
much, as is the way of the rich and mighty. But Fanny
remembered the ten-year viewpoint that the weary-wise old
traveling man had spoken about. She took their offer. She
was to go to Chicago almost at once, to begin work June
first.
Two conversations that took place before she left are
perhaps worth recording. One was with Father Fitzpatrick of
St. Ignatius Catholic Church. The other with Rabbi Emil
Thalmann of Temple Emanu-el.
An impulse brought her into Father Fitzpatrick's study. It
was a week before her departure. She was tired. There had
been much last signing of papers, nailing of boxes,
strapping of trunks. When things began to come too thick
and fast for her she put on her hat and went for a walk at
the close of the May day. May, in Wisconsin, is a thing all
fragrant, and gold, and blue; and white with cherry
blossoms; and pink with apple blossoms; and tremulous with
budding things.
Fanny struck out westward through the neat streets of the
little town, and found herself on the bridge over the ravine
in which she had played when a little girl--the ravine that
her childish imagination had peopled with such pageantry of
redskin, and priests, and voyageurs, and cavaliers. She
leaned over the iron railing and looked down. Where grass,
and brook, and wild flower had been there now oozed great
eruptions of ash heaps, tin cans, broken bottles, mounds of
dirt. Winnebago's growing pains had begun. Fanny
turned away with a little sick feeling. She went on across
the bridge past the Catholic church. Just next the church
was the parish house where Father Fitzpatrick lived. It
always looked as if it had been scrubbed, inside and out,
with a scouring brick. Its windows were a reproach and a
challenge to every housekeeper in Winnebago.
Fanny wanted to talk to somebody about that ravine. She was
full of it. Father Fitzpatrick's study over-looked it.
Besides, she wanted to see him before she left Winnebago. A
picture came to her mind of his handsome, ruddy face,
twinkling with humor as she had last seen it when he had
dropped in at Brandeis' Bazaar for a chat with her mother.
She turned in at the gate and ran up the immaculate, gray-
painted steps, that always gleamed as though still wet with
the paint brush.
"I shouldn't wonder if that housekeeper of his comes out
with a pail of paint and does 'em every morning before
breakfast," Fanny said to herself as she rang the bell.
Usually it was that sparse and spectacled person herself who
opened the parish house door, but to-day Fanny's ring was
answered by Father Casey, parish assistant. A sour-faced
and suspicious young man, Father Casey, thick-spectacled,
and pointed of nose. Nothing of the jolly priest about him.
He was new to the town, but he recognized Fanny and surveyed
her darkly.
"Father Fitzpatrick in? I'm Fanny Brandeis."
"The reverend father is busy," and the glass door began to
close.
"Who is it?" boomed a voice from within. "Who're you
turning away, Casey?"
"A woman, not a parishioner." The door was almost shut now.
Footsteps down the hall. "Good! Let her in." The door
opened ever so reluctantly. Father Fitzpatrick loomed up
beside his puny assistant, dwarfing him. He looked sharply
at the figure on the porch. "For the love of--! Casey,
you're a fool! How you ever got beyond being an altar-boy
is more than I can see. Come in, child. Come in! The
man's cut out for a jailor, not a priest."
Fanny's two hands were caught in one of his big ones, and
she was led down the hall to the study. It was the room of
a scholar and a man, and the one spot in the house that
defied the housekeeper's weapons of broom and duster. A
comfortable and disreputable room, full of books, and
fishing tackle, and chairs with sagging springs, and a sofa
that was dented with friendly hollows. Pipes on the
disorderly desk. A copy of "Mr. Dooley" spread face down on
what appeared to be next Sunday's sermon, rough-drafted.
"I just wanted to talk to you." Fanny drifted to the
shelves, book-lover that she was, and ran a finger over a
half-dozen titles. "Your assistant was justified, really,
in closing the door on me. But I'm glad you rescued me."
She came over to him and stood looking up at him. He seemed
to loom up endlessly, though hers was a medium height. "I
think I really wanted to talk to you about that ravine,
though I came to say good-by."
"Sit down, child, sit down!" He creaked into his great
leather-upholstered desk chair, himself. "If you had left
without seeing me I'd have excommunicated Casey. Between
you and me the man's mad. His job ought to be duenna to a
Spanish maiden, not assistant to a priest with a leaning
toward the flesh."
Now, Father Fitzpatrick talked with a--no, you couldn't call
it a brogue. It was nothing so gross as that. One does not
speak of the flavor of a rare wine; one calls attention
to its bouquet. A subtle, teasing, elusive something that
just tickles the senses instead of punching them in the
ribs. So his speech was permeated with a will-o'-the-wisp,
a tingling richness that evaded definition. You will have
to imagine it. There shall be no vain attempt to set it
down. Besides, you always skip dialect.
"So you're going away. I'd heard. Where to?"
"Chicago, Haynes-Cooper. It's a wonderful chance. I don't
see yet how I got it. There's only one other woman on their
business staff--I mean working actually in an executive way
in the buying and selling end of the business. Of course
there are thousands doing clerical work, and that kind of
thing. Have you ever been through the plant? It's--it's
incredible."
Father Fitzpatrick drummed with his fingers on the arm of
his chair, and looked at Fanny, his handsome eyes half shut.
"So it's going to be business, h'm? Well, I suppose it's
only natural. Your mother and I used to talk about you
often. I don't know if you and she ever spoke seriously of
this little trick of drawing, or cartooning, or whatever it
is you have. She used to think about it. She said once to
me, that it looked to her more than just a knack. An
authentic gift of caricature, she called it--if it could
only be developed. But of course Theodore took everything.
That worried her."
"Oh, nonsense! That! I just amuse myself with it."
"Yes. But what amuses you might amuse other people.
There's all too few amusing things in the world. Your
mother was a smart woman, Fanny. The smartest I ever knew."
"There's no money in it, even if I were to get on with it.
What could I do with it? Who ever heard of a woman
cartoonist! And I couldn't illustrate. Those pink
cheesecloth pictures the magazines use. I want to earn
money. Lots of it. And now."
She got up and went to the window, and stood looking down
the steep green slope of the ravine that lay, a natural
amphitheater, just below.
"Money, h'm?" mused Father Fitzpatrick. "Well, it's popular
and handy. And you look to me like the kind of girl who'd
get it, once you started out for it. I've never had much
myself. They say it has a way of turning to dust and ashes
in the mouth, once you get a good, satisfying bite of it.
But that's only talk, I suppose."
Fanny laughed a little, still looking down at the ravine.
"I'm fairly accustomed to dust and ashes by this time. It
won't be a new taste to me." She whirled around suddenly.
"And speaking of dust and ashes, isn't this a shame? A
crime? Why doesn't somebody stop it? Why don't you stop
it?" She pointed to the desecrated ravine below. Her eyes
were blazing, her face all animation.
Father Fitzpatrick came over and stood beside her. His face
was sad. "It's a--" He stopped abruptly, and looked down
into her glowing face. He cleared his throat. "It's a
perfectly natural state of affairs," he said smoothly.
"Winnebago's growing. Especially over there on the west
side, since the new mill went up, and they've extended the
street car line. They need the land to build on. It's
business. And money."
"Business! It's a crime! It's wanton! Those ravines are
the most beautiful natural spots in Wisconsin. Why, they're
history, and romance, and beauty!"
"So that's the way you feel about it?"
"Of course. Don't you? Can't you stop it? Petitions--"
"Certainly I feel it's an outrage. But I'm just a poor fool
of a priest, and sentimental, with no head for
business. Now you're a business woman, and different."
"I! You're joking."
"Say, listen, m' girl. The world's made up of just two
things: ravines and dump heaps. And the dumpers are forever
edging up, and squeedging up, and trying to grab the ravines
and spoil 'em, when nobody's looking. You've made your
choice, and allied yourself with the dump heaps. What right
have you to cry out against the desecration of the ravines?"
"The right that every one has that loves them."
"Child, you're going to get so used to seeing your ravines
choked up at Haynes-Cooper that after a while you'll prefer
'em that way."
Fanny turned on him passionately. "I won't! And if I do,
perhaps it's just as well. There's such a thing as too much
ravine. What do you want me to do? Stay here, and grub
away, and become a crabbed old maid like Irma Klein,
thankful to be taken around by the married crowd, joining
the Aid Society and going to the card parties on Sunday
nights? Or I could marry a traveling man, perhaps, or Lee
Kohn of the Golden Eagle. I'm just like any other ambitious
woman with brains--"
"No you're not. You're different. And I'll tell you why.
You're a Jew."
"Yes, I've got that handicap."
"That isn't a handicap, Fanny. It's an asset. Outwardly
you're like any other girl of your age. Inwardly you've
been molded by occupation, training, religion, history,
temperament, race, into something--"
"Ethnologists have proved that there is no such thing as a
Jewish race," she interrupted pertly.
"H'm. Maybe. I don't know what you'd call it, then. You
can't take a people and persecute them for thousands of
years, hounding them from place to place, herding them in
dark and filthy streets, without leaving some sort of
brand on them--a mark that differentiates. Sometimes it
doesn't show outwardly. But it's there, inside. You know,
Fanny, how it's always been said that no artist can became a
genius until he has suffered. You've suffered, you Jews,
for centuries and centuries, until you're all artists--quick
to see drama because you've lived in it, emotional,
oversensitive, cringing, or swaggering, high-strung,
demonstrative, affectionate, generous.
"Maybe they're right. Perhaps it isn't a race. But what do
you call the thing, then, that made you draw me as you did
that morning when you came to ten o'clock mass and did a
caricature of me in the pulpit. You showed up something
that I've been trying to hide for twenty years, till I'd
fooled everybody, including myself. My church is always
packed. Nobody else there ever saw it. I'll tell you,
Fanny, what I've always said: the Irish would be the
greatest people in the world--if it weren't for the
Jews."
They laughed together at that, and the tension was relieved.
"Well, anyway," said Fanny, and patted his great arm, "I'd
rather talk to you than to any man in the world."
"I hope you won't be able to say that a year from now, dear
girl."
And so they parted. He took her to the door himself, and
watched her slim figure down the street and across the
ravine bridge, and thought she walked very much like her
mother, shoulders squared, chin high, hips firm. He went
back into the house, after surveying the sunset largely, and
encountered the dour Casey in the hall.
"I'll type your sermon now, sir--if it's done."
"It isn't done, Casey. And you know it. Oh, Casey,"--(I
wish your imagination would supply that brogue, because it
was such a deliciously soft and racy thing)--"Oh,
Casey, Casey! you're a better priest than I am--but a poorer
man."
Fanny was to leave Winnebago the following Saturday. She
had sold the last of the household furniture, and had taken
a room at the Haley House. She felt very old and
experienced--and sad. That, she told herself, was only
natural. Leaving things to which one is accustomed is
always hard. Queerly enough, it was her good-by to Aloysius
that most unnerved her. Aloysius had been taken on at
Gerretson's, and the dignity of his new position sat heavily
upon him. You should have seen his ties. Fanny sought him
out at Gerretson's.
"It's flure-manager of the basement I am," he said, and
struck an elegant attitude against the case of misses'-
ready-to-wear coats. "And when you come back to Winnebago,
Miss Fanny,--and the saints send it be soon--I'll bet ye'll
see me on th' first flure, keepin' a stern but kindly eye on
the swellest trade in town. Ev'ry last thing I know I learned
off yur poor ma."
"I hope it will serve you here, Aloysius."
"Sarve me!" He bent closer. "Meanin' no offense, Miss
Fanny; but say, listen: Oncet ye get a Yiddish business
education into an Irish head, and there's no limit to the
length ye can go. If I ain't a dry-goods king be th' time
I'm thirty I hope a packin' case'll fall on me."
The sight of Aloysius seemed to recall so vividly all that
was happy and all that was hateful about Brandeis' Bazaar;
all the bravery and pluck, and resourcefulness of the
bright-eyed woman he had admiringly called his boss, that
Fanny found her self-control slipping. She put out her hand
rather blindly to meet his great red paw (a dressy striped
cuff seemed to make it all the redder), murmured a word of
thanks in return for his fervent good wishes, and fled up
the basement stairs.
On Friday night (she was to leave next day) she went to the
temple. The evening service began at seven. At half past
six Fanny had finished her early supper. She would drop in
at Doctor Thalmann's house and walk with him to temple, if
he had not already gone.
"Nein, der Herr Rabbi ist noch hier--sure," the maid said
in answer to Fanny's question. The Thalmann's had a German
maid--one Minna--who bullied the invalid Mrs. Thalmann, was
famous for her cookies with walnuts on the top, and who made
life exceedingly difficult for unlinguistic callers.
Rabbi Thalmann was up in his study. Fanny ran lightly up
the stairs.
"Who is it, Emil? That Minna! Next Monday her week is up.
She goes."
"It's I, Mrs. Thalmann. Fanny Brandeis."
"Na, Fanny! Now what do you think!"
In the brightly-lighted doorway of his little study appeared
Rabbi Thalmann, on one foot a comfortable old romeo, on the
other a street shoe. He held out both hands. "Only at
supper we talked about you. Isn't that so, Harriet?" He
called into the darkened room.
"I came to say good-by. And I thought we might walk to
temple together. How's Mrs. Thalmann tonight?"
The little rabbi shook his head darkly, and waved a dismal
hand. But that was for Fanny alone. What he said was:
"She's really splendid to-day. A little tired, perhaps; but
what is that?"
"Emil!" from the darkened bedroom. "How can you say that?
But how! What I have suffered to-day, only! Torture! And
because I say nothing I'm not sick."
"Go in," said Rabbi Thalmann.
So Fanny went in to the woman lying, yellow-faced, on
the pillows of the dim old-fashioned bedroom with its walnut
furniture, and its red plush mantel drape. Mrs. Thalmann
held out a hand. Fanny took it in hers, and perched herself
on the edge of the bed. She patted the dry, devitalized
hand, and pressed it in her own strong, electric grip. Mrs.
Thalmann raised her head from the pillow.
"Tell me, did she have her white apron on?"
"White apron?"
"Minna, the girl."
"Oh!" Fanny's mind jerked back to the gingham-covered
figure that had opened the door for her. "Yes," she lied,
"a white one--with crochet around the bottom. Quite grand."
Mrs. Thalmann sank back on the pillow with a satisfied sigh.
"A wonder." She shook her head. "What that girl wastes
alone, when I am helpless here."
Rabbi Thalmann came into the room, both feet booted now, and
placed his slippers neatly, toes out, under the bed. "Ach,
Harriet, the girl is all right. You imagine. Come, Fanny."
He took a great, fat watch out of his pocket. "It is time
to go."
Mrs. Thalmann laid a detaining hand on Fanny's arm. "You
will come often back here to Winnebago?"
"I'm afraid not. Once a year, perhaps, to visit my graves."
The sick eyes regarded the fresh young face. "Your mother,
Fanny, we didn't understand her so well, here in Winnebago,
among us Jewish ladies. She was different."
Fanny's face hardened. She stood up. "Yes, she was
different."
"She comes often into my mind now, when I am here alone,
with only the four walls. We were aber dumm, we women--
but how dumm! She was too smart for us, your mother. Too
smart. Und eine sehr brave frau."
And suddenly Fanny, she who had resolved to set her face
against all emotion, and all sentiment, found herself with
her glowing cheek pressed against the withered one, and it
was the weak old hand that patted her now. So she lay for a
moment, silent. Then she got up, straightened her hat,
smiled.
"Auf Wiedersehen," she said in her best German. "Und
gute Besserung."
But the rabbi's wife shook her head. "Good-by."
From the hall below Doctor Thalmann called to her. "Come,
child, come!" Then, "Ach, the light in my study! I forgot
to turn it out, Fanny, be so good, yes?"
Fanny entered the bright little room, reached up to turn off
the light, and paused a moment to glance about her. It was
an ugly, comfortable, old-fashioned room that had never
progressed beyond the what-not period. Fanny's eye was
caught by certain framed pictures on the walls. They were
photographs of Rabbi Thalmann's confirmation classes.
Spindling-legged little boys in the splendor of patent-
leather buttoned shoes, stiff white shirts, black broadcloth
suits with satin lapels; self-conscious and awkward little
girls--these in the minority--in white dresses and stiff
white hair bows. In the center of each group sat the little
rabbi, very proud and alert. Fanny was not among these.
She had never formally taken the vows of her creed. As she
turned down the light now, and found her way down the
stairs, she told herself that she was glad this was so.
It was a matter of only four blocks to the temple. But they
were late, and so they hurried, and there was little
conversation. Fanny's arm was tucked comfortably in his.
It felt, somehow, startlingly thin, that arm. And as they
hurried along there was a jerky feebleness about his gait.
It was with difficulty that Fanny restrained herself from
supporting him when they came to a rough bit of walk or
a sudden step. Something fine in her prompted her not to.
But the alert mind in that old frame sensed what was going
on in her thoughts.
"He's getting feeble, the old rabbi, h'm?"
"Not a bit of it. I've got all I can do to keep up with
you. You set such a pace."
"I know. I know. They are not all so kind, Fanny. They
are too prosperous, this congregation of mine. And some
day, `Off with his head!' And in my place there will step a
young man, with eye-glasses instead of spectacles. They are
tired of hearing about the prophets. Texts from the Bible
have gone out of fashion. You think I do not see them
giggling, h'm? The young people. And the whispering in the
choir loft. And the buzz when I get up from my chair after
the second hymn. `Is he going to have a sermon? Is he?
Sure enough!' Na, he will make them sit up, my successor.
Sex sermons! Political lectures. That's it. Lectures."
They were turning in at the temple now. "The race is to the
young, Fanny. To the young. And I am old."
She squeezed the frail old arm in hers. "My dear!" she
said. "My dear!" A second breaking of her new resolutions.
One by one, two by two, they straggled in for the Friday
evening service, these placid, prosperous people, not
unkind, but careless, perhaps, in their prosperity.
"He's worth any ten of them," Fanny said hotly to herself,
as she sat in her pew that, after to-morrow, would no longer
be hers. "The dear old thing. `Sex sermons.' And the race
is to the young. How right he is. Well, no one can say I'm
not getting an early start."
The choir had begun the first hymn when there came down the
aisle a stranger. There was a little stir among the
congregation. Visitors were rare. He was dark and very
slim--with the slimness of steel wire. He passed down the
aisle rather uncertainly. A traveling man, Fanny thought,
dropped in, as sometimes they did, to say Kaddish for a
departed father or mother. Then she changed her mind. Her
quick eye noted his walk; a peculiar walk, with a spring in
it. Only one unfamiliar with cement pavements could walk
like that. The Indians must have had that same light,
muscular step. He chose an empty pew halfway down the aisle
and stumbled into it rather awkwardly. Fanny thought he was
unnecessarily ugly, even for a man. Then he looked up, and
nodded and smiled at Lee Kohn, across the aisle. His teeth
were very white, and the smile was singularly sweet. Fanny
changed her mind again. Not so bad-looking, after all.
Different, anyway. And then--why, of course! Little
Clarence Heyl, come back from the West. Clarence Heyl, the
cowardy-cat.
Her mind went back to that day of the street fight. She
smiled. At that moment Clarence Heyl, who had been screwing
about most shockingly, as though searching for some one,
turned and met her smile, intended for no one, with a
startlingly radiant one of his own, intended most plainly
for her. He half started forward in his pew, and then
remembered, and sat back again, but with an effect of
impermanence that was ludicrous. It had been years since he
had left Winnebago. At the time of his mother's death they
had tried to reach him, and had been unable to get in touch
with him for weeks. He had been off on some mountain
expedition, hundreds of miles from railroad or telegraph.
Fanny remembered having read about him in the Winnebago
Courier. He seemed to be climbing mountains a great
deal--rather difficult mountains, evidently, from the fuss
they made over it. A queer enough occupation for a cowardy-
cat. There had been a book, too. About the Rockies.
She had not read it. She rather disliked these nature
books, as do most nature lovers. She told herself that when
she came upon a flaming golden maple in October she was
content to know it was a maple, and to warm her soul at its
blaze.
There had been something in the Chicago Herald, though--
oh, yes; it had spoken of him as the brilliant young
naturalist, Clarence Heyl. He was to have gone on an
expedition with Roosevelt. A sprained ankle, or some such
thing, had prevented. Fanny smiled again, to herself. His
mother, the fussy person who had been responsible for his
boyhood reefers and too-shiny shoes, and his cowardice too,
no doubt, had dreamed of seeing her Clarence a rabbi.
From that point Fanny's thoughts wandered to the brave old
man in the pulpit. She had heard almost nothing of the
service. She looked at him now--at him, and then at his
congregation, inattentive and palpably bored. As always
with her, the thing stamped itself on her mind as a picture.
She was forever seeing a situation in terms of its human
value. How small he looked, how frail, against the
background of the massive Ark with its red velvet curtain.
And how bravely he glared over his blue glasses at the two
Aarons girls who were whispering and giggling together, eyes
on the newcomer.
So this was what life did to you, was it? Squeezed you dry,
and then cast you aside in your old age, a pulp, a bit of
discard. Well, they'd never catch her that way.
Unchurchly thoughts, these. The little place was very
peaceful and quiet, lulling one like a narcotic. The
rabbi's voice had in it that soothing monotony bred of years
in the pulpit. Fanny found her thoughts straying back to
the busy, bright little store on Elm Street, then forward,
to the Haynes-Cooper plant and the fight that was
before her. There settled about her mouth a certain grim
line that sat strangely on so young a face. The service
marched on. There came the organ prelude that announced the
mourners' prayer. Then Rabbi Thalmann began to intone the
Kaddish. Fanny rose, prayer book in hand. At that Clarence
Heyl rose too, hurriedly, as one unaccustomed to the
service, and stood with unbowed head, looking at the rabbi
interestedly, thoughtfully, reverently. The two stood
alone. Death had been kind to Congregation Emanu-el this
year. The prayer ended. Fanny winked the tears from her
eyes, almost wrathfully. She sat down, and there swept over
her a feeling of finality. It was like the closing of Book
One in a volume made up of three parts.
She said to herself: "Winnebago is ended, and my life here.
How interesting that I should know that, and feel it. It is
like the first movement in one of the concertos Theodore was
forever playing. Now for the second movement! It's got to
be lively. Fortissimo! Presto!"
For so clever a girl as Fanny Brandeis, that was a stupid
conclusion at which to arrive. How could she think it
possible to shed her past life, like a garment? Those
impressionable years, between fourteen and twenty-four,
could never be cast off. She might don a new cloak to cover
the old dress beneath, but the old would always be there,
its folds peeping out here and there, its outlines plainly
to be seen. She might eat of things rare, and drink of
things costly, but the sturdy, stocky little girl in the
made-over silk dress, who had resisted the Devil in
Weinberg's pantry on that long-ago Day of Atonement, would
always be there at the feast. Myself, I confess I am tired
of these stories of young women who go to the big city,
there to do battle with failure, to grapple with temptation,
sin and discouragement. So it may as well be admitted
that Fanny Brandeis' story was not that of a painful hand-
over-hand climb. She was made for success. What she
attempted, she accomplished. That which she strove for, she
won. She was too sure, too vital, too electric, for
failure. No, Fanny Brandeis' struggle went on inside. And
in trying to stifle it she came near making the blackest
failure that a woman can make. In grubbing for the pot of
gold she almost missed the rainbow.
Rabbi Thalmann raised his arms for the benediction. Fanny
looked straight up at him as though stamping a picture on
her mind. His eyes were resting gently on her--or perhaps
she just fancied that he spoke to her alone as he began the
words of the ancient closing prayer:
"May the blessings of the Lord Our God rest upon you. God
bless thee and keep thee. May He cause His countenance to
shine upon thee and be gracious unto thee. May God lift up
His countenance unto thee . . ."
At the last word she hurried up the aisle, and down the
stairs, into the soft beauty of the May night. She felt she
could stand no good-bys. In her hotel room she busied
herself with the half-packed trunks and bags. So it was she
altogether failed to see the dark young man who hurried
after her eagerly, and who was stopped by a dozen welcoming
hands there in the temple vestibule. He swore a deep inward
"Damn!" as he saw her straight, slim figure disappear down
the steps and around the corner, even while he found himself
saying, politely, "Why, thanks! It's good to BE back."
And, "Yes, things have changed. All but the temple, and
Rabbi Thalmann."
Fanny left Winnebago at eight next morning. _
Read next: CHAPTER 9
Read previous: CHAPTER 7
Table of content of Fanny Herself
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book
