 6. Theodore came home at twelve o'clock that night. He had gone to Bauer's studio-party after all. It was the first time he had deliberately disobeyed his mother in a really big thing. Mrs. Brandeis and Fanny had nibbled fudge all evening, it had turned out deliciously velvety, and had gone to bed at their usual time. At half-past ten Mrs. Brandeis had wakened with the instinctive feeling that Theodore was not in the house. She lay there, wide awake, staring into the darkness until eleven. Then she got up and went into his room, though she knew he was not there. She was not worried as to his whereabouts or his well-being. That same instinctive feeling told her where he was. She was very angry and a little terrified at the significance of his act. She went back to bed again, and she felt the blood pounding in her head. Molly Brandeis had a temper, and it was surging now, and beating against the barriers of her self-control. She told herself as she lay there that she must deal with him coolly and firmly, though she wanted to spank him. The time for spankings was past. Someone was coming down the street with a quick light step. She sat up in bed listening. The steps past the house went on. A half-hour passed. Someone turned the corner, whistling blithely. But no, he would not be whistling, she told herself. He would sneak in quietly. It was a little after twelve when she heard the front door open, when Obego rarely locked its doors. She was surprised to feel her heart beating rapidly. He was trying to be quiet, and was making a great deal of noise about it. His shoes and the squeaky fifth stare alone would have convicted him. The imp of perversity in Molly Brandeis made her smile, angry as she was, at the thought of how furious he must be at that stare. Theodore, she called quietly as he was tiptoeing past her room. Yeah? Come in here and turn on the light. He switched on the light and stood there in the doorway. Molly Brandeis sitting up in bed in the chilly room, with her covers about her, was conscious of a little sick feeling, not at what he had done, but that a son of hers should ever wear the sullen, defiant, hangdog look that this figured Theodore's face now. Bowers? A pause. Yes, why? I just stopped in there for a minute after the concert. I didn't mean to stay. And then Bauer introduced me around to everybody. And then they asked me to play, and—and you played badly. Well, I didn't have my own violin. No football game Saturday, and no pocket money this week. Go to bed. He went, breathing hard, and muttering a little under his breath. At breakfast next morning Fanny plied him with questions and was furious at his cool uncommunicativeness. Was it wonderful theatre? Did he play, oh, like an angel? Played all right, except the swan thing. Maybe he thought it was too easy or something, but I thought he murdered it. Pass the toast, unless you want it all. It was not until the following autumn that theatre went to New York. The thing that had seemed so impossible was arranged. He was to live in Brooklyn with a distant cousin of Ferdinand Brandeis on a business basis, and he was to come into New York three times a week for his lessons. Mrs. Brandeis took him as far as Chicago, treated him to an extravagant dinner, put him on the train, and, with difficulty, stifled the impulse to tell all the other passengers in the car to look after her theater. He looked incredibly grown up and at ease in his new suit and the hat that they had wisely bought in Chicago. She did not cry at all in the train, and she kissed him only twice, and no man can ask more than that of any mother. Molly Brandeis went back to Winnebago and the store with her shoulders a little more consciously squared, her jaw a little more firmly set. There was something almost terrible about her concentrativeness. Together she and Fanny began a life of self-denial of which only a woman could be capable. They saved in ways that only a woman's mind could devise, petty ways, that included cream and ice and clothes and candy. It was rather fun at first. When that wore off it had become a habit. Mrs. Brandeis made two resolutions regarding Fanny. One was that she should have at least a high school education and graduate. The other, that she should help in the business of the store as little as possible. To the first, Fanny exceeded gladly. To the second, she objected. But why, if you can work, why can't I? I could help you a lot on Saturdays and at Christmas time and after school. I don't want you to, Mrs. Brandeis had replied almost fiercely. I'm giving my life to it, that's enough. I don't want you to know about buying and selling. I don't want you to know a bill of lading from a sales slip when you see it. I don't want you to know whether F.O.B. is a wireless signal or a branch of the Masons. At which Fanny grinned. No one appreciated her mother's humor more than she. But I do know already. The other day when that fat man was selling you those go-karts I heard him say, F.O.B. Buffalo, and I asked Aloysius what it meant, and he told me. It was inevitable that Fanny Brandeis should come to know these things for the little household revolved about the store on Elm Street. By the time she was 18 and had graduated from the Winnebago High School, she knew so many things that the average girl of 18 did not know, and was ignorant of so many things that the average girl of 18 did know, that Winnebago was almost justified in thinking her queer. She had a joyous time at school, in spite of algebra and geometry and physics. She took the part of the heroine in the senior class play given at the Winnebago Opera House, and at the last rehearsal electrified those present by announcing that if Albert Finkbein, who played the dashing southern hero, didn't kiss her properly when the curtain went down on the first act, just as he was going into battle, she'd rather he didn't kiss her at all. He just makes it ridiculous, she protested. He sort of gives a peck two inches from my nose and then giggles. Everybody will laugh, and it'll spoil everything. With the rather startled Elocution teacher backing her, she rehearsed the bashful Albert in that kiss, until she had received the effect of realism that she thought the scene demanded. But when, on the school slang parties and hayrides the boy next to her slipped a wooden and uncertain arm about her waist, while they were all singing jingle bells, jingle bells, and good night, ladies, and merrily we roll along, she sat up stiffly and unyieldingly until the arm discouraged, withdrew to its normal position. Which two instances are quoted as being a piece with what Winnebago termed her queerness? Not that Frenny Brandeis went bolus through school. On the contrary, she always had someone to carry her books and to take her to school parties and home from the Friday night debating society meetings. Her first love affair turned out disastrously. She was twelve, and she chose as the object of her affections a bullet-headed boy named Simpson. One morning, as the last bell rang and they were taking their seats, Frenny passed his desk and gave his coarse and stubby hair a tweak. It was really a love tweak and intended to be playful, but she probably put more fervor into it than she knew. It brought the tears of pain to his eyes, and he turned and called her that name at which she shrank back horrified. Her shock and unbelief must have been stamped on her face, for the boy, still smarting, had snarled. Yes, I mean it. It was strange how she remembered that incident, years after she had forgotten important happenings in her life. Clarence Hale, whose very existence you will have failed to remember, used to hover about her uncertainly, always looking as if he would like to walk home with her, but never summoning the courage to do it. They were graduated from the grammar school together, and Clarence solemnly read a graduation essay entitled, Where is the Horse? Automobiles were just beginning to flash, plentifully up and down Elm Street. Clarence had always been what Winnebago termed sickly, in spite of his mother's noodle soup and coddling. He was sent west to Colorado, or to a ranch in Wyoming, Fanny was not quite sure which, perhaps because she was not interested. He had come over one afternoon to bid her good-bye, and had dangled about the front porch until she went into the house and shut the door. When she was sixteen there was a blonde German boy whose taciturnity attracted her volubility and vivacity. She mistook his solidness for depth, and it was a long time before she realized that his silence was not due to the weight of his thoughts, but to the fact that he had nothing to say. In her last year at high school she found herself singled out for the attentions of Harman Kent, who was the bone-ash of the Winnebago High School. His clothes were made by Schwartzer, the tailor, when all the other boys of his age got theirs at the spring and fall sales of the Golden Eagle clothing store. It was always nip and tuck between his semester standings and his track team and football possibilities. The faculty refused to allow flunkers to take part in athletics. He was one of those boys who have definite charm and manner and poise at seventeen, who cribbed their exams off their cuffs. He was always at the head of any social plans in the school, and at the dances he rushed about wearing in his coat lapel a ribbon-marked floor committee. The teachers all knew he was a bluff, but his engaging manner carried him through. When he went away to the State University he made Fanny sonomely promise to write to come down to Madison for the football games to be sure to remember about the junior prom. He wrote once a badly-spelled scroll and she answered, but he was the sort of person who must be present to be felt. He could not project his personality. When he came home for the Christmas holidays Fanny was helping in the store. He dropped in one afternoon when she was selling whiskey glasses to Mike Hearn of the Farmer's Rest Hotel. They did not write at all during the following semester, and when he came back for the long summer vacation they met on the street one day and exchanged a few rather forced pleasantries. It suddenly dawned on Fanny that he was patronizing her as much as the scion of an aristocratic line banters the housemaid whom he meets on the stairs. She bit an imaginary apron corner and bobbed a curtsy right there on Elm Street in front of the courier office and walked off, leaving him staring. It was shortly after this that she began a queer line of reading for a girl, lives of Disraeli, Spinoza, Mendelssohn, Mozart, distinguished Jews who had found their religion a handicap. The year of her graduation she did a thing for which Winnebago felt itself justified in calling her different. Each member of the graduating class was allowed to choose a theme for a thesis. Fanny Brandeis called hers a piece of paper. On Winnebago's Fox River were located a number of the largest and most important paper mills in the country. There were mills in which paper was made of wood fiber and others in which paper was made of rags. You could smell the sulfur as soon as you crossed the bridge that led to the flats. Sometimes, when the wind was right, the pungent odor of it spread all over the town. Strangers sniffed it and made a rye face, but the natives liked it. The mills themselves were great ugly brick buildings, their windows festooned with dust webs. Some of them boasted high-detached tower-like structures where a secret acid process went on. In the early days the mills had employed many workers, but newly invented machinery had come to take the place of hand labor. The rag rooms alone still employed hundreds of girls who picked, sorted, dusted over the great suction bins. The rooms in which they worked were gray with dust. They wore caps over their hair to protect it from the moats that you could see spinning and swirling in the watery sunlight that occasionally found its way through the gray-filmed window panes. It never seemed to occur to them that the dust caps so carefully pulled down about their heads did not afford protection for their lungs. They were pale girls, the rag room girls, with a peculiarly gray-white pallor. Fanny Brandeis had once been through the Winnebago Paper Company's mill, and she had watched, fascinated, while a pair of soiled and greasy old blue overalls were dusted and cleaned, and put through this acid vat and that acid tub, growing whiter and more pulpy with each process, until it was fed into a great crushing roller that pressed the moisture out of it, flattened it to the proper thinness, and spewed it out at last, miraculously, in the form of rolls of crisp white paper. On the first day of the Easter vacation, Fanny Brandeis walked down to the office of the Winnebago Paper Company's mill and applied at the superintendent's office for a job. She got it. They were generally shorthanded in the rag room. When Mrs. Brandeis heard of it, they followed one of the few stormy scenes between mother and daughter. Why did you do it? demanded Mrs. Brandeis. I had to, to get it right. Oh, don't be silly. You could have visited the mill a dozen times. Fanny twisted the fingers of her left hand in the fingers of her right, as was her way, when she was terribly in earnest and rather excited. But I don't want to write about the paper business as a process. Well, then, what do you want? I want to write about the overalls on some railroad engineer, perhaps, or the blue calico wrapper that belonged maybe to a scrub woman, and how they came to be spotted or faded or torn and finally all worn out, and how the ragman got them, and the mill, and how the girls sorted them, and the room in which they do it, and the bins, and the machinery. Oh, it's the most fascinating and sort of relentless machinery, and the acid burns on the hands of the men at the vats, and their shoes, and then the paper, so white. And the way we tear it up or crumple it and throw it in the waste basket. Just a piece of paper, don't you see what I mean? Just a piece of paper, and yet all that. She stopped and frowned a little, and grew in articulate, and gave it up with a final. Don't you see what I mean, mother? Don't you see what I mean? Molly Brandeis looked at her daughter in a startled way, like one who, walking tranquilly along a custom path, finds himself confronting a new and hitherto unsuspected vista, formed by a peculiar arrangement of clouds, perhaps, or light, or foliage, or all three blended. I see what you mean, she said, but I wish you wouldn't do it. I wish you didn't feel that you wanted to do it. But how can I make it real, if I don't? You can't, said Molly Brandeis. That's just it. You can't, ever. Fanny got up before six every morning of that Easter vacation and went to the mill, lunchbox and hand. She came home at night, dead tired. She did not take the streetcar to and from the mill, as she might have, because she said the other girls in the rag-room walked, some of them from the very edge of town. Mrs. Brandeis said that she was carrying things too far, but Fanny stuck it out for the two weeks, at the end of which period she spent an entire Sunday in a hair-washing, face-steaming, and manicuring bee. She wrote her paper from notes she had taken and turned it in at the office of the high school principal, with the feeling that it was not at all what she had meant it to be. A week later Professor Henning called her into his office. The essay lay on his desk. I've read your thesis, he began, and stopped, and cleared his throat. He was not an eloquent man. Where did you get your information, Mrs. Brandeis? I got it at the mill. From one of the employees? Oh no, I work there in the rag-room. Professor Henning gave a little startled exclamation that he turned hastily into a cough. I thought that perhaps the editor of the courier might like to see it, it being local, and interesting. He brought it down to the office of the little paper himself, and promised to call for it again in an hour or two, when Lem Davis should have read it. Lem Davis did read it, and snorted, and scuffled with his feet in the drift of papers under his desk, which was a way he had when enraged. Read it! he echoed at Professor Henning's question. Read it! Yes, I read it, and let me tell you its socialism of the rankest kind, that's what. It's anarchism, that's what. Who's this girl? Mrs. Brandeis' daughter of the Bazaar? Let me tell you, I'd go over there and tell her what I think of the way she's bringing up that girl, if she wasn't an advertiser. A piece of paper. Hell! And to show his contempt for what he had read, he wadded together a great mass of exchanges that littered his desk, and hurled them a crumpled heap to the floor, and then spat tobacco juice upon them. I'm sorry, said Professor Henning, and rose, but at the door he turned and said something highly unprofessorial. It's a darn fine piece of writing, and slammed the door. At supper that night he told Mrs. Henning about it. Mrs. Henning was a practical woman, as the wife of a small town high school principal must needs be. But don't you know, she said, that Roscoe Moore, who is president of the out-of-gammy pulp mill and the Winnebago paper company, practically owns the courier? Professor Henning passed a hand over his hair, roofily, like a schoolboy. No, Martha, I didn't know. If I knew those things, dear, I suppose we wouldn't be eating sausage for supper tonight. There was a little silence between them. Then he looked up. Someday I'm going to brag about having been that Brandeis girl's teacher. Fanny was in the store a great deal now. After she finished high school they sent Maddie away, and Fanny took over the housekeeping duties. But it was not her milieu. Not that she didn't do it well. She put a perfect fury of energy and care into the preparation of a pot roast. After she had iced a cake she enhanced it with cunning arabesques of jelly. The house shown, as it never had, even under Maddie's honest regime. But it was like hitching a high-power engine to a butter-churn. There were periods of maddening restlessness. At such time she would set about cleaning the cellar, perhaps. It was a three-room cellar, brick floor, cool, and having about it that indefinable cellar smell, which is of mold and coal and potatoes and onions and kindling wood and dill pickles and ashes. Other girls of Fanny's age at such times cleaned out their bureau drawers and read forbidden novels. Fanny armed herself with the third best broom, the dust-pand and an old bushel basket. She swept up chips, scraped up ashes, scoured the preserved shelves, washed the windows, cleaned the vegetable bins, and got gritty and scarlet-cheeked and streaked with soot. It was a wonderful safety valve, that cellar. A pity it was that the house had no attic. Then there were long, lazy summer afternoons when there was nothing to do but read and dream and watch the town go by to supper. I think that is why our great men and women so often have sprung from small towns or villages. They have had the time to dream in their adolescence. No cars to catch, no matinees, no city streets, none of the teeming, empty, energy-consuming occupations of the city-child. Little that is competitive, much that is unconsciously absorbed at the most impressionable period, long evenings for reading, long afternoons in the fields or woods. With the cloth laid and the bread cut and covered with a napkin and the sauce in the glass bowl and the cookies on a blue plate and the potatoes doing very, very slowly, and the kettle steaming with a peary-bingle cheerfulness, Fanny would stroll out to the front porch again to watch for the familiar figure to appear around the corner of Nara Street. She would wear her blue and white-checked gingham apron, deftly twisted over one hip and tucked in, in deference to the passers-by, and the town would go by. Hen Cody's drays, rattling and thundering, the high schoolboys thudding down the road, dog-tired and sweaty in their football suits or their track pants and jerseys, on their way from the athletic field to the school shower-baths. Mrs. Mosher, flying home, her skirts billowing behind her after a protracted afternoon at Wist, little Ernie Troste with a napkin-covered peach basket carefully balanced in his hand, waiting for the six-fifteen inter-urban to round the corner near the switch so that he could hand up his father's supper. Rudy massed the butcher with a moist little packet of meat in his hand and lurching ever so slightly and looking about defiantly. Oh! Fanny probably never realized how much he saw and absorbed, sitting there on Brandeis' front porch, watching Winnebago go by to supper. At Christmas time she helped in the store afternoons and evenings. Then, one Christmas, Mrs. Brandeis was ill for three weeks with grip. They had to have a helper in the house. When Mrs. Brandeis was able to come back to the store, Sadie left to marry, not one of her traveling men victims, but a steady person in the paper hanging way, whose suit had long been considered hopeless. After that Fanny took her place. She developed a surprising knack at selling. Yet it was not so surprising, perhaps, when one considered her teacher. She learned, as only a woman can learn, who was brought into daily contact with the outside world. It was not only contact, it was the relation of buyer and seller. She learned to judge people because she had to. How else could one gauge their tastes, temperaments, and pocketbooks? They passed in and out of Brandeis' bazaar day after day in an endless and varied procession. Traveling men, school children, housewives, farmers, worried hostesses, newly married couples bent on house furnishing, businessmen. She learned that it was the girls from the paper mills who bought the expensive plates, the ones with the red roses and green leaves hand-painted in great smears and costing two dollars and a half. While the golf club crowd selected for a gift or prize, one of the little white plates with the faded looking blue sprig pattern costing thirty-nine cents. One day, after she had spent endless time in patience over the sale of a nondescript little plate to one of Winnebago's socially-elect, she steered wrathfully after the retreating back of the trying customer. Did you see that? I spent an hour with her, one hour! I showed her everything from the imported limoche bowls to the severest cups and saucers, and all she bought was that miserable little bonbon dish with the cornflower pattern. Cat! Mrs. Brandeis spoke from the depths of her wisdom. Fanny, I didn't miss much that went on during that hour, and I was dying to come over and take her away from you, but I didn't because I knew you needed the lesson, and I knew that that McNulty woman never spends more than twenty-five cents anyway. But I want to tell you now that it isn't only a matter of plates. It's a matter of understanding folks. When you've learned whom to show the expensive hand-painted things to and when to suggest quietly the little vague things with what you call the fated look why you've learned just about all there is to know of human nature, don't expect it at your age. Molly Brandeis had never lost her trick of chatting with customers or listening to them whenever she had a moment's time. People used to drop in and perch themselves on one of the stools near the big glowing base burner and talk to Mrs. Brandeis. It was incredible the secrets they revealed of business and love and disgrace, of hopes and aspirations and troubles and happiness. The farmer women used to fascinate Fanny by their very drabness. Mrs. Brandeis had a long and loyal following of these women. It was before the day when every farmhouse boasted an automobile, a telephone, and a phonograph. A worn and dreary lot, these farmer women, living a skimmed milk existence, putting their youth and health and looks into the soil. They used often to sit back near the stove in winter or in a cool corner near the front of the store in summer and reveal, bit by bit, the sordid tragic details of their starved existence. Fanny was often shocked when they told their age, twenty-five, twenty-eight, thirty, but old and withered from drudgery and childbearing and coarse unwholesome food. Ignorant women and terribly lonely with the dumb lackluster eyes that bespeak monotony. When they smiled they showed blue-white, glassily perfect false teeth that flashed incongruously in the ruin of their wrinkled, sallow, weather-beaten faces. Mrs. Brandeis would question them gently. Children, ten. Living, four. Doctor never had one in the house. Why? He didn't believe in them. No proper kitchen utensils, none of the devices that lighten the deadly monotonous drudgery of housework. Everything went to make his work easier. New harrows, plows, tractors, windmills, reapers, barns, silos. The story would come out bit by bit as the woman sat there, a worn, unlovely figure, her hands toil-blackened, seemed, calloused, unlovelier than any woman's hands were ever meant to be, lying in unaccustomed idleness in her lap. Fanny learned, too, that the woman with the shawl and with her money tied in a corner of her handkerchief was more likely to buy the six-dollar doll with the blue satin dress and the real hair and eyelashes, while the Winnebago East End Society woman haggled over the forty-nine cent kind which she dressed herself. I think their loyalty to Mrs. Brandeis might be explained by her honesty and her sympathy. She was so square with them. When Minnie Mahar out Centerville Way got married, she knew there would be no redundancy of watersets, hanging lamps, or pickle dishes. I thought I'd get her a chamber set, Minnie's aunt would confide to Mrs. Brandeis. Is this for Minnie Mahar of Centerville? Yes, she gets married Sunday. I sold a chamber set for that wedding yesterday and a set of dishes, but I don't think she's got a power lamp, at least I haven't sold one. Why don't you get her that? If she doesn't like it, she can change it. Now there's that blue one with the pink roses. And Minnie's aunt would end up buying the lamp. Fanny learned that the mill girls like the bright colored and expensive wares and why. She learned that the woman with the fascinator, tragic Miss Nomer, over her head, wanted the finest sled for her boy. She learned to keep her temper. She learned to suggest without seeming to suggest. She learned to do surprisingly well all those things that her mother did so surprisingly well, surprisingly because both the women secretly hated the business of buying and selling. Once, on the Fourth of July, when there was a stand outside the store laden with all sorts of fireworks, Fanny came down to find Aloysius and the boy Eddie absent on other work and Mrs. Brandeis momentarily in charge. The sight sickened her, then infuriated her. Come in, she said between her teeth. That isn't your work. Somebody had to be there, pearls at dinner, and Aloysius and Eddie were. Then leave it alone. We're not starving yet. I won't have you selling fireworks like that on the street. I won't have it. I won't have it. The store was paying now, not magnificently, but well enough. Most of the money went to Theodore in Dresden. He was progressing, though not so meteorically as Bauer and Chablitz had predicted. But that sort of thing took time, Mrs. Brandeis argued. Fanny often found her mother looking at her these days with a questioning sadness in her eyes. Once she suggested that Fanny joined the class in drawing at the Winnebago University, a small freshwater college. Fanny did try it for a few months, but the work was not what she wanted. They did fruit pictures and vases, with a book on a table, or a clump of very pink or very white flowers. Fanny quit and discussed and boredom. Besides, they were busy at the store and needed her. There came often to Winnebago a woman whom Fanny Brandeis admired intensely. She was a traveling saleswoman, successful, magnetic, and very much alive. Her name was Mrs. Emma McChesney, and between her and Mrs. Brandeis there existed a warm friendship. She always took dinner with Mrs. Brandeis and Fanny, and they made a special effort to give her all those delectable home-cooked dishes denied her in her endless rounds of hotels. Noodles, soup, she used to say, almost lyrically. With real, handmade egg noodles. You don't know what it means. You haven't been eating vermicelli soup all through Illinois and Wisconsin. We've made a dessert, though, that Molly Brandeis, don't you dare tell me what you've got for dessert. I couldn't stand it. But oh, suppose, suppose its homemade strawberry shortcake. Which it more than likely was. Fanny Brandeis used to think that she would dress exactly as Mrs. McChesney dressed if she too were a successful business woman earning a man-sized salary. Mrs. McChesney was a blue surge sort of woman, and her blue surge never was shiny in the back. Her collar, or jabot, or tie, or cuffs, or whatever relieving bit of white she wore was always of the freshest and crispest. Her hats were apt to be small and full of what is known as line. She usually would try to arrange her schedule so as to spend a Sunday in Winnebago, and the three alert, humor-loving women grown wise and tolerant from much contact with human beings would have a delightful day together. Molly, Mrs. McChesney would say, when they were comfortably settled in the living-room or on the front porch, with your shrewdness and experience and brains, you ought to be one of those five or ten thousand a year buyers. You know how to sell goods and handle people, and you know values. That's all there is to the whole game of business. I don't advise you to go on the road. Heaven knows I wouldn't advise my dearest enemy to do that, much less a friend. But you could do bigger things and get bigger results. You know most of the big wholesalers and retailers too. Why don't you speak to them about a department position, or let me nose around a bit for you? Molly Brandeis shook her head, though her expressive eyes were eager and interested. Don't you think I've thought of that, Emma, a thousand times? But I'm, I'm afraid. There's too much at stake. Suppose I couldn't succeed. There's Theodore. His whole future is dependent on me for the next few years. And there's Fanny here. No, I guess I'm too old, and I'm sure of the business here, small as it is. Emma McChesney glanced at the girl. I'm thinking that Fanny has the making of a pretty capable businesswoman herself. Fanny drew in her breath sharply, and her face sparkled into sudden life, as always when she was tremendously interested. Do you know what I do if I were in Mother's Place? I take a great big running jump for it and land. I take a chance. What is there for her in this town? Nothing. She's been giving things up all her life, and what has it brought her? It has brought me a comfortable living and the love of my two children and the respect of my townspeople. Respect? Why shouldn't they respect you? You're the smartest woman in Lunabego and the hardest working. Emma McChesney frowned a little in thought. What do you two girls do for recreation? I'm afraid we have too little of that, Emma. I know Fanny has. I'm so dog-tired at the end of the day. All I want to do is take my hairpins out and go to bed. And Fanny? Oh, I read. I'm free to pick my book friends, at least. Now, just what do you mean by that child? It sounds a little bitter. I was thinking of what Chesterfield said in one of his letters to his son. Choose always to be in the society of those above you, he wrote. I guess he lived in Winnebago, Wisconsin. I'm a working woman and a Jew, and we have in any money or social position. And unless she's Becky Sharp, any small town girl, with all those handicaps, might as well choose a certain constellation of stars in the sky to wear as a breastpin, as try to choose the friends she really wants. From Molly Brandeis to Emma McChesney, they're flashed a look that said, you see. And from Emma McChesney to Molly Brandeis, another that said, yes, and it's your fault. Look here, Fanny, don't you see any boys, men? No, there aren't any. Those who have any sense in initiative leave to go to Milwaukee or Chicago or New York. Those that stay marry the banker's lovely daughter. Emma McChesney laughed at that, and Molly Brandeis, too, and Fanny joined them a bit roofily. Then, quite suddenly, there came into her face a melting, softening look that made it almost lovely. She crossed swiftly over to where her mother sat, and put a hand on either cheek, grown thinner of late, and kissed the tip of her nose. We don't care, really, do we, mother? We're poor, working girls. But, gosh, ain't we proud? Mother, your mistake was not doing as Ruth did. Ruth? In the Bible. Remember when what's his name, her husband died? Did she go back to her hometown? No, she didn't. She'd lived there all her life, and she knew better. She said to Naomi her mother-in-law, wither thou goest, I will go. And she went. And when they got to Bethlehem, Ruth looked around knowingly, until she saw Boaz, the catch of the town. So she went to work in his fields, gleaning, and she gleaned away, trying to look just as girlish and dreamy and unconscious, but watching him out of the corner of her eye all the time. Presently, Boaz came along, looking over the crops, and he saw her. Who's the new damsel, he asked, the peach? Fanny Brandeis, aren't you ashamed? But, mother, that's what it says in the Bible, actually. Whose damsel is this? They told him it was Ruth, the dashing widow. After that, it was all off with the Bethlehem girls. Boaz paid no more attention to them than if they had never existed. He married Ruth, and she led society. Just a little careful scheming, that's all. I should say you have been reading Fanny Brandeis, said Emma McJesney. She was smiling, but her eyes were serious. Now listen to me, child. The very next time a traveling man in a brown suit and a red necktie asks you to take dinner with him at the Haley House, even one of those roast pork queen fritter with rum sauce, Roman punch Sunday dinners, I want you to accept. Even if he wears an Elk's pin and a Masonic charm and a diamond ring and a brown derby, even if he shows you the letters from his girl in Manistee, said Mrs. McJesney solemnly, you've been seeing too much of Fanny Brandeis. End of Chapter 6 Chapter 7 of Fanny Herself This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Fanny Herself by Edna Ferber Chapter 7 Theodore had been gone six years. His letters, all too brief, were events in the lives of the two women. They read and reread them. Fanny unconsciously embellished them with fascinating details made up out of her own imagination. They're really triumphs of stupidity and dullness, she said one day in disgust, after one of Theodore's long awaited letters had proved particularly dry and sparse. Just think of it. Dresden, Munich, Leipzig, Vienna, Berlin, Frankfurt, and from his letters you would never know he had left Winnebago. I don't believe he actually sees anything of these cities. They're people and the queer houses and the streets. I suppose a new city means nothing to him but another platform, another audience, another piano, all intended as a background for his violin. He could travel all over the world and it wouldn't touch him once. He's got his mental fingers crossed all the time. Theodore had begun to play in concert with some success, but he wrote that there was no real money in it yet. He was not well enough known. It took time. He would have to get a name in Europe before he could attempt an American tour. Just now everyone was mad over Grinert. He was drawing immense audiences. He sent them a photograph at which they gassed and then laughed surprisingly. He looked so awfully German, so different somehow. It's the way his hair is clipped, I suppose, said Fanny, high like that on the temples, and look at his clothes, that tie, and his pants, and that awful collar. Why, his very features look German, don't they? I suppose it's the effect of that haberdashery. A month after the photograph came a letter announcing his marriage. Fanny's quick eye, leaping ahead from line to line, took in the facts that her mind seemed unable to grasp. Her name was Olga Stumpf. In the midst of her horror some imp in Fanny's brain said that her hands would be red and thick with a name like that. An orphan, she sang, one of the Vienna concert halls, but so different from the other girls, and he was so happy, and he hated to ask them for it, but could they cable a hundred or so? That would help, and here was her picture. And there was her picture, one of the so-called vivacious type of Viennese of the lower class, smiling a conscious smile. Her hair elaborately waved and dressed, her figure high-busted, narrow-waisted, earrings, chains, bracelets. You knew that she used a heavy scent. She was older than Theodore, or perhaps it was the earrings. They cabled the hundred. After the first shock of it Molly Brandeis found excuses for him. He must have been awfully lonely, Fanny, often, and perhaps it will steady him and make him more ambitious. He'll probably work all the harder now. No, he won't, but you will, and I will. I didn't mind working for Theodore and Scrimping, and never having any of the things I wanted from blouses to music, but I won't work and deny myself to keep a great thick, cheap German barmaid or whatever she is in comfort. I won't. But she did. And quite suddenly Molly Brandeis of the straight, firm figure and the bright, alert eye and the buoyant humor seemed to lose some of those electric qualities. It was an almost imperceptible letting down. You have seen a fine racehorse suddenly break and lose his stride in the midst of the field, and pull up and try to gain it again, and go on bravely, his stride and form still there, but his spirit broken. That was Molly Brandeis. Fanny did much of the buying now. She bought quickly and shrewdly like her mother. She even went to the Hailey House to buy when necessary, and when O'Baggan's passing the hotel would see her slim, erect figure in one of the sample rooms with its white-covered tables laden with china or glassware or Christmas goods or whatever that particular salesman happened to carry. They lifted their eyebrows at first, but somehow it was impossible to associate this girl with the blithe, shirt sleeve, cigar-smoking traveling men who followed her about the sample room or book in hand. As time went on she introduced some new features into the business, and did away with various old ones. The overflowing benches outside the store were curbed, and finally disappeared altogether. Fanny took charge of the window displays, and often came back to the store at night to spend the evening at work with allowishes. They would tack a piece of muslin around the window to keep off the gaze of passerbys, and together evolve a window that more than made up for the absent show benches. This, I suppose, is no time to stop for a description of Fanny Brandeis, and yet the impulse to do so is irresistible. Personally, I'd like to know about the hair and eyes and mouth of the person whose life I am following. How did she look when she said that? What sort of expression did she wear when this happened? Perhaps the thing that Fanny Brandeis said about herself one day, when she was having one of her talks with Emma McChesney, who was on her full trip for the Featherbloom Petticoat Company, might help. No ballroom would ever be hushed into admiring all when I entered, she said. No waiter would ever drop his tray dazzled, and no diners in a restaurant would stop to gaze at me, their forks poised halfway, their eyes blinded by my beauty. I could tramp up and down between the tables for hours, and no one would know I was there. I'm one of a million women who look their best in a tailor's suit and a hat with a line, not that I ever had, either. But I have my points, only they're blunted just now. Still, that bit of description doesn't do, after all, because she had distinct charm and some beauty. She was not what is known as the Jewish type, in spite of her colouring. The hair that used to curl, wave now. In a day when coiffures were a bird's nest of puffs and curls and pompadour, she wore her hair straight back from her forehead and wound in a coil at the neck. Her face and repose was apt to be rather lifeless and almost heavy. But when she talked, it flashed into sudden life, and you found yourself watching her mouth fascinated. It was the key to her whole character, that mouth. Mobile, humorous, sensitive, the sensuousness of the lower lip corrected by the firmness of the upper. She had large square teeth, very regular, and of the yellow-white tone that bespeaks health. She used to make many of her own clothes, and she always trimmed her hats. Mrs. Brandeis used to bring her material and styles from her Chicago buying trips, and Fanny's quickmine adapted them. She managed somehow to look miraculously well-dressed. The Christmas following Theodore's marriage was the most successful one in the history of Brandeis's bazaar, and it bred in Fanny Brandeis a lifelong hatred of the holiday season. In years after, she always tried to get away from the city at Christmas time. The two women did the work of four men. They had a big stock on hand. Mrs. Brandeis was everywhere at once. She got an enormous amount of work out of her clerks, and they did not resent it. It is a gift that all born leaders have. She herself never sat down, and the clerks unconsciously followed her example. She never complained of weariness, she never lost her temper, she never lost patience with a customer, even the tight-fisted farmer type who doled their money out with that reluctance found only in those who have rung it from the soil. In the midst of the rush she managed somehow never to fail to grasp the humor of a situation. A farmer woman came in for a doll's head, which she chose with incredible deliberation and pains. As it was being wrapped she explained that it was for her little girl, Minnie. She had promised the head this year. Next Christmas they would buy a body for it. Molly Brandeis's quick sympathy went out to the little girl, who was to lavish her mother-love on a doll's head for a whole year. She saw the head in ghastly decapitation, staring stiffly out from the cushions of the chill and funerial polar sofa, and the small Minnie peering in to feast her eyes upon its blonde and waxing beauty. Here she had said, Take this and sew it on the head, so Minnie'll have something she can hold at least. And she had wrapped a pink cambrick sawdust stuffed body in with the head. It was a snowy and picturesque Christmas, and intensely cold, with the hard, dry, cutting cold of Wisconsin. Near the door the little store was freezing. Every time the door opened it let in a blast. Near the big glowing stove it was very hot. The aisles were packed so that sometimes it was almost impossible to wedge one's way through. The china plate stacked high, fairly melted away, as did the dolls piled on the counters. Mrs. Brandeis imported her china and dolls, and no store in Winnebago, not even Garrett's and big department store, could touch them for value. The two women scarcely stopped to eat in the last ten days of the holiday rush. Often Annie, the girl who had taken Maddie's place in the household, would bring down their supper, hot and hot, and they would eat it quickly up in the little gallery where they kept the sleds and doll buggies and drums. At night the store was open until 10 or 11 at Christmas time. They would trudge home through the snow, so numb with weariness that they hardly minded the cold. The icy wind cut their foreheads like a knife and made the temple's ache. The snow, hard and resilient, squeaked beneath their heels. They would open the front door and stagger in, blinking. The house seemed so weirdly quiet and peaceful, after the rush and clamor of the store. Don't you want a sandwich mother with a glass of beer? I'm too tired to eat it, Fanny. I just want to go to bed. Fanny grew to hate the stock phrases that met her with each customer. I want something for a little boy about ten. He's really got everything. Or, I'm looking for a present for a lady friend. Do you think a plate would be nice? She began to loathe them, these satiated little boys, these unknown friends, for whom she must rack her brains. They cleared a snug little fortune that Christmas. On Christmas Eve they smiled wanly at each other, like two comrades, who have fought and bled together and won. When they left the store it was nearly midnight. The ladies' shoppers bundled laden, carrying holly-rees, with strange handles and painted heads, and sticks protruding from lumpy brown paper burdens were hurrying home. They stumbled home, too spent to talk. Fanny, groping for the keyhole, stubbed her toe against a wooden box between the storm-door and the inner door. It had evidently been left there by the expressman or a delivery boy. It was a very heavy box. Hey, Christmas present! Fanny exclaimed. Do you think it is? But it must be. She looked at the address. Miss Fanny Brandeis. She went to the kitchen for a crowbar and came back still in her hat and coat. She pried open the box expertly, tore away the wrappings, and disclosed a gleaming leather-brown set of ballsack, and beneath that, incongruously enough, marked Twain. Why? exclaimed Fanny, sitting down on the floor rather heavily. Then her eye fell upon a card tossed aside in the hurry of unpacking. She picked it up, read it hastily. Merry Christmas to the best daughter in the world, from her mother. Mrs. Brandeis had taken off her wraps and was standing over the sitting-room register, rubbing her numbed hands and smiling a little. My mother! Fanny scrambled to her feet. Hugh, darling, in all that rush and work to take time to think of me, why, her arms were around her mother's shoulders. She was pressing her glowing cheek against the pale, cold one. And they both wept a little, from emotion and weariness and relief, and enjoyed it, as women sometimes do. Fanny made her mother stay in bed next morning, a thing that Mrs. Brandeis took to most ungracefully. After the holiday rush and strain she invariably had a severe cold, the protest of the body she had overdriven and under nourished for two or three weeks. As a patient she was as trying and fractious as a man, tossing about, threatening to get up, demanding hot water bags, cold compresses, alcohol rubs. She fretted about the business and imagined that things were at a standstill during her absence. Fanny herself rose early. Her healthy young body after a night sleep was already recuperating from the month's strain. She had planned a real Christmas dinner to banish the memory of the hasty and unpalatable lunches they had had to gulp during the rush. There was to be a turkey, and Fanny had warned Annie not to touch it. She wanted to stuff it and roast it herself. She spent the morning in the kitchen, aside from an occasional tiptoeing visit to her mother's room. At eleven she found her mother up and no amount of coaxing would induce her to go back to bed. She had read the papers and she said she felt rested already. The turkey came out a delicate golden brown and deliciously crackly. Fanny, looking up over her drumstick, noticed with a shock that her mother's eyes looked strangely sunken and her skin around the jaws and just under the chin where her loose wrapper revealed her throat was clearly yellow and shriveled. She had eaten almost nothing. Mother, you're not eating a thing. You really must eat a little. Mrs. Brandeis began a pretense of using knife and fork, but gave it up finally and sat back, smiling rather wanly. I guess I'm tireder than I thought I was, dear. I think I've got a cold coming on, too. I'll lie down again after dinner, and by tomorrow I'll be as chipper as a sparrow. The turkey's wonderful, isn't it? I'll have some cold for supper. After dinner the house felt very warm and stuffy. It was crisply cold and sunny outdoors. The snow was piled high except on the sidewalks, where it had been neatly shoveled away by the muffled Winnebago's sons and fathers. There was no man in the Brandeis household, and Aloysius had been too busy to perform the chores usually considered his work about the house. The snow lay in drifts upon the sidewalk in front of the Brandeis house except where passing feet had trampled it a bit. I'm going to shovel the walk, Fanny announced suddenly, way around to the woodshed. Where are those old mittens of mine? Fanny, where's the snow shovel? Sure I am. Why not? She shoveled and scraped and pounded, vending rhythmically to the work, lifting each heaping shovelful with her strong young arms, tossing it to the side, digging in again and under. An occasional neighbor passed by or a friend, and she waved at them gaily, and tossed back their baden-edge. Merry Christmas! she called again and again, and replied to a passing acquaintance. Same to you! At two o'clock Bella Weinberg telephoned to say that a little party of them were going to the river to skate. The ice was wonderful. Oh, come on! Fanny skated very well, but she hesitated. Mrs. Brandeis, dozing on the couch, sensed what was going on in her daughter's mind, and roused herself with something of her old disparity. Don't be foolish, child, run along. You don't intend to sit here and gaze upon your sleeping beauty of a mother all afternoon, do you? Well, then! So Fanny changed her clothes, got her skates, and ran out into the snap and sparkle of the day. The winter darkness had settled down before she returned, all glowing and rosy and bright-eyed. Her blood was racing through her body, her lips were parted. The drudgery of the past three weeks seemed to have been blotted out by this one radiant afternoon. The house was dark when she entered. It seemed very quiet and close, and depressing, after the sparkle and rush of the afternoon on the river. Mother, mother, dear, still sleeping? Mrs. Brandeis stirred, sighed, awoke. Fanny flicked on the light. Her mother was huddled in a kimono on the sofa. She sat up rather daisily now, stared at Fanny. Why, what time is it? What? Have I been sleeping all afternoon? Your mother's getting old. She yawned, and in the midst of it caught her breath with a little cry of pain. What is it? What's the matter? Molly Brandeis pressed a hand to her breast. A stitch, I guess? It's this miserable cold coming on. Is there any aspirin in the house? I'll dose myself after supper and take a hot foot bath and go to bed. I'm dead. She ate less for supper than she had for dinner. She hardly tasted the cup of tea that Fanny insisted on making for her. She swayed a little as she sat, and her lids came down over her eyes, flutteringly, as if the weight of them was too great to keep up. At seven she was upstairs in bed sleeping and breathing heavily. At eleven are thereabouts Fanny woke with a start. She sat up in bed wide-eyed, peering into the darkness and listening. Someone was talking in a high, queer voice, a voice like her mother's, and yet unlike. She ran, shivering with the cold, into her mother's bedroom. She switched on the light. Mrs. Brandeis was lying on the pillow, her eyes almost closed, except for a terrifying slit of white that showed between the lids. Her head was tossing to and fro on the pillow. She was talking, sometimes clearly, and sometimes mumblingly. One grows cups and saucers. And now what do you think you'd like for a second prize? In the basement, alowicious. The trains. I'll see that they get there by today. Yours of the tenth at hand. Mother, mother, molly dear! She shook her gently, then almost roughly. The voice ceased. The eyes remained the same. Oh, God! She ran to the back of the house. Annie! Annie, get up! Mother's sick! She's out of her head. I'm going to phone for the doctor. Go in with her. She got the doctor, at last. She tried to keep her voice under control, and thought with a certain pride that she was succeeding. She ran upstairs again. The voice had begun again, but it seemed thicker now. She got into her clothes shaking with cold and terror, and yet thinking very clearly as she always did in a crisis. She put clean towels in the bathroom, pushed the table up to the bed, got a glass of water, straightened the covers, put away the clothes that the tired woman had left about the room. Dr. Hertz came. He went through the usual preliminaries, listened, tapped, counted, straightened up at last. Fresh air, he said, cold air, all the windows open. They rigged up a device of screens and sheets to protect the bed from the drafts. Fanny obeyed orders silently, like a soldier. But her eyes went from the face on the pillow to that of the man bent over the bed. Something vague, cold, clammy, seemed to be closing itself around her heart. It was like an icy hand squeezing there. There had suddenly sprung up that indefinable atmosphere of the sick room, a sick room in which a fight is being waged. Bottles on the table, glasses, a spoon, a paper shade over the electric light globe. What is it, Fanny asked at last. Grip? Grip? Dr. Hertz hesitated a moment. Pneumonia. Fanny's hands grafted the footboard tightly. Do you think we'd better have a nurse? Yes. The nurse seemed to be there somehow miraculously, and the morning came. And in the kitchen Annie went about her work a little more quietly than usual. And yesterday seemed far away. It was afternoon, it was twilight. Dr. Hertz had been there for hours. The last time he brought another doctor with him, Thorn. Mrs. Brandeis was not talking now, but she was breathing. It filled the room, that breathing. It filled the house. Fanny took her mother's hand. That hand with the work-hardened palm and the broken nails. It was very cold. She looked down at it. The nails were blue. She began to rub it. She looked up into the faces of the two men. She picked up the other hand, snatched at it. Look here, she said. Look here! And then she stood up. The vague, clammy thing that had been wound about her heart suddenly relaxed. And at that, something icy hot rushed all over her body and shook her. She came around to the foot of the bed, gripped it with her two hands. Her chin was thrust forward, and her eyes were bright and staring. She looked very much like her mother just then. It was a fighting face, a desperate face. Look here, she began, and was surprised to find that she was only whispering. She wet her lips and smiled and tried again, forming the words carefully with her lips. Look here! She's dying, isn't she? Isn't she? She's dying, isn't she? Dr. Hertz pursed his lips. The nurse came over to her and put a hand on her shoulder. Fanny shook her off. Answer me! I have a right to know. Look at this! She reached forward and picked up the inner, cold, strangely shriveled blue hand again. My dear child, I'm afraid so. There came from Fanny's throat a moan that began high and poignant and quavering, and ended in a shiver that seemed to die in her heart. The room was still again, except for the breathing, and even that was less raucous. Fanny stared at the woman on the bed, at the long, finely shaped head with the black hair wadded up so carelessly now, at the long, straight, clever nose, the full generous mouth. There flooded her whole being a great, blinding rage. What had she had of life? She demanded fiercely. What? What? Her teeth came together grindingly. She breathed heavily through her nostrils, as if she had been running. And suddenly she began to pray, not with the sounding, unctuous, these and thou's of the church and Bible, not elegantly or eloquently, with well-rounded phrases as the righteous pray, but threateningly, coarsely, as a desperate woman prays. It was not a prayer so much as a cry of defiance, a challenge. Look here, God! And there was nothing profane as she said it. Look here, God! She's done her part. It's up to you now. Don't you let her die. Look at her. Look at her! She choked and shook herself angrily, and went on. Is it fair? That's a rotten trick to play on a woman that gave what she gave. What did she ever have of life? Nothing. That little, miserable, dirty store, and those little, miserable, dirty people. You give her a chance, do you hear? You give her a chance, God, or all. Her voice broke in a thin, cracked quaver. The nurse turned her around, suddenly and sharply, and led her from the room. End of Chapter 7 You can come down now. They're all here, I guess. Dr. Thalman'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, dossily, and walked toward the stairs with a heavy, stumbling step. I'd put down my veil if I were you, said the neighbour 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 that, she said. The heavy crepe fell about her shoulders, mercifully hiding the swollen, discoloured 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 into the pallor where Rabbi Thalman 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. Dr. Thalman cleared his throat and opened the book. After all, it was not Rabbi Thalman'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 earthly. 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, clearly enough, that they worshipped 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 Ike in the nickel. No, I think the Catholic priest, seeming to listen with such respectful attention, really heard very little of what Rabbi Thalman 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. Garrison was there, and three of his department heads. Amel 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. Han Cody, who had done all of Molly Brandeis's drying, sat in unaccustomed black next to Mayor A. J. Dawes. Temple Emanuel was there, almost a unit. The officers of Temple Emanuel's Lady's 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 fingertips 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. Bertie Callahan, head-waitress at the Halley House, found a seat just next to the elegant Mrs. Morehouse, who led the golf club crowd. A horny young lady in the dining-room, Bertie Callahan, and her stiffly starched white, but beneath the icy crust of her horchere 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 Divine? Blanche Divine of the white powder and the minks and the diamonds and the high-heeled shoes and the plumes lived in the house with the clothes shutters near the freight depot. She often came into Brandeis's 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 Divine found herself telling Molly Brandeis how she had come to be Blanche Divine, and it was a moving and terrible story. And now her cardless flowers, a great scarlet sheaf of them, lay next to the chast white roses that had been sent by the Temple Emmanuel Lady's 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 purple-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 anyone 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 Mary, 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 an outpassed a 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 sextant 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 lightheaded 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. Oh, 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 wastebasket 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 upstairs, 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 downstairs 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 bosom, soothing women whom she had scarcely known before. They were always there, those women, and their husbands, too, kindly awkward men who padded 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 the 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 theater coming back? I don't know yet, an 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 left a will, far-sighted businesswoman that she was. It was a terse, clear-headed document that gave to Fanny Brandeis my daughter the six thousand-dollar insurance, the stock, goodwill, and fixtures of Brandeis's bazaar, the house furnishings, the few pieces of jewelry in their old-fashioned setting. To Theodora 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's 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 when a bago behind. At best, if she stayed there, she would 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 ragroom, the young woman who had dredged 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 the sight of a parade, just the sheer drama of it, were the marchers, G. A. R. veterans, school children and 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 14th Streets. Something in the sight of these people, alien, hopeful, emotional, often grotesque, thrilled and interested both the women, and at the 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, Garretson's offered Fannie the position of buyer and head of the china, glassware, and kitchenware sections. Garretson showed an imposing block of gleaming plate glass front now and drew custom from a dozen thrifty little towns throughout the Fox River Valley. Fannie refused the offer. In March, she sold outright the stock, goodwill, and fixtures of Brandeis' Bazaar. The purchaser was a thrifty, far-sighted 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. Fannie turned away when they juggled 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 paintbrush that had transformed the bedroom from a dingy oak to a 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. Fannie 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 kingdom 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. Fannie had come upon it hanging on a hook behind the kitchen door after that week in December, and at the sight of it her fortitude and force 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, mouthwording 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 gray granite kettle simmered the cooking fruit. Molly Brandeis, enveloped in the familiar blue and white apron, stood over it like a priestess, 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 gel 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 Dr. Thalman 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 right that brought a certain sense of rest and peace to Molly Brandeis. All this moved through Fanny Brandeis' 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 breath, the frayed button-hole, the little scorched place where she had burned a hole while 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, scuffed bit of leather that was a baby 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 upstairs again. Smells like something burning, cloth or something, called Annie from the kitchen. It's only an old apron that was cluttering up 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 Millie Glasner changed the baby buggy for a go-kart. The youngest hot boy, Sammy, who was graduated from high school in June, is driving AJ Dawes' automobile now. My goodness, how time flies! Doppler'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 chast 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 plum, she might have realized that, to Winnebago, the new first national bank building was as significant and epical 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. Despite 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, eyeing her expertly and approvingly, and yet without insolence. He was a wise, road-weary, skillful member of his fraternity, growing 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. Hmm, 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, ma 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 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 them 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, than it's right. I suppose that's what they call have an 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 fellas in the smoker last night talking about Haynes Cooper. Your mother hated them like poison, the way every small town merchant hates the mail-order houses. But I hear they've got an infant's wear department that's just going to grass for a lack of a proper head. You're only a kid. And they've 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 catalog in every farmer's kitchen, Molly Brandeis used to say, the Bibles in the Polar, 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 catalog. 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, and 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 Quotoroy Road. Express, breakage, risk, loyalty to his own region, all these arguments left him cold. In May, after much manipulation, correspondence, two interviews came a definite offer from the Haines Cooper Company. It was much less than the State Street store had offered, and there was something tentative about the whole agreement. Haines 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 1st. CHAPTER 8 PART 2 OF FANNY HERSELF This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Fanny Herself by Edna Furber. CHAPTER 8 PART 2 Two conversations that took place before she left are perhaps worth recording. One was with Fr. Fitzpatrick of St. Ignatius Catholic Church. The other with Rabbi Amel Thalman of Temple Emanuel. An impulse brought her to Fr. 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 in 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 patentry of red skin and priests and voyagers and cavaliers. She leaned over the iron railing and looked down. Where grass and brook and wildflower had been, there now oozed great eruptions of ash heaps, tin cans, broken bottles, mounds of dirt. Winobago'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 to 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 every housekeeper in Winobago. Fanny wanted to talk to somebody about that ravine. She was full of it. Father Fitzpatrick's study overlooked it. Besides, she wanted to see him before she left Winobago. A picture came to her mind of his handsome, broody face twinkling with humor as she had last seen it when he had dropped in at Brandeis's 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 paintbrush. I shouldn't wonder if that housekeeper of his comes out with a pail of paint and does them every morning before breakfast, Fanny said to herself as she rang the bell. Usually it was that sparse and speckled person herself who opened the parish house door, but today Fanny's ring was answered by Father Casey, parish assistant. A sour-nose and suspicious young man, Father Casey, thick-speckled 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 are 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 older boy is more than I can see. Come in, child, come in. The man's cut out for a jailer, 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 half a 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-bye. 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 duena 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 of 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, too? Chicago. Haines 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, actually working 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 his fingers on the arm of his chair, and looked at Fanny, his handsome eyes, half shut. So it's going to be business, hmm? 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 only could be developed. But, of course, Theodore took everything that worried her. Oh, nonsense of 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? Whoever 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 there looking down the steep green slope of the ravine that lay, a natural amphitheater just below. Money, hmm? 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 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 streetcar 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, their 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 businesswoman and different. Hi, you're joking. Say listen, my girl, the world's made up of just two things, ravines and dump heaps, and the dumpers are forever edging up and squeaging up and trying to grab the ravines and spoil them 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 everyone 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 him 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 AIDS 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's no such thing as a Jewish race, she interrupted pertly. Hmm, 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, hurting 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 become 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 laugh 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 when Obego 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 a custom is always hard. Queerly enough, it was her goodbye to Aloysius that most unnerved her. Aloysius had been taken on at Gerritsons, and the dignity of his new positions had heavily upon him. You should have seen his ties. Fanny sought him out at Gerritsons. Its floor manager of the basement I am, he said, and struck an elegant attitude against the case of Mrs. Ready to Wear Coats. And when you come back to Winnebago, Miss Fanny, and the Saints send it be soon, I'll bet you'll see me on the first floor, keeping a stern but kindly eye on the swellest trade in town. Every last thing I know I learned off your poor ma. I hope it will serve you here, Aloysius. Serve me! he bent closer, mean and no offence, Miss Fanny. But say, listen, once that you get a Yiddish business education into an Irish head, and there's no limit to the length he can go. If I ain't a dry good's king by the 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's 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 and returned 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 Dr. Thallmann's house and walk with him to temple, if he had not already gone. Nine, Herr Rabbi, ist noch hier sure? the maid said in answer to Fanny's question. The Thallmann's had a German maid, one Minna, who bullied the invalid Mrs. Thallmann, was famous for her cookies with walnuts on top, and who made life exceedingly difficult for unlinguistic callers. Rabbi Thallmann was up in his study. Fanny ran lightly up the stairs. Who is it, Amel, that Minna, next Monday her week is up, she goes. It is I, Mrs. Thallmann, Fanny Brandeis. Na, Fanny, now what do you think? In the brightly lighted doorway of his little study appeared Rabbi Thallmann. 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-bye, and I thought we might walk to temple together. How's Mrs. Thallmann 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? Amel, 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 am not sick. Go in, said Rabbi Thallmann. So Fanny went into 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. Thallmann held out a hand. Fanny took it in hers and perched herself on the edge of the bed. She padded the dry, divodalized hand and pressed it in her own strong electric grip. Mrs. Thallmann raised her head from the pillow. Tell me, did she have her white apron on? White apron? Me not 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. Thallmann sank back on the pillow with a satisfied sigh, effonder. She shook her head, but that girl faced alone when I am helpless here. Rabbi Thallmann 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. Thallmann laid a detaining hand on Fanny's arm. You will come back often 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, they 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. There's only the four falls. We were ever doom, we women. But how doom! She was too smart for us, your mother. Too smart. And I'm said 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 gut besselung. But the rabbi's wife shook her head. Goodbye. From the hall below Dr. Thallmann 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 Thallmann's confirmation classes. Spindling leg little boys in the splendor of patent leather button shoes, stiff white shirts, black broadcloth suits with satin lapels, self-conscious and awkward little girls, those 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. Is getting feeble the old rabbi, hmm? 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 eyeglasses 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, hmm? The young people, and 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. Nah. He will let 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 tomorrow 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 travelling man, Fanny thought, dropped in, as sometimes they did, to say cadish 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 would 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 Cohn 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 Hale come back from the West. Clarence Hale, the cowardly cat. Her mind went back to that day of the street fight. She smiled. At that moment Clarence Hale, who had been screwing about most shockingly as though searching for someone, 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 cowardly 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 place. There had been something in the Chicago Herald, though, oh yes, it had spoken of him as the brilliant young naturalist, Clarence Hale. 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 two shiny shoes, and his cowardice, too, no doubt, had dreamed of seeing her Clarence a rabbi. From that point Fanny sluts 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 arc with its red velvet curtain, and how bravely he glared over his blue glasses at the two errands 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 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 Haines 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 mourner's prayer, then Rabbi Thalman began to intone the cadish. Fanny rose, prayer book in hand. At that Clarence Hale 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 Emanuel 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's 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's 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 Thalman 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 goodbyes. 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, but who was stopped by a dozen welcoming hands there in the temple vestibule. He swore an inward dam, as he saw her straight, slim figure disappear down the steps and around the corner, even while he found himself saying politely, by thanks it's good to be back. And, yes, things have changed. All but the temple, and Rabbi Thalman.