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Humoresque

F >> Fannie Hurst >> Humoresque




"How is my little mammela?" said Mr. Pelz, leaning over the bed to kiss
Mrs. Pelz on the shining plaits, the light-tan column of throat and the
little fist pressed so deeply into her bosom.

"Just ought to seen, Roody--honest, she laughed and nearly jerked off
mamma's _sheidel!_" [Footnote: Black wig worn by orthodox Jewish
women after marriage.]


"Red head!" he said, stroking down at the warm "bulge of blanket, so
snugly enclosed in the crotch of mothering arm.

"It's redder than yours already, Roody."

"She's sure a grand little thing cuddled up there, ain't it so,
mammela?"

She reached up to pat his blue shirt-sleeve.

"There's some herring on the table mamma brought over, and some raw meat
and onions. That's some _borshtsh_ on the stove Etta carried all the way
over from Hester Street for your supper."

"And what for the little mammela?"

"I'm fed up, Roody. Mamma closed the store at five to run over with some
of that milk-shake like Doctor Aarons said. He sent his little son
Isadore over with the prescription. Like I said to mamma, she should let
the Canal Street Kosher Sausage Company do double the business from five
until six while she closes shop to carry her daughter a milk-shake! Like
I was used to it from home!"

"When my girl gets to be a little mammela, the best shouldn't be none
too good."

She continued to stroke up at his sleeve and occasionally on up into
his uneven shock of red hair.

"You miss me in the shop, Roody?"

"You should just see once how that Ruby Grabenheiner sits at your
machine! She does one-half your work not one-half so good."

"I'll be back next week Monday."

He patted her quickly. "No! No! A mammela's place is with her baby."

"Roody, you make me laugh. I should sit at home now since we got a new
mouth to feed? That would be a fine come-off!"

"Who do you think was just in, Rosie? Emil Hahn."

"Sol is going to make for me, Roody, one of those little packing-case
cribs like he built for Etta up in the pants-factory, so when the
machine works it rocks, too. Did--did the check from Solomon & Glauber
come in on the last mail, Roody?"

"Now, Rosie, you mustn't worry yourself about such--"

"What you looking so funny for, Roody?"

"I was starting to tell you, Rosie--Hahn was just in and--"

"Roody, don't change the subject on me always. You looked funny. Is it
something wrong with Solomon & Glau--"

"If you don't take the cake, Rosie! Now, why should I look funny?
'Funny,' she says I look, I'm hungry. I smell Etta's _borshtsh_."

She half raised herself, the pulling lips of the child drawing up the
little head from the cove of arm.

"Rosie, you mustn't lift up that way!"

"Roody, I can read you like a book! Solomon & Glauber have
countermanded, too."

"Now, Rosie, wouldn't that keep until--"

"They have!"

"Well, if you got to know it, Rosie, they're shipping back the
consignment."

"Roody!"

"What you going to do about it? Give you my word never seen the like.
It's like the rainy-day skirt had died overnight. All of a sudden from a
novelty, I find myself with such a commodity that every manufacturer in
the business is making them up for himself."

"You seen it first, though, Roody. Nobody can take it away from you that
you seen first how the rainy-day skirt and its shortness would be such a
success with the women."

"'Seen it first,' she says! Say, what good does it do me if I didn't see
far enough? I pick for myself such a success that I crowd myself out of
business."

"It's a dirty shame! A big firm like Solomon & Glauber should not be
allowed to--"

"Say, if it wouldn't be Solomon & Glauber, it would be Funk & Hausman or
any other firm. The rainy-day skirt has slipped out of my hands, Rosie,
to the big fellows. We must realize that for ourselves. That's the
trouble when you don't deal in a patented product. What's the little
fellows like myself to do against a firm like Solomon & Glauber? Start
something?"

"Three countermands in a week, and no orders coming in!"

"Say, it don't tickle my ribs no more than yours."

"Roody, maybe it's the worst thing ever happened to us you wouldn't
listen to mamma and be satisfied with being chief cutter at Lipschuts'."

"Shame on you, Rosie! You want your daughter to grow up with a
pants-cutter all her life for a father? You want I should die in
somebody else's harness. Maybe I didn't hit it right away, but I say
yet, if a fellow's got the eyes and the nerve to see ahead a little with
his imagination--"

"'Imagination.' He talks like a story-book."

"Now--now, take Hahn, Rosie--there's a fellow's got imagination--but not
enough. I know it makes you mad when I talk on his picture-machine, but
you take it from me--there's a fellow with a good thing under his very
nose, but he--he 'ain't quite got the eyes to see ahead."

"Say, for such a good thing like Emil Hahn's picture-machine, where his
wife had to work in my own mother's sausage-store, I can't make
myself excited."

"He 'ain't quite got the eyes to see, Rosie, the big idea in it. He's
afraid of life, instead of making it so that life should be afraid of
him. Ten dollars cheaper I can buy that machine to-day than last week. A
song for it, I tell you."

"Ninety dollars to me is no cheap song, Roody."

"The people got to be amused the same as they got to be fed. A man will
pay for his amusements quicker than he will pay his butcher's or his
doctor's bill. It's a cash business, Rosie. All you do with such a
machine like Hahn's is get it well placed, drop your penny in the slot,
and see one picture after another as big as life. I remember back in the
old country, the years before we came over, when I was yet a
youngster--"

"You bet Hahn never put his good money in that machine. I got it from
Birdie Hahn herself. For a bad debt he took it over along with two
feather beds and--"

"One after another pictures as big as life, Rosie, like real people
moving. One of them, I give you my word, it's grand! A woman it shows
all wrapped tight around in white, on a sofa covered over with such a
spotted--what you call--leopard-skin."

"To me that has a sound, Roody, not to be proud of--"

"A living picture, with such neck and arms and--"

"That's enough, Roody! That's enough! I'm ashamed even for your daughter
here!"

"Such a machine, maybe some day two or three, set up in a place like
Coney Island or, for a beginning, in Pleasure Arcade, is an immense
idea, Rosie. Until an invention like this, nine-tenths of the people
couldn't afford the theyater. The drop-picture machine takes care of
them nine-tenths."

"Theyaters are no place for the poor."

"That's where you're wrong--they need it the most. I don't want to get
you worked up, Rosie, while you ain't strong, but every day that we wait
we're letting a great idea slip through our fingers. If I don't buy that
machine off Emil Hahn, somebody else will see in it what I see. Then
all our lives we will have something to reproach ourselves with."

Mrs. Pelz let slide her hand beneath the pillow, eyes closing and her
face seeming to whiten.

"Ninety dollars! Twenty dollars less than every cent we got saved in the
world. It ain't right we should gamble with it, Roody. Not now."

"Why not now, Rosie? It's all the more reason. Is it worth maybe a
little gamble our Bleema should grow up like the best? I got bigger
plans for her and her little mammela than such a back room all their
lives. In a few years, maybe three rooms for ourselves in one of them
newfangled apartment-houses up on Second Avenue with turn-on
hot water--"

"That's right--you'll have her riding in a horseless carriage next!"

"I tell you, it's a big idea!"

"I wish we had ten cents for every big idea you've been struck with."

"That's just why, Rosie, I'm going to hit one right."

Mrs. Pelz withdrew then the slow hand from beneath the pillow and a
small handkerchief with a small wad knotted into it.

"Nearly every--cent--in--the world, Roody, that we've got. Saved nearly
penny by penny. Our Bleema--it's a sin--our--our--"

"Sin nothing!"

"Our week-old little girl--it--"

"Nothing ventured in life, Rosie, nothing squeezed out of it. Don't put
it back! Look, the baby herself wants it! Papa's little Bleema! Look!
She's trying to lift herself. Ain't that remarkable, Rosie--look at
that child lifting for that handkerchief!"

"Our little baby girl! If it was for ourselves alone, all right, maybe,
take a chance--but for--"

Suddenly Mr. Pelz clapped his thigh. "I got it! I got it! Well let the
little Bleema decide it for us. How's that? She should decide it for us
if we take a gamble on her daddy's big idea! Here--I put a five-cents
piece in her little hand and see which way she drops it. The little
mammela will say which way it is to be--heads or tails. How's that,
Rosie--the baby should decide it for us?"

"Roody--we mustn't!"

"Heads or tails, Rosie?"

"I--I--"

"Quick!"

"H-heads!"

"Quick now, papa's baby, open up little fist!"

"Roody, not so rough! She can't hold that big nickel."

"That's just what I want--she should let it fall."

"Roody, Roody, I hope it's tails."

The coin rolled to the bed-edge, bounced off to the floor, rolled to the
zinc edge.

Immediately after, on all-fours, his face screwed up for scrutiny and
the back of his neck hotly ridden with crimson, Mr. Pelz leaned after.

"Roody--what?"

"Heads!"

Where Riverside Drive reaches its rococo climax of the
twelve-thousand-dollar-a-year and twelve-story-high apartment-house de
luxe and duplex, and six baths divided by fourteen rooms is equal to
solid-marble comfort, Elsinore Court, the neurotic Prince of Denmark and
Controversy done in gilt mosaics all over the foyer, juts above the
sky-line, and from the convex, rather pop-eyed windows of its top story,
bulges high and wide of view over the city.

From one of these windows, looking north, Rudolph Pelz, by the
holding-aside of a dead weight of pink brocade and filet lace, could
gaze upon a sweep of Hudson River that flowed majestically between the
great flank of the city and the brobdingnagian Palisades.

After a day when he had unerringly directed the great swinging crane of
this or that gigantic transaction it had a laving effect upon him--this
view of sure and fluent tide that ran so perpetually into infinitude.

Yet for Mr. Pelz to attempt to articulate into words this porcelain-thin
pillar of emotions was to shatter it into brittle bits.

"Say, Rosie, ain't that a view for you? That's how it is with life--a
river that rises with getting born and flows into death, and the
in-between is life and--and--"

"Roody, will you please hurry for sup--dinner? Do you want Feist to
arrive with you not yet dressed?"

Mr. Pelz turned then into an interior that was as pink and as silk as
the inside of a bud--satin walls with side brackets softly simulating
candles; a Canet bed, piled with a careful riot of sheerest and roundest
of pillows; that long suit of the interior decorator, the
_chaise-longue_; the four French engravings in their gilt frames; the
latest original Josephine's _secrétaire_; the shine of a white adjoining
bathroom. Before a door-impaneled mirror, Mrs. Pelz, in a black-lace
gown that was gracious to her rotundity.

"Just look! I'm all dressed already."

Mr. Pelz advanced to her, his clasp closing over each of her bare arms,
smile and gaze lifting.

"Rosie, you've got them all beat! Guess why I wish I was your diamond
necklace."

"Roody, it's nearly seven. Don't make me ashamed for Feist."

"Guess!"

"All right, then, I guess."

"So I could always be round your neck."

His hand flew immediately to the lay of gems at her throat, a small
flush rising.

"Roody, you hear me--hurry! Stop it, I tell you! You pinch." But she was
warmly pink now, the shake of her head setting the heavy-carat gems in
her ears waggling.

Time, probably emulating destiny, had worked kindly here; had brought to
Mrs. Pelz the soft, dove-like maturity of her little swell of bosom; the
white, even creamy shoulders ever so slightly too plump between the
blades; the still black hair polished and waved into expensive
permanence. Out of years that had first veered and finally taken course
under his unquestionable captaincy, Rudolph Pelz, with some of their
storm and stress written in deep brackets round his mouth, the red hair
just beginning to pale and thin, and a certain roundness of back
enhancing his squattiness, had come snugly and simply into harbor. Only
the high cheek-bones and bony jaw-line and the rather inconveniently low
voice, which, however, had the timbre of an ormolu clock in the chiming,
indicating his peculiar and covert power to dominate as dynamically as
ungrammatically a board of directors reckoning in millions across
the mahogany.

"Shall I call in Sato to help you dress, Roody?"

"Please--no! Just to have him in the room with his yellowness and
tiptoes makes me nervous like a cat."

"I got your shirt and studs laid out myself."

He pinched her cheek again. "Rosie Posy!"

"You had a hard day, Roody? You look tired."

"I don't like the battle of Waterloo in the 'Saint Elba' picture."

"Roody, that scene it took such a fortune to build into the shape of the
letter A?"

"It looks like what is it. Fake! The way it reads in that _French
Revolution_ by that fellow Carlyle they gave me to read and the way it
looks in the picture is the difference of black from white. For fifty
thousand dollars more or less on a four-hundred-thousand-dollar picture
I don't have a fake Waterloo."

"I should say not, Roody, when you're famous for your water scenes in
all your big pictures! In 'The Lure of Silk' it's the scenes on the
water they went craziest over."

"I've already got the passage engaged for next week to shoot the
company over to France. That windmill scene on Long Island looks as much
like the windmill north of Fleuris, where Napoleon could see the Blucher
troops from, as I look like a windmill scene. 'Sol,' I says, 'it looks
just like what it is--a piece of pasteboard out of the storehouse set up
on a rock. Eat those feet of film, Sol,' I says to him, 'plant 'em,
drown 'em--anything you like with 'em. That kind of fake stuff won't
make 'Saint Elba' the greatest picture ever released, and every picture
turned out from these studios has got to be just that.' I wish you could
have heard, Rosie, in the projection-room, quiet like a pin after I came
out with it."

"Fifty thousand dollars, Roody?"

"Yes. 'Fifty thousand dollars,' begins Sol with me, too. 'Fifty
thousand--one hundred thousand--two!' I said. 'It would make no
difference. If we can't fake the kind of battle-plain that wouldn't make
Napoleon turn over in his grave, we cross the ocean for the real thing.'
'Fifty thousand dollars,' Sol keeps saying--you know how he cries with
his voice. 'Fifty thousand dollars your grandmother!' I hollered. 'For a
few dollars more or less I should make a Rudolph Pelz picture something
I'm ashamed of.' Am I right, Rosie? Am I right?"

"I should say so, Roody, for a few dollars you should not belittle
yourself."

"Not if your old man knows it, by golly! and I think he does."

"Hurry now, Roody; you know how Bleema likes it you should be dressed."

"Believe me, if Feist had his choice he wouldn't be dressed, neither.
Full dress for grandma and all of us to look at each other in! When
there's company, it's bad enough, but for Feist and a few servants,
hanged if I see it!"

"Does it hurt, Roody, to give the child a little pleasure? Anyway, she's
right--people like us should get dressed up for sup--dinner. I wouldn't
be surprised if she didn't bring Lester Spencer back for dinner from
automobiling."

"He leaves to-night at ten with the company for Pennsylvania and the
Horseshoe Bend picture. Anyways, I don't see where it comes in that for
a fellow who draws his salary off of me I have to dress. I got to say it
for him, though, give the devil his due, he does a good piece of work
where Sol succeeds in getting him off center-stage in his scene with
Wellington."

"Lester is a good actor. Madame Coutilly, to-day, when I had my
manicure, just raved over him and Norma Beautiful in 'The Lure
of Silk.'"

"He'll be a screen proposition some day if we can chain down some of his
conceit. Only, where such friendships with him and Bleema comes in, I
don't see. I don't like it."

"Say, the child likes to run around with celebrities. Why shouldn't it
give her pleasure over the other girls from Miss Samuels's school to be
seen out once in a while with Lester Spencer, their favorite, or Norma
Beautiful? 'America's Darlings,' I see this week's _Screen Magazine_
calls 'em. It's natural the child should enjoy it."'

"Let her enjoy; only, where it comes in I should have to sit across
from him at supper three times this week, I don't see. Out of the
studio, me and Spencer don't talk the same language. To-night, him and
Feist would mix like oil and water."

"Does Feist know yet, Roody, you closed the deal on the Grismer estate?"

"Sure! I says to him to-day: 'Feist, with us for next-door neighbors of
your country estate, together we own nearly half of Long Island.' Am
I right?"

"Like I says last night in mamma's room to Etta and Sol, 'I was used to
thirty-four rooms and nineteen baths from home yet!' Poor mamma--how she
laughed! Just like before her stroke."

"Nothing, Rosie, not one hundred rooms and fifty baths--nothing I can
ever do for you is one-tenth that you deserve."

"And nothing, Roody, that I can do for you is one-hundredth what you
deserve."

"I sometimes wonder, Rosie, if, with all we got, there isn't maybe some
little happiness I've overlooked for you."

She lifted herself by his coat lapels, kissing him. "Such a question!"

"So many times it comes up in the scenarios and the picture-plots,
Rosie, how money don't always bring happiness."

"It wouldn't, Roody--not a penny's worth to me without you and Bleema.
But with you, Roody, no matter how happy I feel, it seems to me I can't
ever feel happy enough for what we have got. Why, a woman just
couldn't--why, I--I always say about you, Roody, only yesterday to my
own sister-in-law, 'Etta,' I says, 'it's hard for me to think of
anything new to wish for.' Just take last week, for instance, I wished
it that, right after the big check you gave for the Armenian sufferers,
you should give that extra ten thousand in mamma's name to the Belgian
sufferers. Done! Thursday, when I seen that gray roadster I liked so
much for Bleema, this afternoon she's out riding in it. It is a wonder I
got a wish for anything left in me."

"To have you talk like this, Rosie, is the highest of all my successes."

"If--if there's one real wish I got now, Roody, it is only for our
Bleema. We got a young lady, honey; we got to put on our thinking-cap."

"'Young lady'--all of a sudden she decides we've got! Young baby, you
better say."

"A graduate this month from Miss Samuels's Central Park School he calls
a baby!"

"Let me see--how old is--"

"He don't know his own child's age! Well, how many years back is it
since we were in rainy-day skirts?"

"My God! Ten--fourteen--eighteen! Eighteen years! Our little Bleema! It
seems yesterday, Rosie, I was learning her to walk along Grand Street."

"You haven't noticed, Roody, David Feist?"

"'Noticed'?"

"Say, you may be a smart man, Rudolph Pelz--everybody tells me you
are--but they should know once on the Picture Rialto how dumb as a
father you are. 'Noticed?' he asks. All right then--if you need a brick
house--noticed that David Feist hates your daughter and 'ain't got eyes
for her and don't try every excuse to get invited here for sup--dinner."

"You mean, Rosie--"

"Of course I mean! It's pitiful how he follows her everywhere with his
eyes. In the box last night at the opera you was too asleep to see it,
but all evening Etta was nudging me how he nearly ate up our Bleema just
with looks."

"You women with your nonsense!"

"I guess, Rudolph, it would be a bad thing. Our daughter and a young man
smart enough to make himself from a celluloid collar-cutter to a
millionaire five times over on a little thing like inventing a
newfangled film-substance should tie up with the only child of Rudolph
Pelz, the picture king."

"I give you my word, Rosie, such talk makes me sick."

"You'd hate it, wouldn't you? A prince like David Feist."

"People don't talk such things till they happen. If our daughter could
have the King of England and didn't want him, I'd say she should not
marry the King of England. I want my girl home by me yet, anyway, for
many a long day. She should be playing with her dolls instead of her
mother and aunt Etta filling her up with ideas. Don't think I'm so
stuck, neither, on how she runs around with my film stars."

"Honest, Roody, the way you're so strict with that child it's a shame!
The girl has got to have her pleasure."

"Well, if she's got to have her pleasure, she should have it with young
men like Feist and not with--"

"There! Didn't I tell you so? Didn't I?"

"Say, I don't deny if I got some day to have a son-in-law, my first
choice for him would be Feist."

"Roody, the two estates together in one!"

"I'm surprised at you, Rosie--honest, I'm surprised. Such talk!"

Mrs. Pelz took a pinch of his each cheek, tiptoeing to kiss him squarely
on the lips.

"Go get dressed," she said, "and I'll wait for you."

"Rosie Posy," he said, clucking into his cheek with his tongue and
moving away through the pink-shaded twilight.

At the door to the whitely glittering bathroom she called to him again,
softly; he turning.

"What'll you bet, Roody, that I get my biggest wish as soon as I got the
gray roadster and the Belgian check?"

"Women's nonsense!" said Mr. Pelz, his voice suddenly lost in the
violent plunge of water into porcelain.

In a drawing-room faithful to Dunlap Brothers' exorbitant interpretation
of the Italian Renaissance, a veritable forest of wrought-iron
candle-trees burned dimly into a scene of Pinturicchio table,
tapestry-surmounted wedding-chest, brave and hideous with _pastiglia_
work, the inevitable camp-chair of Savonarola, an Umbrian-walnut chair
with lyre-shaped front, bust of Dante Alighieri in Florentine cap and
ear-muffs, a Sienese mirror of the soul, sixteenth-century suit of
cap-à-pie armor on gold-and-black plinth, Venetian credence with
wrought-iron locks. The voiceless and invoiced immobility of the museum
here, as if only the red-plush railing, the cords from across chairs,
and the "Do Not Sit" warnings to the footsore had been removed.

Against a chair cruel to the back with a carved coat of arms of the
Lombardi family Mr. David Feist leaned lightly and wisely. If his
correct-enough patent pumps ever so slightly escaped the floor, his span
of shoulders left hardly an inch to be desired. There was a peninsula of
rather too closely shaved but thick black hair jutted well down Mr.
Feist's brow, forming what might have been bald but were merely hairless
inlets on either side. Behind _pince-nez_ his eyes sparkled in points
not unlike the lenses themselves. Honed to a swift, aquiline boniness of
profile which cut into the shadows, there was something swiftly vigorous
about even his repose.

Incongruous enough on the Pinturicchio table, and as if she had dared to
walk where mere moderns feared to tread, a polychrome framed picture of
Miss Bleema Pelz, tulle-clouded, piquant profile flung charmingly to the
northwest, and one bare shoulder prettily defiled with a long
screw-curl, lit, as it were, into the careful gloom.

Deliberately in range of that photograph, and so beatific of gaze that
it was as if his sense were soaked in its loveliness, Mr. Feist smiled,
and, smiling, reddened. Enter then Mrs. Pelz, hitting softly into white
taffetas beneath the black lace; Mr. Pelz, wide, white and boiled of
shirt-front.

"Good evening, Mr. Feist! It's a shame the way we kept you waiting."

"Not at all, Mrs. Pelz--a pleasure. Hello! how's my friend, the picture
king?"

"Rotten," said Mr. Pelz, amiably, shaking hands with a great riding-up
of cuff, and seating himself astride a Florentine bench and the
leather-embossed arms of the Strozzi family.

"Roody, what a way to sit!"

"'What a way to sit,' she tells me. I'd like to see a fellow sit any way
in this room without making a monkey of himself. Am I right, Feist? The
Eyetalians maybe didn't know no better, but I should have to suffer,
too, when for four-seventy-nine I can buy myself at Tracy's the finest
kind of a rocking-chair that fits me."

"Roody!"

"Say, Feist agrees with me; only, he don't know you well enough yet to
let on. I notice that with all his Louis-this and Louis-that rooms in
his own house, up in his own room it is a good old Uncle Sam's cot and a
patent rocker."

"You've got a gorgeous room here just the same, Pelz."

"Gorgeous for a funeral."

"Every collector in the country knows that table. I had my eye on it for
my music-room once myself when it was shown at Dunlap's."

"Dunlap's are a grand firm of decorators, Mr. Feist. I'm having them do
Grismer, too."

"Well, Feist, how does it feel to have us for neighbors?"

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