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Star Dust

F >> Fannie Hurst >> Star Dust




He seated himself at the piano, his great knees at a wide stride, hands
riding down the keyboard in an avalanche of improvised octaves.

In black silk that stood away from her, Mrs. Neugass sat by, not
releasing hold of Millie's hand, her eyes as if they could never finish
their feast of her. Her timidity forbade her much that she would say,
and so she sat smilingly silent and held the little ring-littered hand,
stroked it and lay it to her cheek. To Lilly, who had never seen her out
of the cotton-stuff uniform of housewife, it seemed to her that
something of her Old Testament beauty had died beneath the bunchy jetted
taffeta that brought out in her the look of peasant--her husband in
camphoric broadcloth suffering the same demotion.

"Now doan' get egcited," said Mr. Neugass, himself shaken of voice.
"Remember it is home folks."

"She's all right, pa, if you don't make her nervous," said Miss Neugass,
seating herself stiffly on a stiff chair, her face, as the evening wore
on, cold of its flush, and tired rings coming out beneath her eyes.

"What do you prefer to sing?" asked Millie du Gass, again, kindly.

"The 'Jewel Song.'"

On her words the opening bars crashed out, and, to Lilly's
consternation, far too rapidly, so that she ran with her breath, as it
were, for the opening notes, lifting to it nicely, however, and, by
miracle, quite at her truest.

The state of her invariable vocal exultation began to mount, her
consciousness of scene to recede, and, anticipating her coloratura
climax, she started to climb, building for warble. Her blood was
pounding and her voice in flight. Up went her chin. It was then Felix
Auchinloss swung on the stool, snipping off the song like a thread, his
face in its window, full of a new impassivity, and this time his eyes
off somewhere behind Lilly's left ear.

"That is verra nize," he said, moving restlessly about the room as if to
throw off an irksome moment, and then winding his hands and winding
them, "a pretty voice as far as it goes, and verra, verra nize."

There was a silence that seemed to wait, and Millie du Gass, her laugh
like glass beads falling from a snapped chain:

"You must come down to the hotel, dear, some day, where I've a concert
grand. This darling old tin pan! You should have seen, Felix, the way
pops used to make me practice on it, rapping me over the knuckles. You
old darling pops!"

"Papa's baby-la," he said, pinching her cheek.

"If you will excuse me now, please, I--won't, intrude any longer."

"Good night, dear; it was just lovely. Good night," joined in
everybody, too kindly.

Walking out of that room, Lilly was conscious suddenly of passing
through a prolonged stare, especially from Mrs. Neugass, who leaned
forward slightly in her chair--a stare that prompted her somehow to
quicken her departure almost to a run.

* * * * *

Out of a night that had flowed around her in a bitter sort of blackness
that fairly threatened to drown her, she floated up toward morning to an
exhausted doze, her face tear-lashed and her breathing sucked in sobbily
as she slept.

It was out of this that she awoke suddenly to a bombardment of knocks at
her door.

"Come!" she cried, sitting up rather alarmedly in bed, and holding the
blanket over her chest. She was lovely and disheveled with sleep, her
whiteness whiter because of the most delicately darkened oyster shells
beneath her eyes.

It was Mrs. Neugass. She was pleasantly shapeless again in cotton stuff,
her bosom bulging down and over the jerked-in apron strings.

"Wait, I'll get up and close the window, Mrs. Neugass!"

"You doan' need to," she said, slamming down the window herself, opening
the floor register, and seating herself rigidly on the chair that faced
the bed. "I want a little talk with you, blease."

"Why, yes, Mrs. Neugass!" A wave of memory and a sense of physical
misery swept over Lilly so that it was difficult for her to force the
smile. But she did, sitting up in bed and hugging her knees with bare
shining arms.

With nervousness patent in every move, Mrs. Neugass sat forward,
pleating and unpleating a little section of her apron.

"I guess you know it, Miss Lilly, that with all the honors we got by our
daughter, we're still blain, respegtable beoble."

"Of course--"

"For fifteen years in one business in one neighborhood we've such a
standing that from three blocks around they come to my husband he should
keep their savings. My girls--I can say it on a bible--more than
anything around them was always respegtability."

"But why--"

"If I'm mistaken, Miss Luella, and blease God I should be, then excuse
me for a foolish old woman, but is--is everything all right with you,
Miss Luella?"

"Mrs. Neugass, I--What do you mean?"

"I took you in for a student, a girl alone from her home town, but not
once since you're with us--I can't help it I got eyes--so much as a
postal card. All right, I said time and time again to my husband, she
don't have friends to come and call on her, because she's a stranger in
New York. Neither did my Millie have so many friends, I guess, the first
few weeks in Munich. But no letters--not a line! I know _goys_ ain't so
strong on family ties, but once in a while a letter--"

"I don't quite see where the matter of my correspondence can be of
interest to you, Mrs. Neugass."

"No, but it is of interest to me if everything is all right with you. If
everything is over and above-board, as the saying is, Miss Luella!"

There was a throb to the silence, as she sat upright there in bed, that
seemed to shape itself about her, like a trap. She buried her face
suddenly into her hands.

Then Mrs. Neugass rose, edging around the back of her chair as if to get
clear of even propinquity.

"I'm right?" she cried, hoarsely and rather coarsely. "I'm right, then?
I took into my home a bad girl?"

"No!--No!--No!--"

Out of bed, her feet hastily into slippers and fumbling into her kimono
so that the flow of her hair went down inside it, Lilly approached Mrs.
Neugass, her gesture toward her and entreating.

"Mrs. Neugass, you're horribly wrong in what you suspect. You must
listen to me--"

"You can exblain nothing to me except to get your clothes packed. How it
goes to show you never can tell beoble from looks. Even my husband, who
never gets deceived in human nature, 'She's a refined, intelligent girl
to have around,' he says. My stepdaughter! A girl I am as careful with
as if she was still eighteen, should go out of her way to get you before
Auchinloss! No wonder he says it you are limited and that you fall just
short of fine talent. You don't deserve it no better. Ain't you ashamed?
You bad girl, you! I'm only sorry for the mother you say you got--your
poor mother!"

"Mrs. Neugass, this is outrageous! You haven't the right to speak to me
like this! It was wrong, I admit, to--to deceive you. But I had my
reasons--you wouldn't have taken me in. I'm not what--what you think
I am!"

"I don't care what you are and what you ain't. I only want you to pack
your bags and go."

"I won't go until you've heard me out!"

"We're respegtable beoble!"

"Oh, I know, Mrs. Neugass, your kind of respectability. I was reared on
it. It's the cruelest respectability in the world. It has no outlook
except through the narrow little bars of the small decencies you have
erected about yourselves."

"That fine talk don't save a girl's skin when she's in such a fix like
you!"

"I've more claims to your precious kind of respectability than you--than
you think!"

"I don't _think_ no more. I know! I don't say it's the nicest thing I
should have looked once through your things. Even then I must have felt
it in my bones. That little dress with the nursery rhyme on the
yoke--how it was I didn't get suspicious then? All of a sudden last
night, though--even while you was singing, it come over me, all these
weeks I must have been blind."

"I tell you I'm a married woman. I was married last July in the
Leffingwell Rock Church in St.--in a city I don't care to name. I
suppose that constitutes me a moral woman in your world of cautious
morality. But in my eyes I'm a moral leper. Not because I did not marry,
but because I did. Married for every reason in the world except love. No
marriage ceremony in the world can condone the immorality of that!
Society may, but God doesn't. From your point of view, then, I'm a
respectable woman. From mine, I'm rotten."

"I don't know what it is you're talking aboud. If you are what you say
you are, what does it mean living around in decent beoble's houses in a
condition like yours? It's an insult to my daughters you should be here.
The right kind of a married woman don't live around New York in such a
way like you. There is something very crooked in the woodpile."

"If that is what bothers you, won't you please, dear Mrs. Neugass, sit
down and let me tell you the whole story? I need you--"

"The whole story, Miss--Mrs. Parlow--or whatever it is you call
yourself--ain't what bothers me. All I want is you should go while my
husband is down in his store and my daughter in her position. I am
ashamed they should know. I'm lucky yet I saved myself from having a
disgrace in the house a few weeks from now."

"Oh, Mrs. Neugass, be careful! You may have cause some day to--"

"A singer she wants to be! Is it any wonder, miss, you got no luck? A
girl like you don't deserve it. I'm sorry enough for your poor mother.
Married or no married, I want you should leave here. Quick, you bad
girl, you! I'll wait outside till you go."

So Lilly was subjected to the bitter, the unspeakably vulgar humiliation
of gathering her belongings like any culprit servant girl, cramming
them, blind with tears and frenzy, into the suitcase and valise, tears
scalding down and rolling over her hands as she dressed.

As she staggered finally down the hallway, the two bags grating the
walls and her hat awry from haste, Mrs. Neugass stood at the door,
holding it open.

"Here," she said, "is your rent back for four days--"

"Don't you dare, Mrs. Neugass, to offer me that! Only let me out,
please, from this outrageous predicament."

"You got righd. It is a outrageous predicament. Ach! shame on you! Such
a fine, clean-looking girl like you. Indeed, you don't got to ask to be
let out twice."

Thirty minutes later, and because her wildly beating brain could figure
out no alternative, Lilly sat on a bench in the waiting room of the
Grand Central Station, bags at her feet, trying to subdue her state of
trembling.

Eleven o'clock moved around largely on the station clock. She was due at
the Broadway Melody Shop. Still she sat on, the palpitating surface of
her gradually slowing its throb. The reverberating terminal, then at the
excavating state of its gigantic reconstruction, rang to the crash of
steel with the fantastic echo of tunnel and of blasting. Its constant
conglomerate of footfalls reduced to the common denominator of a
gigantic shuffle, it swelled toward the noonday schedule, with more and
more rapid comings and goings. A light snow was announcing itself in
little white powderings across overcoat shoulders and in the crevices
of derbys.

The new brown coat enveloped her warmly enough, but she shivered as she
sat, at the same time committing the paradox of unbuttoning and flinging
its double-breastedness away from the beating of her very being. After a
while she gave over her bags to the obliging eye of a shawled Polish
girl on the bench beside her and crossed to the Information Bureau. A
clerk gave her precedence over two men.

Yes, there was a St. Louis train out at two-five. Another at six.

She returned and sat in the midst of a third bustling hour. A young
woman with an infant, and a whole archipelago of luggage surrounding
her, finally replaced the Polish girl. She was as fadely and straggily
pretty as a doll that has been left lying on the lawn throughout a night
of heavy dews. Every so often the tiny head would spring back from the
soft fount of her breasts, a cry rising thin and spiral as smoke.

"Sh-h-h, baby! He won't eat," she said, plaintively. "It's just
terrible; we've tried everything and he won't eat."

Lilly put out her hand toward the small ball of head, but withdrew it.

"Poor little baby!"

"My sister's gone to the matron to get him some barley water before he
gets on the train. There is a grand matron here at the station. I left
him with her all morning while we shopped, and he never whimpered. The
barley water was her idea. He won't eat. It's terrible. He 'ain't gained
in six weeks. The doctor says we've just got to keep trying until we hit
a formula that agrees with him."

"Formula? How funny! Sounds like chemistry."

The young mother cast a commiserating eye.

"I'd hate to tell you what it sounds like about two P.X. I've been on a
visit to my mother in Brooklyn, but he yelled so of nights the whole
flat was kicking. You ain't, by any chance, taking the two-five St.
Louis Limited, are you? Brazil, Indiana, is mine."

"I--don't know--yet."

"Ever been there?"

"Where?"

"Brazil."

"I've passed through."

"Some dump, believe me. I keep saying to him, 'Keep me out here much
longer, Fred, and you'll have to ship me home in a wooden kimono.'"

"Wooden kimono?"

"Coffin. Get me?"

"Then Brazil isn't your home?"

"By transplanting, yes. I never married out there, believe me. We was
both born and raised right here on the little long and narrow island,
till he got a better job out there with the telephone company. Believe
me, I'll take my little old fifteen a week in New York to thirty a week
out there, bungalow setting thrown in. Bunk-a-low, I call it."

"But isn't it better for the baby?"

"That's right, too. I always say to my twin, I say, 'Myrt, if you don't
think I got harder hours than when I worked next to you in the Five and
Ten, and no pay day, neither, just trade with me one day and take care
of the kid and the bunk-a-low.' I always say to Fred, I say, 'If you
think you're dog tired, fasten a speedometer on my ankle and read it
when you come home nights and see who's taken the most steps.' It's
hell, anyways, when they won't eat and you can't hit the right formula."

"Poor baby!"

"You wouldn't give 'em up after you got 'em, but believe me it's a wise
girl will think twice before she has 'em. A girl gains a lot by
marrying--maybe. But believe me, she gives up a lot--sure."

"But you married the right man."

"Yeh; but Nature is a trickster. How you going to know where her
intentions leave off her and your own begin? Fred and me ran off.
Regular love affair. I suppose I am one of them that picked right; right
as a girl with my disposition could ever pick. If I hadn't, believe me,
eight hours for me behind the counter in preference to eating the rest
of my breakfasts across from the wrong face. Sh-h-h, Freddie baby! Can't
you see my back is breaking? Sh-h-h! Auntie Myrt's gone to nice matron
for barley water. For the love of Mike, sh-h-h! or mamma'll spank."

The twin fluttered up then, a vivid italicized prototype, on slim tall
heels that clicked and a very small red hat set just at the angle of
sauciness. They moved off together after a bickering over luggage, the
slim silhouette with the chin sharply flung up and the accentuated
sway-back figure of the little mother, her skirt sagging over run-down
heels, and, for want of a free hand, blowing up the loose strands of
hair from out her eyes.

For a time Lilly sat quite intently, her gaze on a small sign that hung
at right angles from an open doorway, "MATRON." After a while she
gathered up her luggage and walked over, entering a little room fitted
up with the efficient and institutional unprivacy of public service. On
a couch, her face to the wall, a woman in a traveling duster lay
stretched, hat and all, in an attitude of exhaustion, a young girl with
a wayward fling of posture, sitting sullen in a corner, her very pointed
and heeled shoes toeing in. A three-year-old child with a large tag
pinned across his little dress played with railroad-owned blocks; the
matron, a sort of stout Lachesis, with a string of keys at her belt,
gray with years and the rather sweet tiredness of service, sorted towels
at a rack. It was to her that Lilly spun out a ready tale, reddening as
she talked, but stanch to it.

"I'm from Indianapolis. I want a quiet place for the next few months.
Two, to be exact."

Sweeping her with a look. "Are you in any kind of difficulty?"

"No--not that! I've left my husband. We agreed to separate. I want a few
weeks of quiet until--afterward, and then I can arrange to start out
on my own."

"You're too nice a girl to--"

"I'm not asking anything. I am not the kind you are evidently accustomed
to deal with here. It is simply that I'm strange."

"Have you no friends?"

"None with whom I desire to communicate."

"Well," doubtfully, "there is the Nonsectarian Home for Indigent Girls
and the Hanna Larchmont Lying-in Hospital--"

"Oh," cried Lilly, with a sting of color to her cheeks, "you don't
understand! I have funds. I tell you it is just that I am strange. I
want a medium-priced place to live for the next few weeks, where it
won't be embarrassing."

The matron unlocked a drawer.

"I have a few addresses here of private rooming houses in the Hanna
Larchmont Lying-in Hospital and Bellevue districts, if that is what you
want. Personally inspected places that can be recommended for their
cleanliness and respectability."

"That is exactly what I need."

"You will find no questions asked so long as you conduct yourself
quietly, and of course you are expected to make your plans for leaving
well in advance of any emergency. There are several private sanitariums
in the neighborhood."

"Of course."

"Here are three addresses. The first is in East Seventeenth Street, just
in back of the Hanna Larchmont. It's a very nice place run by an old
Irishwoman who has a lace-curtain establishment in the basement. Here
are two others on the same block, in case she has rented her room."

"I'll go there at once," said Lilly, taking the memorandum.

"If I were you I should go back home to friends. It is too bad that a
girl like you should find herself in this position. Won't you let me
help you?"

"Thank you"--lifting her bags again--"you have helped me a great deal."

That night Lilly slept in a small back room, two flights up, over a
lace-curtain-cleaning establishment. It was cruder and rougher than
anything she had yet encountered; a white-pine table with a washbowl and
a toothbrush mug, and a black iron bed that at first glance had sent
darting through her a sinking sense of institution. But it was clean,
and a sparse Irish landlady with a moist pink presence that steamed hot
suds had left her without question and one week's advance payment tucked
into her bosom.

Before going to bed, after she had looked under it and turned out the
gas jet, she went over to her single window, opening it wide to the bite
of a winter's night and shooting up the shade. Her view was again of
roofs and roofs and chimney pots, dirtier, this time, and dingier, and
marching against the sky line, like a dark herd of buffalo, a long range
of buildings, blackened of bricks.

It was the Hanna Larchmont Lying-in Hospital seen from the rear.




CHAPTER XXIII

When Lilly returned to the Broadway Melody Shop that morning following,
there was already a voice driving with such nasal power into the
sidewalk din that she hardly needed to enter to learn of her successful
replacement.

There was an entirely new hauteur incasing Miss Kirk, who upon her
entrance wound into an attitude.

"Well!"

"I was ill."

"I--see."

"I guess the place is filled. Oh, it's all right!"

"Better go over to the office and see Phonzie about it. All I know is
they sent over a pair of lungs that can stop traffic when they let out.
Forty copies of 'Cinderella Ella' just like hot cakes the first time she
telephones it out to 'em! Hauls in a netful every time she opens her
mouth, and, some mouth! 'Phonzie,' I telephones over to him this
morning, 'thank God she's screened from the public or somebody would buy
her for codfish balls.'"

"Do you think there might be something over at the office for me? I've
had some training for desk work, too."

"Don't know. I always told you to put some nose into your voice. Let
out, that's what they want in this business. You never came out enough
from behind your tonsils. The refined stuff through a megaphone has
about as much chance as a violet in the six-o'clock rush. In other
words, dearie," finished Miss Kirk, her rather close-set eyes focusing
upon the tip of Lilly's nose, "I think you're fired. Canned, so to
speak. Replaced, as it were."

Lilly laughed, forcing her head high to deny disconcertment.

"Well, anyway, that saves me the trouble of resigning."

"Yes," said Miss Kirk, her gaze suddenly long and full of portent, "I
wouldn't be surprised."

To Lilly's heated consciousness the grilling quality in that gaze was so
unmistakable that it plunged into her like an arrow. She walked out,
stinging with it.

Hurrying toward the music-publishing office, she caught suddenly her
reflection in the plate-glass window of a shop devoted to Broadway's
intense interpretation of the prevalent in modes. She stood, in the very
act of motion, regarding this snapshot of herself. Then she entered,
emerging presently in a full-length dark-blue cape with gilt buttons and
little pipings of red along the edge. It was neither so warm nor so
durable as the brown coat, and cost her the rather sickening sensation
of breaking into a hundred-dollar bill for twelve dollars and
ninety-eight cents.

But it was immensely becoming, this flowing wrap, enveloping her like a
wimple, her face rising out of it as clear as a nun's. Nevertheless, it
was her realization of need for it that quite suddenly ended her quest.
She turned for home, stopping at the Public Library for one of her
frequent perusals of the St. Louis newspapers. She read quickly, her eye
skimming the obituary, personal, and social columns. For a week there
had daily appeared a little insertion which invariably caused her a
twist of heart:

To Sublet: Furnished. Seven rooms and bath. Brand new from top to
bottom. Every convenience. Will sell furnishings if desired. Spacious
front lawn. Poultry yard. 5199 Page Avenue. Apply 5198 Page Avenue.

Then one day it disappeared and something lifted from Lilly's heart.
This time, as she opened the St. Louis paper of just one week previous,
a small oval photograph leaped at her from a row of them, choking her as
if it had clutched at her throat.

In a full-page advertisement, Slocum-Hines Hardware Company announced to
its many friends a twenty-fifth anniversary, the entire sheet bordered
in small oval photographs of the personnel of valued employees.

"Albert Penny, first-assistant buyer." Regarding it, her consciousness
of his promotion was secondary to a feeling that straight lines joining
the four corners of Albert's face would have produced almost a perfect
rectangle. A little farther on was Vincent Bankhead, buyer, and on a
lower row, Ralph Sluder, with whom she had graduated from grade school.

Strangely enough, in this very edition the name of Horace Lindsley
sprang out at her from the tiniest of type in the marriage-license
column. Horace Lindsley, 3345 Bell Avenue. Carol Ingomar Devine, 3899
Westminster Place. The name of the bride was associated in Lilly's mind
with the society columns of the Sunday _Post-Dispatch_. A hundred little
pointed darts shot through her, and even now the old sinking but
delicious sensation of too sudden descent in an elevator.

That night she went to bed with a toothache, a biting little spark of
pain that toward morning became a raging flame rushing against the
entire inside of her cheek. She could not trace its source, every tooth
seeming to stampede.

All of the day following she lay with her face buried into her pillow,
abandoning herself utterly to creature discomfort. Toward evening she
ventured down as far as Fourteenth Street for a bowl of milk and toast,
but the pain raged on, tightening her throat against food, and she crept
back to the haven of her cheek to Mrs. McMurtrie's scorched pillow slip.

After another two nights of local application and the rather futile
business of holding warm water in the sag of her cheek, she found out,
at the direction of Mrs. McMurtrie, a neighborhood dentist who occupied
a suite of rooms over a corner drug store, the large grinning picture of
a boy, with a delighted hiatus of missing front tooth, painted on each
window and giltly inscribed, "It Didn't Hurt a Bit."

It is inconceivable, except that under duress of great pain Lilly could
have engaged services so obviously quasi professional, but she was past
that perception by now, her nerves from brow to shoulder crackling like
a bonfire.

Examination by a dentist with gray pointed side whiskers that flared and
brushed her cheek unpleasantly, revealed a pair of abscesses gathering
within the gum, and for weeks of mornings she lay back to the agony of
steel incisions, for the remainder of the day stretching out on her iron
bedstead, face to wall.

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