A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Z

Star Dust

F >> Fannie Hurst >> Star Dust




Then for a few days a premature spring came out teasingly. The East
Seventeenth Street block, with its rows of houses, going down none too
debonairly, from gentility to senility, showing a bud here and there.
There even remained one private residence with a polished door bell and
name plate and a little cluster of crocuses in an iron jardinière set
out in a front yard about the dimension of an army blanket.

Crocuses, whose cold, moist smell, with all the pungency of associations
an odor can arouse, somehow suggested, to Lilly, Taylor Avenue and
little Harry Calvert. She did not remember it, but Harry had once stolen
two satiny red ones for her from a Taylor Avenue flower bed and been
soundly cuffed by a housewife.

A block away, Gramercy Park, a rectangle of the Knickerbocker New York
of the woodcut, red-brick sidewalk, salon parlor, and crystal
chandelier, was already lacy with the first leafwork of spring. Several
times, when the sun lay warmest, Lilly ventured into its Old World
sobriety, strolling around the tall grill fence that inclosed the park.
It was locked against the public, nursemaids from surrounding homes and
a few old ladies stiff with gentility holding keys. Children from the
raggedy fringe of Third Avenue played without awareness, against the
outside of the iron palings, too young, and, anyway, too imprisoned in
class, to resent one more monopoly even of God's sunshine and the brown,
warm earth already swollen with life about to be.

It seemed to Lilly that almost any of these mild days Washington Irving,
in pot hat and lace in his sleeves, might come strolling this pompous
Square. She bought a manhandled copy of Volume I of Knickerbocker's
_History of New York_ off a secondhand bookstall one day, and read it
sitting on the sun-drenched stoop of one of the old houses whose eyeless
stare and boarded windows bespoke one absent family. Off this same stall
she also purchased a volume of Wordsworth's poems, feeling a vague, a
procreative, and who shall say mistaken need for beauty. Over and over
she read, milking each phrase dry:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath elsewhere had its setting and cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness and not in utter nakedness
But trailing clouds of glory, do we come from God who is our home.

She read of daffodils as if she would steep her soul in the sun of their
yellowness, bought some one morning and propped them in the
toothbrush mug.

She practiced her shorthand, too, these days, in a blank book bought for
the purpose, sometimes an hour--even two or three--until the sun receded
off the stoop.

Then for a week it rained, and from the patch of back yard, two stories
beneath her window, began to mount the moist smell of living earth.
Beside this open window, after the harrowing mornings of dentistry, with
a soft rain falling from a sky swift and low with clouds, she wrote, her
pencil dabbing constantly at the well of her tongue, a short story of
some six thousand words composed out of the fabric of an idea that
suddenly presented itself. She copied it in her most painstaking
handwriting, on one side of foolscap, and sent it, with return postage,
to a popular magazine.

She was venturing out less and less, preparing over a portable oil stove
her own breakfast, and very often her own lunch and dinner. She tried to
sew, too, cutting up one of the sheerest and prettiest of her nightgowns
into a litter of small garments, but almost immediately her hands would
fall idle and the great waves of terror begin to surge.

Certain inevitable decisions crept closer. She decided against the
Hanna Larchmont Hospital, its very foyer awakening in her such a
sickening sense of public institution that she ventured no farther, but
engaged a tiny room in a private sanitarium in Nineteenth Street, at
twenty dollars a week, and the privilege of boarding on two or three
weeks after her discharge.

Her bag of three new one-hundred-dollar bills still hung in all its
reassuring entirety from the little pink ribbon about her neck, but the
confronting dentist's bill of twenty-five dollars, and the slow but acid
process of daily expenditure eating into the thirty or forty dollars
left in her purse, lay uncomfortably against her consciousness.

By a series of constantly repeated calculations, particularly if the
short story should bring in even a check large enough to cover the
dentistry, Lilly planned to span the weeks of her narrowing interval
with the three bills intact, but pretty shortly the first piece of mail
she had received in New York arrived in a long, bulky envelope:

MY DEAR MISS PARLOW,--Thank you for submitting the accompanying
manuscript. It does not quite get across in this office, but it is near
enough to our standard for us to want to see anything more you may care
to submit.--THE EDITOR.

That night Lilly cried again all through her sleep, presenting herself
next morning at the dentist's with heavy, rimmed eyes. It was her final
visit, and before mounting the chair she laid down her carefully
counted-out payment, five five-dollar bills, in a little pile on the
revolving stand.

Doctor Hotchkiss, with the offshoot of white whiskers from each jowl,
and who was fond of pinching her cheek as she lay under his touch,
moistened his fingers and counted.

"The charges are fifty dollars," he said.

She was immediately startled.

"Why, Doctor Hotchkiss, you said twenty-five!"

"Fifty, with the bridgework, my dear young woman," he said, the words
swimming in the oil of his suavity.

"You said twenty-five."

"You misunderstood, my dear young woman. Twenty-five would not pay for
the amount of gold I used. Fifty is what I said. Fifty dollars," his
voice rising.

She looked her despair.

"I--It's not honorable. I asked you distinctly. What if I haven't it to
spare--"

"That is not my business," he replied, his entire manner roughening up.
"You have forty dollars' worth of my gold in your mouth and the law
provides for receiving goods you can't pay for. You've got it, all
right, and if you haven't, from the look of you, there is some one
behind you who has."

She colored so furiously that her eyes smarted to tears as she reached
down into her blouse for the little chamois bag.

"Give me fifty dollars," she said, cramming the five five-dollar bills
back into her purse, holding a crisp new hundred-dollar bill out to him,
her voice as fluttering as a broken wing; "but nothing--nothing will
ever convince me that you have not taken advantage of me."

He counted her fifty dollars off his own roll, all the more suave.

"You will find you have made a mistake, my dear young woman. This is a
strictly one-price office. Now I will take out that temporary filling
and finish you up."

She was loath to mount the chair, except that the nerve was jumping
again. For half an hour she lay under his touch; finally, as he fumbled
to untie the bib-like towel about her neck, his lips descended so close
to her cheek that she could feel their cold, liver-colored caress touch
her finally in a kiss. She sprang to her feet, jerking the towel away
from her neck and rubbing it across the defiled spot.

"How dare you! You cheat! You miserable creature! How dare you! You come
near me and I'll call the police. Let me out of here! Out!"

She ran from the place with her hat in her hand, across the street, and
up two flights to her room. Panting and drenched with perspiration, all
day she lay on the little iron bed, her face to the wall, shuddering.

"O God, where are you driving me? What are you driving me on for? Where?
Why? What does it mean?"

At dusk, with a sense of weakness entirely new to her, she rose to
undress, resting after each discarded piece of clothing.

She could hear Mrs. McMurtrie passing through the outer hall, a tin
bucket, on one of its frequent errands to Joe's place across the street,
grating against the wall. The room took on a deeper and soupy color of
twilight, the great pachyderm of the Hanna Larchmont Hospital casting
its shadow.

Suddenly, one of those boltlike perceptions that can spring out
apparently from space, Lilly clapped her hands to her throat, her
breast, the back of her neck. Her bag, the little chamois bag, and the
pink ribbon at her neck were gone! She shook through her clothing in a
frenzy of haste; she tore each piece inside out; slapped her hands over
the washstand; flung back her mattress, plunging her fingers into every
imaginable crevice. Dragged out the bed; jerked up the tacks from the
carpet, turning back the corners; felt along the dark, narrow halls and
down two flights on her hands and knees; shook out her clothing again.
The hair came down over her shoulders and her reasoning seemed to go.

That hand fumbling to untie that bib-towel. Those pointed whiskers
approaching her cheek. The little pink bow at her neck. Those liverlike
lips. That soft, boneless hand at the back of her neck had jerked out
the bag! O God! that soft, slimy kiss and the little jerk of the bow at
the back of her neck! and fell down with a screaming that brought Mrs.
McMurtrie.

At noon of the next day Lilly Penny lay in the public ward of the Hanna
Larchmont Lying-in Hospital, a premature mother by some weeks.

Lilly Penny, whose trousseau had included twelve of the sheerest batiste
ones, in a coarse, unbleached nightdress not her own and the least
gentle to her flesh she had ever known.

There was a row of her of which she was the whitest; wan women, big-eyed
with pain, who had gone down into the canons of death that there
might be life.

She had a slow, vagarious notion that all of the cots were tilted, so
that they appeared each on a cross, these mothers. It was sad to lie
there in that etheric world, yet somehow pleasant. The frieze on the
auditorium of the St. Louis Center High School was unaccountably before
her. It was still sown with lilies, but with babies' heads for calyxes.
Her mother, her teeth set with effort, was scrubbing something. A window
sill? Who was calling? Mamma--Flora. You wouldn't give 'em up after you
got 'em, but: it's a wise girl that'll think twice. She felt so white.
Never, in fact, had she enjoyed such a sense of her whiteness. She held
up her arm to regard the column of it, and wanted to laugh, but it was
easier to cry.

They brought her child. Hers, Lilly Becker Penny's. A huge tray of them,
like a vender's street-corner offering of spring flowers. Tiny human
blooms with a tag at each wrist. Incredible!

"Three guesses," said the nurse, through a smile, and held out the human
bouquet toward her. She could scarcely breathe. She wanted to scream, to
draw up the sheet over her head. To suffocate. Herself, external to
herself, was breathing out there--off somewhere in that tray. She tried
to pull up the covers over her head. A hand would draw them away. There
was a black one in that row of little pink nubs of humanity! Heads like
hard-boiled eggs not quite cooked through. No! No! No!

Suddenly Lilly raised to her elbow. The second from the end! The big
head. The full-blown spring-tight curls! The color of honey. The blue
eyes that were almost ready to turn gray. The tag on the wrist. Number
two. The tag of her own unbleached gown? Number two!

"Give me!" cried Lilly, on a sudden mounting note that left a little
resonance like a plucked violin string.

"Right the first time," cried the nurse, lifting the second from the
end, "and a little beauty she is."

That little living ball of head in the crotch of her arm! She leaned
forward to the flameless heat of it, her lips moving and wanting
to speak.

"What is it, dear?" asked the nurse.

She moved them again, but still silently.

The nurse bent lower, her ear to the pillow.

"Now what is it, dear? Say it again."

This time through the veil of a whisper she could hear quite clearly:

"Zoe."




Book Two


THE GRAPE




CHAPTER I

There were vagrant little streams of water, released by thaw, hurrying
along against the curbs of Second Avenue, the absolutely impeccable
spring day that Lilly Penny walked out of the Hanna Larchmont Hospital
into the warm scented bath of its sunshine, a blanketed bundle in the
crook of her arm that mysteriously seemed to animate the nap of the
wool, lifting it and suggesting the little life it enfolded.

She felt strangely light and giddy that life could have gone clattering
on outside those dim weeks of hers inside the walls.

She had gone down in a dark, a fantastic hiatus in her scheme of things,
and it was incredible that out here were street cars still clanging for
right of way, pedestrians weaving in and out the great tapestry of a
city day, factory whistles splitting asunder with terrific cleavage the
fore--from the afternoon. There was a hurdy-gurdy rattling tinnily
through the morning that must have played on uninterruptedly through
this strange demise of hers.

School children, the air raucous with them, sped home for luncheon
through streets that already smelled of sun on asphalt. She had never
really noticed them before. That little fat girl with the braids. How
pretty to loop them up that way behind each ear with bright red bows.
She pressed against the little warm life at her bosom. She felt throaty
with laughter, and the tears of a delicious weakness that made her ache
to lie down somewhere in this sun, close to the soft bearing earth whose
secret she knew now, and open this bundle. Hers! It was the first moment
of her actual ownership. Reality was reclaiming her from that unreal
realm of doctors and nurses and the dozy detached period of her
convalescence.

She wanted to run with her living loot to some quiet corner and open it
up. There was a little square of park with a municipal-laid-out bed of
tulips across the street, but its benches were crowded with humanity,
like sparrows sunning themselves on a wire, and the winding of its
asphalt paths swift with the hurry of all the strangely uninterrupted
world outside.

She hurried toward Seventeenth Street--could have run, in fact, such a
resurgence of the old vitality was upon her. Before one of the private
houses a rheumatic-looking oleander was in the supremest moment of its
full bloom. It lit up the old street as if a bride had donned her veil
there. Outside the cleaning establishment were two stretchers of lace
curtains sunning themselves against the wall.

Lilly hurried up the stoop and pulled out the bell that rang dimly in
one of those subterranean retreats peculiar to landladies.

Mrs. McMurtrie herself opened the door, as usual her great hands
steaming and swollen with suds.

"Well?" she said, her arm immediately flung up to the virago's akimbo
and her foot sliding in between the door.

In an agony of anxiety over possible exclusion, Lilly's words came so
fast they hardly allowed for the coherence of spacing.

"How do you do, Mrs. McMurtrie? I've returned and I'm fine. I'm so
sorry about that--that night and the trouble I must have caused you.
Thank you for sending my bag after me. It's a girl. She's the best
little thing, Mrs. McMurtrie. Doesn't cry at all. I'll only be wanting
her with me for a few days until I can get her placed somewhere near me,
so I can spend evenings and Sundays with her. I've such plans! I'm ready
to take a position again and forge right ahead. If I might have the old
room, Mrs. McMurtrie, I promise you that you won't know she's in the
house these few days. It won't mean one thing in the way of extras for
you, but I'm willing to pay more. Nothing except a little alcohol stove,
and if your little girl could watch her for an hour or two once in a
while, when I'm out, I'll pay her, too. Gladly. My bag is at the
hospital. I'll send for it--"

"Be saving your breath," cried Mrs. McMurtrie, flinging her gesture
upward with a cluck of the fingers. "I wouldn't give that for your yarn!
You're a hussy, from the looks of the whole business, and I've a mind to
be suing the railroad station for the sending of you to me. You
mentioned the husband of your own free will. Your husband! Faith, and
not so much as a relation turning up to be with you in your trouble.
Husband! You'd better be going and telling that to the Home for Indigent
Girls. Your husband! Bah!"

To a door slammed full in her face Lilly stood there for a stunned
instant, hugging at her bundle. She would have liked to crumple up, to
have felt the earth open and drag her down to a merciful oblivion, but
after a while she turned and walked down those steps, fumbling with her
free hand for an address she had applied for at the hospital information
desk, against possible emergency.

The slip of paper read Nineteenth Street, almost in a straight line
from where she stood. It was a morose, lean building, only two windows
wide and five stories high, with a porcelain sign above the bell,
"ROOMS." A wrinkled pod of a woman opened the door.

"I'm looking for a room for myself alone except for a few days until I
get my baby placed--"

"Nothing," answered on the click of a closed door.

With her lips almost ludicrously lifted to stimulate the crescent of a
smile, Lilly descended. There were passers-by and one or two of them
turned for another glance, and more than ever she kept the smile
looped up.

Then she instituted a campaign down one side and up the other of two
blocks of Nineteenth Street. Finally there came a whimper from the
depths of the blanket, and a light and coughy little cry against and
into her heart.

She stood on the corner, arguing with herself for a clear brain, the
easy fatigue of weakness beginning to descend and a queer unsteadiness
of limb setting in.

"Don't lose your head, Lilly," she admonished of self. "There is a way,
only you haven't yet struck it. Don't let your brain feel trapped. Keep
cool. Quiet. Dove. Peace. Cathedral. Sweet and low. Sweet and low.
Neugass. No. Gertrude Kirk. No, no! If only Mrs. McMurtrie--Indigent
Girls--No--no--no!"

However, after a while she did turn back through toward Second Avenue,
her feet quickened with a destination she could not bring herself to
admit, and so she loitered, inquiring at three more front doors which
had now come to have an angry scowl for her as she mounted their
front steps.

Between a Home for Lithuanian Aged and a Swedish bakery and lunch room
that she had more than once frequented, a black-and-gold sign spanned
what at one time had been the noncommittal front of a stately
residence--"Nonsectarian Home for Indigent Girls."

Ascending these steps, she could feel the glance of every passer-by
boring into the very back of her head, awls crawling through and through
her. She tried to drag her hat down over her eyes. Her black velvet
sailor, modish enough when new, had suffered somewhat in the hurried
packing off of her things after her. The buckram rim, misshapen from too
close quarters, flared rather outlandishly off her face, so that after
she had pulled the bell she stood with her back to the sidewalk, while
the sign above seared into her.

Induced by the warmth of the day and the bundle of blanket she carried,
a pox of perspiration had burst out on her face, but the little
whimperings against her heart had died down so that she dared not risk
the jolt of reaching for her handkerchief.

She was admitted finally into one of the large salon parlors that had
lost its beauty as a woman can lose hers. Stripped of the jewels of
crystal chandeliers, long mirrors, and glittering floors, it remained
now a gaunt strip of room, divided by a low fence and swinging gate into
office and waiting room.

There were long windows that looked out upon the polyglot of Second
Avenue, which even then, over a not quite abandoned elegance, was
donning its Joseph's coat of seventeen nationalities and dining,
bartering, and gesticulating in as many languages.

On a strip of bench between the windows Lilly sat and waited.

The movement of the room coagulated about the figure of a woman seated
at a desk on the office side of the partition. Girls, to Lilly it seemed
a whole phantasmagoria of identical ones with short hair and eyes none
too young, passed in and out of the little swinging gate. Suddenly it
struck her, with such a wrench that she almost cried out, that here was
no illusion. They were uniformed, these girls. In dark-blue cotton
stuff, with three rows of white tape running around the skirt hem and
white bone buttons up the back. Through the doorway one of them was
washing down a flight of stairs, raising a cold, soap-and-lye smell.
Another, with a splay smile that was terrible as a wound, wiped in and
out among the spokes of the banisters, her face as without muscle as a
squeezed orange, and smiling without knowing that it smiled.

Sitting there with her bundle closer and closer to her heart, Lilly
closed her eyes to that smile.

Above all, she knew that she needed to keep clear, and yet across the
swept horizon she tried to create, silhouettes of thought such as these
would move, fantastic as cloud shapes.

"Who am I?" And then, with her old untrained probing after reality: "How
do I know I am not dreaming? Where am I going? What is it I want? How
terrible! Me, Lilly Becker. This place is like the poorhouse at home,
that time the High School sociology class visited it. Zoe, are you real?
Mine alone! Not his. Mine. You must be the miracle and show me the way,
Zoe. You shall be me plus everything that I am not. To have missed the
ecstasy of you is not to have lived. If Auchinloss could hear me now.
Who knows? I may, yet. What if I am like Joan of Arc, heeding a vision,
only I don't know which way the vision is pointing. Funny. Oh, but I'm
going to clear the way for you, Zoe. No Chinese shoes for your little
feet or your little brain. Free--to choose--to be! That's the way I'll
rear my daughter. My daughter! Queer I never think of him, her father.
Zoe--what if you don't want to be saved from what I'm saving you. The
fatness--the sedentary spirit of--out there. But you are me plus
everything that I am not. You will want to be saved. You will."

It was out of this limbo that Lilly was finally summoned, through the
little swing door to an empty chair beside the desk.

She thought she had never beheld such eyes as were turned upon her
through polished eyeglasses with the complement of a wide black-ribbon
guard. They were the color of slate and cleaned for impression. The
eight cases that had preceded Lilly were gone from them just as the
eight cases to follow would erase one by one.

"Sit down," she said. Then, "Girl or boy?"

"Girl."

"Name?"

"Zoe. Oh, you mean my name? Let me explain. You must understand that I
am not--indigent. I am looking for a room. I've just come out of the
hospital with my little one, and you have no idea how difficult it is to
find lodging where there is a child."

"What is your name?"

"I--I must beg of you not to--to take an attitude toward--"

"If you want me to help you, my dear, you must trust me. What is your
name?"

"Lilly. Your files won't help you. I'm not on record--that way. Lilly
Parlow for professional reasons, but I want her christened by her full
family name--"

"What is your family name?"

"Why, Lilly--Becker--Penny."

"Your last address?"

"You mean?"

"Where did you sleep last night?"

"I told you. Hanna Larchmont Hospital. I received my discharge to-day."

"Is the father of your child your lawful husband?"

"Indeed, yes!"

"Where is he?"

"Out West--where I came from."

"Exactly where?"

"D-d-denver, I think."

"Why are you here and he there?"

"Oh, you mustn't question me like this! I left him of my own free will,
after I found I had made a mistake. I am not asking anything of you. I
can pay. I want a room for me and my baby, for a few days until I get
her placed. I can make certain arrangements for her and take up my
work again."

"What is your work?"

"I am a singer."

"Where are your friends?"

"I have none."

"You are quite sure that this man whom you call your husband--"

"I won't be talked to in that tone."

"Of course, you realize that you are a highly specialized case."

"Do these institutions merely function as machines? Is no provision made
for the exception? Rent me a room for me and my baby. I will pay you in
advance. See, I have five five-dollar bills in my purse. I must have a
place to sleep and I won't leave here unless you forcibly eject me. I
must have my luggage; it is still at the hospital."

"How is it they did not help you there to make further provision for--"

"I didn't explain. It seemed inconceivable that I could not find
immediately lodgings."

"I see," said Lilly's interrogator, with the air of seeing not at all.
"Your case does not come under our kind of jurisdiction. Our girls are
unfortunate mothers who are cared for here until such time as
arrangements can be made to place the child. But no girl is entitled to
our nursery and infirmary service for more than four consecutive weeks,
and then, as I said, only in the event of unfortunate motherhood."

"Can only the unmarried mother be unfortunate?"

Copyright (c) 2007. famouswriterz.com. All rights reserved.