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




Toward this end R.J. and Bruce Visigoth steered, with an impeccable
oneness of purpose, the destinies of an enterprise audacious in its
concept and ultimately to be spectacular in its fulfillment.

But outside the sharply defined inclosures of their business lives, the
brothers went down into a wordless vale of fifteen years of
estrangement, not in enmity, but rather as a hatpin, plunged through the
heart, can kill, bloodlessly.




CHAPTER VII

When Lilly put on her hat outside in the now darkening and deserted
offices, it seemed to her that the roar of men's passions was a gale
through the silence. Quite irrelevantly she was clutched with a terror
of catastrophe. The possibility of fire! Only last week there had been a
devastating one in a children's hospital out in Columbus, Ohio. She beat
down these flames of fear. Yet what strange and horrible passions lay
just a scratch beneath the surface of the day-by-days. A little girl
aged four had once been found battered and dead beside a farm hand's
dinner pail in St. Louis County! Suddenly all the faces she could
conjure began to form staring circles around her--the Visigoths. Minnie
Dupree. Ida Blair. Auchinloss. Phonzie. Phonzie!

She decided to walk fast and long and ran downstairs out into the little
areaway that ran like an alley from stage entrance to sidewalk. A newly
installed nickelodeon, adjoining, was already lighted, throwing out a
hard white shine and tinned music at the instance of five cents in the
slot. In the glaring pallor Bruce Visigoth was suddenly at her side, his
felt hat bunched up in his hand and his hair wet-looking, as if drenched
with perspiration.

"I couldn't let you go without apologizing, Mrs. Penny."

She smiled with lips that would pull to the nervous impulse to cry.

"The idea!" she said, feeling the words tawdry and provincial as they
came.

"It was my fault for permitting it to happen in the presence of a third
party--you especially."

"Those things cannot always be avoided," again biting down into her
tongue for its banality.

"Will you forget it as if it had never occurred?"

She turned her gaze, that could be so singularly clear, full upon him.

"It is already forgotten."

Strangely enough and with unspoken accord they took to walking then at a
clip that was almost a rush and created quite a wind in their faces. It
was their first meeting out of office and here they were half running
through a cool and winey half darkness and utterly without destination.

She stopped abruptly at West Fourteenth Street, beyond the thunder of
the Sixth Avenue Elevated and where the sky line began to dip down
toward the piers.

"Good night," she said, throwing back her head to look up at him from
under the low brim of sailor.

He whipped off his resiliently soft hat, hugging it under one arm.

"Of course," he said, "of course," mopping at his forehead and so
unstrung that she could have laughed. "I'm sorry. I beg your pardon. Is
this where you live?"

They were before a greasily lighted taxidermist's window of mounted
raccoon, fox terrior with legs curled for running, and an owl on
a branch.

"No," she said, eying the owl, "I don't live here," and were both off
into a gale of laughter that swept down the barriers of self-restraint.

"We've both been walking it off," she said, easily. "Here is where I
turn for home."

He caught her hand.

"D-don't go. I'd be so grateful--so grateful if you'd have dinner with
me to-night."

"Nonsense!" she said, amazed at her fluency of manner. "You're a bit
unstrung, that's all. Look in at your club or a show."

"Please."

"All right," she said, suddenly, on a little click of teeth. "I'll
come--this once."

"You're a brick," he cried, releasing her hand with a grateful pressure.

She was excited out of all proportions to the event, flushing up with a
sense of adventure and crowded moment.

He began to scan for a cab.

"Let's walk."

"Not a bit of it," bringing one down with a cane. "We're out on a
party."

"But--"

"No buts," helping her in and climbing in after. "Waldorf."

"I'm too shirtwaisted."

"Nothing of the kind. You're as trim as a dime. I like those waists you
wear. They make you look smooth--shining. That's it, you've a shine
to you."

The odor of another drive in an open cab through this same snarl of
traffic was winding about her like mist. That doctor's outer office with
its row of thoughtful chairs. Rembrandt's "Night-Watch." That frenzied
moment of finding the lock! The run up two flights. She sat forward on
the slippery leather seat.

"I--I shouldn't have come."

"If you're serious, of course I'll take you home. But I can't tell you
how much I want you not to feel that way."

She sat back again.

"I'm behaving like a shop girl."

They both laughed again and complete thaw set in.

He selected one of the lesser dining rooms where the formality of
evening clothes was still the rule, but here and there a couple like
themselves, in street attire. It was her first New York meal that was
not read off a badly thumbed menu and eaten off thick-lipped china. A
stringed orchestra played the Duo of Parsifal and Kundry, which was
enough to set the blood rocking in her veins and some of its bombastic
maternal passion to dye her face.

He ordered a man's dinner: Clear soup with croûtons. Long oysters on the
half shell. A thick steak with potatoes deliciously concocted beneath a
crust of cheese. Light wine. Ices in long glasses as slender as the neck
of a crane. Turkish coffee brewed at the table over alcohol.

She sighed out finally, warm with well-being: "I didn't realize how
deadly tired I was of just--grub. You see, it's the first time I've
dined at a first-class place since I'm in New York."

"You don't mean that."

She nodded, smiling.

"I think I'm as surprised as you are. It's just one of the things that
never occurred to me."

He regarded her for a long moment and without smile.

"You queer, queer girl."

"If anyone tells me that again, I'll begin to believe it is my
inevitable epitaph."

"No epitaph is inevitable. It is what you write it."

She leaned her chin into the cup of her palm.

"Do you think that?"

"Yes, and therefore yours should embody courage and dauntless idealism
and love of truth."

She looked off through the atmosphere that was talcy with soft odors and
the warm perfume of bare shoulders.

"Love of truth," she said, her eyes lit, "would be enough."

"Love of you, would be an epitaph to my liking."

She was afraid he could see the little beating at her throat and wanted
to be facetious. Poor Lilly, to whom persiflage came none too readily.

"Now, you're making sport of me."

"Probably it is a case of laugh that I may not weep."

"Even tears can be idle."

"Or idolizing."

"I suppose I am to surmise over the quality of yours?"

"Well, you have had me guessing for three years. Mrs. Penny. Lilly! I
can't say the other, it--won't s-say itself."

She asked her question with a cessation of her entire being, as if her
heart had missed a beat.

"Hasn't--your--brother--told--you--anything?"

"Oh yes. I know how you threw over the professional end of it for what
you decided you could do better. I thought that pretty plucky; so many
of us mistake inflated judgment for genius and stubbornness for
perseverance, when that same perseverance applied to the job within
one's capacity may lead to fine fulfillment."

"It's good to hear you say that."

"But that is about all I do know--Lilly--except, of course, that there
is a youngster and somewhere in the background a husband whom I would
like to meet out some dark night when I happen to be wearing my favorite
pair of brass knuckles."

Something nameless and shapeless had lifted; there was a gavotte to her
heartbeat.

"My husband was--is a good man."

"But not a wise one if he couldn't hold a creature like you."

"And my child! You talk about shine! Of course I know it is only her
hair and eyes and now her little teeth, but sometimes it seems to me
there is an actual iridescence to her. Just as real as the gold circlets
the Italians loved to paint about heads they adored."

"Your head is--"

"You see, the fuzz of her curls gives that effect. Those new
stereopticon views that move, that we used on the bills last week, show
it--that aura off the hair. Even the nurses and Mrs. Dupree have
remarked Zoe's. She's really the show child of the place, you know."

"By inheritance?"

"No. She's only like me about the eyes, and like--him--in the honey
color of her hair. Hers is as brilliant and curly as mine is dull and
smooth. And she's so big. So golden and burstingly big. I can't look at
her without fairly gasping, 'can this be mine'!"

"And to think a man let you go, once he had you captured."

"He didn't let go. I went. I can never hear him referred to slightingly
without feeling myself a rotter not to explain. My husband was so
terribly all he should have been, Mr. Visigoth. As decent and
God-fearing a man as ever--chewed his beefsteak with his temples."

He threw back his head for one of his sustained laughs.

"It's horrid of me to belittle him. Let me explain further."

"Lord! you don't need to. I know everything about him there is to know.
A fine, hefty truck horse trying to do teamwork with a red-nostriled
filly."

"I--I think that's it--I've never been able to get it across to anyone
before, but--"

"He was just cast wrong. That's all there is to be said against the
chap. Right?"

"Exactly."

"I understand. In a way I'm in a similar position with my own brother.
Only, I've stuck it out because it was my mother's great wish to see us
get on together. After what you have observed these years, particularly
to-day, none of this can be particularly new to you."

"I've noticed, of course, you--you're different."

"It is the little things about Robert I cannot swallow. Never could. He
is the better business man and keeps my head out of the clouds, but many
a time I've wanted to duck these years of apprenticeship and produce the
things I believe in. I will some day, but that is another story. Robert
has vision. His sense of land and theater values is unfailing. He--"

"Well, so is your vision just as unfailing in your work. The chain
didn't even begin to form before you took over the booking end."

"He has fine traits, too. Big ones. His word is his bond. He has
business foresight and integrity, but somehow it is his little
meannesses. I remember once in my father's house he took a thrashing for
something outrageous he was not guilty of, because he had promised some
youngster across the way he would shield him, come what might, and
somehow I thought it pretty fine of him. But another time he let me take
a thrashing for something he had done and stood by without opening his
mouth. It is those indescribable smallnesses in his make-up. Once when I
was in favor of branching out and producing a legitimate three-act play
which I happened to run across--a rare thing from the French--he--well,
I won't go into it--but this thing--to-night--that bauble of my
mother's--it--it's the climax of a lifetime of such flea bites--a trifle
hardly worth the mentioning, and yet--it's the most utter--the most
damnable--"

There was a half crash of his clenched hand among the silver and a rise
of suffusing red up out of the white of his soft collar.

"I beg your pardon. I didn't mean to let you in for any more of it. I'm
sorry. And after you were gracious enough to come alone, too. Come, here
is to making this little party a gay one."

He held up his glass. "Here's to the shining child."

"Oh!" she cried, and drank quickly.

"Like it?"

"Not much. It burns."

"You should see your eyes."

"You should see hers."

"Whose?"

"My child's."

"Do you know what I should have done in your husband's place?"

"What?"

"Harnessed you, too, but to a moonbeam."

"I once knew a man to whom I never spoke ten words in all my life, and
yet I always imagined he might have talked to me like that--not
literally--not in terms of tin dippers."

"Of what, you queer, queer girl?"

"Now I know of whom you remind me! An old school-teacher I once had.
Odd."

"I would never have let you slip my harness through."

"And have deprived the Amusement Enterprise Company of my austere
services!"

"You've been invaluable. Ninety per cent of your judgments have been
ninety-nine per cent there!"

"Luck."

"Luck nonsense! Judgment isn't horseshoe-shaped."

"I love it! Feeling the public pulse for what it wants. The psychology
of your vaudeville audience is as elementary as a primer and as
intricate as life. It is a bloodhound when it comes to detecting the
false from the true. Take that little sketch, 'Trapped,' you sent me out
to see last week. A more sophisticated audience might have mistaken its
brittle epigrammatic quality for brilliancy and its flippancy for
cleverness. But not your ten-twenty-thirty's. In real life a husband
doesn't psychanalyze his wife's lover. He horsewhips him. And that
lovely blank-verse fantasy that you attempted on your own. That is the
sort of thing you are going to stand for some day in the theater. I
loved your wanting it. But right now, while you are on your way up to
the goal, is where I come in. Sort of mediator between your ideals and
the box office. Of course you loved the fantasy. So did I, and I loved
your wanting to do it. But it took vaudeville just one performance to
decide that it wasn't ready for that kind of mysticism."

"And you forty minutes."

"You would never have backed it even over my O.K."

"Then you don't realize how far your O.K. goes with me."

"What is this," she smiled, "a mutual-admiration fête?"

"I don't know," suddenly leaning toward her, reddening. "I can only
speak for myself. Lilly--you're wonderful--"

She chose to be casual, most effectively, too.

"Indeed it is mutual. I need hardly to tell you what association with
your office has meant to me. The romance of an organization like yours.
The thrill of seeing it triple proportions in these few years. The fine
stimulating something that comes with the acquisition of each new
Amusement Enterprise Theater. The chats we have had over plays, play
writing, producing. Your own fine aim. Oh, it has made bearable even the
monotony of the secretarial end of it!"

"I am afraid your secretarial services are about to be dispensed with."

She placed a quick hand to her heart.

"What do you mean?"

He flecked his cigar, laughing over at her.

"You're delicious. What could I mean except that you have outgrown your
job?"

"You--mean--"

"I mean that I am going to officially place you in charge of the booking
department at--well, your own idea of salary."

"I--I don't know what to say."

"Don't say anything."

"You can't know--"

"I do know."

"You see, she is almost four now, and beautifully cared for, but, now
that her little mind is beginning to unfold--I--Oh, to be able to afford
a place of my own--next year--when she has outgrown Mrs. Dupree's. You
see, I've never really had her. I've such plans for the day when I can
have her rearing all to myself. I want life to unfold so naturally to
her. Like a flower. That's why I am so terribly jealous of every day we
spend apart. That's why you--you cannot know what it means to have you
tell me that I've made good. It means that the time is nearing for me to
have her with me, to--to--Well, you cannot--cannot know!"

She sat back, feeling foolish because her eyes were filling and trying
to smile back the tears.

He reached over to place his palms over her hand.

"How rightly named you are! 'Lilly.' One of those big, milky-spathed,
calla lilies. Calla Lilly."

"We'll be going now," she said, feeling for her jacket.

They rode down to Eleventh Street in a cab, almost silently, and as she
sat looking out, unsmiling, she could feel his gaze burn her profile.

He left her at the stoop, standing bareheaded.

"You've saved me from an evening of horrors."

"I'm glad."

"You're not angry--Calla Lilly?"

"Of course not."

"How soon again?"

"No."

"Yes, yes!"

"No."

And somehow the word was like a plummet deep into the years ahead.




CHAPTER VIII

One hot Saturday afternoon, at least a twelvemonth later, as Lilly was
rushing down from the children's department of one of Broadway's
gigantic cut-rate department stores, she stopped so abruptly that she
created a little throwback in the sidewalk jam.

Her miracle was broken. Her first impulse even now was to dart back, but
the tow of the crowd was strong, and, besides, she was suddenly eye to
eye with an exceedingly thin youth with a very long neck rising far
above a high collar, a pasty and slightly pimpled face evidently slow to
beard, and a soft hat pulled down over meek light-blue eyes, himself
even more inclined to push on than she.

It was her first encounter since her clean cleavage from a strangely
remote dream phase of her existence. For the first three years she had
carried about a fear of some such meeting, a passer-by brushing her
shoulders or a sense of presence at her back sending a shock through
her. Once she had hurriedly left a Subway train because of a fancied
likeness to Roy Kemble in a young fellow across the aisle. Even now
there were days when fancied resemblances seem to people the crowds.

"Why, Harry Calvert!"

"Hello," he said in the tempo of no great surprise, but purpling up into
his lightish hair. "I know you. You're Lilly Becker."

"Harry, I cannot believe my eyes! I haven't seen you since you were in
knickers. And to think we remembered each other! Come here a minute out
of the crowd. I want to talk to you."

He followed her with some reluctance and a great sheepishness out of
Broadway into quieter Thirty-fourth Street, twirling his hat, his
nervousness growing.

"You look fine, Lilly."

"What are you doing here, Harry? How is your grandma? St. Louis?"

She could have embraced, cried over him, the loneliness of years seeming
to rush to a head.

"Gramaw and I live here."

"Harry, not really!"

"Nearly two years, now."

"Where?"

"'Way out near Tremont Avenue."

"And you, Harry, what do you do?"

"I was window dresser for a gents' furnishing store up to a few weeks
ago, but it--it changed hands. I'm out of a job right now."

"Harry, do you ever hear from--home?"

"No, Miss Lilly, we never see anyone from there. You're the first."

"I'll tell you what. I'm going home with you. Take me out with you to
visit your grandma. I haven't seen her in years--it's been so long
ago--everything."

He was wringing his hat now and shifting.

"It's a long way out, Lilly. It's hardly built up out there at all."

"I don't care. I'll buy some pastries on the way and we will make a
party of it. Does she still keep boarders?"

"Roomers."

"Poor, dear Mrs. Schum, fancy her living here!"

They rode out on a surface car, changing twice and jammed face to face
on a rear platform, a brilliant pink out in her face.

"Harry, I just cannot realize it. You a full-fledged man!"

"I'm twenty-four."

"What is that yellow on your fingers? Not from smoking?"

"I used to a lot, but not now."

"Is your grandmother just as wrapped up in you as ever, Harry? Poor
dear!"

"Yes, she is. You sure look fine, Lilly. You're pretty!"

"And what in the world brought you to New York and what ever became of
Mr. Hazzard and--"

"Oh, gramaw read in the paper once that he died of that sore on his
face."

"And old Willie and Mr. Keebil and Snow Horton--ever see any of them,
Harry?"

"No; you see it is nearly two years since--"

"I have a little daughter--almost five years old!"

"Gramaw followed up in the papers when you were married. Flora Kemble
and Roy, they're both married, too."

"Harry, didn't you ever hear anything about--well, about my marriage?"

"Yes, there was something about it. I forget. You live in New York?"

"Yes, and, Harry, don't say anything when we get to your home. Just let
me walk in and surprise her."

"Yes."

More and more she noticed his indoor whiteness and the eyelids which
would twitch nervously.

"Do you keep well, Harry?"

"Fairly."

There was quite a walk from the car, across a viaduct, down a flight of
steps, and into a steep new street of flimsy-looking apartment houses of
the dawning era of vertical homes. But the Harlem River, neat as a
canal, flowed within easy view and there was something very scoured
about the expression of the just graded street of occasional vacant
lots, showing the first break in the continuity of city brick that
Lilly's tired eyes had encountered.

"Why, Harry, I've never been away out here before! How nice and clean!"

"Here we are."

They entered one of the tan-brick buildings, "El Dorado" writ in elegant
gilt script across the transom. Then up three flights of clean, new,
fireproof stairs, Harry inserting his key into one of the two doors that
faced the landing.

"Sh-h-h, Harry! Tell her it is just a friend."

Old odors laden with memory rushed to meet her; that pungency which,
unaccountably enough, reeks of the cold boiled potato, and which old
upholsteries, windowless hallways, and frequent meat stews can generate.

There was a blob of low-pressure gaslight in the hallway, a weak and
watery eye burning from a side bracket into the odor so poignant with
association. Tony Eli drowned at eighteen. Her father peering behind the
dresser. "Where's Lilly?" "Here I am!" Herself hugging up her knees in
their stout ribbed stockings, her round gaze on the red-glass globe with
the warts blown into it.

There it was, that same glass globe around the puny light; and the
hatrack--the one with the seat that opened for rubbers and school bags.

"Gramaw, come out. Here is some one."

A long cooking fork in her hand, and a puff of steam hissing out after
her, Mrs. Schum peered into the hallway. She was strangely smaller,
Lilly thought, as if the flesh were beginning to wither off the rack of
her bones.

"Mrs. Schum! Dear Mrs. Schum!"

"Who's that?"

"Come out, gramaw. It's no one to be afraid of."

"Harry!" Her voice came cracking out like a shot. "Harry, are you in
trouble?"

"No--no--"

"Who is hounding you? If you are here about my grandson, madam, they are
all the time trying to get the best of my boy. He hasn't broken parole
since old Judge Delahanty down in the Twenty-third Street Court--"

"Mrs. Schum! Dear Mrs. Schum! Don't you know me? Please! Think, dearie,
the little girl out in St. Louis who used to plague you for bread
and butter--"

The old face loosened, the eyes peering through spectacles held across
the nose with a bit of twine.

"It isn't--Lilly--Becker?"

"Right the first time, gramaw!"

"Bless my heart! Bless my soul! Let me sit down. I'm right weak. Little
Lilly--Becker!"

They embraced there in a hallway hardly wide enough to contain them.
These two, who ordinarily might have met again, after such a span of
years, in the mildest of reunions, here in each other's arms, hungrily,
heartbeat to heartbeat.

"Lilly, Lilly, come in here and let me look at you. Light up the front
room, Harry. Well, I declare! Let me sit down. I'm right weak-kneed.
Law! pretty is no name! Well, I declare!"

In the little front room of chromos, folding bed with desk attachment,
a bisque knickknack or two, they were finally knee to knee, Lilly's hat
tossed aside, her hands clasping the old veiny ones.

"Begin at the beginning, Mrs. Schum. Everything. First, tell me, dear,
how long since you have heard of my folks?"

"Harry, you go out in the kitchen and keep the things warm until gramaw
comes out to dish up. Set the table with a cloth on, and run over to the
delicatessen for a bit of cold cuts. He's a right smart help to me,
Lilly. Not like some boys, too proud to help. And now--now--let me
see--why, it's two years since I met your mother downtown in St. Louis
before I had any idea of coming here."

"How did she look?"

"Splendid. She was with one of her euchre friends, so I didn't have the
chance for an old-time chat, but she made me promise to come and see
her, and 'pon my word, just as young and pretty as you please, with a
fine face veil and a purple feather boa and shopping out of the Busy Bee
bins just the way she used to do."

"She looked--happy?"

"Indeed she did! Buying some menfolk stuff. Wool socks, I think she
said, for your father, was it, who is subject to colds in the head--"

"No, those weren't for papa. Oh, Mrs. Schum, it's so good to hear of her
first hand like this! What--what did she say about me?"

"Told me about you off here studying opera, and your husband was making
his home with them. I--I took it from what she said you were none too
happy with him, but I had no idea of your being here still! Aren't
things well with you, Lilly? I always said you reminded me of my Annie,
and she would have turned out something big if she had lived. I expect
it of you, too, Lilly."

"What else?"

"She put up a bold front with me, I will say that, never letting on that
there had been trouble. And then just before I left--we came away mighty
unexpectedly--Katy Stutz--"

"Katy Stutz--"

"Yes, came to sew for a family I had boarding with me, and she said she
heard you had left him for good and that your parents took sides with
your husband and had him in their home, occupying your very room, and
that your mother was as fussy over him as she ever was over you, babying
him to death. Lilly, Lilly, what is wrong with you?"

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