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




"Break the news in a public place, Lilly--the hotel lobby or a
taxi---and avoid family fireworks."

"My news can't be broken."

"Why?"

"Smashed, rather."

At four o'clock the morning of the arrival, Lilly was up, moving with
the aimlessness of great nervousness about the apartment. At that same
hour Mrs. Becker was emerging backward from her sleeper, kimono-clad,
and bulging through the curtains into the dark aisle.

"Carrie," her husband whispered after her, jutting his head out with a
turtle's dart, "it's only three o'clock, Eastern time. Why are you
getting up?"

"Because I want to," she said, plowing on.

Once in the dressing room, she fell to crying as she staggered and
dressed, apparently because each object, as she took it up, fell from
her fingers.

And yet the meeting occurred, as dreaded and anticipated moments often
do, damply, and as a heavily loaded bomb, for one reason or another, can
go off with a cat cough.

To the observer, what happened that early afternoon was simply a very
trim and very tailored young woman, her boyishness of attire somewhat
accentuated because her swift clean-cutness was so obviously its
inspiration, greeting, in the marble vastness of Grand Central Terminal,
a trio of what was plainly a pair of travel-stained parents and
perhaps an uncle.

Standing there peering between the grillwork as the train slid in
through the greasy gloom, watching the run of "red caps" and the slow
disgorging of passengers, Lilly saw it all in waves of movement, waves
of heat, waves of gaseous unreality.

Then she spied them. Her mother in the old, familiar vanguard, her
father with that bulge to his back from which the gray coat hung
loosely, Albert struggling to save his luggage from the fiery piracy of
a "red cap."

Her first sense was of fatness, their incredible, caravaning,
lumbaginous fatness! There was a new chin to her mother. Gone was the
old pulled-in waistline, but the old love of finery was out on her hat
in ostrich plumes, a boa of marabou lending further elegance. And her
father! He was somehow behind himself, slanting out from neck to quite a
bulge of abdomen, then receding again to legs that caught her throat
with a sense of their being too thin to sustain him. The fringe of hair
that showed beneath his slouch hat was quite white, too, and with that
same clutch at her throat she saw that it was thin as a baby's can
be thin.

It is doubtful if she would have known Penny. He was himself in
sebaceous italics. The old stolidity of stature was there, but hardly
the solidity. Like Mrs. Becker, he had chubbied up, so to speak, until
he looked shorter. And Albert was bald. It showed out under the rear of
his derby, like a well-scrubbed visage awaiting some deft hand to sketch
in the features, as poor Harry had done it to the clothespins. His
Scandinavian blondness was quite gone; there was just a fringe of tan
hair left and his jowls hung a bit, of skin not quite filled
with flesh.

All this in a telegraphic flash as she stood there waiting, and at the
sight of her father, on his too thin legs, dragging his cane slightly so
that it scraped, and in the other hand a sagging old black valise that
she remembered, all the tightness at her throat relaxed suddenly, the
tears coming so easily that she could smile through them.

The dragging of that cane, it hurt her poignantly, as little vagrant
memories can.

They spied her out even as she spied them, and, bodybeat to bodybeat,
she and her mother met, shaking to silent sobs and twisting hearts. Then
her father, pressing the coldly smelling mustache to her lips and
lifting her in the old way by the armpits, so that the instant closed
over her like a swoon.

With Albert it was strangely easier; there was a pause as wide as a hair
while he stood there blinking, and weighted with his unsurrendered
luggage.

"Albert," she said, finding the word at last.

At that moment, a "red cap," wild for fee, made for one of the brand-new
leather cases.

"Let go," he cried, in small anger. "That is a
six-dollar-and-ninety-eight-cent bag you are jerking."

Then he brought his gaze back to Lilly, his Adam's apple above the gray
necktie throbbing so that it seemed to her his entire body must
reverberate to the pistonlike process.

"Well," he said. "Well, well," the words dropping down into the dry well
of a gulp.

But somehow after the episode of the luggage, everything was easier, for
Lilly at least. She could smile now.

Very presently they were actually in a taxicab together, the talk of
the moment echoing against the silence of unspoken words taking shape
between them.

"Papa!" she said, finally, from the little folding seat opposite him,
stroking his hands and steadying herself with them against the throw of
the cab. "Oh, papa, papa!"

He smiled back through crinkles that were new to her, patting her in
turn and looking off.

Mrs. Becker fell to crying, pressing her handkerchief up against her
eyes and trying to lift her veil above the tears.

"After all these years," she kept repeating. "Years. Years."

"Now, now, Carrie--you promised."

"What hotel?" asked Penny, one of the bags across his knees and one
weather eye for the other on the driver's seat.

"The Astor; that is one of the best. I've your rooms all arranged for.
My--my place is too small."

"A less expensive would do, wouldn't it, mother?" addressing himself,
without once meeting Lilly's eye, to his mother-in-law.

"You're my guests," she said, trying to smile down old aversions. "This
is my party."

"Years--" sobbed Mrs. Becker. "She looks the same, but I'm a stranger to
my own child. Ben, we're strangers."

They were all suddenly in tears, Mr. Becker laying a clumsy hand to his
wife's arm.

"Carrie, you promised--"

"Can't help it--can't help it," her lips bubbling. "I'm bursting with
it. All these years. I can't hold in. What mother could?"

Only their arrival at the hotel stemmed the rising tide, but, once up
in their aerial suite of rooms, the last bell hop tipped out, then broke
the storm wave, flaying them all.

"Lilly--Lilly let me look at you. Baby--are you my baby--are you mine?
Years--O God--years--"

"Mamma--mamma--"

"Feel my heart. Ben--tell her--what I've suffered--"

"Carrie--now--now--what is past is past; we must look to the present
now."

"Papa dear--you look so changed and yet so--natural--"

There was an air of indescribable prosperity that rose off Mr. Becker,
in the nondescript but excellent quality of the gray suiting, the
polished, square-toed, custom-made shoes, the little linen string of
necktie, one for each day, the kind, despite family suasion, he had
always worn. But it was difficult for him to speak now because he was
always blinking and looking off.

"You've given us a great sorrow to bear, Lilly," he said, in a tone of
rehearsed reproach. "We tried to be thankful for our health
and--bear our--"

"There he goes on health again at a time like this. I'm a broken woman.
Years! Years of explaining lies to the community. Years of holding up
our heads over an opera singer that nobody ever hears about and that
never came home to her folks. Years of feeling them laugh behind our
backs--your father and husband trying to hold up their heads in business
under the lie. What have I ever done, I've asked myself all these
years--to deserve it? I've never harmed anyone. I've--"

"Carrie--please."

"Where do you live? How do you live? A stranger to my own child. Worse
than a stranger!"

"I've a well-paid position with a producing firm, mamma, and I live
nicely. You shall see, dear."

"Producing? Producing what? Trouble? A position! For that she threw away
her life. Her big talk of prima donna, and we find her in a position.
The girl that was going to set the world on fire. That's why we looked
our eyes out all these years for her name in the paper, only to find her
in a position! Ben, what have we ever done to deserve it? Albert, I'm
her mother, but my heart bleeds for you--"

He was tugging at his bag straps, industriously keeping his head
averted, but the red up in his ears.

"Mother," he said, "did you pack my throat atomizer?"

She licked up at the taste of her tears.

"It's wrapped in between your socks. You're standing in a draught,
Albert; close that window. You heard that man in the train about the
epidemic of colds that is starting all over the country. O my God! I'm
just so upset. And now that it has happened everything is so different.
I could tear out my tongue for what I want to say and I can't say
anything--not so much your father and I--at least we had Albert to help
make it up to us. We know what a son he has been, don't we, Ben, but to
think of him, the upstandingest boy that ever wore shoe leather--him
having to suffer for it--"

"Carrie, Carrie, it's time to go over all that later. Let's get our
bearings. Lilly, you've not changed except for the bones kind of
setting and--"

"I don't like you in those shirt waists. Too mannish. The lace I used to
dress that child in! The way I used to love to poke in the
bins--sacrificed for her. These years--years. Lilly--tell me you've been
a good girl--that your sinning has only been against us--child that I
raised--Lilly--"

They were locked in embrace again, Mrs. Becker blown hot and cold by the
ever-shifting clouds of her emotions, the two men standing by in a state
of helplessness that was always in inverse proportion to the lavalike
eruptions from the crater of her nerves.

"Mother, father and I will leave you alone for a while and you have your
talk together first--"

"No! She's your wife. You have yours first! It's about time you were
coming into some of your rights!"

Such a fiery redness was out in Albert's ears that against the lights
they were of the translucency of red-hot iron, and even through her pity
for his _malaise_, her old poignant distaste of him would not be laid.
She wanted him to lunge somehow with that bull-like head of his with the
bashedin squareness to its top, but since nothing like that happened,
she sprang up instead, grasping her mother's hand.

"Not now," she cried. "I want to tell you all something first, and then
I want to take you--to my place--to see where--the way I live--"

"Yes," said Mrs. Becker, rising with a crinkling of nose and drawing her
marabout boa about her, "I want to see the way you live--first. Guests
of hers at a hotel like this. A position, she tells me.
Lilly--Lilly--for God's sake tell me you've been a good girl--"

"Carrie!" At the sound of rare thunder in her husband's voice she did
subside then. Later she began.

"Nice rooms. Nicer than in Chicago that time. Albert, let me give you a
clean handkerchief out of the valise.... No, you don't know where they
are. Don't like that shirt waist. Too mannish. Don't worry about those
pillows, Albert. I brought your little one along. Glass tops. That's
nice, isn't it? How would you like one for your chiffonier at home,
Albert? Quit whittling toothpicks on the floor, Ben--Oh dear! if
somebody don't say something, I'll scream--"

"Come, mamma--papa--Albert. I want to take you--home, and while we drive
up there I want to talk to you."

But once within the cab and with her mother's constant runnel of talk
and its threat of hysteria, courage failed Lilly, so she sat back,
holding herself against rising panic and her mind refusing to hook
tentacles into the situation toward which they were speeding.

"You look mighty well, Lilly," her father would repeat, gently; "not
much changed, but a little more settled--in the bones--"

"Who does your darning and mending?"

"I do, mamma. See, this is Broadway, papa. We're just rounding the
famous Columbus Circle."

"I don't see much difference between this and St. Louis. Do you, Ben?
Just stores and stores like there are on Olive Street. Oh, look! There
is one of the Ryan Cut Price Drug Stores, just like we have at home.
Look at the crowds around that thing--what's that? 'Subway,' it says--"

"Lilly, Lilly, it makes me tremble when I think of you in this great
city alone."

"Why, papa, I never was so safe."

"It's not decent, that's what it's not."

"Now, Carrie--"

"Stop cutting me off every time I open my mouth."

"How far is it?" asked Albert, speaking for the first time.

"Why, I guess it ought to take about ten minutes from here," replied
Lilly, grateful for the question and trying to meet his averted glance.

He withdrew quite a disk of silver watch, reading it carefully.

"We're already on the way seven and a quarter minutes," he said.

"Albert," she began, "there is something I want to--ought to--tell
you--first--"

"Albert, close that window next to you."

"I--don't quite know--how to begin--"

"Close it all the way, Albert, you're still in a draught."

Suddenly Lilly sat back, silent holding her father's hand the rest of
the way.

But no sooner were the three of them safely into the little front room
than, without even seating them, she rushed out to forestall Zoe.

But too late. That young lady herself had already appeared between the
curtains of the alcove. She had done the outlandish, the outrageous, the
irrelevant thing.

An old red rep portière wound tightly around her body to below the
armpits, and held there by skillfully adjusted bands of black velvet, a
fillet of the same so low that it touched her eyebrows secured about her
boxed and brilliantly blond hair, she held the half-profile pose of a
Carmencita, a pair of ten-cent-store black earrings dangling and her
upflung gesture one of defiance, mischief with an unmistakable dash of
irrepressible dramatics.

In a silence that shaped itself to a grin, Lilly, caught midstep as it
were, stood regarding her daughter. She wanted to scream, to throw back
her head and shout her hysteria, to spank her daughter bodily there
across her knees, and more than that she wanted to laugh! Enormous
laughter, to allay her sense of madness.

Instead she found voice, which, when it came, was not her own, for
thinness.

"Albert," she said, "this is your daughter--Zoe."

"Ben," whispered Mrs. Becker, out of a fantastic cave of silence and
rising suddenly from her chair to plant herself on the overstuffed
divan, where there was more horizontal room--"Ben, I think I'm going
to faint."

And she did.




CHAPTER IX

Yet within a week Mrs. Becker, through all the fog of her bewilderment,
was embroidering seed pearls on her granddaughter's white
graduation slippers.

Forty years of dogged loyalty to the white string ties, fresh every day,
had gone down before seventeen's mandate; and to Ben Becker's
unspeakable sheepishness, he had appeared one evening in an impeccable
dark-blue knitted cravat, his collar, of cut heretofore easily inclusive
of chin, snugger to his neck, and flowing out to slight points.

"So you let her bamboozle you into something I couldn't accomplish in
thirty-eight years," was Mrs. Becker's sole comment through a mouthful
of seed pearls.

"Nonsense! The child has ideas. These collars don't dig in."

"Humph! She's had you around her little finger from the start."

"Now, Carrie, why do you say that?"

"Because it's true," trying not to smile.

It was.

An immediate _entente cordiale_ had shaped itself around Zoe and her
grandfather. She named him with her usual fantastic aptitude.

"Dapple-dear," she would have it, and could not explain the choice. It
must have been some such remote analogy as his likeness to an old
dapple-gray family horse, patient flanked and thoroughly imperturbable
to the fleck of the whip.

Her grandmother she promptly christened "Tippy," also for a reason she
could not or would not divulge. But one evening, to her secret
amusement, Lilly found a sheet of paper in the litter of the desk,
jotted all over with Zoe's joyous scrawl, "Zantippe," in every case the
first syllable crossed out.

All but Albert. She addressed him quite studiedly, "Father," her teeth
coming down in a little bite over her lower lip, her use of the term
never failing to elicit the rush of red to his ears.

He seemed tranced, falling into all plans, just so they included the
presence of his mother-in-law, without comment. To her proverbial apron
strings he kept firm hold, literally not permitting her out of his
sight. Even when he addressed Lilly or his daughter his gaze was
straight for Mrs. Becker, and the flags of her moral support that he
must have had the eyes to see waving for him in her glance.

The impending interview began to take on the proportions of a delayed
tooth-pulling. Repeatedly Lilly had cleared the way for it; just as
repeatedly he had fled to cover. A week passed.

Meanwhile something disquieting happened. It developed in further
correspondence from Washington on the matter of canteen equipment, that
there was some thought of sending Albert to France. An increased
stolidity was his sole reaction, but there was no doubt that the
prospect of an impending ocean trip weighed heavily.

The submarine situation, at a time when the seas were sown with the
menace of sudden death, was of greatest and worrying concern to him.

No new device was overlooked. His room at the hotel was littered with
rubber suits, guaranteed to keep the body floating upright for thirteen
hours. Adjustable cork life savers. Patent propellers. Wings.

There was talk, in the face of the impending contingency, of applying
for a commission. Albert in olive drab! To Lilly he would not conjure.

But meanwhile, to the slow champings of a huge governmental machine in
travail, there was little to do but wait, and in the interim not a day
that he and Mrs. Becker failed to follow up this or that newest device
against bone-cracking seas.

"Albert, there must be a way out! Don't tell me there are not plenty of
men who could help install canteen service. Let them send Vincent
Bankhead. He's younger. You leave it to me if they decide to send you.
I'll find you a way out. It's done every day."

"Wait until I'm called, mother; then there's time to act."

But his eyes were worried.

One day when the strain of holding together the precarious threads of
the situation was becoming almost more than she could bear, and the end
of the ten-day vacation period she was allowing herself from the office
was at hand, Lilly spread three matinée tickets out on the table of a
tea room where the five of them were lunching.

"Zoe, you and your grandparents are going to the Hippodrome this
afternoon. Albert and I will take a walk or a drive and meet you at the
hotel afterward."

"Mother, you come, too."

"No, Albert, Lilly's right. I want this thing settled. I want something
decided or I'll go mad. My husband has got me muzzled; I'm afraid to
open my mouth; but if I don't know something soon, I'll go crazy. Why
are we here? When are we all going back? I don't like it here. I can't
stand the noise. My servant girl is out there eating me out of house and
home. I didn't even lock the grocery closet; that is the state of
excitement I left home in. Something has got to be settled. The minute I
open my mouth to talk about what is in the back of all our heads,
everybody shushes me up. Now you two go and talk it out. I want to go
home. I want us all to go home. I'm a wreck. I--"

"Carrie--"

"Oh, I'll shut up! Next time you travel with me, get me a muzzle. All
I'm good for is to bear the brunt of everything. You've dribbled my head
full of enough these last seventeen years to drive any woman but me
crazy. But with her, it's a soft mouth. I'll shut up, but for God's sake
settle things. I'm going crazy. I can't stand it."

The look of one trapped settled over Albert,

"I think I'd rather walk," he said; "those cabs are reckless and the
meters run up so."

"Don't curl up your lips so, Lilly, over a little economy. Albert's
right. What good does it do you to earn, the way you spend? Your husband
has forty thousand dollars to show, and what have you to show? Taxicab
rides don't draw any interest. Don't be so ready to curl up your lips."

"Why, mamma, you imagine things!" And to Albert, "Of course, let's
walk."

For two hours, then, oftentimes stopping to face each other, they paced
the wind-swept rectangle of the reservoir in Central Park, spring out in
the air, but quite a tear of breeze across their high place.

He was sullen, casuistic, and impenetrable as a sea wall under a
dashing, and the thought came to her that had he presented any other
surface it would have been easier.

"Well, Albert," she began, facing him there in the wide afternoon light,
"what is there that we two can say to each other?"

"Words," he said, stodgy in his bitterness, "mean nothing against
seventeen years."

"You're right. And yet--I want you to know, Albert--before you go
across--"

"Don't be too sure you'll be rid of me that way."

"Or before you go back home--that she is yours as much as mine and--"

"Generous," he said, dryly.

She could have beaten her head with a sense of futility.

"You've been a bad woman with a streak of devil in you. Tried to ruin my
life, but I didn't let you. No, siree! I've worked things out. I've
gotten on. I'm big in my way--in my business--in my home."

"Albert, I love to hear you say that!"

"You! You don't love anything or anybody outside yourself."

"Why? Because I took my chance to save myself from everything I--I
hated! Not you--not they--but everything it stands for out there. Does
self-preservation imply only selfishness?"

"Whatever it implies," he answered, stung to dark red by his effort for
quick retort, "you're selfish--rotten selfish. But you haven't kept me
down. I've gotten up these eighteen years--and you--you--Bah!"

"You've been happy, Albert? Tell me you have."

"Happy! I'm not a hog for happiness. You to inquire about my happiness!
Lots you care! I've had my share of contentment. Contented as a man can
be in a community where he has kept up a farce for seventeen years that
his wife is off with his consent studying opera. But I've kept my
name--kept it in spite of you. I don't know what's been what with you.
Guess if the truth is known, I'm afraid to think what's what!"

"Albert--"

"Oh, I don't put anything past you. I don't even know if that girl is
mine. For all I know you're a--"

"Albert!"

"Bah! I don't put anything past you!"

She faced his words as if they were blows, letting them rain.

"You're lying, Albert," she said, evenly. "She's yours and you know it."

"I've kept _my_ name! Kept it and tried to make it up to your parents,
who deserved better than you!"

She quivered and the red that sprang out in her face was almost purple,
and yet by her silence bared her chest for more, as if grateful for the
sting of the lash.

"Bah! Don't be afraid. I don't want to know anything, but I'm not the
booby I may seem to you. When a woman has lived around this way for all
these years, in with a gang of show folks--Bah! I don't want to
know." And spat.

"She's yours, Albert, and you know it. You know it!"

"Yes, I guess she is, from the look of her, not that I put anything past
you. But that's your business. You're nothing to me. I'm cured of you.
You couldn't make me suffer the way they do in books. I've kept my name,
so if it's divorce you have on your brain, you might as well get it out,
because--"

"No, Albert--"

"I've kept my name, whatever you've done to yours. Your life is your
business. But the girl. That's where I have a right or two coming
to me."

She was prepared for just this, but somehow when it came it was a full
moment before she could answer, for the rush of fear that choked her.

"That's for--for Zoe to decide."

"That's for _me_ to decide. She goes to a decent, respectable home where
she belongs. You're not fit to raise her. Look at what you made of her.
A fine specimen. A short-haired freak with all your crazy ideas thriving
in her head. You've ruined your life, but you didn't succeed in ruining
mine and you won't ruin hers. You and your stage-struck notions that
never got you anywhere. She's going home where she belongs!"

She could hardly breathe for keeping down the rising tide of her terror,
but her eyes were always cold for him.

"Your daughter has a lyric-soprano voice, and however little that may
mean to you she is going to delight the world with it some day. One of
the great masters of the world has made her his protégée. She is
preparing for her audition--her hearing--in the fall, and it is even
possible she may be singing in grand opera next season. You cannot--"

"I'll see her dead first. You were an opera bird, too. I'll see her dead
first before I let her make a zero mark out of her life as her crazy
mother did before her."

"Albert, can't you see! Zoe's the wine. You, mamma--papa--the vine. I
don't count. I--I'm sort of the grape--that fermented--you see! She's
me--plus. Her arm is long enough to touch what she wants. Mine wasn't. I
saw it, but I couldn't reach. I was one generation too underdone. You
cannot have Zoe. I cannot. She doesn't belong to you or me. She belongs
to life. She's not mine. She is only my success; she--"

"She--goes--home!"

"No!"

"Why in God's name did you get me on here? You don't expect to see me
stand by and countenance your craziness?"

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