Just Around the Corner: Romance en casserole
slopped over full many a non-waterproof romance, lay on the floor, with
its red run into many pinks and its rosette limp as a wad of paper.
Goldie picked her careful way round it. Fear and nausea and sickness at
the heart made her dizzy.
The dresser, with its wavy mirror, was strewn with her husband's
neckties; an uncorked bottle of bay-rum gave out its last faint fumes.
She opened the first long drawer with a quivering intake of breath and
pulled out a shirt-waist, another, and yet another, and a coarse white
petticoat with a large-holed embroidery flounce. Then she dragged a
suit-case, which was wavy like the mirror, through the blur of her
tears, out from under the bed; and while she fumbled with the lock the
door behind her opened, and her heart rose in her throat with the sudden
velocity of an express elevator shooting up a ten-story shaft.
In the dresser mirror, and without turning her head or gaining her feet,
she looked into the eyes of her husband.
"Pussy-cat!" he said, and came toward her with his teeth flashing like
Carrara marble in sunlight.
She sprang to her feet and backed against the dresser.
"Don't! Don't you come near me!"
"You don't mean that, Goldie."
She shivered in her scorn.
"Don't you come near me! I came--to get my things."
"Oh!" he said, and tossed his hat on the bed and peeled off his coat.
"Help yourself, kiddo. Go as far as you like."
She fell to tearing at the contents of her drawer without
discrimination, cramming them into her bag and breathing furiously, like
a hare in the torture of the chase. The color sprang out in her cheeks,
and her eyes took fire.
Her husband threw himself, in his shirt-sleeves and waistcoat, across
the bed and watched her idly. Only her fumbling movements and the sing
of the too-high gas broke the silence. He rose, lowered the flame, and
lay down again.
Her little box of poor trinkets spilled its contents as she packed it;
her hair-brush fell from her trembling fingers and clattered to the
floor.
"Can I help you, Goldie-eyes?"
Silence. He coughed rather deep in his chest, and she almost brushed
his hand as she passed to the clothes wardrobe. He reached out and
caught her wrist.
"Now, Goldie, you--"
"Don't--don't you touch me! Let go!"
He drew her down to the bed beside him.
"Can't you give a fellow another chance, baby? Can't you?" She tugged
for her freedom, but his clasp was tight as steel and tender as love.
"Can't you, baby?"
"You!" she said, kicking at the sloppy satin slipper at her feet, as if
it were a loathsome thing that crawled. "I--I don't ever want to see you
again, you--you--"
"You drove me to it, pussy; honest you did!"
"You didn't need no driving. You take to it like a fish to water--nobody
can drive you. You just ain't--no--good!"
"You drove me to it. When you quit I just went crazy mad. I kicked the
skylight--I tore things wide open. I was that sore for you--honest,
baby!"
"I've heard that line of talk before. I ain't forgot the night at
Hinkey's. I ain't forgot nothing. You or horses can't hold me here!" She
wrenched at her wrists.
"I got a job yesterday, baby. Bill made good. Eighty dollars, honey! Me
and Cutty are quits for good. Ain't that something--now, ain't it?"
"Let me go!"
"Pussy-cat!"
"Let me go, I say!"
He coughed and turned on his side toward her.
"You don't mean it."
"I do! I do! Let go! Let go!"
She tore herself free and darted to the wardrobe door. He closed his
eyes and his lashes lay low on his cheeks.
"Before you go, Goldie, where's the antiphlogistin? I got a chest on me
like an ice-wagon."
"Sure, you have. That's the only time you ever show up before crack of
dawn."
He reached out and touched her wrist.
"I'm hot, ain't I?"
She placed a reluctant hand on his brow.
"Fever?"
"It ain't nothing much. I'll be all right."
"It's just one of your spells. Stay in bed a couple of days, and you'll
soon be ready for another jamboree!"
"Don't fuss at me, baby."
"It's in the wash-stand drawer in a little tin can. Don't make the
plaster too hot."
"Sure, I won't. I'll get along all righty."
She threw a shabby cloth skirt over her arm and a pressed-plush coat
that was gray at the elbows and frayed at the hem. He reached out for
the dangling empty sleeve as she passed.
"You was married in that coat, wasn't you, hon?"
"Yes," she said, and her lips curled like burning paper; "I was married
in that coat."
"Goldie-eyes, you know I can't get along without my petsie; you know it.
There ain't no one can hold a candle to you, baby!"
"Yes, yes!"
"There ain't! I wish I was feelin' well enough to tell you how sorry,
baby--how sorry a fellow like me can get. I just wish it, baby--baby--"
She surrendered like a reed to the curve of a scythe and crumpled in a
contortional heap beside the bed.
"You--you always get me!"
He gathered her up and laid her head backward on his shoulder, so that
her face was foreshortened and close to his.
"Goldie-eyes," he said, "I'll make it up to you! I'll make it up to
you!" And he made a motion as though to kiss her where the curls lay on
her face, but drew back as if sickened.
"Good God!" he said. "Poor little baby!"
Quick as a throb of a heart she turned her left cheek, smooth as a lily
petal, to his lips.
"It's all right, Harry!" she said, in a voice that was tight. "I'm
crazy, I guess; but, gee, it's great to be crazy!"
"I'll make it up to you, baby. See if I don't! I'll make it up to you."
She kissed him, and his lips were hot and dry.
"Lemme fix your plaster, dearie; you got one of your colds."
"Don't get it too hot, hon."
"Gee! Lemme straighten up. Say, ain't you a messer, though! Look at this
here wash-stand and those neckties! Ain't you a messer, though, dearie!"
She crammed the ties into a dresser drawer, dragged a chair into place,
removed a small tin can from the wash-stand drawer, hung her hat and
jacket on their peg, and lowered the shade.
MARKED DOWN
Along with radium, parcels post, wireless telegraphy, and orchestral
church music came tight skirts and the hipless movement.
Adolph Katzenstein placed his figurative ear to the ground, heard the
stealthy whisper of soft messalines and clinging charmeuse, and sold out
the Empire Shirt-waist Company for twenty-five hundred dollars at a
slight loss.
Five years later the Katzenstein Neat-Fit Petticoat was flaunted in the
red and white electric lights in the lightest part of Broadway, and the
figure of an ecstatic girl in an elastic-top, charmeuse-ruffled
petticoat had become as much of an epic in street-car advertising as the
flakiest breakfast food or the safest safety razor.
Then the Katzensteins moved from a simplex to a complex apartment,
furnished the dining-room in Flemish oak and the bedroom in white
mahogany; Mrs. Katzenstein telephoned to her fancy grocer's for
artichokes instead of buying cabbages from the street-vender, and Mr.
Katzenstein walked with the four fingers of each hand thrust into the
distended front pockets of his trousers.
On the first Tuesday of each month Mrs. Katzenstein entertained at
whist--an antediluvian survival of a bridgeless era.
At eight o'clock in the morning of one of these first Tuesdays she
entered her daughter's white-mahogany bedroom, raised the shades with a
clatter, and drew back the curtains.
"Birdie, get up! It's late, and we got house-cleaning this morning.
Papa's been gone already an hour."
The pink-and-white flowered comforter on the bed stirred, and two plump
arms, with frills of lace falling backward, raised up like sturdy
monoliths in the stretch that accompanies a yawn.
"Aw--yaw--yaw--mamma! Can't you let a girl sleep after she's been up
late? Tell Tillie she should begin her sweeping in the hall."
"I should know what time you got home last night. You sneak in like you
was afraid it would give me some pleasure to wake up and hear about it!
Who was there? What did Marcus have to say?"
"Aw, mamma, let me sleep--can't you? I'll get up in a minute."
"So close-mouthed she is--goes to the party with a grand boy like Marcus
and comes home like she was muzzled! Nothing to say! If I was out with a
young man so often I could talk."
"Please, mamma, pull down the shade."
"'Please, mamma, pull down the shade!'" mimicked Mrs. Katzenstein, in a
high falsetto. "After I rush round all day yesterday for the pink wreath
for her hair, that's what I hear the next morning--that's the thanks I
get!"
Birdie pulled the comforter up closer about her ears, and the head on
the rumpled pillow burrowed deeper.
"And such laziness! I been up two hours with my _Kuechen_ and cheese-pie
fixed already for this afternoon, and my daughter sleeps like a lady!
The man that gets her I don't envy!"
The pink-and-white mound on the bed heaved like a ship at sea.
"In a minute, mamma!"
Mrs. Katzenstein jerked up a filmy gown from across the back of a chair
and held it from her at arm's-length.
"Anybody's too good for a girl that ain't got no order! I wonder what
Marcus Gump would say if he knew how you treat your things? Her good
pink dress that I paid twenty dollars for the making alone she throws
round like it cost nothing! Sack-cloth is too good! I don't put it
away--you can wait on yourself."
However, as she spoke Mrs. Katzenstein folded the pink gown, with an
avalanche of lace flowing from the bodice, lengthwise in a drawer and
smothered it with tissue-paper.
"That a girl like that shouldn't be ashamed to let her poor old mother
wait on her!"
"I'd put it away, mamma, if you'd just give me time."
"Tuesday, when I have the ladies and my card party, she sleeps! No
consideration that girl has got for her mother!"
Birdie swung herself to the side of the bed; her wealth of crow-blue
hair fell over her shoulders; sleep trembled on her lashes.
"I'm up, ain't I? Now are you satisfied?"
"For all the help you are to me you might as well stay in bed the rest
of the morning. A girl that can come home from a party and have nothing
to say! But for my part I don't want to know. I guess they had a big
blow-out, didn't they?"
Birdie, high-chested as Juno, with wide, firm shoulders that sloped as
must have sloped the shoulders of Artemis when they tempted Actaeon,
coiled her hair before the mirror with the gesture that has belonged to
women since first they coiled their hair. Her cheeks, fleshly but
fruit-like in their freshness, might have belonged to a buxom nymph of
the grove.
"I wish you could have seen the spread Jeanette had, mamma! I brought
home the recipe for her lobster chops. I'll bet if she had one she had
six different kinds of ice-cream."
With one swoop Mrs. Katzenstein flung the snowy avalanche of pillows and
sheets over the footboard of the bed and opened wide both the windows.
"Tillie," she cried, "bring me the broom. I'll start in Miss Birdie's
room while you finish the breakfast dishes."
"Such an affair as she had! I said to Marcus, on the way home, it could
have been at Delmonico's and not have been finer."
"You don't say so! Such is life, ain't it? We knew Simon Lefkowitz when
he used to come to papa and buy for his stock six shirt-waists at a
time. Then they didn't live in no eighty-dollar apartment. Many's the
morning I used to meet the old lady at market. Who else was there?"
"Who? Let me see! Gertie Glauber was there. She had on that dress
Laevitt made; and, believe me, I liked mine better. Tekla Stein and
Morris Adler--you know those Adlers in the millinery business?"
"Nice people!"
"You couldn't get a pin between Tekla and him--honest, how that girl
worked for him! Selma Blumenthal was there, too, and I must say she
looked grand--those eyes of hers and that figure! But what those fellows