CHAPTER V
Anyone who has lived in Chicago knows that you don't live on the South Side. You simply do not live on the South Side. And yet Chicago's South Side is a pleasant place of fine houses and neat lawns (and this when every foot of lawn represents a tidy fortune); of trees, and magnificent parks and boulevards; of stately (if smoke-blackened) apartment houses; of children, and motor cars; of all that makes for comfortable, middle-class American life. More than that, booming its benisons upon the whole is the astounding spectacle of Lake Michigan forming the section's eastern boundary. And yet Fashion had early turned its back upon all this as is the way of Fashion with natural beauty.
We know that the Paysons lived south; and why. We know, too, that Carrie Payson was the kind of mother who would expect her married daughter to live near her. Belle had had the courage to make an early marriage as a way of escape from the Prairie avenue household, but it was not until much later that she had the temerity to broach the subject of moving north. She had been twenty when she married Henry Kemp, ten years her senior. A successful marriage. Even now, nearing forty, she still said, "Henry, bring me a chair," and Henry brought it. Not that Henry was a worm. He was merely the American husband before whom the foreign critic stands aghast. A rather silent, gray-haired, eye-glassed man with a slim boyish waistline, a fair mashie stroke, a keen business head, and a not altogether blind devotion to his selfish, pampered semi-intellectual wife. There is no denying his disappointment at the birth of his daughter Charlotte. He had needed a son to stand by him in this family of strong-minded women. It was not altogether from the standpoint of convenience that he had called Charlotte "Charley" from the first.
Thwarted in her secret ambition to move north, Belle moved as far south as possible from the old Prairie Avenue dwelling; which meant that the Kemps were residents of Hyde Park. Between the two families—the Kemps in Hyde Park and the Paysons in Prairie Avenue—there existed a terrible intimacy, fostered by Mrs. Carrie Payson. They telephoned each other daily. They saw one another almost daily. Mrs. Payson insisted on keeping a finger on the pulse of her married daughter's household as well as her own. During Charley's babyhood the innermost secrets of the nursery, the infant's most personal functions, were discussed daily via the telephone. Lottie, about sixteen at that time, and just finishing at Armour, usually ate her hurried breakfast to the accompaniment of the daily morning telephone talk carried on between her mother and her married sister.
"How are they this morning?... Again!... Well then give her a little oil.... Certainly not! I didn't have the doctor in every time you two girls had a little something wrong.... Oh, you're always having that baby specialist in every time she makes a face. We never heard of baby specialists when I was a.... Well, but the oil won't hurt her.... If they're not normal by to-morrow get him but.... You won't be able to go to the luncheon, of course.... You are! But if Charley's.... Well, if she's sick enough to have a doctor she's sick enough to need her mother at home.... Oh, all right. Only, if anything happens.... How was the chicken you bought yesterday?... Didn't I tell you it was a tough one! You pay twice as much over there in Hyde Park.... What are you going to wear to the luncheon?..."
Throughout her school years Lottie had always had a beau to squire her about at school parties and boy-and-girl activities. He was likely to be a rather superior beau, too. No girl as clear-headed as Lottie, and as intelligently fun-loving and merry, would tolerate a slow-witted sweetheart. The word sweetheart is used for want of a better. Of sweethearting there was little among these seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds. Viewed through the wise eyes of to-day's adolescents they would have seemed as quaint and stiff as their pompadours and high collars.
In a day when organised Social Work was considered an original and rather daring departure for women Lottie Payson seemed destined by temperament and character to be a successful settlement worker. But she never became one. Lottie had too much humour and humaneness for the drab routine of school-teaching; not enough hardness and aggressiveness for business; none of the creative spark that marks the genius in art. She was sympathetic without being sentimental; just and fair without being at all stern or forbidding. Above all she had the gift of listening. The kind of woman who is better-looking at thirty-five than at twenty. The kind of woman who learns with living and who marries early or never. With circumstance and a mother like Mrs. Carrie Payson against her, Lottie's chances of marrying early were hardly worth mentioning. Lottie was the kind of girl who "is needed at home."
Don't think that she hadn't young men to walk home with her from school. She had. But they were likely to be young men whose collars were not guiltless of eraser marks; who were active in the debating societies; and whose wrists hung, a red oblong, below their too-short sleeves. The kind of young man destined for utter failure or great success. The kind of young man who tries a pecan grove in Carolina, or becomes president of a bank in New York. None of these young men ever kissed Lottie. I think that sometimes, looking at her serious pretty lips closed so firmly over the white teeth, they wanted to. I'm sure that Lottie, though she did not know it, wished they would. But they never did. Lottie absolutely lacked coquetry as does the woman who tardily develops a sense of sex power. In Lottie's junior year these gawky and studious young men narrowed down to one. His name was Rutherford Hayes Adler and he was a Jew. There is no describing him without the use of the word genius, and in view of his novels of to-day (R. H. Adler) there is no need to apologise for the early use of the word. He was a living refutation of the belief that a brilliant mathematician has no imagination. His Armour report cards would have done credit to young Euclid; and he wrote humorous light verse to Lottie and sold insurance on the side. Being swarthy, black-haired, and black-eyed he was cursed with a taste for tan suits and red neckties. These, with the high choker collar of the period, gave him the look of an end-man strayed from the minstrel troupe. Being naturally shy, he assumed a swagger. He was lovable and rather helpless, and his shoe strings were always coming untied. His humour sense was so keen, so unerring, so fastidious as to be almost a vice. Armour students who did not understand it said, "He's a funny fellow. I don't know—kind of batty, isn't he?"
This young man it was who walked home with Lottie Payson all through her junior and senior years; sat next to her at meetings of the debating society; escorted her to school festivities; went bicycling with her on Saturday afternoons. The Payson household paid little attention to him or to Lottie. Belle was busy with her love affair. Henry Kemp had just appeared on her horizon. Mrs. Payson was deep in her real estate transactions. On the few occasions when Rutherford Hayes actually entered the house and sat down to await Lottie the two were usually on their way to some innocuous entertainment or outing. So that it was Aunt Charlotte, if anybody, who said "How do you do, young man. Oh yes, you're Mr. Adler. Lottie'll be right down." A little silence. Then kindly, from Aunt Charlotte, "H'm! How do you like your school work?" Years afterwards Adler put Aunt Charlotte into one of his books. And Lottie. And Mrs. Carrie Payson, too. He had reason to remember Mrs. Carrie Payson.
It was at the end of Lottie's senior year that Mrs. Payson became aware of this young man whose swart face seemed always to be just appearing or disappearing around the corner with Lottie either smiling in greeting or waving a farewell. End-of-the-year school festivities were accountable for this. Then, too, Belle must have registered some objection. When next young Adler appeared at the Prairie Avenue house it was Mrs. Payson who sailed down the rather faded green river of the parlor carpet.
"How do you do," said Mrs. Payson; her glance said, "What are you doing here, in this house?"
Rutherford Hayes Adler wanted to get up from the chair into which his lank length was doubled. He knew he should get up. But a hideous shyness kept him there—bound him with iron bands. When finally, with a desperate effort, he broke them and stumbled to his feet it was too late. Mrs. Payson had seated herself—if being seated can describe the impermanent position which she now assumed on the extreme edge of the stiffest of the stiff parlor chairs.
The sallow, skinny little Carrie Thrift had mellowed—no, that word won't do—had developed into an erect, dignified, white-haired woman of rather imposing mien. The white hair, in particular, was misleadingly softening.
"May I ask your father's name?" she said. Just that.
The boy had heard that tone used many times in the past nineteen hundred years. "Adler," he replied.
"Yes, I know. But his first name. What is his first name, please?"
"His first name was Abraham—Abraham I. Adler. The I stands for Isaac."
"Abraham—Isaac—Adler," repeated Mrs. Payson. As she uttered the words they were an opprobrium.
"Your father's name was Isaac too, wasn't it?" said the boy.
"His name was Isaac Thrift." An altogether different kind of Isaac, you would have thought. No relation to the gentleman in the Bible. A New England Isaac not to be confused with the Levantine of that name.
"Yes. I remember I used to hear my grandfather speak of him."
"Indeed! In what connection, may I ask?"
"Why, he came to Chicago in '39, just about the time your father came, I imagine. They were young men together. Grandfather was an old settler."
Mrs. Payson's eyebrows doubted it. "I don't remember ever having seen him mentioned in books on early Chicago."
"You wouldn't," said Adler; "he isn't."
"And why not?"
"Jew," said Rutherford Hayes, pleasantly, and laconically.
Mrs. Payson stood up. So did the boy. He had no difficulty in rising now. No self-consciousness, no awkwardness. There was about him suddenly a fluid grace, an easy muscular rhythm. "Of course, grandfather has been dead a good many years now," he went on politely, "and father, too."
"I'm afraid Lottie won't be able to go this evening," Mrs. Payson said. "She has been going out too much. It is bad for her school work. Young girls nowadays——"
"I see. I'm sorry." There was nothing of humility in the little bow he made from the waist. Ten minutes earlier you would never have thought him capable of so finished an act as that bow. He walked to the folding doors that led to the hall. On the way his glance fell on the portrait of old Isaac Thrift over the liver-coloured marble mantel. It was a fine portrait. One of Healy's. Adler paused a moment before it. "Is that a good portrait of your father?"
"It is considered very like him."
"It must be. I can see now why my grandfather took his part to the last."
"Took his part!" But her tone was a shade less corroding. "In what, if you please?"
"Grandfather lost his fortune when a firm he trusted proved—well, when a member of it proved untrustworthy."
When he grew older he was always ashamed of having thus taken a mean advantage of a woman. But he was so young at the time; and she had hurt him so deeply. He turned again now, for the door. And there stood Lottie, brave, but not quite brave enough. She was not wearing her white dress—her party dress, for the evening. Her mother had forbidden her to come down. And yet here she was. Braver—not much, but still braver—than Charlotte had been before her.
"I—I can't go, Ford," she faltered.
"It's all right," he said, then. And there, before the white-haired, relentless, and disapproving Carrie Payson he went up to her, put one lean dark hand on her shoulder, drew her to him and kissed her, a funny little boyish peck on the forehead. "Good-bye, Lottie," he said. And was gone.
Lottie's being needed at home began before the failure of Aunt Charlotte's sight. Aunt Charlotte had to go to the eye specialist's daily. Lottie took her. This was even before the day of the ramshackle electric. Lottie never begrudged Aunt Charlotte the service. Already between these two women, the one hardly more than twenty, the other already past sixty, there existed a curious and unspoken understanding. They were not voluble women, these two. Lottie never forgot those two hours in the waiting room of the famous specialist. Every chair was occupied, always. Silent, idle, waiting figures with something more crushed and apprehensive about them than ordinarily about the waiting ones in a doctor's outer room. The neat little stack of magazines on the centre table remained untouched. Sometimes, if the wait was a long one, Lottie would run out for an hour's shopping; or would drop in at her mother's office. Mrs. Payson usually was busy with a client; maps, documents, sheafs of blue-bound papers. But if one of her daughters came downtown without dropping in at the office she took it as a deliberate slight; or as a disregard of parental authority. Lottie hated the door marked:
CARRIE THRIFT PAYSONReal EstateBondsMortgages
"Oh, you're busy."
Mrs. Payson would glance up. There was nothing absent-minded about the glance. For the moment her attention was all on Lottie. "Sit down. Wait a minute."
"I'll come back."
"Wait."
Lottie waited. Finally, "Aunt Charlotte will be wondering——"
"We're through now." She would sit back in her desk chair, her hands busy with the papers, her eyes on her client. "Now, if you'll come in again on Monday, say, at about this time, I'll have the abstract for you, and the trust deed. In the meantime I'll get in touch with Spielbauer——"
She would rise, as would her client, a man, usually. With the conclusion of the business in hand she effected a quick change of manner; became the woman in business instead of the business woman. Sometimes the client happened to be an old time acquaintance, in which case Carrie Payson would put a hand on Lottie's shoulder. "This is my baby."
The client would laugh genially, "Quite a baby!" This before the word had taken on its slang significance.
"I wouldn't know what to do without her," Mrs. Payson would say. "I have to be here all day."
"Yes, they're a great help. Great help. Well—see you Monday, Mrs. Payson. Same time. If you'll just see Spielbauer——"
The door closed, Mrs. Payson would turn again to Lottie. "What was the girl doing when you left?"
"Why—she was still ironing."
"How far had she got?"
"All the fancy things. She was beginning on the sheets."
"Well, I should think so! At that hour."
Lottie turned toward the door. "Aunt Charlotte'll be waiting."
Mrs. Payson must have a final thumb on the clay. "Be very careful crossing the streets." And yet there was pride and real affection in her eyes as she looked after the sturdy vigorous figure speeding down the corridor toward the elevator.
Once, when Lottie returned to the oculist's after a longer absence than usual Aunt Charlotte had gone. "How long?" The attendant thought it must be fifteen minutes. Chicago's downtown streets, even to the young and the keen-sighted, were a maelstrom dotted at intervals by blue-uniformed figures who held up a magic arm and blew a shrill blast just when a swirl and torrent of drays, cabs, street-cars, and trucks with plunging horses threatened completely to engulf them. Added to this was the thunderous roar of the Wabash Avenue L trains. Even when the crossing was comparatively safe and clear the deafening onrush of a passing L train above always caused Aunt Charlotte to scuttle back to the curb from which she was about to venture forth. The roar seemed to be associated in her mind with danger; it added to her confusion. Leading a horse out of a burning barn was play compared with ushering Aunt Charlotte across a busy downtown street.
"Just let me take my time," she would say, tremulously but stubbornly immovable.
"But Aunt Charlotte if we don't go now we'll be here forever. Now's the time."
Aunt Charlotte would not budge. Then, at the wrong moment, she would dart suddenly across to the accompaniment of the startled whoop or curse of a driver, chauffeur, or car conductor obliged to draw a quick rein or jam on an emergency brake to avoid running her down.
Lottie, knowing all this, sped toward Wabash Avenue with fear in her heart, and a sort of anger born of fear. "Oh, dear! It does seem to me she might have waited. Mother didn't want a thing. Not a thing. I told her——"
She came to the corner of Wabash and Madison where they always took the Indiana Avenue car. She saw a little group of people near the curb and her heart contracted as she sped on, but when she came up to them it was only a balky automobile engine that had drawn their attention. She looked across at the corner which was their car-stop. There stood Aunt Charlotte. At once cowering, brave; terrified, courageous. At sight of that timorous, peering, black-garbed figure Lottie gave a little sob. The blood rushed back to her heart as though it had lain suspended in her veins.
"Aunt Charlotte, why did you do it?"
"I got across alone."
"But why didn't you wait for me? You knew——"
"I got across alone. But the street car—the wagons never stopping so a body can get out to the street car. And no way of telling whether it was an Indiana or a Cottage Grove. But I got across alone." She had her five-cent piece in her black-gloved trembling hand.
Safely in the car, Lottie waxed stern again. "Why didn't you wait, Aunt Charlotte? You knew I'd be back as soon as I could. I didn't mean to be late. That was awfully naughty of you, Charlotte Thrift."
Aunt Charlotte was looking out of the car window. What she saw must have been little more than a blur to her. But something told Lottie that in the dim eyes turned away from her was still another blur—a blur of hot mist. Lottie leaned forward, covering with her own firm cool young grasp the hand that lay so inertly in the black silk lap. "What is it? Why——"
Aunt Charlotte turned and Lottie saw that what she had sensed was true. "It isn't right!" said Aunt Charlotte almost fiercely, and yet in a half-whisper, for the car was crowded and she had a horror of attracting public notice.
"What isn't?"
"Your calling for me, and bringing me back. Every day. Every day."
"Now! You're just a little blue to-day; but the doctor said you'd only have to come down for treatment a week or two more."
"It isn't me. It's you. Your life! Your life!"
A little flush crept into Lottie's face. "It's all right, dear."
"It isn't all right. Don't you think I know!" Aunt Charlotte's voice suddenly took on a deep and resonant note—the note of exhortation. "Lottie, you're going to be eaten alive by two old cannibal women. I know. I know. Don't you let 'em! You've got your whole life before you. Live it the way you want to. Then you'll have only yourself to blame. Don't you let somebody else live it for you. Don't you."
"How about mother, slaving down in that office all day, when all the other women of her age are taking it easy—a nap at noon, and afternoon parties, and a husband to work for them?"
"Slaving fiddlesticks! She likes it. Your mother'd rather read the real estate transfers than a novel. Besides, she doesn't need to. We could live on the rents. Nothing very grand, maybe. But we could live. And why not let you do something? That's what I'd like to know! Why not——"
"Oh, I'd love it. All the girls—that is, all the girls I like—are doing some kind of work. But mother says——"
Aunt Charlotte sniffed. It was almost a snort. "I know what your mother says. 'No daughter of mine is going to work for her living.' Hmph!" (Which is not expressing it, but nearly.) "Calls herself modern. She's your grandfather over again and he thought he was a whole generation ahead of his generation. Wasn't, though. Little behind, if anything."
Sometimes Aunt Charlotte, the subdued, the vaguely wistful, had a sparkling pugnacity, a sudden lift of spirits that showed for a brief moment a glimpse of the girl of fifty years ago. A tiff with Carrie Payson (in which Charlotte, strangely enough, usually came off victorious) often brought about this brief phenomenon. At such times she had even been known to sing, in a high off-key falsetto, such ghostly, but rakish, echoes as: Champagne Charley Was His Name, or, Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines, or even, Up in a Balloon Boys. Strangely enough as she grew older this mood became more and more familiar. It was a sort of rebirth. At times she assumed an almost jaunty air. It was as though life, having done its worst, was no longer feared by her.
In spite of objections, Lottie made sporadic attempts to mingle in the stream of life that was flowing so swiftly past her—this new life of service and self-expression into which women were entering. Settlement work; folk dancing, pageantry, juvenile and girls' court work; social service; departmental newspaper work. Lottie was attracted by all of these and to any one of them she might have given valuable service. A woman, Emma Barton, not yet fifty, had been appointed assistant judge of the new girls' court. No woman had held a position such as that. Lottie had met her. The two had become friends—close friends in spite of the disparity in their ages.
"I need you so badly up here," Emma Barton often told Lottie. "You've got a way with girls; and you're not school-teachery or judicial with them. That's the trouble with the regular court worker. And they talk to you, don't they? Why, I wonder?
"Maybe it's because I listen," Lottie replied. "And they think I'm sort of simple. Maybe I am. But not so simple as they think." She laughed. A visit to Judge Barton's court always stimulated her, even while it saddened.
Chicagoans, for the most part, read in the papers of Judge Barton and pictured in their minds a stout and pink-jowled judiciary in a black coat, imposing black-ribboned eyeglasses, and careful linen. These people, if they chanced to be brought face to face with Judge Barton, were generally seen to smile uncertainly as though a joke were being played on them without success. They saw a small, mild-faced woman with graying hair and bright brown eyes—piercing eyes that yet had a certain liquid quality. She was like a wise little wren who has seen much of life and understands more than she has seen, and forgives more than she understands. A blue cloth dress with, probably, some bright embroidery worked on it. A modern workaday dress on a modern woman. Underneath, characteristically enough, a black sateen petticoat with a pocket in it, like a market woman. A morning spent in Judge Barton's court was life with the cover off. It was a sight vouchsafed to few. Emma Barton discouraged the curious and ousted the morbidly prying. Besides, there was no space in her tiny room for more than the persons concerned. It was less like a court room than your own office, perhaps.
Then there was Winnie Steppler, who wrote for Chicago's luridest newspaper under the nom de plume of "Alice Yorke." A pink-cheeked, white-haired, Falstaffian woman with the look and air of a picture-book duchess and the wit and drollery of a gamin. Twice married, twice widowed; wise with a terrible wisdom; seeing life so plainly that she could not write of what she saw. There were no words. Or perhaps the gift of words had kindly been denied her. Her "feature stuff" was likely to be just that. Her conversation was razor-keen and as Irish as she cared to make it. People were always saying to her, "Why don't you write the way you talk?"
"It's lucky for my friends I don't talk the way I write."
Perhaps these two women, more than anything or anyone else, had influenced Lottie to intolerance of aimless diversion. Not that Lottie had much time for her own aimless diversion even if she had fancied it. Rheumatism of a painful and crippling kind had laid its iron fingers upon Carrie Payson. Arthritis, the doctors called it. It affected only the fingers of the left hand—but because of it the downtown real estate office was closed. The three women were home together now in the big old house on Prairie, and Mrs. Payson was talking of selling it and moving into an apartment out south. It was about this time, too, that she bought the electric—one of the thousands that now began to skim Chicago's boulevards—and to which Lottie became a galley slave. She sometimes thought humorously of the shiny black levers as oars and the miles of boulevard as an endless sea to which she was condemned. Don't think that Lottie Payson was sorry for herself. If she had been perhaps it would have been better for her. For ten years or more she had been so fully occupied in doing her duty—or what she considered her obvious duty—that she had scarcely thought of her obligations toward herself. If you had disturbing thoughts you put them out of your mind. And slammed the door on them. When she was twenty-nine, or thereabouts, she had read a story that stuck in her memory. It was Balzac's short story of the old maid who threw herself into the well. She went to Aunt Charlotte with it.
"Now that's a morbid, unnatural kind of story, isn't it?" she said.
Aunt Charlotte's forefinger made circles, round and round, on her black-silk knee. Lottie had read the story aloud to her. "No. It's true. And it's natural."
"I don't see how you can say so. Now, when you were about forty——"
"When I was thirty-five or forty I had you and Belle. To tend to, I mean, and look after. If I hadn't had you I don't say that I would have gone off with the butcher boy, but I don't say that I wouldn't. Every time I wiped your noses or buttoned you up or spatted your hands when you were naughty it was a—well—a——"
"A sort of safety valve, you mean?" Lottie supplied the figure for her.
"Yes. Between thirty-five and forty—that's the time to look out for. You can fool nature just so long, and then she turns around and hits back."
"But look at all the girls I know—women of my age, and older—who are happy, and busy and contented."
There came a soft look into the dark eyes beneath the heavy black brows. From the vantage point of her years and experience she pronounced upon her sex. "Women are wonderful, Lottie," she said. "Just wonderful. A good thing for the race that men aren't like 'em. In self-control, I mean, and that. Wouldn'tbeany race, I reckon."