Book: The Vertical City

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THE VERTICAL CITY

By

FANNIE HURST


_Author of_

"GASLIGHT SONATAS"

"HUMORESQUE"

ETC.


1922






CONTENTS


SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY

BACK PAY

THE VERTICAL CITY

THE SMUDGE

GUILTY

ROULETTE





SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY


By that same architectural gesture of grief which caused Jehan at Agra
to erect the Taj Mahal in memory of a dead wife and a cold hearthstone,
so the Bon Ton hotel, even to the pillars with red-freckled monoliths
and peacock-backed lobby chairs, making the analogy rather absurdly
complete, reared its fourteen stories of "elegantly furnished suites,
all the comforts and none of the discomforts of home."

A mausoleum to the hearth. And as true to form as any that ever mourned
the dynastic bones of an Augustus or a Hadrian.

An Indiana-limestone and Vermont-marble tomb to Hestia.

All ye who enter here, at sixty dollars a week and up, leave behind the
lingo of the fireside chair, parsley bed, servant problem, cretonne shoe
bags, hose nozzle, striped awnings, attic trunks, bird houses, ice-cream
salt, spare-room matting, bungalow aprons, mayonnaise receipt, fruit
jars, spring painting, summer covers, fall cleaning, winter apples.

The mosaic tablet of the family hotel is nailed to the room side of each
door and its commandments read something like this:

One ring: Bell Boy.

Two rings: Chambermaid.

Three rings: Valet.

Under no conditions are guests permitted to use electric irons in
rooms.

Cooking in rooms not permitted.

No dogs allowed.

Management not responsible for loss or theft of jewels. Same can be
deposited for safe-keeping in the safe at office.

* * * * *

Note:

Our famous two-dollar Table d'Hote dinner is served in the Red
Dining Room from six-thirty to eight. Music.

It is doubtful if in all its hothouse garden of women the Hotel Bon
Ton boasted a broken finger nail or that little brash place along the
forefinger that tattles so of potato peeling or asparagus scraping.

The fourteenth-story manicure, steam bath, and beauty parlors saw to
all that. In spite of long bridge table, lobby divan, and table-d'hote
seances, "tea" where the coffee was served with whipped cream and the
tarts built in four tiers and mortared in mocha filling, the Bon Ton
hotel was scarcely more than an average of fourteen pounds overweight.

Forty's silhouette, except for that cruel and irrefutable place where
the throat will wattle, was almost interchangeable with eighteen's.
Indeed, Bon Ton grandmothers with backs and French heels that were
twenty years younger than their throats and bunions, vied with twenty's
profile.

Whistler's kind of mother, full of sweet years that were richer because
she had dwelt in them, but whose eyelids were a little weary, had no
place there.

Mrs. Gronauer, who occupied an outside, southern-exposure suite of
five rooms and three baths, jazzed on the same cabaret floor with her
granddaughters.

Many the Bon Ton afternoon devoted entirely to the possible lack
of length of the new season's skirts or the intricacies of the new
filet-lace patterns.

Fads for the latest personal accoutrements gripped the Bon Ton in
seasonal epidemics.

The permanent wave swept it like a tidal one.

In one winter of afternoons enough colored-silk sweaters were knitted in
the lobby alone to supply an orphan asylum, but didn't.

The beaded bag, cunningly contrived, needleful by needleful, from little
strands of colored-glass caviar, glittered its hour.

Filet lace came then, sheerly, whole yokes of it for crepe-de-Chine
nightgowns and dainty scalloped edges for camisoles.

Mrs. Samstag made six of the nightgowns that winter--three for herself
and three for her daughter. Peach-blowy pink ones with lace yokes that
were scarcely more to the skin than the print of a wave edge running up
sand, and then little frills of pink-satin ribbon, caught up here and
there with the most delightful and unconvincing little blue-satin
rosebuds.

It was bad for her neuralgic eye, the meanderings of the filet pattern,
but she liked the delicate threadiness of the handiwork, and Mr. Latz
liked watching her.

There you have it! Straight through the lacy mesh of the filet to the
heart interest.

Mr. Louis Latz, who was too short, slightly too stout, and too shy
of likely length of swimming arm ever to have figured in any woman's
inevitable visualization of her ultimate Leander, liked, fascinatedly,
to watch Mrs. Samstag's nicely manicured fingers at work. He liked them
passive, too. Best of all, he would have preferred to feel them between
his own, but that had never been.

Nevertheless, that desire was capable of catching him unawares. That
very morning as he had stood, in his sumptuous bachelor's apartment,
strumming on one of the windows that overlooked an expansive
tree-and-lake vista of Central Park, he had wanted very suddenly and
very badly to feel those fingers in his and to kiss down on them.

Even in his busy broker's office, this desire could cut him like a swift
lance.

He liked their taper and their rosy pointedness, those fingers, and the
dry, neat way they had of stepping in between the threads.

Mr. Latz's nails were manicured, too, not quite so pointedly, but just
as correctly as Mrs. Samstag's. But his fingers were stubby and short.
Sometimes he pulled at them until they cracked.

Secretly he yearned for length of limb, of torso, even of finger.

On this, one of a hundred such typical evenings in the Bon Ton lobby,
Mr. Latz, sighing out a satisfaction of his inner man, sat himself down
on a red-velvet chair opposite Mrs. Samstag. His knees, widespread,
taxed his knife-pressed gray trousers to their very last capacity, but
he sat back in none the less evident comfort, building his fingers up
into a little chapel.

"Well, how's Mr. Latz this evening?" asked Mrs. Samstag, her smile
encompassing the question.

"If I was any better I couldn't stand it," relishing her smile and his
reply.

The Bon Ton had just dined, too well, from fruit flip _a la_ Bon Ton,
mulligatawny soup, filet of sole _saute_, choice of or both _poulette
emince_ and spring lamb _grignon_, and on through to fresh strawberry
ice cream in fluted paper boxes, _petits fours_, and _demi-tasse_.
Groups of carefully corseted women stood now beside the invitational
plush divans and peacock chairs, paying twenty minutes' after-dinner
standing penance. Men with Wall Street eyes and blood pressure slid
surreptitious celluloid toothpicks and gathered around the cigar stand.
Orchestra music flickered. Young girls, the traditions of demure sixteen
hanging by one-inch shoulder straps, and who could not walk across a
hardwood floor without sliding the last three steps, teetered in
bare arm-in-arm groups, swapping persiflage with pimply,
patent-leather-haired young men who were full of nervous excitement and
eager to excel in return badinage.

Bell hops scurried with folding tables. Bridge games formed.

The theater group got off, so to speak. Showy women and show-off men.
Mrs. Gronauer, in a full-length mink coat that enveloped her like a
squaw, a titillation of diamond aigrettes in her Titianed hair, and an
aftermath of scent as tangible as the trail of a wounded shark, emerged
from the elevator with her son and daughter-in-law.

"Foi!" said Mr. Latz, by way of somewhat unduly, perhaps, expressing his
own kind of cognizance of the scented trail.

"_Fleur de printemps_," said Mrs. Samstag, in quick olfactory analysis.
"Eight-ninety-eight an ounce." Her nose crawling up to what he thought
the cunning perfection of a sniff.

"Used to it from home--not? She is not. Believe me, I knew Max Gronauer
when he first started in the produce business in Jersey City and the
only perfume he had was at seventeen cents a pound and not always fresh
killed at that. _Cold storage de printemps_!"

"Max Gronauer died just two months after my husband," said Mrs. Samstag,
tucking away into her beaded handbag her filet-lace handkerchief, itself
guilty of a not inexpensive attar.

"Thu-thu!" clucked Mr. Latz for want of a fitting retort.

"Heigh-ho! I always say we have so little in common, me and Mrs.
Gronauer, she revokes so in bridge, and I think it's terrible for a
grandmother to blondine so red, but we've both been widows for almost
eight years. Eight years," repeated Mrs. Samstag on a small, scented
sigh.

He was inordinately sensitive to these allusions, reddening and wanting
to seem appropriate.

"Poor little woman, you've had your share of trouble."

"Share," she repeated, swallowing a gulp and pressing the line of her
eyebrows as if her thoughts were sobbing. "I--It's as I tell Alma,
Mr. Latz, sometimes I think I've had three times my share. My one
consolation is that I try to make the best of it. That's my motto in
life, 'Keep a bold front.'"

For the life of him, all he could find to convey to her the bleeding
quality of his sympathy was, "Poor, poor little woman!"

"Heigh-ho!" she said, and again, "Heigh-ho!"

There was quite a nape to her neck. He could see it where the carefully
trimmed brown hair left it for a rise to skillful coiffure, and what
threatened to be a slight depth of flesh across the shoulders had been
carefully massaged of this tendency, fifteen minutes each night and
morning, by her daughter.

In fact, through the black transparency of her waist Mr. Latz thought
her plumply adorable.

It was about the eyes that Mrs. Samstag showed most plainly whatever
inroads into her clay the years might have gained. There were little
dark areas beneath them like smeared charcoal, and two unrelenting sacs
that threatened to become pouchy.

Their effect was not so much one of years, but they gave Mrs. Samstag,
in spite of the only slightly plump and really passable figure, the look
of one out of health. Women of her kind of sallowness can be found daily
in fashionable physicians' outer offices, awaiting X-ray appointments.

What ailed Mrs. Samstag was hardly organic. She was the victim of
periodic and raging neuralgic fires that could sweep the right side of
her head and down into her shoulder blade with a great crackling and
blazing of nerves. It was not unusual for her daughter Alma to sit up
the one or two nights that it could endure, unfailing through the wee
hours in her chain of hot applications.

For a week, sometimes, these attacks heralded their comings with little
jabs, like the pricks of an exploring needle. Then the under-eyes began
to look their muddiest. They were darkening now and she put up two
fingers with a little pressing movement to her temple.

"You're a great little woman," reiterated Mr. Latz, rather riveting even
Mrs. Samstag's suspicion that here was no great stickler for variety of
expression.

"I try to be," she said, his tone inviting out in her a mood of sweet
forbearance.

"And a great sufferer, too," he said, noting the pressing fingers.

She colored under this delightful impeachment.

"I wouldn't wish one of my neuralgia spells to my worst enemy, Mr.
Latz."

"If you were mine--I mean--if--the--say--was mine--I wouldn't stop until
I had you to every specialist in Europe. I know a thing or two about
those fellows over there. Some of them are wonders."

Mrs. Samstag looked off, her profile inclined to lift and fall as if by
little pulleys of emotion.

"That's easier said than done, Mr. Latz, by a--widow who wants to do
right by her grown daughter and living so--high since the war."

"I--I--" said Mr. Latz, leaping impulsively forward on the chair that
was as tightly upholstered in effect as he in his modish suit, then
clutching himself there as if he had caught the impulse on the fly, "I
just wish I could help."

"Oh!" she said, and threw up a swift brown look from the lace making and
then at it again.

He laughed, but from nervousness.

"My little mother was an ailer, too."

"That's me, Mr. Latz. Not sick--just ailing. I always say that it's
ridiculous that a woman in such perfect health as I am should be such a
sufferer."

"Same with her and her joints."

"Why, except for this old neuralgia, I can outdo Alma when it comes
to dancing down in the grill with the young people of an evening, or
shopping."

"More like sisters than any mother and daughter I ever saw."

"Mother and daughter, but which is which from the back, some of my
friends put it," said Mrs. Samstag, not without a curve to her voice;
then, hastily: "But the best child, Mr. Latz. The best that ever lived.
A regular little mother to me in my spells."

"Nice girl, Alma."

"It snowed so the day of--my husband's funeral. Why, do you know that up
to then I never had an attack of neuralgia in my life. Didn't even know
what a headache was. That long drive. That windy hilltop with two men to
keep me from jumping into the grave after him. Ask Alma. That's how I
care when I care. But, of course, as the saying is, 'time heals.' But
that's how I got my first attack. 'Intenseness' is what the doctors
called it. I'm terribly intense."

"I--guess when a woman like you--cares like--you--cared, it's not much
use hoping you would ever--care again. That's about the way of it, isn't
it?"

If he had known it, there was something about his intensity of
expression to inspire mirth. His eyebrows lifted to little Gothic arches
of anxiety, a rash of tiny perspiration broke out over his blue shaved
face, and as he sat on the edge of his chair it seemed that inevitably
the tight sausagelike knees must push their way through mere fabric.

Ordinarily he presented the slightly bay-windowed, bay-rummed, spatted,
and somewhat jowled well-being of the Wall Street bachelor who is a
musical-comedy first-nighter, can dig the meat out of the lobster claw
whole, takes his beefsteak rare and with two or three condiments, and
wears his elk's tooth dangling from his waistcoat pocket and mounted on
a band of platinum and tiny diamonds.

Mothers of debutantes were by no means unamiably disposed toward him,
but the debutantes themselves slithered away like slim-flanked minnows.

It was rumored that one summer at the Royal Palisades Hotel in Atlantic
City he had become engaged to a slim-flanked one from Akron, Ohio. But
on the evening of the first day she had seen him in a bathing suit the
rebellious young girl and a bitterly disappointed and remonstrating
mother had departed on the Buck Eye for "points west."

There was almost something of the nudity of arm and leg he must have
presented to eighteen's tender sensibilities in Mr. Latz's expression
now as he sat well forward on the overstuffed chair, his overstuffed
knees strained apart, his face nude of all pretense and creased with
anxiety.

"That's about the way of it, isn't it?" he said again into the growing
silence.

Suddenly Mrs. Samstag's fingers were rigid at their task of lace making,
the scraping of the orchestral violin tearing the roaring noises in her
ears into ribbons of alternate sound and vacuum, as if she were closing
her ears and opening them, so roaringly the blood pounded.

"I--When a woman cares for--a man like--I did--Mr. Latz, she'll never
be happy until--she cares again--like that. I always say, once an
affectionate nature, always an affectionate nature."

"You mean," he said, leaning forward the imperceptible half inch that
was left of chair--"you mean--me--?"

The smell of bay rum came out greenly then as the moisture sprang out on
his scalp.

"I--I'm a home woman, Mr. Latz. You can put a fish in water, but you
cannot make him swim. That's me and hotel life."

At this somewhat cryptic apothegm Mr. Latz's knee touched Mrs.
Samstag's, so that he sprang back full of nerves at what he had not
intended.

"Marry me, Carrie," he said, more abruptly than he might have, without
the act of that knee to immediately justify.

She spread the lace out on her lap.

Ostensibly to the hotel lobby they were as casual as, "My mulligatawny
soup was cold to-night," or, "Have you heard the new one that Al Jolson
pulls at the Winter Garden?" But actually the roar was higher than ever
in Mrs. Samstag's ears and he could feel the plethoric red rushing in
flashes over his body.

"Marry me, Carrie," he said, as if to prove that his stiff lips could
repeat their incredible feat.

With a woman's talent for them, her tears sprang.

"Mr. Latz--"

"Louis," he interpolated, widely eloquent of eyebrow and posture.

"You're proposing, Louis!" She explained rather than asked, and placed
her hand to her heart so prettily that he wanted to crush it there with
his kisses.

"God bless you for knowing it so easy, Carrie. A young girl would make
it so hard. It's just what has kept me from asking you weeks ago, this
getting it said. Carrie, will you?"

"I'm a widow, Mr. Latz--Louis--"

"Loo--"

"L--loo. With a grown daughter. Not one of those merry-widows you read
about."

"That's me! A bachelor on top, but a home man underneath. Why, up to
five years ago, Carrie, while the best little mother a man ever had was
alive, I never had eyes for a woman or--"

"It's common talk what a grand son you were to her, Mr. La--Louis--"

"Loo."

"Loo."

"I don't want to seem to brag, Carrie, but you saw the coat that just
walked out on Mrs. Gronauer? My little mother she was a humpback,
Carrie, not a real one, but all stooped from the heavy years when she
was helping my father to get his start. Well, anyway, that little
stooped back was one of the reasons why I was so anxious to make it up
to her. Y'understand?"

"Yes--Loo."

"But you saw that mink coat. Well, my little mother, three years before
she died, was wearing one like that in sable. Real Russian. Set me back
eighteen thousand, wholesale, and she never knew different than that
it cost eighteen hundred. Proudest moment of my life when I helped my
little old mother into her own automobile in that sable coat.

"I had some friends lived in the Grenoble Apartments when you did--the
Adelbergs. They used to tell me how it hung right down to her heels and
she never got into the auto that she didn't pick it up so as not to sit
on it.

"That there coat is packed away in cold storage now, Carrie, waiting,
without me exactly knowing why, I guess, for--the one little woman in
the world besides her I would let so much as touch its hem."

Mrs. Samstag's lips parted, her teeth showing through like light.

"Oh," she said, "sable! That's my fur, Loo. I've never owned any, but
ask Alma if I don't stop to look at it in every show window. Sable!"

"Carrie--would you--could you--I'm not what you would call a youngster
in years, I guess, but forty-four isn't--"

"I'm--forty-one, Louis. A man like you could have younger."

"No. That's what I don't want. In my lonesomeness, after my mother's
death, I thought once that maybe a young girl from the West, nice girl
with her mother from Ohio--but I--funny thing, now I come to think about
it--I never once mentioned my little mother's sable coat to her. I
couldn't have satisfied a young girl like that, or her me, Carrie, any
more than I could satisfy Alma. It was one of those mamma-made matches
that we got into because we couldn't help it and out of it before it was
too late. No, no, Carrie, what I want is a woman as near as possible to
my own age."

"Loo, I--I couldn't start in with you even with the one little lie that
gives every woman a right to be a liar. I'm forty-three, Louis--nearer
to forty-four. You're not mad, Loo?"

"God love it! If that ain't a little woman for you! Mad? Why, just your
doing that little thing with me raises your stock fifty per cent."

"I'm--that way."

"We're a lot alike, Carrie. For five years I've been living in this
hotel because it's the best I can do under the circumstances. But at
heart I'm a home man, Carrie, and unless I'm pretty much off my guess,
you are, too--I mean a home woman. Right?"

"Me all over, Loo. Ask Alma if--"

"I've got the means, too, Carrie, to give a woman a home to be proud
of."

"Just for fun, ask Alma, Loo, if one year since her father's death I
haven't said, 'Alma, I wish I had the heart to go back housekeeping.'"

"I knew it!"

"But I ask you, Louis, what's been the incentive? Without a man in the
house I wouldn't have the same interest. That first winter after my
husband died I didn't even have the heart to take the summer covers off
the furniture. Alma was a child then, too, so I kept asking myself, 'For
what should I take an interest?' You can believe me or not, but half the
time with just me to eat it, I wouldn't bother with more than a cold
snack for supper, and everyone knew what a table we used to set. But
with no one to come home evenings expecting a hot meal--"

"You poor little woman! I know how it is. Why, if I so much as used to
telephone that I couldn't get home for supper, right away I knew the
little mother would turn out the gas under what was cooking and not eat
enough herself to keep a bird alive."

"Housekeeping is no life for a woman alone. On the other hand, Mr.
Latz--Louis--Loo, on my income, and with a daughter growing up, and
naturally anxious to give her the best, it hasn't been so easy. People
think I'm a rich widow, and with her father's memory to consider and
a young lady daughter, naturally I let them think it, but on my
seventy-four hundred a year it has been hard to keep up appearances in a
hotel like this. Not that I think you think I'm a rich widow, but just
the same, that's me every time. Right out with the truth from the
start."

"It shows you're a clever little manager to be able to do it."

"We lived big and spent big while my husband lived. He was as shrewd a
jobber in knit underwear as the business ever saw, but--well, you
know how it is. Pneumonia. I always say he wore himself out with
conscientiousness."

"Maybe you don't believe it, Carrie, but it makes me happy what you just
said about money. It means I can give you things you couldn't afford for
yourself. I don't say this for publication, Carrie, but in Wall Street
alone, outside of my brokerage business, I cleared eighty-six thousand
last year. I can give you the best. You deserve it, Carrie. Will you say
yes?"

"My daughter, Loo. She's only eighteen, but she's my shadow--I lean on
her so."

"A sweet, dutiful girl like Alma would be the last to stand in her
mother's light."

"But remember, Louis, you're marrying a little family."

"That don't scare me."

"She's my only. We're different natured. Alma's a Samstag through and
through. Quiet, reserved. But she's my all, Louis. I love my baby too
much to--to marry where she wouldn't be as welcome as the day itself.
She's precious to me, Louis."

"Why, of course! You wouldn't be you if she wasn't. You think I would
want you to feel different?"

"I mean--Louis--no matter where I go, more than with most children,
she's part of me, Loo. I--Why, that child won't so much as go to spend
the night with a girl friend away from me. Her quiet ways don't show it,
but Alma has character! You wouldn't believe it, Louis, how she takes
care of me."

"Why, Carrie, the first thing we pick out in our new home will be a room
for her."

"Loo!"

"Not that she will want it long, the way I see that young rascal
Friedlander sits up to her. A better young fellow and a better business
head you couldn't pick for her. Didn't that youngster go out to Dayton
the other day and land a contract for the surgical fittings for a big
new clinic out there before the local firms even rubbed the sleep out of
their eyes? I have it from good authority Friedlander Clinical Supply
Company doubled their excess-profit tax last year."

A white flash of something that was almost fear seemed to strike Mrs.
Samstag into a rigid pallor.

"No! No! I'm not like most mothers, Louis, for marrying their daughters
off. I want her with me. If marrying her off is your idea, it's best you
know it now in the beginning. I want my little girl with me--I have to
have my little girl with me!"

He was so deeply moved that his eyes were embarrassingly moist.

"Why, Carrie, every time you open your mouth you only prove to me
further what a grand little woman you are!"

"You'll like Alma, when you get to know her, Louis."

"Why, I do now! Always have said she's a sweet little thing."

"She is quiet and hard to get acquainted with at first, but that is
reserve. She's not forward like most young girls nowadays. She's the
kind of a child that would rather go upstairs evenings with a book or
her sewing than sit down here in the lobby. That's where she is now."

"Give me that kind every time in preference to all these gay young
chickens that know more they oughtn't to know about life before they
start than my little mother did when she finished."

"But do you think that girl will go to bed before I come up? Not a bit
of it. She's been my comforter and my salvation in my troubles. More
like the mother, I sometimes tell her, and me the child. If you want me,
Louis, it's got to be with her, too. I couldn't give up my baby--not my
baby."

"Why, Carrie, have your baby to your heart's content! She's got to be a
fine girl to have you for a mother, and now it will be my duty to please
her as a father. Carrie, will you have me?"

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