Fanny Herself Part 12

Two days after the funeral f.a.n.n.y Brandeis went back to the store, much as her mother had done many years before, after her husband's death. She looked about at the bright, well-stocked shelves and tables with a new eye--a speculative eye. The Christmas season was over. January was the time for inventory and for replenishment. Mrs. Brandeis had always gone to Chicago the second week in January for the spring stock. But something was forming in f.a.n.n.y Brandeis's mind--a resolve that grew so rapidly as to take her breath away. Her brain felt strangely clear and keen after the cras.h.i.+ng storm of grief that had shaken her during the past week.

"What are you going to do now?" people had asked her, curious and interested. "Is Theodore coming back?"

"I don't know--yet." In answer to the first. And, "No. Why should he? He has his work."

"But he could be of such help to you."

"I'll help myself," said f.a.n.n.y Brandeis, and smiled a curious smile that had in it more of bitterness and less of mirth than any smile has a right to have.

Mrs. Brandeis had left a will, far-sighted business woman that she was.

It was a terse, clear-headed doc.u.ment, that gave "to f.a.n.n.y Brandeis, my daughter," the six-thousand-dollar insurance, the stock, good-will and fixtures of Brandeis' Bazaar, the house furnis.h.i.+ngs, the few pieces of jewelry in their old-fas.h.i.+oned setting. To Theodore was left the sum of fifteen hundred dollars. He had received his share in the years of his musical education.

f.a.n.n.y Brandeis did not go to Chicago that January. She took inventory of Brandeis' Bazaar, carefully and minutely. And then, just as carefully and minutely she took stock of f.a.n.n.y Brandeis. There was something relentless and terrible in the way she went about this self-a.n.a.lysis.

She walked a great deal that winter, often out through the drifts to the little cemetery. As she walked her mind was working, working. She held long mental conversations with herself during these walks, and once she was rather frightened to find herself talking aloud. She wondered if she had done that before. And a plan was maturing in her brain, while the fight went on within herself, thus:

"You'll never do it, f.a.n.n.y. You're not built that way."

"Oh, won't I! Watch me! Give me time."

"You'll think of what your mother would have done under the same conditions, and you'll do that thing."

"I won't. Not unless it's the long-headed thing to do. I'm through being sentimental and unselfish. What did it bring her? Nothing!"

The weeks went by. f.a.n.n.y worked hard in the store, and bought little.

February came, and with the spring her months of private thinking bore fruit. There came to f.a.n.n.y Brandeis a great resolve. She would put herself in a high place. Every talent she possessed, every advantage, every sc.r.a.p of knowledge, every bit of experience, would be used toward that end. She would make something of herself. It was a worldly, selfish resolve, born of a bitter sorrow, and ambition, and resentment. She made up her mind that she would admit no handicaps. Race, religion, training, natural impulses--she would discard them all if they stood in her way.

She would leave Winnebago behind. At best, if she stayed there, she could never accomplish more than to make her business a more than ordinarily successful small-town store. And she would be--n.o.body. No, she had had enough of that. She would crush and destroy the little girl who had fasted on that Day of Atonement; the more mature girl who had written the thesis about the paper mill rag-room; the young woman who had drudged in the store on Elm Street. In her place she would mold a hard, keen-eyed, resolute woman, whose G.o.dhead was to be success, and to whom success would mean money and position. She had not a head for mathematics, but out of the puzzling problems and syllogisms in geometry she had retained in her memory this one immovable truth:

A straight line is the shortest distance between two points.

With her mental eye she marked her two points, and then, starting from the first, made directly for the second. But she forgot to reckon with the law of tangents. She forgot, too, how paradoxical a creature was this f.a.n.n.y Brandeis whose eyes filled with tears at sight of a parade--just the sheer drama of it--were the marchers G. A. R. veterans, school children in white, soldiers, Foresters, political marching clubs; and whose eyes burned dry and bright as she stood over the white mound in the cemetery on the state road. Generous, spontaneous, impulsive, warm-hearted, she would be cold, calculating, deliberate, she told herself.

Thousands of years of persecution behind her made her quick to appreciate suffering in others, and gave her an innate sense of fellows.h.i.+p with the downtrodden. She resolved to use that sense as a searchlight aiding her to see and overcome obstacles. She told herself that she was done with maudlin sentimentality. On the rare occasions when she had accompanied her mother to Chicago, the two women had found delight in wandering about the city's foreign quarters. When other small-town women buyers s.n.a.t.c.hed occasional moments of leisure for the theater or personal shopping, these two had spent hours in the ghetto around Jefferson and Taylor, and Fourteenth Streets. Something in the sight of these people--alien, hopeful, emotional, often grotesque--thrilled and interested both the women. And at sight of an ill-clad Italian, with his slovenly, wrinkled old-young wife, turning the handle of his grind organ whilst both pairs of eyes searched windows and porches and doorsteps with a hopeless sort of hopefulness, she lost her head entirely and emptied her limp pocketbook of dimes, and nickels, and pennies. Incidentally it might be stated that she loved the cheap and florid music of the hand organ itself.

It was rumored that Brandeis' Bazaar was for sale. In the spring Gerretson's offered f.a.n.n.y the position of buyer and head of the china, gla.s.sware, and kitchenware sections. Gerretson's showed an imposing block of gleaming plate-gla.s.s front now, and drew custom from a dozen thrifty little towns throughout the Fox River Valley. f.a.n.n.y refused the offer. In March she sold outright the stock, good-will, and fixtures of Brandeis' Bazaar. The purchaser was a thrifty, farsighted traveling man who had wearied of the road and wanted to settle down. She sold the household goods too--those intimate, personal pieces of wood and cloth that had become, somehow, part of her life. She had grown up with them.

She knew the history of every nick, every scratch and worn spot. Her mother lived again in every piece. The old couch went off in a farmer's wagon. f.a.n.n.y turned away when they joggled it down the front steps and into the rude vehicle. It was like another funeral. She was furious to find herself weeping again. She promised herself punishment for that.

Up in her bedroom she opened the bottom drawer of her bureau. That bureau and its history and the history of every piece of furniture in the room bore mute testimony to the character of its occupant; to her protest against things as she found them, and her determination to make them over to suit her. She had spent innumerable Sunday mornings wielding the magic paint brush that had transformed the bedroom from dingy oak to gleaming cream enamel. She sat down on the floor now, before the bureau, and opened the bottom drawer.

In a corner at the back, under the neat pile of garments, was a tightly-rolled bundle of cloth. f.a.n.n.y reached for it, took it out, and held it in her hands a moment. Then she unrolled it slowly, and the bundle revealed itself to be a faded, stained, voluminous gingham ap.r.o.n, blue and white. It was the kind of ap.r.o.n women don when they perform some very special household ritual--baking, preserving, house cleaning.

It crossed over the shoulders with straps, and its generous fullness ran all the way around the waist. It was discolored in many places with the brown and reddish stains of fruit juices. It had been Molly Brandeis'

canning ap.r.o.n. f.a.n.n.y had come upon it hanging on a hook behind the kitchen door, after that week in December. And at sight of it all her fort.i.tude and forced calm had fled. She had spread her arms over the limp, mute, yet speaking thing dangling there, and had wept so wildly and uncontrollably as to alarm even herself.

Nothing in connection with her mother's death had power to call up such poignant memories as did this homely, intimate garment. She saw again the steamy kitchen, deliciously scented with the perfume of cooking fruit, or the tantalizing, mouth-watering spiciness of vinegar and pickles. On the stove the big dishpan, in which the jelly gla.s.ses and fruit jars, with their tops and rubbers, bobbed about in hot water.

In the great granite kettle simmered the cooking fruit Molly Brandeis, enveloped in the familiar blue-and-white ap.r.o.n, stood over it, like a priestess, stirring, stirring, slowly, rhythmically. Her face would be hot and moist with the steam, and very tired too, for she often came home from the store utterly weary, to stand over the kettle until ten or eleven o'clock. But the pride in it as she counted the golden or ruby tinted tumblers gleaming in orderly rows as they cooled on the kitchen table!

"Fifteen gla.s.ses of grape jell, Fan! And I didn't mix a bit of apple with it. I didn't think I'd get more than ten. And nine of the quince preserve. That makes--let me see--eighty-three, ninety-eight--one hundred and seven altogether."

"We'll never eat it, Mother."

"You said that last year, and by April my preserve cupboard looked like Old Mother Hubbard's."

But then, Mrs. Brandeis was famous for her preserves, as Father Fitzpatrick, and Aloysius, and Doctor Thalmann, and a dozen others could testify. After the strain and flurry of a busy day at the store there was something about this homely household rite that brought a certain sense of rest and peace to Molly Brandeis.

All this moved through f.a.n.n.y Brandeis's mind as she sat with the crumpled ap.r.o.n in her lap, her eyes swimming with hot tears. The very stains that discolored it, the faded blue of the front breadth, the frayed b.u.t.tonhole, the little scorched place where she had burned a hole when trying unwisely to lift a steaming kettle from the stove with the ap.r.o.n's corner, spoke to her with eloquent lips. That ap.r.o.n had become a vice with f.a.n.n.y. She brooded over it as a mother broods over the shapeless, scuffled bit of leather that was a baby's shoe; as a woman, widowed, clings to a shabby, frayed old smoking jacket. More than once she had cried herself to sleep with the ap.r.o.n clasped tightly in her arms.

She got up from the floor now, with the ap.r.o.n in her hands, and went down the stairs, opened the door that led to the cellar, walked heavily down those steps and over to the furnace. She flung open the furnace door. Red and purple the coal bed gleamed, with little white flame sprites dancing over it. f.a.n.n.y stared at it a moment, fascinated. Her face was set, her eyes brilliant. Suddenly she flung the tightly-rolled ap.r.o.n into the heart of the gleaming ma.s.s. She shut her eyes then.

The fire seemed to hold its breath for a moment. Then, with a gasp, it sprang upon its food. The bundle stiffened, writhed, crumpled, sank, lay a blackened heap, was dissolved. The fire bed glowed red and purple as before, except for a dark spot in its heart. f.a.n.n.y s.h.i.+vered a little.

She shut the furnace door and went up-stairs again.

"Smells like something burning--cloth, or something," called Annie, from the kitchen.

"It's only an old ap.r.o.n that was cluttering up my--my bureau drawer."

Thus she successfully demonstrated the first lesson in the cruel and rigid course of mental training she had mapped out for herself.

Leaving Winnebago was not easy. There is something about a small town that holds you. Your life is so intimately interwoven with that of your neighbor. Existence is so safe, so sane, so sure. f.a.n.n.y knew that when she turned the corner of Elm Street every third person she met would speak to her. Life was made up of minute details, too trivial for the notice of the hurrying city crowds. You knew when Milly Glaenzer changed the baby buggy for a go-cart. The youngest Hupp boy--Sammy--who was graduated from High School in June, is driving A. J. Dawes's automobile now. My goodness, how time flies! Doeppler's grocery has put in plate-gla.s.s windows, and they're getting out-of-season vegetables every day now from Milwaukee. As you pa.s.s you get the coral glow of tomatoes, and the tender green of lettuces. And that vivid green? Fresh young peas! And in February. Well! They've torn down the old yellow brick National Bank, and in its place a chaste Greek Temple of a building looks rather contemptuously down its cla.s.sic columns upon the farmer's wagons drawn up along the curb. If f.a.n.n.y Brandeis' sense of proportion had not been out of plumb she might have realized that, to Winnebago, the new First National Bank building was as significant and epochal as had been the Woolworth Building to New York.

The very intimacy of these details, f.a.n.n.y argued, was another reason for leaving Winnebago. They were like detaining fingers that grasped at your skirts, impeding your progress.

She had early set about pulling every wire within her reach that might lead, directly or indirectly, to the furtherance of her ambition. She got two offers from Milwaukee retail stores. She did not consider them for a moment. Even a Chicago department store of the second grade (one of those on the wrong side of State Street) did not tempt her. She knew her value. She could afford to wait. There was money enough on which to live comfortably until the right chance presented itself. She knew every item of her equipment, and she conned them to herself greedily: Definite charm of manner; the thing that is called magnetism; brains; imagination; driving force; health; youth; and, most precious of all, that which money could not buy, nor education provide--experience.

Experience, a priceless weapon, that is beaten into shape only by much contact with men and women, and that is sharpened by much rubbing against the rough edges of this world.

In April her chance came to her; came in that accidental, haphazard way that momentous happenings have. She met on Elm Street a traveling man from whom Molly Brandeis had bought for years. He dropped both sample cases and shook hands with f.a.n.n.y, eying her expertly and approvingly, and yet without insolence. He was a wise, road-weary, skillful member of his fraternity, grown gray in years of service, and a little bitter.

Though perhaps that was due partly to traveling man's dyspepsia, brought on by years of small-town hotel food.

"So you've sold out."

"Yes. Over a month ago."

"H'm. That was a nice little business you had there. Your ma built it up herself. There was a woman! Gos.h.!.+ Discounted her bills, even during the panic."

f.a.n.n.y smiled a reflective little smile. "That line is a complete characterization of my mother. Her life was a series of panics. But she never lost her head. And she always discounted."

He held out his hand. "Well, glad I met you." He picked up his sample cases. "You leaving Winnebago?"

"Yes."

"Going to the city, I suppose. Well you're a smart girl. And your mother's daughter. I guess you'll get along all right. What house are you going with?"

"I don't know. I'm waiting for the right chance. It's all in starting right. I'm not going to hurry."

He put down his cases again, and his eyes grew keen and kindly. He gesticulated with one broad forefinger. "Listen, m' girl. I'm what they call an old-timer. They want these high-power, eight-cylinder kids on the road these days, and it's all we can do to keep up. But I've got something they haven't got--yet. I never read anybody on the Psychology of Business, but I know human nature all the way from Elm Street, Winnebago, to Fifth Avenue, New York."

"I'm sure you do," said f.a.n.n.y politely, and took a little step forward, as though to end the conversation.

"Now wait a minute. They say the way to learn is to make mistakes. If that's true, I'm at the head of the cla.s.s. I've made 'em all. Now get this. You start out and specialize. Specialize! Tie to one thing, and make yourself an expert in it. But first be sure it's the right thing."

"But how is one to be sure?"