Bunner Sisters, by Edith Wharton
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Edith Wharton >> Bunner Sisters, by Edith Wharton
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7 Wharton, Edith. "Bunner Sisters." Scribner's Magazine 60
(Oct. 1916): 439-58; 60 (Nov. 1916): 575-96.
BUNNER SISTERS
BY EDITH WHARTON
PART I
I
In the days when New York's traffic moved at the pace of the
drooping horse-car, when society applauded Christine Nilsson at the
Academy of Music and basked in the sunsets of the Hudson River
School on the walls of the National Academy of Design, an
inconspicuous shop with a single show-window was intimately and
favourably known to the feminine population of the quarter
bordering on Stuyvesant Square.
It was a very small shop, in a shabby basement, in a side-
street already doomed to decline; and from the miscellaneous
display behind the window-pane, and the brevity of the sign
surmounting it (merely "Bunner Sisters" in blotchy gold on a black
ground) it would have been difficult for the uninitiated to guess
the precise nature of the business carried on within. But that was
of little consequence, since its fame was so purely local that the
customers on whom its existence depended were almost congenitally
aware of the exact range of "goods" to be found at Bunner Sisters'.
The house of which Bunner Sisters had annexed the basement was
a private dwelling with a brick front, green shutters on weak
hinges, and a dress-maker's sign in the window above the shop. On
each side of its modest three stories stood higher buildings, with
fronts of brown stone, cracked and blistered, cast-iron balconies
and cat-haunted grass-patches behind twisted railings. These
houses too had once been private, but now a cheap lunchroom filled
the basement of one, while the other announced itself, above the
knotty wistaria that clasped its central balcony, as the Mendoza
Family Hotel. It was obvious from the chronic cluster of refuse-
barrels at its area-gate and the blurred surface of its curtainless
windows, that the families frequenting the Mendoza Hotel were not
exacting in their tastes; though they doubtless indulged in as much
fastidiousness as they could afford to pay for, and rather more
than their landlord thought they had a right to express.
These three houses fairly exemplified the general character of
the street, which, as it stretched eastward, rapidly fell from
shabbiness to squalor, with an increasing frequency of projecting
sign-boards, and of swinging doors that softly shut or opened at
the touch of red-nosed men and pale little girls with broken jugs.
The middle of the street was full of irregular depressions, well
adapted to retain the long swirls of dust and straw and twisted
paper that the wind drove up and down its sad untended length; and
toward the end of the day, when traffic had been active, the
fissured pavement formed a mosaic of coloured hand-bills, lids of
tomato-cans, old shoes, cigar-stumps and banana skins, cemented
together by a layer of mud, or veiled in a powdering of dust, as
the state of the weather determined.
The sole refuge offered from the contemplation of this
depressing waste was the sight of the Bunner Sisters' window. Its
panes were always well-washed, and though their display of
artificial flowers, bands of scalloped flannel, wire hat-frames,
and jars of home-made preserves, had the undefinable greyish tinge
of objects long preserved in the show-case of a museum, the window
revealed a background of orderly counters and white-washed walls in
pleasant contrast to the adjoining dinginess.
The Bunner sisters were proud of the neatness of their shop
and content with its humble prosperity. It was not what they had
once imagined it would be, but though it presented but a shrunken
image of their earlier ambitions it enabled them to pay their rent
and keep themselves alive and out of debt; and it was long
since their hopes had soared higher.
Now and then, however, among their greyer hours there came one
not bright enough to be called sunny, but rather of the silvery
twilight hue which sometimes ends a day of storm. It was such an
hour that Ann Eliza, the elder of the firm, was soberly enjoying as
she sat one January evening in the back room which served as
bedroom, kitchen and parlour to herself and her sister Evelina. In
the shop the blinds had been drawn down, the counters cleared and
the wares in the window lightly covered with an old sheet; but the
shop-door remained unlocked till Evelina, who had taken a parcel to
the dyer's, should come back.
In the back room a kettle bubbled on the stove, and Ann Eliza
had laid a cloth over one end of the centre table, and placed near
the green-shaded sewing lamp two tea-cups, two plates, a sugar-bowl
and a piece of pie. The rest of the room remained in a greenish
shadow which discreetly veiled the outline of an old-fashioned
mahogany bedstead surmounted by a chromo of a young lady in a
night-gown who clung with eloquently-rolling eyes to a crag
described in illuminated letters as the Rock of Ages; and against
the unshaded windows two rocking-chairs and a sewing-machine were
silhouetted on the dusk.
Ann Eliza, her small and habitually anxious face smoothed to
unusual serenity, and the streaks of pale hair on her veined
temples shining glossily beneath the lamp, had seated herself at
the table, and was tying up, with her usual fumbling deliberation,
a knobby object wrapped in paper. Now and then, as she struggled
with the string, which was too short, she fancied she heard the
click of the shop-door, and paused to listen for her sister; then,
as no one came, she straightened her spectacles and entered into
renewed conflict with the parcel. In honour of some event of
obvious importance, she had put on her double-dyed and triple-
turned black silk. Age, while bestowing on this garment a
patine worthy of a Renaissance bronze, had deprived it of
whatever curves the wearer's pre-Raphaelite figure had once been
able to impress on it; but this stiffness of outline gave it an air
of sacerdotal state which seemed to emphasize the importance of the
occasion.
Seen thus, in her sacramental black silk, a wisp of lace
turned over the collar and fastened by a mosaic brooch, and her
face smoothed into harmony with her apparel, Ann Eliza looked ten
years younger than behind the counter, in the heat and burden of
the day. It would have been as difficult to guess her approximate
age as that of the black silk, for she had the same worn and glossy
aspect as her dress; but a faint tinge of pink still lingered on
her cheek-bones, like the reflection of sunset which sometimes
colours the west long after the day is over.
When she had tied the parcel to her satisfaction, and laid it
with furtive accuracy just opposite her sister's plate, she sat
down, with an air of obviously-assumed indifference, in one of the
rocking-chairs near the window; and a moment later the shop-door
opened and Evelina entered.
The younger Bunner sister, who was a little taller than her
elder, had a more pronounced nose, but a weaker slope of mouth and
chin. She still permitted herself the frivolity of waving her pale
hair, and its tight little ridges, stiff as the tresses of an
Assyrian statue, were flattened under a dotted veil which ended at
the tip of her cold-reddened nose. In her scant jacket and skirt
of black cashmere she looked singularly nipped and faded; but it
seemed possible that under happier conditions she might still warm
into relative youth.
"Why, Ann Eliza," she exclaimed, in a thin voice pitched to
chronic fretfulness, "what in the world you got your best silk on
for?"
Ann Eliza had risen with a blush that made her steel-browed
spectacles incongruous.
"Why, Evelina, why shouldn't I, I sh'ld like to know? Ain't
it your birthday, dear?" She put out her arms with the awkwardness
of habitually repressed emotion.
Evelina, without seeming to notice the gesture, threw back the
jacket from her narrow shoulders.
"Oh, pshaw," she said, less peevishly. "I guess we'd better
give up birthdays. Much as we can do to keep Christmas nowadays."
"You hadn't oughter say that, Evelina. We ain't so badly off
as all that. I guess you're cold and tired. Set down while I take
the kettle off: it's right on the boil."
She pushed Evelina toward the table, keeping a sideward eye on
her sister's listless movements, while her own hands were busy with
the kettle. A moment later came the exclamation for which she
waited.
"Why, Ann Eliza!" Evelina stood transfixed by the sight of
the parcel beside her plate.
Ann Eliza, tremulously engaged in filling the teapot, lifted
a look of hypocritical surprise.
"Sakes, Evelina! What's the matter?"
The younger sister had rapidly untied the string, and drawn
from its wrappings a round nickel clock of the kind to be bought
for a dollar-seventy-five.
"Oh, Ann Eliza, how could you?" She set the clock down, and
the sisters exchanged agitated glances across the table.
"Well," the elder retorted, "AIN'T it your birthday?"
"Yes, but--"
"Well, and ain't you had to run round the corner to the Square
every morning, rain or shine, to see what time it was, ever since
we had to sell mother's watch last July? Ain't you, Evelina?"
"Yes, but--"
"There ain't any buts. We've always wanted a clock and now
we've got one: that's all there is about it. Ain't she a beauty,
Evelina?" Ann Eliza, putting back the kettle on the stove, leaned
over her sister's shoulder to pass an approving hand over the
circular rim of the clock. "Hear how loud she ticks. I was afraid
you'd hear her soon as you come in."
"No. I wasn't thinking," murmured Evelina.
"Well, ain't you glad now?" Ann Eliza gently reproached her.
The rebuke had no acerbity, for she knew that Evelina's seeming
indifference was alive with unexpressed scruples.
"I'm real glad, sister; but you hadn't oughter. We could have
got on well enough without."
"Evelina Bunner, just you sit down to your tea. I guess I
know what I'd oughter and what I'd hadn't oughter just as well as
you do--I'm old enough!"
"You're real good, Ann Eliza; but I know you've given up
something you needed to get me this clock."
"What do I need, I'd like to know? Ain't I got a best black
silk?" the elder sister said with a laugh full of nervous pleasure.
She poured out Evelina's tea, adding some condensed milk from
the jug, and cutting for her the largest slice of pie; then she
drew up her own chair to the table.
The two women ate in silence for a few moments before Evelina
began to speak again. "The clock is perfectly lovely and I don't
say it ain't a comfort to have it; but I hate to think what it must
have cost you."
"No, it didn't, neither," Ann Eliza retorted. "I got it dirt
cheap, if you want to know. And I paid for it out of a little
extra work I did the other night on the machine for Mrs. Hawkins."
"The baby-waists?"
"Yes."
"There, I knew it! You swore to me you'd buy a new pair of
shoes with that money."
"Well, and s'posin' I didn't want 'em--what then? I've
patched up the old ones as good as new--and I do declare, Evelina
Bunner, if you ask me another question you'll go and spoil all my
pleasure."
"Very well, I won't," said the younger sister.
They continued to eat without farther words. Evelina yielded
to her sister's entreaty that she should finish the pie, and poured
out a second cup of tea, into which she put the last lump of sugar;
and between them, on the table, the clock kept up its sociable
tick.
"Where'd you get it, Ann Eliza?" asked Evelina, fascinated.
"Where'd you s'pose? Why, right round here, over acrost the
Square, in the queerest little store you ever laid eyes on. I saw
it in the window as I was passing, and I stepped right in and asked
how much it was, and the store-keeper he was real pleasant about
it. He was just the nicest man. I guess he's a German. I told
him I couldn't give much, and he said, well, he knew what hard
times was too. His name's Ramy--Herman Ramy: I saw it
written up over the store. And he told me he used to work at
Tiff'ny's, oh, for years, in the clock-department, and three years
ago he took sick with some kinder fever, and lost his place, and
when he got well they'd engaged somebody else and didn't want him,
and so he started this little store by himself. I guess he's real
smart, and he spoke quite like an educated man--but he looks sick."
Evelina was listening with absorbed attention. In the narrow
lives of the two sisters such an episode was not to be under-rated.
"What you say his name was?" she asked as Ann Eliza paused.
"Herman Ramy."
"How old is he?"
"Well, I couldn't exactly tell you, he looked so sick--but I
don't b'lieve he's much over forty."
By this time the plates had been cleared and the teapot
emptied, and the two sisters rose from the table. Ann Eliza, tying
an apron over her black silk, carefully removed all traces of the
meal; then, after washing the cups and plates, and putting them
away in a cupboard, she drew her rocking-chair to the lamp and sat
down to a heap of mending. Evelina, meanwhile, had been roaming
about the room in search of an abiding-place for the clock. A
rosewood what-not with ornamental fret-work hung on the wall beside
the devout young lady in dishabille, and after much weighing of
alternatives the sisters decided to dethrone a broken china vase
filled with dried grasses which had long stood on the top shelf,
and to put the clock in its place; the vase, after farther
consideration, being relegated to a small table covered with blue
and white beadwork, which held a Bible and prayer-book, and an
illustrated copy of Longfellow's poems given as a school-prize to
their father.
This change having been made, and the effect studied from
every angle of the room, Evelina languidly put her pinking-machine
on the table, and sat down to the monotonous work of pinking a heap
of black silk flounces. The strips of stuff slid slowly to the
floor at her side, and the clock, from its commanding altitude,
kept time with the dispiriting click of the instrument under her
fingers.
II
The purchase of Evelina's clock had been a more important
event in the life of Ann Eliza Bunner than her younger sister could
divine. In the first place, there had been the demoralizing
satisfaction of finding herself in possession of a sum of money
which she need not put into the common fund, but could spend as she
chose, without consulting Evelina, and then the excitement of her
stealthy trips abroad, undertaken on the rare occasions when she
could trump up a pretext for leaving the shop; since, as a rule, it
was Evelina who took the bundles to the dyer's, and delivered the
purchases of those among their customers who were too genteel to be
seen carrying home a bonnet or a bundle of pinking--so that, had it
not been for the excuse of having to see Mrs. Hawkins's teething
baby, Ann Eliza would hardly have known what motive to allege for
deserting her usual seat behind the counter.
The infrequency of her walks made them the chief events of her
life. The mere act of going out from the monastic quiet of the
shop into the tumult of the streets filled her with a subdued
excitement which grew too intense for pleasure as she was swallowed
by the engulfing roar of Broadway or Third Avenue, and began to do
timid battle with their incessant cross-currents of humanity.
After a glance or two into the great show-windows she usually
allowed herself to be swept back into the shelter of a side-street,
and finally regained her own roof in a state of breathless
bewilderment and fatigue; but gradually, as her nerves were soothed
by the familiar quiet of the little shop, and the click of
Evelina's pinking-machine, certain sights and sounds would detach
themselves from the torrent along which she had been swept, and she
would devote the rest of the day to a mental reconstruction of the
different episodes of her walk, till finally it took shape in her
thought as a consecutive and highly-coloured experience, from
which, for weeks afterwards, she would detach some fragmentary
recollection in the course of her long dialogues with her sister.
But when, to the unwonted excitement of going out, was added
the intenser interest of looking for a present for Evelina,
Ann Eliza's agitation, sharpened by concealment, actually preyed
upon her rest; and it was not till the present had been given, and
she had unbosomed herself of the experiences connected with its
purchase, that she could look back with anything like composure to
that stirring moment of her life. From that day forward, however,
she began to take a certain tranquil pleasure in thinking of Mr.
Ramy's small shop, not unlike her own in its countrified obscurity,
though the layer of dust which covered its counter and shelves made
the comparison only superficially acceptable. Still, she did not
judge the state of the shop severely, for Mr. Ramy had told her
that he was alone in the world, and lone men, she was aware, did
not know how to deal with dust. It gave her a good deal of
occupation to wonder why he had never married, or if, on the other
hand, he were a widower, and had lost all his dear little children;
and she scarcely knew which alternative seemed to make him the more
interesting. In either case, his life was assuredly a sad one; and
she passed many hours in speculating on the manner in which he
probably spent his evenings. She knew he lived at the back of his
shop, for she had caught, on entering, a glimpse of a dingy room
with a tumbled bed; and the pervading smell of cold fry suggested
that he probably did his own cooking. She wondered if he did not
often make his tea with water that had not boiled, and asked
herself, almost jealously, who looked after the shop while he went
to market. Then it occurred to her as likely that he bought his
provisions at the same market as Evelina; and she was fascinated by
the thought that he and her sister might constantly be meeting in
total unconsciousness of the link between them. Whenever she
reached this stage in her reflexions she lifted a furtive glance to
the clock, whose loud staccato tick was becoming a part of her
inmost being.
The seed sown by these long hours of meditation germinated at
last in the secret wish to go to market some morning in Evelina's
stead. As this purpose rose to the surface of Ann Eliza's thoughts
she shrank back shyly from its contemplation. A plan so steeped in
duplicity had never before taken shape in her crystalline soul.
How was it possible for her to consider such a step? And, besides,
(she did not possess sufficient logic to mark the downward trend of
this "besides"), what excuse could she make that would not excite
her sister's curiosity? From this second query it was an easy
descent to the third: how soon could she manage to go?
It was Evelina herself, who furnished the necessary pretext by
awaking with a sore throat on the day when she usually went to
market. It was a Saturday, and as they always had their bit of
steak on Sunday the expedition could not be postponed, and it
seemed natural that Ann Eliza, as she tied an old stocking around
Evelina's throat, should announce her intention of stepping round
to the butcher's.
"Oh, Ann Eliza, they'll cheat you so," her sister wailed.
Ann Eliza brushed aside the imputation with a smile, and a few
minutes later, having set the room to rights, and cast a last
glance at the shop, she was tying on her bonnet with fumbling
haste.
The morning was damp and cold, with a sky full of sulky clouds
that would not make room for the sun, but as yet dropped only an
occasional snow-flake. In the early light the street looked its
meanest and most neglected; but to Ann Eliza, never greatly
troubled by any untidiness for which she was not responsible, it
seemed to wear a singularly friendly aspect.
A few minutes' walk brought her to the market where Evelina
made her purchases, and where, if he had any sense of topographical
fitness, Mr. Ramy must also deal.
Ann Eliza, making her way through the outskirts of potato-
barrels and flabby fish, found no one in the shop but the gory-
aproned butcher who stood in the background cutting chops.
As she approached him across the tesselation of fish-scales,
blood and saw-dust, he laid aside his cleaver and not
unsympathetically asked: "Sister sick?"
"Oh, not very--jest a cold," she answered, as guiltily as if
Evelina's illness had been feigned. "We want a steak as usual,
please--and my sister said you was to be sure to give me jest as
good a cut as if it was her," she added with child-like candour.
"Oh, that's all right." The butcher picked up his weapon with
a grin. "Your sister knows a cut as well as any of us," he
remarked.
In another moment, Ann Eliza reflected, the steak would be cut
and wrapped up, and no choice left her but to turn her disappointed
steps toward home. She was too shy to try to delay the butcher by
such conversational arts as she possessed, but the approach of a
deaf old lady in an antiquated bonnet and mantle gave her her
opportunity.
"Wait on her first, please," Ann Eliza whispered. "I ain't in
any hurry."
The butcher advanced to his new customer, and Ann Eliza,
palpitating in the back of the shop, saw that the old lady's
hesitations between liver and pork chops were likely to be
indefinitely prolonged. They were still unresolved when she was
interrupted by the entrance of a blowsy Irish girl with a basket on
her arm. The newcomer caused a momentary diversion, and when she
had departed the old lady, who was evidently as intolerant of
interruption as a professional story-teller, insisted on returning
to the beginning of her complicated order, and weighing anew, with
an anxious appeal to the butcher's arbitration, the relative
advantages of pork and liver. But even her hesitations, and the
intrusion on them of two or three other customers, were of no
avail, for Mr. Ramy was not among those who entered the shop; and
at last Ann Eliza, ashamed of staying longer, reluctantly claimed
her steak, and walked home through the thickening snow.
Even to her simple judgment the vanity of her hopes was plain,
and in the clear light that disappointment turns upon our actions
she wondered how she could have been foolish enough to suppose
that, even if Mr. Ramy DID go to that particular market, he
would hit on the same day and hour as herself.
There followed a colourless week unmarked by farther incident.
The old stocking cured Evelina's throat, and Mrs. Hawkins dropped
in once or twice to talk of her baby's teeth; some new orders for
pinking were received, and Evelina sold a bonnet to the lady with
puffed sleeves. The lady with puffed sleeves--a resident of "the
Square," whose name they had never learned, because she always
carried her own parcels home--was the most distinguished and
interesting figure on their horizon. She was youngish, she was
elegant (as the title they had given her implied), and she had a
sweet sad smile about which they had woven many histories; but even
the news of her return to town--it was her first apparition that
year--failed to arouse Ann Eliza's interest. All the small daily
happenings which had once sufficed to fill the hours now appeared
to her in their deadly insignificance; and for the first time in
her long years of drudgery she rebelled at the dullness of her
life. With Evelina such fits of discontent were habitual and
openly proclaimed, and Ann Eliza still excused them as one of the
prerogatives of youth. Besides, Evelina had not been intended by
Providence to pine in such a narrow life: in the original plan of
things, she had been meant to marry and have a baby, to wear silk
on Sundays, and take a leading part in a Church circle. Hitherto
opportunity had played her false; and for all her superior
aspirations and carefully crimped hair she had remained as obscure
and unsought as Ann Eliza. But the elder sister, who had long
since accepted her own fate, had never accepted Evelina's. Once a
pleasant young man who taught in Sunday-school had paid the younger
Miss Bunner a few shy visits. That was years since, and he had
speedily vanished from their view. Whether he had carried with him
any of Evelina's illusions, Ann Eliza had never discovered; but his
attentions had clad her sister in a halo of exquisite
possibilities.
Ann Eliza, in those days, had never dreamed of allowing
herself the luxury of self-pity: it seemed as much a personal right
of Evelina's as her elaborately crinkled hair. But now she began
to transfer to herself a portion of the sympathy she had so long
bestowed on Evelina. She had at last recognized her right to set
up some lost opportunities of her own; and once that dangerous
precedent established, they began to crowd upon her memory.
It was at this stage of Ann Eliza's transformation that
Evelina, looking up one evening from her work, said suddenly: "My!
She's stopped."
Ann Eliza, raising her eyes from a brown merino seam, followed
her sister's glance across the room. It was a Monday, and they
always wound the clock on Sundays.
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