Fanny Herself

E >> Edna Ferber >> Fanny Herself

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"I--I'd like to see you again, Miss Brandeis. If you'll let
me."

"I'm so busy," faltered Fanny. Then it came to her that
perhaps he did not know. "I'm with Haynes-Cooper, you
know. Assistant buyer in the infants' wear department."

"Yes, I know. I suppose a girl like you couldn't be
interested in seeing a chap like me again, but I thought
maybe----"

"But I would," interrupted Fanny, impulsively. "Indeed I
would."

"Really! Perhaps you'll drive, some evening. Over to the
Bismarck Gardens, or somewhere. It would rest you."

"I'm sure it would. Suppose you telephone me."

That was her honest, forthright, Winnebago Wisconsin self
talking. But up in her apartment the other Fanny Brandeis,
the calculating, ambitious, determined woman, said: "Now
why did I say that! I never want to see the boy again.

"Use him. Experiment with him. Evidently men are going to
enter into this thing. Michael Fenger has, already. And
now this boy. Why not try certain tests with them as we
used to follow certain formulae in the chemistry laboratory
at high school? This compound, that compound, what
reaction? Then, when the time comes to apply your
knowledge, you'll know."

Which shows how ignorant she was of this dangerous phase of
her experiment. If she had not been, she must have known
that these were not chemicals, but explosives with which she
proposed to play.

The trouble was that Fanny Brandeis, the creative, was not
being fed. And the creative fire requires fuel. Fanny
Brandeis fed on people, not things. And her work at Haynes-
Cooper was all with inanimate objects. The three months
since her coming to Chicago had been crowded and eventful.
Haynes-Cooper claimed every ounce of her energy, every atom
of her wit and resourcefulness. In return it gave--salary.
Not too much salary. That would come later, perhaps.
Unfortunately, Fanny Brandeis did not thrive on that
kind of fare. She needed people. She craved contact.
All these millions whom she served--these unseen, unheard
men and women, and children--she wanted to see them. She
wanted to touch them. She wanted to talk with them. It was
as though a lover of the drama, eager to see his favorite
actress in her greatest part, were to find himself viewing
her in a badly constructed film play.

So Fanny Brandeis took to prowling. There are people who
have a penchant for cities--more than that, a talent for
them, a gift of sensing them, of feeling their rhythm and
pulse-beats, as others have a highly developed music sense,
or color reaction. It is a thing that cannot be acquired.
In Fanny Brandeis there was this abnormal response to the
color and tone of any city. And Chicago was a huge,
polyglot orchestra, made up of players in every possible
sort of bizarre costume, performing on every known
instrument, leaderless, terrifyingly discordant, yet with an
occasional strain, exquisite and poignant, to be heard
through the clamor and din.

A walk along State street (the wrong side) or Michigan
avenue at five, or through one of the city's foreign
quarters, or along the lake front at dusk, stimulated her
like strong wine. She was drunk with it. And all the time
she would say to herself, little blind fool that she was:

"Don't let it get you. Look at it, but don't think about
it. Don't let the human end of it touch you. There's
nothing in it."

And meanwhile she was feasting on those faces in the crowds.
Those faces in the crowds! They seemed to leap out at her.
They called to her. So she sketched them, telling herself
that she did it by way of relaxation, and diversion. One
afternoon she left her desk early, and perched herself on
one of the marble benches that lined the sunken garden just
across from the main group of Haynes-Cooper buildings.
She wanted to see what happened when those great buildings
emptied. Even her imagination did not meet the actuality.
At 5:30 the streets about the plant were empty, except for
an occasional passerby. At 5:31 there trickled down the
broad steps of building after building thin dark streams of
humanity, like the first slow line of lava that crawls down
the side of an erupting volcano. The trickle broadened into
a stream, spread into a flood, became a torrent that
inundated the streets, the sidewalks, filling every nook and
crevice, a moving mass. Ten thousand people! A city!
Fanny found herself shaking with excitement, and something
like terror at the immensity of it. She tried to get a
picture of it, a sketch, with the gleaming windows of the
red brick buildings as a background. Amazingly enough, she
succeeded in doing it. That was because she tried for broad
effects, and relied on one bit of detail for her story. It
was the face of a girl--a very tired and tawdry girl, of
sixteen, perhaps. On her face the look that the day's work
had stamped there was being wiped gently away by another
look; a look that said release, and a sweetheart, and an
evening at the movies. Fanny, in some miraculous way, got
it.

She prowled in the Ghetto, and sketched those patient Jewish
faces, often grotesque, sometimes repulsive, always mobile.
She wandered down South Clark street, flaring with purple-
white arc-lights, and looked in at its windows that
displayed a pawnbroker's glittering wares, or, just next
door, a flat-topped stove over which a white-capped magician
whose face smacked of the galley, performed deft tricks with
a pancake turner. "Southern chicken dinner," a lying sign
read, "with waffles and real maple syrup, 35@." Past these
windows promenaded the Clark street women, hard-eyed, high-
heeled, aigretted; on the street corners loafed the Clark
street men, blue-shaven, wearing checked suits, soiled
faun-topped shoes, and diamond scarf pins. And even as she
watched them, fascinated, they vanished. Clark street
changed overnight, and became a business thoroughfare, lined
with stately office buildings, boasting marble and gold-leaf
banks, filled with hurrying clerks, stenographers, and
prosperous bond salesmen. It was like a sporting man who,
thriving in middle age, endeavors to live down his shady
past.

Fanny discovered Cottage Grove avenue, and Halsted street,
and Jefferson, and South State, where she should never have
walked. There is an ugliness about Chicago's ugly streets
that, for sheer, naked brutality, is equaled nowhere in the
world. London has its foul streets, smoke-blackened,
sinister. But they are ugly as crime is ugly--and as
fascinating. It is like the ugliness of an old hag who has
lived a life, and who could tell you strange tales, if she
would. Walking through them you think of Fagin, of Children
of the Ghetto, of Tales of Mean Streets. Naples is
honeycombed with narrow, teeming alleys, grimed with the
sediment of centuries, colored like old Stilton, and
smelling much worse. But where is there another Cottage
Grove avenue! Sylvan misnomer! A hideous street, and
sordid. A street of flat-wheeled cars, of delicatessen
shops and moving picture houses, of clanging bells, of
frowsy women, of men who dart around corners with pitchers,
their coat collars turned up to hide the absence of linen.
One day Fanny found herself at Fifty-first street, and there
before her lay Washington Park, with its gracious meadow,
its Italian garden, its rose walk, its lagoon, and drooping
willows. But then, that was Chicago. All contrast. The
Illinois Central railroad puffed contemptuous cinders into
the great blue lake. And almost in the shadow of the City
Hall nestled Bath-House John's groggery.

Michigan Avenue fascinated her most. Here was a street
developing before one's eyes. To walk on it was like
being present at a birth. It is one of the few streets in
the world. New York has two, Paris a hundred, London none,
Vienna one. Berlin, before the war, knew that no one walked
Unter den Linden but American tourists and German
shopkeepers from the provinces, with their fat wives. But
this Michigan Boulevard, unfinished as Chicago itself,
shifting and changing daily, still manages to take on a
certain form and rugged beauty. It has about it a gracious
breadth. As you turn into it from the crash and thunder of
Wabash there comes to you a sense of peace. That's the
sweep of it, and the lake just beyond, for Michigan avenue
is a one-side street. It's west side is a sheer mountain
wall of office buildings, clubs, and hotels, whose ground
floors are fascinating with specialty shops. A milliner
tantalizes the passer-by with a single hat stuck knowingly
on a carved stick. An art store shows two etchings, and a
vase. A jeweler's window holds square blobs of emeralds, on
velvet, and perhaps a gold mesh bag, sprawling limp and
invertebrate, or a diamond and platinum la valliere,
chastely barbaric. Past these windows, from Randolph to
Twelfth surges the crowd: matinee girls, all white fox, and
giggles and orchids; wise-eyed saleswomen from the smart
specialty shops, dressed in next week's mode; art students,
hugging their precious flat packages under their arms;
immigrants, in corduroys and shawls, just landed at the
Twelfth street station; sightseeing families, dazed and
weary, from Kansas; tailored and sabled Lake Shore Drive
dwellers; convention delegates spilling out of the
Auditorium hotel, red-faced, hoarse, with satin badges
pinned on their coats, and their hats (the wrong kind) stuck
far back on their heads; music students to whom Michigan
Avenue means the Fine Arts Building. There you have the
west side. But just across the street the walk is as
deserted as though a pestilence lurked there. Here the Art
Institute rears its smoke-blackened face, and Grant
Park's greenery struggles bravely against the poisonous
breath of the Illinois Central engines.

Just below Twelfth street block after block shows the solid
plate glass of the automobile shops, their glittering wares
displayed against an absurd background of oriental rugs,
Tiffany lamps, potted plants, and mahogany. In the windows
pose the salesmen, no less sleek and glittering than their
wares. Just below these, for a block or two, rows of
sinister looking houses, fallen into decay, with slatternly
women lolling at their windows, and gas jets flaring blue in
dim hallways. Below Eighteenth still another change, where
the fat stone mansions of Chicago's old families (save the
mark!) hide their diminished heads behind signs that read:

"Marguerite. Robes et Manteaux." And, "Smolkin. Tailor."

Now, you know that women buyers for mail order houses do not
spend their Saturday afternoons and Sundays thus, prowling
about a city's streets. Fanny Brandeis knew it too, in her
heart. She knew that the Ella Monahans of her world spent
their holidays in stayless relaxation, manicuring, mending a
bit, skimming the Sunday papers, massaging crows'-feet
somewhat futilely. She knew that women buyers do not, as a
rule, catch their breath with delight at sight of the pock-
marked old Field Columbian museum in Jackson Park, softened
and beautified by the kindly gray chiffon of the lake mist,
and tinted by the rouge of the sunset glow, so that it is a
thing of spectral loveliness. Successful mercantile women,
seeing the furnace glare of the South Chicago steel mills
flaring a sullen red against the lowering sky, do not draw a
disquieting mental picture of men toiling there, naked to
the waist, and glistening with sweat in the devouring heat
of the fires.

I don't know how she tricked herself. I suppose she
said it was the city's appeal to the country dweller,
but she lied, and she knew she was lying. She must have
known it was the spirit of Molly Brandeis in her, and of
Molly Brandeis' mother, and of her mother's mother's mother,
down the centuries to Sarah; repressed women, suffering
women, troubled, patient, nomadic women, struggling now in
her for expression.

And Fanny Brandeis went doggedly on, buying and selling
infants' wear, and doing it expertly. Her office desk would
have interested you. It was so likely to be littered with
the most appealing bits of apparel--a pair of tiny,
crocheted bootees, pink and white; a sturdy linen smock; a
silken hood so small that one's doubled fist filled it.

The new catalogue was on the presses. Fanny had slaved over
it, hampered by Slosson. Fenger had given her practically a
free hand. Results would not come in for many days. The
Christmas trade would not tell the tale, for that was always
a time of abnormal business. The dull season following the
holiday rush would show the real returns. Slosson was
discouragement itself. His attitude was not resentful; it
was pitying, and that frightened Fanny. She wished that he
would storm a little. Then she read her department
catalogue proof sheets, and these reassured her. They were
attractive. And the new baby book had turned out very well,
with a colored cover that would appeal to any one who had
ever been or seen a baby.

September brought a letter from Theodore. A letter from
Theodore meant just one thing. Fanny hesitated a moment
before opening it. She always hesitated before opening
Theodore's letters. While she hesitated the old struggle
would rage in her.

"I don't owe him anything," the thing within her would say.
"God knows I don't. What have I done all my life but give,
and give, and give to him! I'm a woman. He's a man.
Let him work with his hands, as I do. He's had his share.
More than his share."

Nevertheless she had sent him one thousand of the six
thousand her mother had bequeathed to her. She didn't want
to do it. She fought doing it. But she did it.

Now, as she held this last letter in her hands, and stared
at the Bavarian stamp, she said to herself:

"He wants something. Money. If I send him some I can't
have that new tailor suit, or the furs. And I need them.
I'm going to have them."

She tore open the letter.

"Dear Old Fan:

"Olga and I are back in Munich, as you see. I think we'll
be here all winter, though Olga hates it. She says it isn't
lustig. Well, it isn't Vienna, but I think there's a
chance for a class here of American pupils. Munich's
swarming with Americans--whole families who come here to
live for a year or two. I think I might get together a very
decent class, backed by Auer's recommendations. Teaching!
Good God, how I hate it! But Auer is planning a series of
twenty concerts for me. They ought to be a success, if
slaving can do it. I worked six hours a day all summer. I
wanted to spend the summer--most of it, that is--in
Holzhausen Am Ammersee, which is a little village, or
artist's colony in the valley, an hour's ride from here, and
within sight of the Bavarian Alps. We had Kurt Stein's
little villa for almost nothing. But Olga was bored, and
she wasn't well, poor girl, so we went to Interlaken and it
was awful. And that brings me to what I want to tell you.

"There's going to be a baby. No use saying I'm glad,
because I'm not, and neither is Olga. About February,
I think. Olga has been simply wretched, but the doctor says
she'll feel better from now on. The truth of it is she
needs a lot of things and I can't give them to her. I told
you I'd been working on this concerto of mine. Sometimes I
think it's the real thing, if only I could get the leisure
and the peace of mind I need to work on it. You don't know
what it means to be eaten up with ambition and to be
handicapped "

"Oh, don't I!" said Fanny Brandeis, between her teeth, and
crumpled the letter in her strong fingers. "Don't I!" She
got up from her chair and began to walk up and down her
little office, up and down. A man often works off his
feelings thus; a woman rarely. Fenger, who had not been
twice in her office since her coming to the Haynes-Cooper
plant, chose this moment to visit her, his hands full of
papers, his head full of plans. He sensed something wrong
at once, as a highly organized human instrument responds to
a similarly constructed one.

"What's wrong, girl?"

"Everything. And don't call me girl."

Fenger saw the letter crushed in her hand.

"Brother?" She had told him about Theodore and he had been
tremendously interested.

"Yes."

"Money again, I suppose?"

"Yes, but----"

"You know your salary's going up, after Christmas."

"Catalogue or no catalogue?"

"Catalogue or no catalogue."

"Why?"

"Because you've earned it."

Fanny faced him squarely. "I know that Haynes-Cooper isn't
exactly a philanthropic institution. A salary raise
here usually means a battle. I've only been here three
months."
Fenger seated himself in the chair beside her desk and ran a
cool finger through the sheaf of papers in his hand. "My
dear girl--I beg your pardon. I forgot. My good woman
then--if you like that better--you've transfused red blood
into a dying department. It may suffer a relapse after
Christmas, but I don't think so. That's why you're getting
more money, and not because I happen to be tremendously
interested in you, personally."

Fanny's face flamed scarlet. "I didn't mean that."

"Yes you did. Here are those comparative lists you sent me.
If I didn't know Slosson to be as honest as Old Dog Tray I'd
think he had been selling us to the manufacturers. No
wonder this department hasn't paid. He's been giving 'em
top prices for shoddy. Now what's this new plan of yours?"

In an instant Fanny forgot about Theodore, the new winter
suit and furs, everything but the idea that was clamoring to
be born. She sat at her desk, her fingers folding and
unfolding a bit of paper, her face all light and animation
as she talked.

"My idea is to have a person known as a selector for each
important department. It would mean a boiling down of the
products of every manufacturer we deal with, and skimming
the cream off the top. As it is now a department buyer has
to do the selecting and buying too. He can't do both and
get results. We ought to set aside an entire floor for the
display of manufacturers' samples. The selector would make
his choice among these, six months in advance of the season.
The selector would go to the eastern markets too, of course.
Not to buy. Merely to select. Then, with the line chosen
as far as style, quality, and value is concerned, the buyer
would be free to deal directly with the manufacturer as to
quantity, time, and all that. You know as well as I
that that's enough of a job for any one person, with the
labor situation what it is. He wouldn't need to bother
about styles or colors, or any of that. It would all have
been done for him. The selector would have the real
responsibility. Don't you see the simplicity of it, and the
way it would grease the entire machinery?"

Something very like jealousy came into Michael Fenger's face
as he looked at her. But it was gone in an instant. "Gad!
You'll have my job away from me in two years. You're a
super-woman, do you know that?"

"Super nothing! It's just a perfectly good idea, founded on
common sense and economy."

"M-m-m, but that's all Columbus had in mind when he started
out to find a short cut to India."

Fanny laughed out at that. "Yes, but see where he landed!"

But Fenger was serious. "We'll have to have a meeting on
this. Are you prepared to go into detail on it, before Mr.
Haynes and the two Coopers, at a real meeting in a real
mahogany directors' room? Wednesday, say?"

"I think so."

Fenger got up. "Look here, Miss Brandeis. You need a day
in the country. Why don't you run up to your home town over
Sunday? Wisconsin, wasn't it?"

"Oh, no! No. I mean yes it was Wisconsin, but no I don't
want to go."

"Then let me send you my car."

"Car! No, thanks. That's not my idea of the country."

"It was just a suggestion. What do you call going to the
country, then?"

"Tramping all day, and getting lost, if possible. Lying
down under a tree for hours, and letting the ants amble
over you. Dreaming. And coming back tired, hungry, dusty,
and refreshed."

"It sounds awfully uncomfortable. But I wish you'd try it,
this week."

"Do I look such a wreck?" Fanny demanded, rather pettishly.

"You!" Fenger's voice was vibrant. "You're the most
splendidly alive looking woman I ever saw. When you came
into my office that first day you seemed to spark with
health, and repressed energy, and electricity, so that you
radiated them. People who can do that, stimulate. That's
what you are to me--a stimulant."

What can one do with a man who talks like that? After all,
what he said was harmless enough. His tone was quietly
sincere. One can't resent an expression of the eyes. Then,
too, just as she made up her mind to be angry she remembered
the limp and querulous Mrs. Fenger, and the valve and the
scarf. And her anger became pity. There flashed back to
her the illuminating bit of conversation with which
Fascinating Facts had regaled her on the homeward drive that
night of the tea.

"Nice chap, Fenger. And a wiz in business. Get's a king's
salary; Must be hell for a man to be tied, hand and foot,
the way he is."

"Tied?"

"Mrs. Fenger's a semi-invalid. At that I don't believe
she's as helpless as she seems. I think she just holds him
by that shawl of hers, that's forever slipping. You know he
was a machine boy in her father's woolen mill. She met him
after he'd worked his way up to an office job. He has
forged ahead like a locomotive ever since."

That had been their conversation, gossipy, but tremendously
enlightening for Fanny. She looked up at him now.

"Thanks for the vacation suggestion. I may go off
somewhere. Just a last-minute leap. It usually turns
out better, that way. I'll be ready for the Wednesday
discussion."

She sounded very final and busy. The crumpled letter lay on
her desk. She smoothed it out, and the crumple transferred
itself to her forehead. Fenger stood a moment, looking down
at her. Then he turned, abruptly and left the office.
Fanny did not look up.

That was Friday. On Saturday her vacation took a personally
conducted turn. She had planned to get away at noon, as
most office heads did on Saturday, during the warm weather.
When her 'phone rang at eleven she answered it mechanically
as does one whose telephone calls mean a row with a tardy
manufacturer, an argument with a merchandise man, or a
catalogue query from the printer's.

The name that came to her over the telephone conveyed
nothing to her.

"Who?" Again the name. "Heyl?" She repeated the name
uncertainly. "I'm afraid I--O, of course! Clarence Heyl.
Howdy-do."

"I want to see you," said the voice, promptly.

There rose up in Fanny's mind a cruelly clear picture of the
little, sallow, sniveling school boy of her girlhood. The
little boy with the big glasses and the shiny shoes, and the
weak lungs.

"Sorry," she replied, promptly, "but I'm afraid it's
impossible. I'm leaving the office early, and I'm swamped."
Which was a lie.

"This evening?"

"I rarely plan anything for the evening. Too tired, as a
rule."

"Too tired to drive?"

"I'm afraid so."

A brief silence. Then, "I'm coming out there to see you."

"Where? Here? The plant! That's impossible, Mr. Heyl.
I'm terribly sorry, but I can't----"

"Yes, I know. Also terribly sure that if I ever get to you
it will be over your office boy's dead body. Well, arm him.
I'm coming. Good-by."

"Wait a minute! Mr. Heyl! Clarence! Hello! Hello!"

A jiggling of the hook. "Number, please?" droned the voice
of the operator.

Fanny jammed the receiver down on the hook and turned to her
work, lips compressed, a frown forming a double cleft
between her eyes.

Half an hour later he was there. Her office boy brought in
his card, as she had rehearsed him to do. Fanny noted that
it was the wrong kind of card. She would show him what
happened to pushers who pestered business women during
office hours.

"Bring him in in twenty minutes," she said, grimly. Her
office boy (and slave) always took his cue from her. She
hoped he wouldn't be too rude to Heyl, and turned back to
her work again. Thirty-nine seconds later Clarence Heyl
walked in.

"Hello, Fan!" he said, and had her limp hand in a grip that
made her wince.

"But I told----"

"Yes, I know. But he's a crushed and broken office boy by
now. I had to be real harsh with him."

Fanny stood up, really angry now. She looked up at Clarence
Heyl, and her eyes were flashing. Clarence Heyl looked down
at her, and his eyes were the keenest, kindest, most gently
humorous eyes she had ever encountered. You know that
picture of Lincoln that shows us his eyes with much that
expression in them? That's as near as I can come to
conveying to you the whimsical pathos in this man. They
were the eyes of a lonely little boy grown up. And they had
seen much in the process.

Fanny felt her little blaze of anger flicker and die.

"That's the girl," said Heyl, and patted her hand. "You'll
like me--presently. After you've forgotten about that
sniveling kid you hated." He stepped back a pace and threw
back his coat senatorially. "How do I look?" he demanded.

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