Fanny Herself

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They had oysters (a New Yorker would have sniffed at them),
and chicken potpie, and asparagus, and ice cream. If that
doesn't prove Mrs. Brandeis was game, I should like to know
what could! They stopped at the Windsor-Clifton, because it
was quieter and less expensive than the Palmer House, though
quite as full of red plush and walnut. Besides, she had
stopped at the Palmer House with her husband, and she knew
how buyers were likely to be besieged by eager salesmen with
cards, and with tempting lines of goods spread knowingly in
the various sample-rooms.

Fanny Brandeis was thirteen, and emotional, and incredibly
receptive and alive. It is impossible to tell what she
learned during that Chicago trip, it was so crowded, so
wonderful. She went with her mother to the wholesale houses
and heard and saw and, unconsciously, remembered. When she
became fatigued with the close air of the dim showrooms,
with their endless aisles piled with every sort of ware, she
would sit on a chair in some obscure corner, watching those
sleek, over-lunched, genial-looking salesmen who were
chewing their cigars somewhat wildly when Mrs. Brandeis
finished with them. Sometimes she did not accompany her
mother, but lay in bed, deliciously, until the middle of the
morning, then dressed, and chatted with the obliging Irish
chamber maid, and read until her mother came for her at
noon.

Everything she did was a delightful adventure; everything
she saw had the tang of novelty. Fanny Brandeis was to see
much that was beautiful and rare in her full lifetime, but
she never again, perhaps, got quite the thrill that those
ugly, dim, red-carpeted, gas-lighted hotel corridors gave
her, or the grim bedroom, with its walnut furniture and its
Nottingham curtains. As for the Chicago streets themselves,
with their perilous corners (there were no czars in blue to
regulate traffic in those days), older and more
sophisticated pedestrians experienced various emotions while
negotiating the corner of State and Madison.

That buying trip lasted ten days. It was a racking
business, physically and mentally. There were the hours of
tramping up one aisle and down the other in the big
wholesale lofts. But that brought bodily fatigue only. It
was the mental strain that left Mrs. Brandeis spent and limp
at the end of the day. Was she buying wisely? Was she
over-buying? What did she know about buying, anyway? She
would come back to her hotel at six, sometimes so exhausted
that the dining-room and dinner were unthinkable. At such
times they would have dinner in their room another delicious
adventure for Fanny. She would try to tempt the fagged
woman on the bed with bits of this or that from one of the
many dishes that dotted the dinner tray. But Molly
Brandeis, harrowed in spirit and numbed in body, was too
spent to eat.

But that was not always the case. There was that
unforgettable night when they went to see Bernhardt the
divine. Fanny spent the entire morning following standing
before the bedroom mirror, with her hair pulled out in a
wild fluff in front, her mother's old marten-fur scarf high
and choky around her neck, trying to smile that slow, sad,
poignant, tear-compelling smile; but she had to give it up,
clever mimic though she was. She only succeeded in looking
as though a pin were sticking her somewhere. Besides,
Fanny's own smile was a quick, broad, flashing grin, with a
generous glint of white teeth in it, and she always forgot
about being exquisitely wistful over it until it was too
late.

I wonder if the story of the china religious figures will
give a wrong impression of Mrs. Brandeis. Perhaps not, if
you will only remember this woman's white-lipped
determination to wrest a livelihood from the world, for her
children and herself. They had been in Chicago a week, and
she was buying at Bauder & Peck's. Now, Bauder & Peck,
importers, are known the world over. It is doubtful if
there is one of you who has not been supplied, indirectly,
with some imported bit of china or glassware, with French
opera glasses or cunning toys and dolls, from the great New
York and Chicago showrooms of that company.

Young Bauder himself was waiting on Mrs. Brandeis, and he
was frowning because he hated to sell women. Young Bauder
was being broken into the Chicago end of the business, and
he was not taking gracefully to the process.

At the end of a long aisle, on an obscure shelf in a dim
corner, Molly Brandeis' sharp eyes espied a motley
collection of dusty, grimy china figures of the kind one
sees on the mantel in the parlor of the small-town Catholic
home. Winnebago's population was two-thirds Catholic,
German and Irish, and very devout.

Mrs. Brandeis stopped short. "How much for that lot?" She
pointed to the shelf. Young Bauder's gaze followed hers,
puzzled. The figures were from five inches to a foot high,
in crude, effective blues, and gold, and crimson, and
white. All the saints were there in assorted sizes, the
Pieta, the cradle in the manger. There were probably two
hundred or more of the little figures.
"Oh, those!" said young Bauder vaguely. "You don't want
that stuff. Now, about that Limoges china. As I said, I
can make you a special price on it if you carry it as an
open-stock pattern. You'll find----"

"How much for that lot?" repeated Mrs. Brandeis.

"Those are left-over samples, Mrs. Brandeis. Last year's
stuff. They're all dirty. I'd forgotten they were there."

"How much for the lot?" said Mrs. Brandeis, pleasantly, for
the third time.

"I really don't know. Three hundred, I should say.
But----"

"I'll give you two hundred," ventured Mrs. Brandeis, her
heart in her mouth and her mouth very firm.

"Oh, come now, Mrs. Brandeis! Bauder & Peck don't do
business that way, you know. We'd really rather not sell
them at all. The things aren't worth much to us, or to you,
for that matter. But three hundred----"

"Two hundred," repeated Mrs. Brandeis, "or I cancel my
order, including the Limoges. I want those figures."

And she got them. Which isn't the point of the story. The
holy figures were fine examples of foreign workmanship,
their colors, beneath the coating of dust, as brilliant and
fadeless as those found in the churches of Europe. They
reached Winnebago duly, packed in straw and paper, still
dusty and shelf-worn. Mrs. Brandeis and Sadie and Pearl sat
on up-ended boxes at the rear of the store, in the big barn-
like room in which newly arrived goods were unpacked. As
Aloysius dived deep into the crate and brought up figure
after figure, the three women plunged them into warm and
soapy water and proceeded to bathe and scour the entire
school of saints, angels, and cherubim. They came out
brilliantly fresh and rosy.

All the Irish ingenuity and artistry in Aloysius came to the
surface as he dived again and again into the great barrel
and brought up the glittering pieces.

"It'll make an elegant window," he gasped from the depths of
the hay, his lean, lengthy frame jack-knifed over the edge.
"And cheap." His shrewd wit had long ago divined the
store's price mark. "If Father Fitzpatrick steps by in the
forenoon I'll bet they'll be gone before nighttime to-
morrow. You'll be letting me do the trim, Mrs. Brandeis?"

He came back that evening to do it, and he threw his whole
soul into it, which, considering his ancestry and
temperament, was very high voltage for one small-town store
window. He covered the floor of the window with black crepe
paper, and hung it in long folds, like a curtain, against
the rear wall. The gilt of the scepters, and halos, and
capes showed up dazzlingly against this background. The
scarlets, and pinks, and blues, and whites of the robes
appeared doubly bright. The whole made a picture that
struck and held you by its vividness and contrast.

Father Fitzpatrick, very tall and straight, and handsome,
with his iron-gray hair and his cheeks pink as a girl's, did
step by next morning on his way to the post-office. It was
whispered that in his youth Father Fitzpatrick had been an
actor, and that he had deserted the footlights for the altar
lights because of a disappointment. The drama's loss was
the Church's gain. You should have heard him on Sunday
morning, now flaying them, now swaying them! He still had
the actor's flexible voice, vibrant, tremulous, or strident,
at will. And no amount of fasting or praying had ever
dimmed that certain something in his eye--the something
which makes the matinee idol.

Not only did he step by now; he turned, came back; stopped
before the window. Then he entered.

"Madam," he said to Mrs. Brandeis, "you'll probably save
more souls with your window display than I could in a month
of hell-fire sermons." He raised his hand. "You have the
sanction of the Church." Which was the beginning of a queer
friendship between the Roman Catholic priest and the Jewess
shopkeeper that lasted as long as Molly Brandeis lived.

By noon it seemed that the entire population of Winnebago
had turned devout. The figures, a tremendous bargain,
though sold at a high profit, seemed to melt away from the
counter that held them.

By three o'clock, "Only one to a customer!" announced Mrs.
Brandeis. By the middle of the week the window itself was
ravished of its show. By the end of the week there remained
only a handful of the duller and less desirable pieces--the
minor saints, so to speak. Saturday night Mrs. Brandeis did
a little figuring on paper. The lot had cost her two
hundred dollars. She had sold for six hundred. Two from
six leaves four. Four hundred dollars! She repeated it to
herself, quietly. Her mind leaped back to the plush
photograph album, then to young Bauder and his cool
contempt. And there stole over her that warm, comfortable
glow born of reassurance and triumph. Four hundred dollars.
Not much in these days of big business. We said, you will
remember, that it was a pitiful enough little trick she
turned to make it, though an honest one. And--in the face
of disapproval--a rather magnificent one too. For it gave
to Molly Brandeis that precious quality, self-confidence,
out of which is born success.

CHAPTER THREE

By spring Mrs. Brandeis had the farmer women coming to her
for their threshing dishes and kitchenware, and the West End
Culture Club for their whist prizes. She seemed to realize
that the days of the general store were numbered, and she
set about making hers a novelty store. There was something
terrible about the earnestness with which she stuck to
business. She was not more than thirty-eight at this time,
intelligent, healthy, fun-loving. But she stayed at it all
day. She listened and chatted to every one, and learned
much. There was about her that human quality that invites
confidence.

She made friends by the hundreds, and friends are a business
asset. Those blithe, dressy, and smooth-spoken gentlemen
known as traveling men used to tell her their troubles,
perched on a stool near the stove, and show her the picture
of their girl in the back of their watch, and asked her to
dinner at the Haley House. She listened to their tale of
woe, and advised them; she admired the picture of the girl,
and gave some wholesome counsel on the subject of traveling
men's lonely wives; but she never went to dinner at the
Haley House.

It had not taken these debonair young men long to learn that
there was a woman buyer who bought quickly, decisively, and
intelligently, and that she always demanded a duplicate
slip. Even the most unscrupulous could not stuff an order
of hers, and when it came to dating she gave no quarter.
Though they wore clothes that were two leaps ahead of the
styles worn by the Winnebago young men--their straw
sailors were likely to be saw-edged when the local edges
were smooth, and their coats were more flaring, or their
trousers wider than the coats and trousers of the Winnebago
boys--they were not, for the most part, the gay dogs that
Winnebago's fancy painted them. Many of them were very
lonely married men who missed their wives and babies, and
loathed the cuspidored discomfort of the small-town hotel
lobby. They appreciated Mrs. Brandeis' good-natured
sympathy, and gave her the long end of a deal when they
could. It was Sam Kiser who had begged her to listen to his
advice to put in Battenberg patterns and braid, long before
the Battenberg epidemic had become widespread and virulent.

"Now listen to me, Mrs. Brandeis," he begged, almost
tearfully. "You're a smart woman. Don't let this get by
you. You know that I know that a salesman would have as
much chance to sell you a gold brick as to sell old John D.
Rockefeller a gallon of oil."
Mrs. Brandeis eyed his samples coldly. "But it looks so
unattractive. And the average person has no imagination. A
bolt of white braid and a handful of buttons--they wouldn't
get a mental picture of the completed piece. Now,
embroidery silk----"

"Then give 'em a real picture!" interrupted Sam. "Work up
one of these water-lily pattern table covers. Use No. 100
braid and the smallest buttons. Stick it in the window and
they'll tear their hair to get patterns."

She did it, taking turns with Pearl and Sadie at weaving the
great, lacy square during dull moments. When it was
finished they placed it in the window, where it lay like
frosted lace, exquisitely graceful and delicate, with its
tracery of curling petals and feathery fern sprays.
Winnebago gazed and was bitten by the Battenberg bug. It
wound itself up in a network of Battenberg braid, in all
the numbers. It bought buttons of every size; it stitched
away at Battenberg covers, doilies, bedspreads, blouses,
curtains. Battenberg tumbled, foamed, cascaded over
Winnebago's front porches all that summer. Listening to Sam
Kiser had done it.

She listened to the farmer women too, and to the mill girls,
and to the scant and precious pearls that dropped from the
lips of the East End society section. There was something
about her brown eyes and her straight, sensible nose that
reassured them so that few suspected the mischievous in her.
For she was mischievous. If she had not been I think she
could not have stood the drudgery, and the heartbreaks, and
the struggle, and the terrific manual labor.

She used to guy people, gently, and they never guessed it.
Mrs. G. Manville Smith, for example, never dreamed of the
joy that her patronage brought Molly Brandeis, who waited on
her so demurely. Mrs. G. Manville Smith (nee Finnegan)
scorned the Winnebago shops, and was said to send to Chicago
for her hairpins. It was known that her household was run
on the most niggardly basis, however, and she short-rationed
her two maids outrageously. It was said that she could
serve less real food on more real lace doilies than any
other housekeeper in Winnebago. Now, Mrs. Brandeis sold
Scourine two cents cheaper than the grocery stores, using it
as an advertisement to attract housewives, and making no
profit on the article itself. Mrs. G. Manville Smith always
patronized Brandeis' Bazaar for Scourine alone, and thus
represented pure loss. Also she my-good-womaned Mrs.
Brandeis. That lady, seeing her enter one day with her
comic, undulating gait, double-actioned like a giraffe's,
and her plumes that would have shamed a Knight of Pythias,
decided to put a stop to these unprofitable visits.

She waited on Mrs. G. Manville Smith, a dangerous gleam in
her eye.

"Scourine," spake Mrs. G. Manville Smith.

"How many?"

"A dozen."

"Anything else?"

"No. Send them."

Mrs. Brandeis, scribbling in her sales book, stopped, pencil
poised. "We cannot send Scourine unless with a purchase of
other goods amounting to a dollar or more."

Mrs. G. Manville Smith's plumes tossed and soared
agitatedly. "But my good woman, I don't want anything
else!"

"Then you'll have to carry the Scourine?"

"Certainly not! I'll send for it."

"The sale closes at five." It was then 4:57.

"I never heard of such a thing! You can't expect me to
carry them."

Now, Mrs. G. Manville Smith had been a dining-room girl at
the old Haley House before she married George Smith, and
long before he made his money in lumber.

"You won't find them so heavy," Molly Brandeis said
smoothly.

"I certainly would! Perhaps you would not. You're used to
that sort of thing. Rough work, and all that."

Aloysius, doubled up behind the lamps, knew what was coming,
from the gleam in his boss's eye.

"There may be something in that," Molly Brandeis returned
sweetly. "That's why I thought you might not mind taking
them. They're really not much heavier than a laden tray."

"Oh!" exclaimed the outraged Mrs. G. Manville Smith. And
took her plumes and her patronage out of Brandeis' Bazaar
forever.

That was as malicious as Molly Brandeis ever could be. And
it was forgivable malice.

Most families must be described against the background of
their homes, but the Brandeis family life was bounded and
controlled by the store. Their meals and sleeping hours and
amusements were regulated by it. It taught them much, and
brought them much, and lost them much. Fanny Brandeis
always said she hated it, but it made her wise, and
tolerant, and, in the end, famous. I don't know what more
one could ask of any institution. It brought her in contact
with men and women, taught her how to deal with them. After
school she used often to run down to the store to see her
mother, while Theodore went home to practice. Perched on a
high stool in some corner she heard, and saw, and absorbed.
It was a great school for the sensitive, highly-organized,
dramatic little Jewish girl, for, to paraphrase a well-known
stage line, there are just as many kinds of people in
Winnebago as there are in Washington.

It was about this time that Fanny Brandeis began to realize,
actively, that she was different. Of course, other little
Winnebago girls' mothers did not work like a man, in a
store. And she and Bella Weinberg were the only two in her
room at school who stayed out on the Day of Atonement, and
on New Year, and the lesser Jewish holidays. Also, she went
to temple on Friday night and Saturday morning, when the
other girls she knew went to church on Sunday. These things
set her apart in the little Middle Western town; but it was
not these that constituted the real difference. She played,
and slept, and ate, and studied like the other healthy
little animals of her age. The real difference was
temperamental, or emotional, or dramatic, or historic, or
all four. They would be playing tag, perhaps, in one of the
cool, green ravines that were the beauty spots of the little
Wisconsin town.

They nestled like exquisite emeralds in the embrace of the
hills, those ravines, and Winnebago's civic surge had not
yet swept them away in a deluge of old tin cans, ashes, dirt
and refuse, to be sold later for building lots. The Indians
had camped and hunted in them. The one under the Court
Street bridge, near the Catholic church and monastery, was
the favorite for play. It lay, a lovely, gracious thing,
below the hot little town, all green, and lush, and cool, a
tiny stream dimpling through it. The plump Capuchin
Fathers, in their coarse brown robes, knotted about the
waist with a cord, their bare feet thrust into sandals,
would come out and sun themselves on the stone bench at the
side of the monastery on the hill, or would potter about the
garden. And suddenly Fanny would stop quite still in the
midst of her tag game, struck with the beauty of the picture
it called from the past.

Little Oriental that she was, she was able to combine the
dry text of her history book with the green of the trees,
the gray of the church, and the brown of the monk's robes,
and evolve a thrilling mental picture therefrom. The tag
game and her noisy little companions vanished. She was
peopling the place with stealthy Indians. Stealthy,
cunning, yet savagely brave. They bore no relation to the
abject, contemptible, and rather smelly Oneidas who came to
the back door on summer mornings, in calico, and ragged
overalls, with baskets of huckleberries on their arm, their
pride gone, a broken and conquered people. She saw them
wild, free, sovereign, and there were no greasy, berry-
peddling Oneidas among them. They were Sioux, and
Pottawatomies (that last had the real Indian sound), and
Winnebagos, and Menomonees, and Outagamis. She made them
taciturn, and beady-eyed, and lithe, and fleet, and every
other adjectival thing her imagination and history book
could supply. The fat and placid Capuchin Fathers on the
hill became Jesuits, sinister, silent, powerful, with
France and the Church of Rome behind them. From the shelter
of that big oak would step Nicolet, the brave, first among
Wisconsin explorers, and last to receive the credit for his
hardihood. Jean Nicolet! She loved the sound of it. And
with him was La Salle, straight, and slim, and elegant, and
surely wearing ruffles and plumes and sword even in a canoe.
And Tonty, his Italian friend and fellow adventurer--Tonty
of the satins and velvets, graceful, tactful, poised, a
shadowy figure; his menacing iron hand, so feared by the
ignorant savages, encased always in a glove. Surely a
perfumed g--- Slap! A rude shove that jerked her head back
sharply and sent her forward, stumbling, and jarred her like
a fall.

"Ya-a-a! Tag! You're it! Fanny's it!"

Indians, priests, cavaliers, coureurs de bois, all
vanished. Fanny would stand a moment, blinking stupidly.
The next moment she was running as fleetly as the best of
the boys in savage pursuit of one of her companions in the
tag game.

She was a strange mixture of tomboy and bookworm, which was
a mercifully kind arrangement for both body and mind. The
spiritual side of her was groping and staggering and feeling
its way about as does that of any little girl whose mind is
exceptionally active, and whose mother is unusually busy.
It was on the Day of Atonement, known in the Hebrew as Yom
Kippur, in the year following her father's death that that
side of her performed a rather interesting handspring.

Fanny Brandeis had never been allowed to fast on this, the
greatest and most solemn of Jewish holy days Molly Brandeis'
modern side refused to countenance the practice of
withholding food from any child for twenty-four hours. So
it was in the face of disapproval that Fanny, making deep
inroads into the steak and fried sweet potatoes at
supper on the eve of the Day of Atonement, announced her
intention of fasting from that meal to supper on the
following evening. She had just passed her plate for a
third helping of potatoes. Theodore, one lap behind her in
the race, had entered his objection.

"Well, for the land's sakes!" he protested. "I guess you're
not the only one who likes sweet potatoes."

Fanny applied a generous dab of butter to an already buttery
morsel, and chewed it with an air of conscious virtue.

"I've got to eat a lot. This is the last bite I'll have
until to-morrow night."

"What's that?" exclaimed Mrs. Brandeis, sharply.

"Yes, it is!" hooted Theodore.

Fanny went on conscientiously eating as she explained.

"Bella Weinberg and I are going to fast all day. We just
want to see if we can."

"Betcha can't," Theodore said.

Mrs. Brandeis regarded her small daughter with a thoughtful
gaze. "But that isn't the object in fasting, Fanny--just to
see if you can. If you're going to think of food all
through the Yom Kippur services----"

"I sha'n't?" protested Fanny passionately. "Theodore would,
but I won't."

"Wouldn't any such thing," denied Theodore. "But if I'm
going to play a violin solo during the memorial service I
guess I've got to eat my regular meals."

Theodore sometimes played at temple, on special occasions.
The little congregation, listening to the throbbing rise and
fall of this fifteen-year-old boy's violin playing,
realized, vaguely, that here was something disturbingly,
harrowingly beautiful. They did not know that they were
listening to genius.

Molly Brandeis, in her second best dress, walked to
temple Yom Kippur eve, her son at her right side, her
daughter at her left. She had made up her mind that she
would not let this next day, with its poignantly beautiful
service, move her too deeply. It was the first since her
husband's death, and Rabbi Thalmann rather prided himself on
his rendition of the memorial service that came at three in
the afternoon.

A man of learning, of sweetness, and of gentle wit was Rabbi
Thalmann, and unappreciated by his congregation. He stuck
to the Scriptures for his texts, finding Moses a greater
leader than Roosevelt, and the miracle of the Burning Bush
more wonderful than the marvels of twentieth-century wizardy
in electricity. A little man, Rabbi Thalmann, with hands
and feet as small and delicate as those of a woman. Fanny
found him fascinating to look on, in his rabbinical black
broadcloth and his two pairs of glasses perched, in reading,
upon his small hooked nose. He stood very straight in the
pulpit, but on the street you saw that his back was bent
just the least bit in the world--or perhaps it was only his
student stoop, as he walked along with his eyes on the
ground, smoking those slender, dapper, pale brown cigars
that looked as if they had been expressly cut and rolled to
fit him.

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