Fanny Herself

E >> Edna Ferber >> Fanny Herself

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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 Fanny 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 class.
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?"

"By squinting up your eyes so you can see ten years ahead.
If it looks good to you at that distance--better, in fact,
than it does close by--then it's right. I suppose that's
what they call having imagination. I never had any. That's
why I'm still selling goods on the road. To look at you I'd
say you had too much. Maybe I'm wrong. But I never yet saw
a woman with a mouth like yours who was cut out for
business--unless it was your mother--And her eyes were
different. Let's see, what was I saying?"

"Specialize."

"Oh, yes. And that reminds me. Bunch of fellows in the
smoker last night talking about Haynes-Cooper. Your mother
hated 'em like poison, the way every small-town
merchant hates the mail-order houses. But I hear they've
got an infants' wear department that's just going to grass
for lack of a proper head. You're only a kid. And they
have done you dirt all these years, of course. But if you
could sort of horn in there--why, say, there's no limit to
the distance you could go. No limit! With your brains and
experience."

That had been the beginning. From then on the thing had
moved forward with a certain inevitableness. There was
something about the vastness of the thing that appealed to
Fanny. Here was an organization whose great arms embraced
the world. Haynes-Cooper, giant among mail-order houses,
was said to eat a small-town merchant every morning for
breakfast.

"There's a Haynes-Cooper catalogue in every farmer's
kitchen," Molly Brandeis used to say. "The Bible's in the
parlor, but they keep the H. C. book in the room where they
live."

That she was about to affiliate herself with this house
appealed to Fanny Brandeis's sense of comedy. She had heard
her mother presenting her arguments to the stubborn farmer
folk who insisted on ordering their stove, or dinner set, or
plow, or kitchen goods from the fascinating catalogue. "I
honestly think it's just the craving for excitement that
makes them do it," she often said. "They want the thrill
they get when they receive a box from Chicago, and open it,
and take off the wrappings, and dig out the thing they
ordered from a picture, not knowing whether it will be right
or wrong."

Her arguments usually left the farmer unmoved. He would
drive into town, mail his painfully written letter and order
at the post-office, dispose of his load of apples, or
butter, or cheese, or vegetables, and drive cheerfully back
again, his empty wagon bumping and rattling down the
old corduroy road. Express, breakage, risk, loyalty to his
own region--an these arguments left him cold.

In May, after much manipulation, correspondence, two
interviews, came a definite offer from the Haynes-Cooper
Company. It was much less than the State Street store had
offered, and there was something tentative about the whole
agreement. Haynes-Cooper proffered little and demanded
much, as is the way of the rich and mighty. But Fanny
remembered the ten-year viewpoint that the weary-wise old
traveling man had spoken about. She took their offer. She
was to go to Chicago almost at once, to begin work June
first.

Two conversations that took place before she left are
perhaps worth recording. One was with Father Fitzpatrick of
St. Ignatius Catholic Church. The other with Rabbi Emil
Thalmann of Temple Emanu-el.

An impulse brought her into Father Fitzpatrick's study. It
was a week before her departure. She was tired. There had
been much last signing of papers, nailing of boxes,
strapping of trunks. When things began to come too thick
and fast for her she put on her hat and went for a walk at
the close of the May day. May, in Wisconsin, is a thing all
fragrant, and gold, and blue; and white with cherry
blossoms; and pink with apple blossoms; and tremulous with
budding things.

Fanny struck out westward through the neat streets of the
little town, and found herself on the bridge over the ravine
in which she had played when a little girl--the ravine that
her childish imagination had peopled with such pageantry of
redskin, and priests, and voyageurs, and cavaliers. She
leaned over the iron railing and looked down. Where grass,
and brook, and wild flower had been there now oozed great
eruptions of ash heaps, tin cans, broken bottles, mounds of
dirt. Winnebago's growing pains had begun. Fanny
turned away with a little sick feeling. She went on across
the bridge past the Catholic church. Just next the church
was the parish house where Father Fitzpatrick lived. It
always looked as if it had been scrubbed, inside and out,
with a scouring brick. Its windows were a reproach and a
challenge to every housekeeper in Winnebago.

Fanny wanted to talk to somebody about that ravine. She was
full of it. Father Fitzpatrick's study over-looked it.
Besides, she wanted to see him before she left Winnebago. A
picture came to her mind of his handsome, ruddy face,
twinkling with humor as she had last seen it when he had
dropped in at Brandeis' Bazaar for a chat with her mother.
She turned in at the gate and ran up the immaculate, gray-
painted steps, that always gleamed as though still wet with
the paint brush.

"I shouldn't wonder if that housekeeper of his comes out
with a pail of paint and does 'em every morning before
breakfast," Fanny said to herself as she rang the bell.

Usually it was that sparse and spectacled person herself who
opened the parish house door, but to-day Fanny's ring was
answered by Father Casey, parish assistant. A sour-faced
and suspicious young man, Father Casey, thick-spectacled,
and pointed of nose. Nothing of the jolly priest about him.
He was new to the town, but he recognized Fanny and surveyed
her darkly.

"Father Fitzpatrick in? I'm Fanny Brandeis."

"The reverend father is busy," and the glass door began to
close.

"Who is it?" boomed a voice from within. "Who're you
turning away, Casey?"

"A woman, not a parishioner." The door was almost shut now.

Footsteps down the hall. "Good! Let her in." The door
opened ever so reluctantly. Father Fitzpatrick loomed up
beside his puny assistant, dwarfing him. He looked sharply
at the figure on the porch. "For the love of--! Casey,
you're a fool! How you ever got beyond being an altar-boy
is more than I can see. Come in, child. Come in! The
man's cut out for a jailor, not a priest."

Fanny's two hands were caught in one of his big ones, and
she was led down the hall to the study. It was the room of
a scholar and a man, and the one spot in the house that
defied the housekeeper's weapons of broom and duster. A
comfortable and disreputable room, full of books, and
fishing tackle, and chairs with sagging springs, and a sofa
that was dented with friendly hollows. Pipes on the
disorderly desk. A copy of "Mr. Dooley" spread face down on
what appeared to be next Sunday's sermon, rough-drafted.

"I just wanted to talk to you." Fanny drifted to the
shelves, book-lover that she was, and ran a finger over a
half-dozen titles. "Your assistant was justified, really,
in closing the door on me. But I'm glad you rescued me."
She came over to him and stood looking up at him. He seemed
to loom up endlessly, though hers was a medium height. "I
think I really wanted to talk to you about that ravine,
though I came to say good-by."

"Sit down, child, sit down!" He creaked into his great
leather-upholstered desk chair, himself. "If you had left
without seeing me I'd have excommunicated Casey. Between
you and me the man's mad. His job ought to be duenna to a
Spanish maiden, not assistant to a priest with a leaning
toward the flesh."

Now, Father Fitzpatrick talked with a--no, you couldn't call
it a brogue. It was nothing so gross as that. One does not
speak of the flavor of a rare wine; one calls attention
to its bouquet. A subtle, teasing, elusive something that
just tickles the senses instead of punching them in the
ribs. So his speech was permeated with a will-o'-the-wisp,
a tingling richness that evaded definition. You will have
to imagine it. There shall be no vain attempt to set it
down. Besides, you always skip dialect.

"So you're going away. I'd heard. Where to?"

"Chicago, Haynes-Cooper. It's a wonderful chance. I don't
see yet how I got it. There's only one other woman on their
business staff--I mean working actually in an executive way
in the buying and selling end of the business. Of course
there are thousands doing clerical work, and that kind of
thing. Have you ever been through the plant? It's--it's
incredible."

Father Fitzpatrick drummed with his fingers on the arm of
his chair, and looked at Fanny, his handsome eyes half shut.

"So it's going to be business, h'm? Well, I suppose it's
only natural. Your mother and I used to talk about you
often. I don't know if you and she ever spoke seriously of
this little trick of drawing, or cartooning, or whatever it
is you have. She used to think about it. She said once to
me, that it looked to her more than just a knack. An
authentic gift of caricature, she called it--if it could
only be developed. But of course Theodore took everything.
That worried her."

"Oh, nonsense! That! I just amuse myself with it."

"Yes. But what amuses you might amuse other people.
There's all too few amusing things in the world. Your
mother was a smart woman, Fanny. The smartest I ever knew."

"There's no money in it, even if I were to get on with it.
What could I do with it? Who ever heard of a woman
cartoonist! And I couldn't illustrate. Those pink
cheesecloth pictures the magazines use. I want to earn
money. Lots of it. And now."

She got up and went to the window, and stood looking down
the steep green slope of the ravine that lay, a natural
amphitheater, just below.

"Money, h'm?" mused Father Fitzpatrick. "Well, it's popular
and handy. And you look to me like the kind of girl who'd
get it, once you started out for it. I've never had much
myself. They say it has a way of turning to dust and ashes
in the mouth, once you get a good, satisfying bite of it.
But that's only talk, I suppose."

Fanny laughed a little, still looking down at the ravine.
"I'm fairly accustomed to dust and ashes by this time. It
won't be a new taste to me." She whirled around suddenly.
"And speaking of dust and ashes, isn't this a shame? A
crime? Why doesn't somebody stop it? Why don't you stop
it?" She pointed to the desecrated ravine below. Her eyes
were blazing, her face all animation.

Father Fitzpatrick came over and stood beside her. His face
was sad. "It's a--" He stopped abruptly, and looked down
into her glowing face. He cleared his throat. "It's a
perfectly natural state of affairs," he said smoothly.
"Winnebago's growing. Especially over there on the west
side, since the new mill went up, and they've extended the
street car line. They need the land to build on. It's
business. And money."

"Business! It's a crime! It's wanton! Those ravines are
the most beautiful natural spots in Wisconsin. Why, they're
history, and romance, and beauty!"

"So that's the way you feel about it?"

"Of course. Don't you? Can't you stop it? Petitions--"

"Certainly I feel it's an outrage. But I'm just a poor fool
of a priest, and sentimental, with no head for
business. Now you're a business woman, and different."

"I! You're joking."

"Say, listen, m' girl. The world's made up of just two
things: ravines and dump heaps. And the dumpers are forever
edging up, and squeedging up, and trying to grab the ravines
and spoil 'em, when nobody's looking. You've made your
choice, and allied yourself with the dump heaps. What right
have you to cry out against the desecration of the ravines?"

"The right that every one has that loves them."

"Child, you're going to get so used to seeing your ravines
choked up at Haynes-Cooper that after a while you'll prefer
'em that way."

Fanny turned on him passionately. "I won't! And if I do,
perhaps it's just as well. There's such a thing as too much
ravine. What do you want me to do? Stay here, and grub
away, and become a crabbed old maid like Irma Klein,
thankful to be taken around by the married crowd, joining
the Aid Society and going to the card parties on Sunday
nights? Or I could marry a traveling man, perhaps, or Lee
Kohn of the Golden Eagle. I'm just like any other ambitious
woman with brains--"

"No you're not. You're different. And I'll tell you why.
You're a Jew."

"Yes, I've got that handicap."

"That isn't a handicap, Fanny. It's an asset. Outwardly
you're like any other girl of your age. Inwardly you've
been molded by occupation, training, religion, history,
temperament, race, into something--"

"Ethnologists have proved that there is no such thing as a
Jewish race," she interrupted pertly.

"H'm. Maybe. I don't know what you'd call it, then. You
can't take a people and persecute them for thousands of
years, hounding them from place to place, herding them in
dark and filthy streets, without leaving some sort of
brand on them--a mark that differentiates. Sometimes it
doesn't show outwardly. But it's there, inside. You know,
Fanny, how it's always been said that no artist can became a
genius until he has suffered. You've suffered, you Jews,
for centuries and centuries, until you're all artists--quick
to see drama because you've lived in it, emotional,
oversensitive, cringing, or swaggering, high-strung,
demonstrative, affectionate, generous.

"Maybe they're right. Perhaps it isn't a race. But what do
you call the thing, then, that made you draw me as you did
that morning when you came to ten o'clock mass and did a
caricature of me in the pulpit. You showed up something
that I've been trying to hide for twenty years, till I'd
fooled everybody, including myself. My church is always
packed. Nobody else there ever saw it. I'll tell you,
Fanny, what I've always said: the Irish would be the
greatest people in the world--if it weren't for the
Jews."

They laughed together at that, and the tension was relieved.

"Well, anyway," said Fanny, and patted his great arm, "I'd
rather talk to you than to any man in the world."

"I hope you won't be able to say that a year from now, dear
girl."

And so they parted. He took her to the door himself, and
watched her slim figure down the street and across the
ravine bridge, and thought she walked very much like her
mother, shoulders squared, chin high, hips firm. He went
back into the house, after surveying the sunset largely, and
encountered the dour Casey in the hall.

"I'll type your sermon now, sir--if it's done."

"It isn't done, Casey. And you know it. Oh, Casey,"--(I
wish your imagination would supply that brogue, because it
was such a deliciously soft and racy thing)--"Oh,
Casey, Casey! you're a better priest than I am--but a poorer
man."

Fanny was to leave Winnebago the following Saturday. She
had sold the last of the household furniture, and had taken
a room at the Haley House. She felt very old and
experienced--and sad. That, she told herself, was only
natural. Leaving things to which one is accustomed is
always hard. Queerly enough, it was her good-by to Aloysius
that most unnerved her. Aloysius had been taken on at
Gerretson's, and the dignity of his new position sat heavily
upon him. You should have seen his ties. Fanny sought him
out at Gerretson's.

"It's flure-manager of the basement I am," he said, and
struck an elegant attitude against the case of misses'-
ready-to-wear coats. "And when you come back to Winnebago,
Miss Fanny,--and the saints send it be soon--I'll bet ye'll
see me on th' first flure, keepin' a stern but kindly eye on
the swellest trade in town. Ev'ry last thing I know I learned
off yur poor ma."

"I hope it will serve you here, Aloysius."

"Sarve me!" He bent closer. "Meanin' no offense, Miss
Fanny; but say, listen: Oncet ye get a Yiddish business
education into an Irish head, and there's no limit to the
length ye can go. If I ain't a dry-goods king be th' time
I'm thirty I hope a packin' case'll fall on me."

The sight of Aloysius seemed to recall so vividly all that
was happy and all that was hateful about Brandeis' Bazaar;
all the bravery and pluck, and resourcefulness of the
bright-eyed woman he had admiringly called his boss, that
Fanny found her self-control slipping. She put out her hand
rather blindly to meet his great red paw (a dressy striped
cuff seemed to make it all the redder), murmured a word of
thanks in return for his fervent good wishes, and fled up
the basement stairs.

On Friday night (she was to leave next day) she went to the
temple. The evening service began at seven. At half past
six Fanny had finished her early supper. She would drop in
at Doctor Thalmann's house and walk with him to temple, if
he had not already gone.

"Nein, der Herr Rabbi ist noch hier--sure," the maid said
in answer to Fanny's question. The Thalmann's had a German
maid--one Minna--who bullied the invalid Mrs. Thalmann, was
famous for her cookies with walnuts on the top, and who made
life exceedingly difficult for unlinguistic callers.

Rabbi Thalmann was up in his study. Fanny ran lightly up
the stairs.

"Who is it, Emil? That Minna! Next Monday her week is up.
She goes."

"It's I, Mrs. Thalmann. Fanny Brandeis."

"Na, Fanny! Now what do you think!"

In the brightly-lighted doorway of his little study appeared
Rabbi Thalmann, on one foot a comfortable old romeo, on the
other a street shoe. He held out both hands. "Only at
supper we talked about you. Isn't that so, Harriet?" He
called into the darkened room.

"I came to say good-by. And I thought we might walk to
temple together. How's Mrs. Thalmann tonight?"

The little rabbi shook his head darkly, and waved a dismal
hand. But that was for Fanny alone. What he said was:
"She's really splendid to-day. A little tired, perhaps; but
what is that?"

"Emil!" from the darkened bedroom. "How can you say that?
But how! What I have suffered to-day, only! Torture! And
because I say nothing I'm not sick."

"Go in," said Rabbi Thalmann.

So Fanny went in to the woman lying, yellow-faced, on
the pillows of the dim old-fashioned bedroom with its walnut
furniture, and its red plush mantel drape. Mrs. Thalmann
held out a hand. Fanny took it in hers, and perched herself
on the edge of the bed. She patted the dry, devitalized
hand, and pressed it in her own strong, electric grip. Mrs.
Thalmann raised her head from the pillow.

"Tell me, did she have her white apron on?"

"White apron?"

"Minna, the girl."

"Oh!" Fanny's mind jerked back to the gingham-covered
figure that had opened the door for her. "Yes," she lied,
"a white one--with crochet around the bottom. Quite grand."

Mrs. Thalmann sank back on the pillow with a satisfied sigh.
"A wonder." She shook her head. "What that girl wastes
alone, when I am helpless here."

Rabbi Thalmann came into the room, both feet booted now, and
placed his slippers neatly, toes out, under the bed. "Ach,
Harriet, the girl is all right. You imagine. Come, Fanny."
He took a great, fat watch out of his pocket. "It is time
to go."

Mrs. Thalmann laid a detaining hand on Fanny's arm. "You
will come often back here to Winnebago?"

"I'm afraid not. Once a year, perhaps, to visit my graves."

The sick eyes regarded the fresh young face. "Your mother,
Fanny, we didn't understand her so well, here in Winnebago,
among us Jewish ladies. She was different."

Fanny's face hardened. She stood up. "Yes, she was
different."

"She comes often into my mind now, when I am here alone,
with only the four walls. We were aber dumm, we women--
but how dumm! She was too smart for us, your mother. Too
smart. Und eine sehr brave frau."

And suddenly Fanny, she who had resolved to set her face
against all emotion, and all sentiment, found herself with
her glowing cheek pressed against the withered one, and it
was the weak old hand that patted her now. So she lay for a
moment, silent. Then she got up, straightened her hat,
smiled.

"Auf Wiedersehen," she said in her best German. "Und
gute Besserung."

But the rabbi's wife shook her head. "Good-by."

From the hall below Doctor Thalmann called to her. "Come,
child, come!" Then, "Ach, the light in my study! I forgot
to turn it out, Fanny, be so good, yes?"

Fanny entered the bright little room, reached up to turn off
the light, and paused a moment to glance about her. It was
an ugly, comfortable, old-fashioned room that had never
progressed beyond the what-not period. Fanny's eye was
caught by certain framed pictures on the walls. They were
photographs of Rabbi Thalmann's confirmation classes.
Spindling-legged little boys in the splendor of patent-
leather buttoned shoes, stiff white shirts, black broadcloth
suits with satin lapels; self-conscious and awkward little
girls--these in the minority--in white dresses and stiff
white hair bows. In the center of each group sat the little
rabbi, very proud and alert. Fanny was not among these.
She had never formally taken the vows of her creed. As she
turned down the light now, and found her way down the
stairs, she told herself that she was glad this was so.

It was a matter of only four blocks to the temple. But they
were late, and so they hurried, and there was little
conversation. Fanny's arm was tucked comfortably in his.
It felt, somehow, startlingly thin, that arm. And as they
hurried along there was a jerky feebleness about his gait.
It was with difficulty that Fanny restrained herself from
supporting him when they came to a rough bit of walk or
a sudden step. Something fine in her prompted her not to.
But the alert mind in that old frame sensed what was going
on in her thoughts.

"He's getting feeble, the old rabbi, h'm?"

"Not a bit of it. I've got all I can do to keep up with
you. You set such a pace."

"I know. I know. They are not all so kind, Fanny. They
are too prosperous, this congregation of mine. And some
day, `Off with his head!' And in my place there will step a
young man, with eye-glasses instead of spectacles. They are
tired of hearing about the prophets. Texts from the Bible
have gone out of fashion. You think I do not see them
giggling, h'm? The young people. And the whispering in the
choir loft. And the buzz when I get up from my chair after
the second hymn. `Is he going to have a sermon? Is he?
Sure enough!' Na, he will make them sit up, my successor.
Sex sermons! Political lectures. That's it. Lectures."
They were turning in at the temple now. "The race is to the
young, Fanny. To the young. And I am old."

She squeezed the frail old arm in hers. "My dear!" she
said. "My dear!" A second breaking of her new resolutions.

One by one, two by two, they straggled in for the Friday
evening service, these placid, prosperous people, not
unkind, but careless, perhaps, in their prosperity.

"He's worth any ten of them," Fanny said hotly to herself,
as she sat in her pew that, after to-morrow, would no longer
be hers. "The dear old thing. `Sex sermons.' And the race
is to the young. How right he is. Well, no one can say I'm
not getting an early start."

The choir had begun the first hymn when there came down the
aisle a stranger. There was a little stir among the
congregation. Visitors were rare. He was dark and very
slim--with the slimness of steel wire. He passed down the
aisle rather uncertainly. A traveling man, Fanny thought,
dropped in, as sometimes they did, to say Kaddish for a
departed father or mother. Then she changed her mind. Her
quick eye noted his walk; a peculiar walk, with a spring in
it. Only one unfamiliar with cement pavements could walk
like that. The Indians must have had that same light,
muscular step. He chose an empty pew halfway down the aisle
and stumbled into it rather awkwardly. Fanny thought he was
unnecessarily ugly, even for a man. Then he looked up, and
nodded and smiled at Lee Kohn, across the aisle. His teeth
were very white, and the smile was singularly sweet. Fanny
changed her mind again. Not so bad-looking, after all.
Different, anyway. And then--why, of course! Little
Clarence Heyl, come back from the West. Clarence Heyl, the
cowardy-cat.

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