Читать книгу Her Mother's Daughter - Nalbro Bartley - Страница 5

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BY Christmas time Beaumont’s bakery was a mecca for discriminating citizens in search of dainties. Nowhere else could one buy such pink frosted triangles and apple strudels or fruit wheels or Nuremberg Lebkuchen or savarins or Bohemian houska. Nowhere else were the crusty loaves of rye bread and fancy éclairs, Baba Rheums and Napoleons to be had. The obscure shop on Elm Street was so crowded at four of an afternoon—the time for the bread and rolls to be done—that people stood outside or walked up and down, popping their heads in the door to say:

“Don’t forget me, Mrs. Beaumont—twelve sweet buns and two loaves of bread,” or “I’m waiting for my Red Riding Hood cakes. The children will be heartbroken if I come away without them.”

Behind the counter, clad in a shining white apron, her auburn hair piled carelessly atop her head, she would regretfully report that the filbert cream tartlets had been sold over an hour ago.

A boy made deliveries for them after school. The owner of the building was persuaded to rent them an adjoining room. Here they served sandwiches and coffee. So many people who waited for their orders had formed the habit of buying cakes to eat, munching them untidily over Min’s spotless floor. They hired another helper for the lunch room and still another to assist Min. Jules, now in chef’s costume, had a return of his former enthusiasm. Min had been right. Beaumont’s bakery was considered a valuable addition to the city of Rutledge.

It was some time before Min realized that she would be treated patronizingly by Rutledge’s fashionable set should she attempt to become of it. That the praises and words of good will were not American democracy but spoken in the same spirit of condescension as when a pension guest tipped for an additional service. At first Min’s simple mind had estimated American life as anything but complex. America with its sparkling backgrounds, its dazzling opportunities was a place where everyone could make money and where money could buy everything. Jules and she were making some of this money. Soon they would have enough money to buy everything. As for being able to enjoy that everything—but Min had not thought this far ahead.

Socially, she might have been on equal terms with the women in her neighborhood. But she was so busy, particularly when Jules bought a team and undertook to deliver bread throughout the city, that she had no time for her own pleasures. So she was called “that Swiss woman” and their success was something to be exclaimed over and envied. Several tried to borrow money of Jules or buy a half interest in the business. But Min waved all such offers aside. Accumulation became the Beaumont goal.

At the end of two years they bought the building they were in and moved over the shop into what was a remnant of a flat. Min selected a little furniture and re-papered the rooms. There was no occasion to do more. From half past five in the morning until eight at night, she was below stairs, now in the kitchen, now in the store, now making sandwiches and boiling coffee, even doing the stable work and making the deliveries if the man had left without warning them. She scarcely looked at herself in a mirror. On Sundays they rested from sheer exhaustion. Occasionally Min slipped away for evening church but Jules lay upstairs reading newspapers and sipping his wine and grumbling about Monday’s tasks and the infamous price of help and supplies. Each Saturday Min took their savings to a bank. She was well known by the cashier.

“Well, well, baking’s a pretty fine thing, isn’t it?” he would say, as he handed back her passbook. “Got many more like you over in cuckoo land?”

Jules was content that Min tended to the financial end of the business. All he need do was bake and look in at the door when a customer insisted on thanking him personally for a particularly delectable cake. Evenings and Sundays he rested and enjoyed being waited upon by Min.

In 1893, when the World’s Fair attracted even some of their neighbors, Min proposed that they take a holiday and go to Chicago. Jules flouted any such idea. What could there be to see in Chicago after one had lived in London, Paris, Brussels? Where would their trade go—whatever was she thinking of?

“I don’t know,” Min answered. She was sitting in the one rocking chair of their living-room. As she rocked the floor creaked and the chair slipped along on the faded carpet. “I wonder what we are working so hard for—a trip home? No,” as Jules shook his head. “To be murdered in our beds? I’d like to spend something before that happens. I’d like a red carpet and a gilt framed mirror, a piano, too. I want to join a pedro club like the one Mrs. O’Toole belongs to. When she entertains them, they have prizes and a course supper. Her husband gave her a sunburst of pearls for a Christmas present and he only works in a store. Americans enjoy what they earn but we don’t ... you’re growing thin, Jules, have you noticed it? And my hands are as rough as when I cleaned the pig stys.”

A snore rewarded her. It was Jules’ most effective way of refusing to argue.

That night Min went to church. As she sat in an obscure pew listening to the music, her small, sharp eyes were watching the people, taking note of the women’s clothes and manners and comparing the husbands with Jules. For almost the first time she felt a stranger in a strange land. She was out of everything—excepting the bakery. She had chosen a prominent church, several of their customers were attending the service. Either they did not see her or they did not want to see her. Only the usher and a professional greeter had made her welcome. Oh, it was one thing to be Mrs. Beaumont in a white apron and behind a baked-goods counter and it was another to attempt being one of the community. Jules had never helped in her efforts at Americanization. He could have done much had he joined a lodge or a singing society. There was the Orpheus and the Saengerbund and the Alliance Française—all jolly, wholesome organizations, in which the foreigners banded together.

In 1894 the Beaumonts bought the building next door to their bakery. Three helpers stood with Min behind counters. The lunch room had become a popular business-man’s café. Jules had sent to New York for an assistant baker. But Min still wore her starched white aprons, her thick hair combed carelessly atop her head. She still rose at five-thirty and dropped into bed at half-past eight,—with a snore from Jules as a welcome. They lived in the same rooms over their first building. Beyond repairing a leak in the roof there had been no other improvements.

Min was only twenty-two; she looked thirty-two; she felt forty-two—perhaps more. She wondered if the customers ever speculated as to her age. A sense of bitterness was creeping over her. The satisfaction of their success was warped by the fact that this success had brought nothing but hard work and long hours—and snubs. What did it matter if she had enough money to buy an “electric” sealskin coat, ankle length, as was then the fashion? Where would she wear it, how would she wear it, as Mrs. O’Toole, her more happily situated but poorer neighbor had taken pains to point out? Mrs. O’Toole was past thirty but her husband took her to the theater and she wore slimpsy silk dresses. She had both a front and back parlor and a gilt-banded china set. Her little girls took piano lessons and wore coral beads.

It was four years since Min had left the Beaumont pension and set off for Paris in pursuit of a silk dress, a necklace—and life. She was in America, it was true, and Jules was about to become a citizen. They had paid off most of their obligations and their bakery was the best patronized in the city. They received out-of-town orders for wedding and birthday cakes. They could have sold twice the amount of wares had they been able to produce them. But Jules insisted upon quality not quantity. Min was beginning to think otherwise. These careless Americans would hardly notice the difference between a hand kneaded coffee cake and a machine kneaded one—if the almonds were sprinkled as lavishly and a foreign name given it. But it did not seem the time to defy Jules on such points; nor could she decide when she could defy him. Certainly not until she had a definite purpose.

That was the thing, she told herself one fragrant summer morning. The good-natured O’Tooles had gone down the river for a picnic and the German family across the street were packing to go camping. They had bargained for a supply of stale bread. Nobody cared whether Min came or went or merely stayed! She had nothing for which to work except to see the figures in that bank-book multiply; to listen to Jules’ satisfied chuckle when they paid off their loans or wrote another boasting, statistical letter to the unbelieving Beaumonts in Switzerland. What did any of it amount to when it was summer and one was but twenty-two? Min felt greedy. She wanted a lot of happiness, a lot of beauty, a lot of pretty pennies!

The same unreasonable irritation and longing possessed her that had mastered her twelve years ago when she flung the bell clapper down the mountain and then, in a panic of fear, rushed to find it.

There was no bell clapper to fling away, no ruby rings lying beside it in the thick grasses. Min was “settled,” as Jules reminded. This was American life and she must be forever content.

What she wanted was to see someone of her own, if not herself, enjoy the spending of what they had made, someone who had been spared the drudgery and hardship and who was neither self-conscious nor limited. She was resigned never to become one of the attractive, well-groomed persons who swept into the bakeshop and said a few gracious words and swept out again, the scent of violets lingering afterwards. Min might have more money than this sort of creature, yet she could not be like them. It was mockery—to make money only to discover that one could not make oneself as one wished to be.

Min despised herself all over again—her coarseness, her shrewdness, her undisciplined heart, her loud laugh. Some day she would have a great deal of money. Often these “old” Americans were shamelessly poor. Jules was obliged to dun them. Still, they were different, to be envied. Supposing money did buy everything—what use was it unless one knew how to understand that everything? Min was of the common people, strong and capable, with sordid aims, perhaps, and sentimental weaknesses. Oh, to be born free and slim and lovely ... that night she cried herself to sleep.

Once Min bought a pair of white kid gloves, sixteen button length. She paid nine dollars for them—smooth, creamy affairs. The girl offered to fit them, powdering and expanding the slim fingertips with her polished wooden stick. Min had refused, hiding her stubby red fingers. When she was alone she forced her hands into the gloves. They covered her arms, arms with large freckles, to be exact. She was oblivious to the rest of her costume. Those cool, white hands and arms lent a feeling of satisfaction. But she hurried to take them off before she should be discovered. There was never any occasion to wear them. Sometimes she was provoked at herself for spending nine dollars in such a fashion. Still, she liked to look at them, sometimes try them on, imagine herself wearing black velvet and ermine furs and silver filagree ornaments—and the gloves. She had read descriptions of such costumes.

Six months after she bought the gloves, she joined a neighborhood club. It was the sort of thing where women bring their sewing and their suspicions and spend the afternoon, punctuated with refreshments and perhaps pianoforte solos by the hostess’s children. Mrs. O’Toole and Mrs. Myers, a German woman, belonged and a woman from the south and one from Newfoundland. Then there was Min, half Swiss, half English, and two Swedish girls with lovely, fair skin and braids of white-gold hair. Also a Greek woman whose husband ran a candy store. The rest were natives of Rutledge whose husbands held mediocre positions in factories or stores. But Mrs. Myers’ husband and the Swedish girls’ and the Greek’s and Min’s husband were all in business for themselves. These had more of the world’s goods than the “old” Americans but they seemed to have far less pleasure in life. It was a topic for discussion among the “old” Americans, the consensus of opinion being that “the foreigners will live like dogs to save a dime. Who’d want their money if one had to do that? I guess they don’t have the same feelings.”

Another thing impressed Min about this cosmopolitan little group. The “old” Americans were preoccupied with their present ambitions. The foreign women spoke of the future, of what their children should do and have and be. They, themselves, were resigned to doing the frontier work which should enable these children to be considered “old” Americans—to spend what had been saved! There was a certain fortitude in the way they accepted the name of “foreigners” and were barred from the intimate neighborhood life. No matter how deep their sympathies or how keen their brains—and none of them were stupid—they were not adjudged competent to share in the “old” American life.

“They look at things so differently,” Min had overheard Mrs. O’Toole saying. “Working day and night and living off scraps. The awful clothes they wear—why, that Greek woman wears a shawl except on Sundays and her husband is worth thirty thousand. I don’t care how nice they seem, they aren’t our sort. Poor things, I suppose it seems heaven after what they left in Europe. Of course, their children——” a hopeful note in her thin voice.

Min went to no more of the meetings. She felt humiliated, her English blood insulted. That this O’Toole person dared to say that she did not understand when all the time she was intelligently acknowledging her limitations. So did the others—even the Greek woman who had beautiful twin daughters in a convent school.

“My girls be all right in America—hey?” she would ask Min eagerly.

In the old world these foreigners had had certain set standards and social boundaries. Competition was unknown, so was ambition. In America they found themselves without a class background. The result was a sense of inferiority, discomfort, one did not know just what to do or where to go. Of necessity material gain became the paramount issue. The O’Tooles and their ilk had class backgrounds, lending a sense of security. They knew certain people intimately, were at ease in certain theaters and stores. Life was lived within these boundaries while they enjoyed gossiping and speculating about everyone outside of them. Above the O’Toole faction were petty tradespeople, civic employees, stenographers and school-teachers. Then came more important merchants, bankers, lawyers, and doctors. There were any number of boundary lines in Rutledge. There were the so-called aristocrats, possessors of the “quiet” wealth. Even among them the Merediths and the Tuckers and the McCrays were subservient to the Grants and the Duff-Porters. So it went. But everyone bought Beaumont’s baked goods, Min would remind herself, after puzzling over this situation. As she had told Jules, they all had stomachs.

These “old” Americans regarded the foreigners as unimportant rabble, someone to do the hard tasks and make the “old” Americans more comfortable. Out of this rabble would come many police court cases, a few successes, an occasional genius. America was so young and virile that it had plenty of room for the rabble. What did their presence matter? Poor things, they were not to be blamed for wanting to leave the old countries.

Min was not missed from the neighborhood club. She had made an unfavorable impression the afternoon she entertained. Wearied of pastries and cakes, she had served but sandwiches and coffee whereas the club members had anticipated nothing less than a banquet at “that Swiss woman’s.”

Moreover, Min was not satisfied with the social strata that the club typified. She had become absorbed with dreams of her children’s future—a future which should be shared with the Grants and the Duff-Porters ... if Jules and herself had been detained on Ellis Island, her children should be entertained on Long Island. This summarized Min’s ambition, proved how well she understood. For now she could afford to be snubbed and overworked. She was still young and dauntless and her mother’s blood ran full in her veins.