Herma Read online

  It was an exalted moment, a moment of keen triumph and exultation; and yet calm. He went on looking in the mirror a little longer, with a deep curiosity. He saw a thin-shouldered, handsome, and slightly frowning youth who might have been a twin of Herma. His hair was a little long for a boy, but some wore it that way. The feet were big—boys have large feet. He had Herma’s look of determination, her fine hands and features, even a certain roundness of contour here and there. But he was unmistakably a boy, a slim and good-looking young man. He was satisfied.

  Coming to himself, he found the towel at his feet and wrapped it around his middle. He looked around him. He took the slipper out of the door and flung it across the room. Then he opened the door cautiously. There was still no sound from the bedroom across the hall. But from downstairs he heard an unmistakable tiny noise: the chink of china against a saucer. Mama was having a cup of tea to restore her spirits, which were always somewhat slow to waken after lying down in the afternoon. He pushed the door the rest of the way open, strode across the hall, and entered the large bedroom.

  The bed was still unmade and the blinds pulled down. The room was filled with a dim shadowy light. He crossed rapidly to the closet and pulled it open, still holding the towel around himself with one hand. It was hard to see anything in there, but after a little groping he found Papa’s Sunday suit. He laid it over his shoulder—all with one hand, because he had to hold the towel with the other—and found a shirt and socks as well. He tried Papa’s derby, but it was far too large and came down over his ears. The shoes were too large as well but they would have to do. Draped with his plunder, he stole out swiftly and went back to his own room.

  Up the stairway came a little sigh. Mama, sitting at the kitchen table, had taken her first sip of tea. He dressed rapidly. Everything was too large, especially the trousers, but luckily they were fitted with braces so there was no danger of their falling down. When the shirt and coat were in place there was only a certain empty region of air around his middle, between his body and the clothes, which perhaps would not be noticeable from the outside.

  He looked at himself in the mirror; in the clothes far too large for him he looked like a second-rate clown in a circus, except for the thin and intent seriousness of his expression. Still looking in the mirror, he felt in his pockets. There was nothing much except an old train ticket and, in the side pocket of the coat, a small gold penknife with a folding blade.

  He turned away and went to the chiffonier. In the tumble of under-drawers, hair ribbons, handkerchiefs, mismatched stockings, hairpins, pictures of actresses cut from magazines, and dried flowers half crumbled to dust—Lord love us, but she was untidy!—he groped for and found Madame Modjeska’s gold coin. He dropped it into the left-hand coat pocket, and took the knife out of the other pocket. With this he went to the door and dexterously tightened the screws to the latch. Girls, he thought, never were any good at fixing things. He tried the latch to be sure it was working properly, and confidently went out.

  With the over-large shoes it was a trick going down the stairs without making any noise. The hallway at the bottom of the stairs was arranged in such a way that it was necessary to pass briefly by the kitchen door, but it was almost shut and he accomplished this quickly and without incident. The screen door at the back of the house he was careful to close silently. In another minute he was out on Ross Street, walking briskly, and with as much assurance as he could muster in his odd costume, down the sidewalk toward Fourth. No one, as far as he could tell, had noticed him leaving the house.

  No one on Fourth Street paid any attention to him either. It was late afternoon and the town lay in a heavy warm somnolence. A buggy went by, leaving little specks of dust quivering in the slanting light. There were only a few people out on the street. He went directly along the sidewalk to Proper Procter’s, through the double door, and to the right toward the men’s section.

  As ill luck would have it, instead of a clerk in the men’s section it was Mr. Proper Procter himself, a suave and rather unctuous individual with a pince-nez and a small mouth. Not only did he know Papa but he probably knew who Herma was too. However, he showed no sign of recognition, neither did he seem to pay any attention to the awkward and ill-fitting clothing that had obviously been made for somebody else.

  “May I help you, young man?”

  “I would like a suit. And the whole outfit—shirt, shoes, socks, braces, a necktie, and so on.” He strove to master the adolescent quaver in his voice.

  “Certainly. If you will step this way.”

  He led him through the glass cabinets gleaming with shirts, belts, braces, and neckties to the rack of ready-made suits. Procter’s was the first store in town to offer ready-made clothing—the end of all gentility, according to some, but in the opinion of the more modern-minded a great convenience and economy. In fact Procter’s suits, ready made as they were, were faultless in construction and of the latest cut and fashion. Mr. Procter deftly whipped a tape measure around his waist, and measured him again from crotch to foot—he almost flinched at that, but controlled himself. Then Mr. Procter pulled out and displayed on top of the rack (a) an alpaca summer suit with green pipings around the lapels; (b) a conservative blue serge, so dark it was almost black, much like Papa’s own suit; and (c) a light brownish-gray suit with pin stripes of darker brown, a nipped-in waist, a vest with a watch pocket, and narrow tubular trousers.

  “It all depends,” Mr. Procter told him, “on the taste”—glancing as though for the first time at what he was wearing now.

  “Exactly. I’ll take this,” pointing to the gray pin-striped suit.

  “It’s sixteen dollars. It’s the latest thing that young fellows are wearing in the city. You need a chocolate derby, a white shirt with a low collar, a plaid necktie, and shoes the same color as the hat, only we call’em cordovan and not chocolate.”

  He saw that in fact this was exactly what he needed. Mr. Procter was not only highly tactful but faultless in his choice.

  “Just as you say.”

  “Fine. I’ll have the suit fitted. Mr. Rubenstern!” he called up the stairs.

  “Fitted?”

  “Yes, fitted.”

  “It isn’t necessary. I’ll wear it just as it is.”

  Ah, explained Mr. Procter, but that wasn’t possible. The sleeves were too long and the trousers too large—and anyhow, as he pointed out in a final and irrefutable argument, the cuffs of the trousers weren’t finished and had only been cut off with pinking shears. By this time Mr. Rubenstern, a stout and discouraged-looking gentleman with a bald head, was coming down the stairs with his own tape measure draped around him. He went off to a dressing room and put the suit on, and then came out while Mr. Rubenstern jerked and tugged at it and slashed away making marks with a thin piece of chalk. He was growing more and more impatient. He hadn’t really anticipated all this.

  Mr. Procter had out a ticket with blanks on it, and groped in his vest for a pencil. “Name?”

  With no particular hesitation he said the first thing that came into his head: “Fred.”

  “Last name?”

  This time he was a little at a loss. A second or two passed before a vision of the Feed and Grain store came to him, a little further down on Fourth.

  “Fred Hite.”

  “Address?”

  “Liberty Hotel.”

  “Ah, you’re a guest in our town. You’d like the suit sent to the hotel then?”

  “I don’t think you quite understand. I want to wear it. And right away.”

  Ah, but that too was impossible, Mr. Procter explained with his polite air of infallibility. He could have it in a day or two, or if there were a rush, tomorrow morning at eleven.

  “Out of the question. Can you see me going around like this?”

  This was the moment, if Mr. Procter had ever felt the impulse to do so, to ask why Fred was going about like this. But he was too tactful, or too familiar with the manifold sartorial eccentricities and deviations of the
world, to make a comment. Evidently he saw the point, and agreed if only silently that Fred could not go about like this, but the most he would concede was “Perhaps tomorrow morning.”

  “I’ll pay extra.”

  It was not necessary to pay extra, Mr. Procter assured him. At Procter’s every service and courtesy were provided the customer, and the price was only that indicated on the garment. He looked with some fixity at Fred’s thin adolescent face, with its shock of dark hair and its intent and determined expression. Then he turned to the tailor.

  “Mr. Rubenstern, are you very occupied?”

  “Not vurry.”

  “Perhaps,” Mr. Proctor conceded, “if you could come by again in an hour or two. We close,” he warned him, “at six. Do you think we can accommodate the young gentleman, Mr. Rubenstern?”

  Mr. Rubenstern seemed plunged into a fit of gloom. He said, “I’ll stop everything else.”

  It was settled. Fred went back to the dressing room, took off the suit, and passed it out to the still dejected Mr. Rubenstern. He dressed and came out. Then there was no help for it; he was banished out into the street again in the baggy black suit and loose shoes. After he had tried on the new suit and taken it off, the outsized clothes felt wretched, and worse, conspicuous. He gritted his teeth and raged inwardly. Staring down the passersby and forcing them to avert their eyes, he strode down Fourth to the S. P. station and back again on the other side of the street, and found by the clock on the bank that he had used up only five minutes. He forced himself to slow his pace, even stopping now and then and pretending to look in a shop window. In this way he was able to stretch out his circuit of Fourth Street, up one side and down the other, to fifteen minutes. Each time he passed Procter’s he looked in to see if Mr. Rubenstern was by any chance waddling down the great walnut staircase with the suit over his arm. An hour or two might mean one hour, might it not? To make sure, he took another trip up and down Fourth Street, and then strode into the store with his chin jutting out, saying nothing.

  Mr. Procter, finally, seemed a little impatient with him. But as a merchant it was not his policy to have emotions, and he was almost successful in concealing his irritation. “I don’t think it would be ready yet,” he said firmly. He called up the staircase. “Mr. Rubenstern!”

  The bald head appeared over the balustrade. “I’m not able to do miracles yet. I’m only human.” But he was able to do miracles, for he appeared almost immediately on the staircase, holding the suit over his arm.

  The suit fitted like a motorman’s glove. Miracle or not, Mr. Rubenstern knew his trade. Fred had to have Mr. Procter’s help in tying the plaid necktie; Mr. Procter stood behind him and guided him in the mirror. The cordovan pumps were so elegant that Fred had the impression he could fly, if he pushed himself upon his toes a little. The shirt had French cuffs, and Mr. Procter had provided imitation-jewel links, evidently as a gift. Mr. Rubenstern, standing at one side, put the hat on him as though he were helping to dress a mannikin. Mr. Procter, meanwhile, was wrapping up the old clothes in a brown-paper bundle.

  “Wait!”

  Fred took the clothes away from him, groped in the pocket of the black coat, found the Double Eagle, and handed it to him. Mr. Procter glanced at it reflectively, as though he were interested in numismatics, and then turned away without a word to put it into the cash register. He gave Fred a handful of change—no paper, just a half-dozen or so coins. Fred slipped them into his pocket without looking at them.

  “Thank you. And good day.”

  “And the package?” inquired Mr. Procter, still placid.

  “I’ll call for it later.”

  11.

  Out in the street Fred walked along with a springy step. He felt himself a different person, and in fact he was. In the well-fitting fashionable suit, the neat white shirt, and the brown shoes that seemed winged, he launched out into a world that seemed all at once gleaming and marvelously simple, and his for the taking. The first thing he took from it was a cigar. He stepped into Shakespeare’s and ordered, “A Guantanamo.”

  These, popularly called Nickel Guanos, were the local favorite. They were long and thin and if tended with care would last for an hour or more. Fred put down his nickel.

  “Alight!”

  “Thank you.”

  The clerk lit the cigar, and Fred sidled out into the late afternoon sunlight again. He took a puff. He was uncertain what to do with the cigar when he was not smoking it. Certainly you didn’t leave it in your mouth. Only the men standing around at the livery stable did that. But it seemed awkward holding it in his fingers, as though it were a firecracker that he was about to throw away as soon as he found a place to throw it. Trying several different grips in succession, he finally stuck it between the first and second fingers of his right hand, then held the hand behind him with the wrist gripped loosely in his left. This seemed casual and had a devil-may-care air to it. Fred walked down Fourth to Main, looked around to see if anybody were watching, and got on the Yellow Dog.

  Smoking was permitted only in the rear half which was open to the air. At this time of the day he had it to himself. There were two or three passengers in the closed section in front. He sat comfortably with his legs crossed, drew at the long, thin cigar, and expelled the smoke in a leisurely way. Like a millionaire, like a young prince, he savored his Guantanamo while the landscape rolled past him in the gray twilight air. The sugar factory went by, then the beet fields with men working bent over in the long, narrow trenches. Some day, he thought, he might own all this. Anything was possible for a clever young fellow with ambition and a cool head. He might sell it to a combination of bankers from the East, or he might keep it in order to speculate on the world sugar market. He took another pull at his cigar, and the Yellow Dog slowed for Angel Town with its brakes squeaking.

  When it started off again it was only five minutes to the beach. The car made its jerky turn to the left, ran along between the bluff and the beach for a mile or so, then clacked to a stop by the half-broken wooden platform lying in the sand. Fred got off and threw away his cigar.

  The big building lay like a stranded ark at the edge of the sea, only a hundred yards from the tracks. A boardwalk led out to it across the sand. As he drew closer he got a good look at it for the first time. It was constructed, evidently, out of odd scraps of lumber of all shapes and sizes, with a piece of tin or corrugated iron nailed over it here and there. On top of it was the sign with the R almost fallen off at the end. Only the front side facing the shore rested on the sand; the rest of it was built out over the water on pilings. The left end of the building was long and low, with dusty windows and an unpainted wooden door in the middle. At the other end was a structure that was entirely different. It seemed to be three stories high; at least it had three rows of windows. Although it was built of wood like the rest of the building, it affected a kind of pretentious mock-classic style; there were fluted columns with the paint peeling off them, wooden niches with carved wooden vases, and along the top a jigsaw frieze like a kind of tawdry Parthenon. There seemed to be no separate entrance to this part of the building. But as Fred came closer he saw that there was a sign on it too, or at least that someone had affixed a small board high up on it with the crudely painted words: “Hotel Dolores y Sueño.” There was no sign of life from any part of the building; the only sound was a gentle crashing now and then as a wave broke through the pilings underneath.

  The unpainted wooden door at the left end was slightly ajar. He pushed through it and entered, leaving the door open behind him. At first he could see almost nothing. It was early evening now and the place was dark. Finally he began to make out some details. This part of the building was a long dance hall. At one end was a small platform for the band, with a music stand and some chairs on one of which was an abandoned saxophone. Behind the platform, for some reason, a piece of faded red velvet was hung on the wall. At the other end of the hall was a larger raised floor, stretching across the room from one side to the other.
On it were a half-dozen tables and chairs with wire legs. The tables had not been cleaned; there were bottles on them, some lying on their sides, and brownish pools of liquid. Behind the tables was a tiny bar, and over the bar was a mirror with a picture painted on it, an improbable romantic scene of lovers and moonlight. Underneath were the words “Cerveza El Brujo.” To the right of the bar, at the very end of the hall, was the door that led to the hotel.

  This door had a curtain hanging in it of the same red velvet as the drapery behind the band. The curtain was half open, and there was someone standing in the opening. She was half the length of the dance hall away from Fred, and it was some time before his eyes adjusted to the gloom enough that he could make out something of her. She seemed very young, perhaps no older than he was. But her body was full; she was a miniature woman with breasts that were already large enough to sag. Her black hair was parted in the center and fell away on either side like ravens’ wings. She wore a slightly tawdry red dress like a Spanish dancer, with slits to the knee, and there was a red paper flower in her hair. Her small round face had no expression whatsoever. Her glance, moving in a leisurely way from one part of him to another, took in the thin adolescent form, the stylish suit, and the pale but resolute face.

  “It costs a dollar,” she said, “but for you it will be twenty-five cents.”

  12.

  Fred came home in a high state of exhilaration and managed to sneak into the house without being observed. He went upstairs and into his room, securely latched the door, took off his hat, looked into it as if to see if there was some message there, came to himself and put the hat away in the closet, walked around the room, and looked at himself in the mirror, opening the coat and sticking his thumbs experimentally into the vest. Then he went to the chiffonier and dropped the last of his coins into the drawer, which was a terrible mess, with underclothing, crumpled magazine pictures, and soiled ribbons sticking up out of it. He found a scrap of paper, wrote something on it, and stuck it into the frame of the mirror. Then he began undressing and hiding the various items of clothing away in dark and inaccessible corners of the closet.