Back STreet by Fannie Hurst Page B

waving in their high psyches, arrived and departed across the heavily carpeted floors. The men were a miscellaneous lot. A few of them in black broadcloth and white planks of shirt front, but most of them like Saxel, in their sack suits and derby hats.
    “Fact of the matter is, Ray—you don’t mind if I call you Ray, do you?—I live in Hamilton. Ever been to Hamilton?”
    Had she ever been to Hamilton? Ask Nat Paisley over at Niles Tool Works if she had ever been to Hamilton. Or Otto Kugel, or Phil Dinninger. Ever been to Hamilton? How’s Stengel’s? And the St. Charles, and Mosler Safe Works? Where did he buy the necktie he was wearing? Strauss’s. Ever been to Lindenwood Grove? Did she know Hamilton?
    “Well, that’s fine. I live there alone with my mother in the same house I was born.”
    She was right. The thought had struck her from the very first that he might be Jewish. Yessir, he was one of those high-class Jewish boys. The mother determined it. They lived at home, those Jewish fellows did. They stuck. Catch one of those high-class Jewish boys behaving like Marshall and never showing up around his mother, years on end, until there was something in it for him. Those gray eyes and that nice shiny black hair and the little mustache were what gave the hint, although he might just as easily have been Italian.
    “So you live in Hamilton?”
    “Guess that’s the way you’d put it, but I work down in the city. Clerk in the First National.”
    The thought trailed through her mind: “First bank clerk I’ve ever known. Nice. Clean.”
    “Takes me a full hour coming and going. About the only man out of Hamilton who does that. My next move, I guess, will be to try and pry my mother out of the old house and move her down to the city. Girl like you makes a man realize what he’s missing in a small town.”
    “Oh yes, I know all about you fellows and what you miss!” Those high-class Jewish boys were all of a stripe. Ray had known one. Arthur Metzger, lived on Richmond Street where so many of the high-class ones dwelt. Father owned Metzger Jewelry Store on Vine. Arthur one of the best fellows in the world. Not a suave, good-looking type like this one. Beaky. But a good spender. Kind of boy who gave a girl the best of everything. Best seats, best shows. Drove his own phaeton, and, in Ray’s case, always deplored the fact that she did not drink the champagnes and other wines he was eager to provide for her.
    But one night, in a burst of confidence, he told her what she had long suspected. With the Jewish fellows of his class, girls were divided into two classes—“shiksas” and the girls they would marry. Ray was a “shiksa.” Out of his class and out of his faith and out of his reckoning, except as the kind of girl on whom you could sow a wild oat. He taught her a few phrases like “shiksa.” Goy.
Batsimer
. It was his great joke to make her repeat these words that sat so oddly on her lips.
    “What are you, Ray? Go on, say it again. It sounds cute.”
    “I’m a goy.”
    But something leaden as anything she had ever felt in her life dropped heavily into her conscience, as she sat there in the Burnet House opposite Walter Saxel.
    “I ran down to the city this evening after spending Sunday up in Hamilton with my mother, in order to visit a friend of mine on Richmond Street.”
    “A girl?”
    “A young lady.”
    Of course. One of those well-to-do Jews in the stone fronts on Richmond Street. If a fellow like Saxel called on one of those girls, you just bet it was a “young lady.” Ray classified as “goy.”
    “Don’t let me detain you.”
    “Now, Ray, was that nice?”
    “It wasn’t. I’m sorry. Funny, now. Known you about forty minutes and feel jealous because you’re not spending the evening with me.”
    “Well, sir, you’ll think I’m talking through my hat, but I’m going to do something I never did in my life before. Call up a girl like Corinne Trauer at the last minute and tell her I