Back STreet by Fannie Hurst

Author:Fannie Hurst [Hurst, Fannie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-7068-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-03-25T04:00:00+00:00

31

The year he became president of the Affiliated Charities, Walter turned the Cape May house, Castle View, into a temporary home for convalescent children. Later he was to bequeath this Georgian seventeen-room mansion, on its two hundred acres, to the township of Cape May as a permanent seaside vacation ground for children from the New York tenements.

During the summer of 1915, which was before his acquisition of the even more elaborate estate of Rye, this voluntary evacuation had the effect of throwing awry plans for a summer at Cape May which had been more meticulously laid than usual.

The reason for this was to come to Ray later in a shock so blasting that she fell into the habit of dating her life before and after the episode of Youngstown. Part of the repercussive effect of this shock was the fact that she could find herself unhorsed and thrown into indescribable confusion by an isolated circumstance which, after all, was only part and parcel of a general condition which she had learned from the start to endure.

The turning over of the Cape May house, coming as an eager impulse from both Walter and Corinne, exerted no small pull upon the affairs of Ray.

For several summers, at Walter’s insistence, she had occupied, in the township proper of Cape May, the small furnished flat of a druggist and his wife who, eager for the summer income, moved into the quarters of a tent colony on the beach.

It was a pleasant little apartment over the drugstore, on a busy street, but within walk of the ocean. Electric lights flowed into her front windows at night, and in many respects there was less of the shrouded feeling of isolation there than in the flat in town. It seemed to Ray, all things considered, that her times there with Walter had been happiest of all. Away from the propinquity of his affairs, a pretty well-worn-down vein of playfulness was in the habit of asserting itself, carrying them back to the lighter moods of the old Cincinnati days. He was freer to be himself, there. And often, against their rigid precedent, they strolled out together of late evenings, down toward the moon-swept, breeze-swept, deserted end of the beach, where white sands, the color of casket-plush, sparkled, and magic stole out.

Ecstasy, of a kind that made everything disenchanting that was already written into the years seem not to matter, touched these moody tender evenings with Walter. Their hands stole together, and locked, as they walked; their feet shushed softly into the white sands; and sometimes they sat and built around themselves a mound of it, as children might have. Two human specks, filled with the immemorial lure of the flesh.

Even the long days alone in the flat over the drugstore on the shoddy little street, or of wandering alone on the unfrequented ends of the beach, sometimes directly past the two Saxel children, or even past Corinne herself, strolling the sands with her husband or friends, were tinged with some of the retrospective or anticipatory sublimity of those few evenings.

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