Every Soul Hath Its Song. Fannie Hurst
In Madam Moores's two-flights-up flat the windows were flung open to the moist air of spring, which flowed in cool as water between crisp muslin curtains, stirring them. In the sudden flare of electric light the canary unfolded its head from a sheaf of wing, cheeped, and fell to picking up seed from the bottom of its cage.
Mr. Alphonse Michelson collapsed into the shallow chair beside the table and relaxed his head against the threadbare dent in the upholstery.
"Whoops! home never was like this!"
"Is him tired?"
"Dead."
"Smoke?"
"Yep."
"There."
"Ah!"
"Now him all comfy and I go fix poor tired bad boy him din-din."
More native than mother-tongue is Mother's tongue. Whom women love they would first destroy with gibberish. To Mr. Michelson's linguistic credit, however, he shifted in his chair in unease.
"What did you say?"
"What him want for din-din?"
He slung one slim leg atop the other, slumping deeper to the luxury of his chair. "Dinner?"
"Yes, din-din."
"Say, those were swell chicken livers smothered in onions you served the other night, madam. Believe me, those were some livers!"
No, reader, Romance is not dead. On the contrary, he has survived the frock-coat and learned to chew a clove.
A radiance as soft as the glow from a pink-shaded lamp flowed over Madam
Moores's face.
"Livers him going to have and biscuits made in my own ittsie bittsie oven. Eh?"
"Swell."
She divested herself of her wraps, fluffing her mahogany-colored hair where the hat had restricted it, lighted a tiny stove off in the tiny kitchenette and enveloped herself in a blue-bib-top apron. Her movements were short and full of caprice, and when she set the table, brushing his chair as she passed and repassed, lights came out in her eyes when she dared raise her lids to show them.
They dined by the concealed fireplace and from off a table that could fold its legs under like Aladdin's. Fumes of well-made coffee rose as ingratiating as the perfume of a love story. Mr. Michelson dropped a lump of butter into the fluffy heart of a biscuit and clapped the halves together.
"Some biscuits!"
"Bad boy, stop jollying."
"Say, if I'd tell you the truth about what I think of these biscuits, you'd say I was writing a streetcar advertisement for baking-powder. Say, this is some cup custard!"
"More?"
"Full to my eyebrows."
"Just a little bittsie?"
"Nope."
He lighted a cigarette and they settled back in after-dinner completeness, their dessert-plates pushed well toward the center of the table and their senses quiet. She pleated the edge of her napkin and watched him blow leisurely spirals of smoke to the ceiling.
"What you thinking about, Phonzie?"
"Nothing."
"Honest?"
"If I was thinking at all I was just sizing it up as pretty soft for a fellow like me to get this sort of stand-in with—with my boss. Gawd! me and Roth used to love each other like snakes."
"I—I ain't your boss, Phonzie. Don't I give you the run of everything—hiring the models and all?"
"Sure you're my boss, and it's pretty soft for me."
"And I was just thinking, Phonzie, that it's pretty soft for me to have found a fellow like you to manage things for me."
"Shucks!"
"Without you, so used to the ways of the Avenue and all that kind of thing, where would I be now, trying to run in the right kind of bluff with the trade?"
"That's easy! After all, Fifth Avenue and Third Avenue is pretty much alike in the end, madam. A spade may be a spade, but if you're a good salesman, you can put it on black velvet and sell it for a dessert-spoon any day in the week."
"That's just what I'm saying, Phonzie, about you're knowing how. I needed just a fellow like you to show me how the swell trade has got to be blindfolded, and that the difference between a dressmaker and a modiste is about a hundred and fifty dollars a gown."
"You ought to see the way we handled them when I was on the floor for Roth. Say, we wouldn't touch a peignoir in that establishment for under two hundred and fifty, and—we had 'em coming in there like sheep. The Riverside Drive trade is nothing, madam, compared to what we could do down there with the Avenue business."
"You sure know how to handle the lorgnette bunch, Phonzie."
"Is it any wonder, being in the business twenty years?"
"Twenty years! Why, Phonzie, you—you don't look much more than twenty yourself."
He laughed, shifting one knee to the other. "That's because you can't see that my eye teeth are gold, madam."
"You're so light on your feet, Phonzie, and slick."
"To look twenty and feel your forty years ain't what it's cracked up to be. If I had a home of my own, you know what I'd buy first—a pair of carpet slippers and a patent rocker."
"I bet you mean it, too, Phonzie."
"Sure I mean it! How'd you like to go through life like me, trying to keep the kink ironed in my hair and out of my back, or lose my job at the only kind of work I'm good for? It's like having to live with a grin frozen on your face so you can't close your mouth."
"I—I just can't get over it, Phonzie, you forty! You five years older than me and me afraid—thinking all along it was just the other way."
"I had already shed my milk teeth before you were born, madam."
"Whatta you know about that!"
"Ask Gert. She's been following me around from place to place for years, sticking to me because I say there ain't a model in the business can show the clothes like she can."
"Yes?"
"Ask her; she's my age and we been on the job together for twenty years. Long before live models was even known in the business, she and me were showing goods in the old Cunningham place on Madison Avenue."
"Even—even back there you was dead set on having good figures around the place, wasn't you, Phonzie?"
"I tell you it's economy in the end, madam, to have figures that can show off the goods to advantage."
"Oh, I'm not kicking, Phonzie, but I was just saying."
"I have been in the business long enough, madam, to learn that the greatest way in the world to show gowns is on live stock. A dame will fall for any sort of a rag stuck on a figure like Gert's, and think the waist-line and all is thrown in with the dress. You seen for yourself Van Ness order five gowns right off Gert's back to-day. Would she have fallen for them if we had shown them in the hand? Not much! She forgot all about her own thirty-eight waist-line when she ordered that pink organdie. She was seeing Gert's twenty-two inches."
"But honest, Phonzie, take a girl like Gert, even with her figure, she—Oh, I don't know, there's something about her!"
"She may rub your fur the wrong way, madam, but under all her flip ways they don't come no finer than Gert."
"No, it ain't that, only she don't always get across. Take Lipton; she won't even let her show her a gown; she's always calling for Dodo instead. Sometimes I think the trade takes exceptions to a girl like Gert, her all decked out