Fanny Herself Part 9

At Christmas time she helped in the store, afternoons and evenings.

Then, one Christmas, Mrs. Brandeis was ill for three weeks with grippe.

They had to have a helper in the house. When Mrs. Brandeis was able to come back to the store Sadie left to marry, not one of her traveling-men victims, but a steady person, in the paper-hanging way, whose suit had long been considered hopeless. After that f.a.n.n.y took her place. She developed a surprising knack at selling. Yet it was not so surprising, perhaps, when one considered her teacher. She learned as only a woman can learn who is brought into daily contact with the outside world.

It was not only contact: it was the relation of buyer and seller. She learned to judge people because she had to. How else could one gauge their tastes, temperaments, and pocketbooks? They pa.s.sed in and out of Brandeis' Bazaar, day after day, in an endless and varied procession--traveling men, school children, housewives, farmers, worried hostesses, newly married couples bent on house furnishing, business men.

She learned that it was the girls from the paper mills who bought the expensive plates--the ones with the red roses and green leaves hand-painted in great smears and costing two dollars and a half, while the golf club crowd selected for a gift or prize one of the little white plates with the faded-looking blue sprig pattern, costing thirty-nine cents. One day, after she had spent endless time and patience over the sale of a nondescript little plate to one of Winnebago's socially elect, she stared wrathfully after the retreating back of the trying customer.

"Did you see that? I spent an hour with her. One hour! I showed her everything from the imported Limoges bowls to the Sevres cups and saucers, and all she bought was that miserable little bonbon dish with the cornflower pattern. Cat!"

Mrs. Brandeis spoke from the depths of her wisdom.

"f.a.n.n.y, I didn't miss much that went on during that hour, and I was dying to come over and take her away from you, but I didn't because I knew you needed the lesson, and I knew that that McNulty woman never spends more than twenty-five cents, anyway. But I want to tell you now that it isn't only a matter of plates. It's a matter of understanding folks. When you've learned whom to show the expensive hand-painted things to, and when to suggest quietly the little, vague things, with what you call the faded look, why, you've learned just about all there is to know of human nature. Don't expect it, at your age."

Molly Brandeis had never lost her trick of chatting with customers, or listening to them, whenever she had a moment's time. People used to drop in, and perch themselves on one of the stools near the big glowing base burner and talk to Mrs. Brandeis. It was incredible, the secrets they revealed of business, and love and disgrace; of hopes and aspirations, and troubles, and happiness. The farmer women used to fascinate f.a.n.n.y by their very drabness. Mrs. Brandeis had a long and loyal following of these women. It was before the day when every farmhouse boasted an automobile, a telephone, and a phonograph.

A worn and dreary lot, these farmer women, living a skimmed milk existence, putting their youth, and health, and looks into the soil.

They used often to sit back near the stove in winter, or in a cool corner near the front of the store in summer, and reveal, bit by bit, the sordid, tragic details of their starved existence. f.a.n.n.y was often shocked when they told their age--twenty-five, twenty-eight, thirty, but old and withered from drudgery, and child-bearing, and coa.r.s.e, unwholesome food. Ignorant women, and terribly lonely, with the dumb, lack-l.u.s.ter eyes that bespeak monotony. When they smiled they showed blue-white, gla.s.sily perfect false teeth that flashed incongruously in the ruin of their wrinkled, sallow, weather-beaten faces. Mrs. Brandeis would question them gently.

Children? Ten. Living? Four. Doctor? Never had one in the house. Why? He didn't believe in them. No proper kitchen utensils, none of the devices that lighten the deadeningly monotonous drudgery of housework.

Everything went to make his work easier--new harrows, plows, tractors, wind mills, reapers, barns, silos. The story would come out, bit by bit, as the woman sat there, a worn, unlovely figure, her hands--toil-blackened, seamed, calloused, unlovelier than any woman's hands were ever meant to be--lying in unaccustomed idleness in her lap.

f.a.n.n.y learned, too, that the woman with the shawl, and with her money tied in a corner of her handkerchief, was more likely to buy the six-dollar doll, with the blue satin dress, and the real hair and eye-lashes, while the Winnebago East End society woman haggled over the forty-nine cent kind, which she dressed herself.

I think their loyalty to Mrs. Brandeis might be explained by her honesty and her sympathy. She was so square with them. When Minnie Mahler, out Centerville way, got married, she knew there would be no redundancy of water sets, hanging lamps, or pickle dishes.

"I thought like I'd get her a chamber set," Minnie's aunt would confide to Mrs. Brandeis.

"Is this for Minnie Mahler, of Centerville?"

"Yes; she gets married Sunday."

"I sold a chamber set for that wedding yesterday. And a set of dishes.

But I don't think she's got a parlor lamp. At least I haven't sold one.

Why don't you get her that? If she doesn't like it she can change it.

Now there's that blue one with the pink roses."

And Minnie's aunt would end by buying the lamp.

f.a.n.n.y learned that the mill girls liked the bright-colored and expensive wares, and why; she learned that the woman with the "fascinator" (tragic misnomer!) over her head wanted the finest sled for her boy. She learned to keep her temper. She learned to suggest without seeming to suggest.

She learned to do surprisingly well all those things that her mother did so surprisingly well--surprisingly because both the women secretly hated the business of buying and selling. Once, on the Fourth of July, when there was a stand outside the store laden with all sorts of fireworks, f.a.n.n.y came down to find Aloysius and the boy Eddie absent on other work, and Mrs. Brandeis momentarily in charge. The sight sickened her, then infuriated her.

"Come in," she said, between her teeth. "That isn't your work."

"Somebody had to be there. Pearl's at dinner. And Aloysius and Eddie were--"

"Then leave it alone. We're not starving--yet. I won't have you selling fireworks like that--on the street. I won't have it! I won't have it!"

The store was paying, now. Not magnificently, but well enough. Most of the money went to Theodore, in Dresden. He was progressing, though not so meteorically as Bauer and Schabelitz had predicted. But that sort of thing took time, Mrs. Brandeis argued. f.a.n.n.y often found her mother looking at her these days with a questioning sadness in her eyes. Once she suggested that f.a.n.n.y join the cla.s.s in drawing at the Winnebago university--a small fresh-water college. f.a.n.n.y did try it for a few months, but the work was not what she wanted; they did fruit pictures and vases, with a book, on a table; or a clump of very pink and very white flowers. f.a.n.n.y quit in disgust and boredom. Besides, they were busy at the store, and needed her.

There came often to Winnebago a woman whom f.a.n.n.y Brandeis admired intensely. She was a traveling saleswoman, successful, magnetic, and very much alive. Her name was Mrs. Emma McChesney, and between her and Mrs. Brandeis there existed a warm friendship. She always took dinner with Mrs. Brandeis and f.a.n.n.y, and they made a special effort to give her all those delectable home-cooked dishes denied her in her endless round of hotels.

"Noodle soup!" she used to say, almost lyrically.

"With real hand-made, egg noodles! You don't know what it means. You haven't been eating vermicelli soup all through Illinois and Wisconsin."

"We've made a dessert, though, that--"

"Molly Brandeis, don't you dare to tell me what you've got for dessert.

I couldn't stand it. But, oh, suppose, SUPPOSE it's homemade strawberry shortcake!"

Which it more than likely was.

f.a.n.n.y Brandeis used to think that she would dress exactly as Mrs.

McChesney dressed, if she too were a successful business woman earning a man-size salary. Mrs. McChesney was a blue serge sort of woman--and her blue serge never was shiny in the back. Her collar, or jabot, or tie, or cuffs, or whatever relieving bit of white she wore, was always of the freshest and crispest. Her hats were apt to be small and full of what is known as "line." She usually would try to arrange her schedule so as to spend a Sunday in Winnebago, and the three alert, humor-loving women, grown wise and tolerant from much contact with human beings, would have a delightful day together.

"Molly," Mrs. McChesney would say, when they were comfortably settled in the living-room, or on the front porch, "with your shrewdness, and experience, and brains, you ought to be one of those five or ten thousand a year buyers. You know how to sell goods and handle people.

And you know values. That's all there is to the whole game of business.

I don't advise you to go on the road. Heaven knows I wouldn't advise my dearest enemy to do that, much less a friend. But you could do bigger things, and get bigger results. You know most of the big wholesalers, and retailers too. Why don't you speak to them about a department position? Or let me nose around a bit for you."

Molly Brandeis shook her head, though her expressive eyes were eager and interested. "Don't you think I've thought of that, Emma? A thousand times? But I'm--I'm afraid. There's too much at stake. Suppose I couldn't succeed? There's Theodore. His whole future is dependent on me for the next few years. And there's f.a.n.n.y here. No, I guess I'm too old.

And I'm sure of the business here, small as it is."

Emma McChesney glanced at the girl. "I'm thinking that f.a.n.n.y has the making of a pretty capable business woman herself."

f.a.n.n.y drew in her breath sharply, and her face sparkled into sudden life, as always when she was tremendously interested.

"Do you know what I'd do if I were in Mother's place? I'd take a great, big running jump for it and land! I'd take a chance. What is there for her in this town? Nothing! She's been giving things up all her life, and what has it brought her?"

"It has brought me a comfortable living, and the love of my two children, and the respect of my townspeople."

"Respect? Why shouldn't they respect you? You're the smartest woman in Winnebago, and the hardest working."

Emma McChesney frowned a little, in thought. "What do you two girls do for recreation?"

"I'm afraid we have too little of that, Emma. I know f.a.n.n.y has. I'm so dog-tired at the end of the day. All I want is to take my hairpins out and go to bed."

"And f.a.n.n.y?"

"Oh, I read. I'm free to pick my book friends, at least."

"Now, just what do you mean by that, child? It sounds a little bitter."

"I was thinking of what Chesterfield said in one of his Letters to His Son. 'Choose always to be in the society of those above you,' he wrote.

I guess he lived in Winnebago, Wisconsin. I'm a working woman, and a Jew, and we haven't any money or social position. And unless she's a Becky Sharp any small town girl with all those handicaps might as well choose a certain constellation of stars in the sky to wear as a breastpin, as try to choose the friends she really wants."

From Molly Brandeis to Emma McChesney there flashed a look that said, "You see?" And from Emma McChesney to Molly Brandeis another that said, "Yes; and it's your fault."

"Look here, f.a.n.n.y, don't you see any boys--men?"

"No. There aren't any. Those who have any sense and initiative leave to go to Milwaukee, or Chicago, or New York. Those that stay marry the banker's lovely daughter."