Part 9 (1/2)

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 furnis.h.i.+ng, 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 friends.h.i.+p. 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.