Fanny Herself | Page 2

But more often she
came forward to you from the rear of the store, with bits of excelsior
clinging to her black sateen apron. You knew that she had been helping
Aloysius as he unpacked a consignment of chamber sets or a hogshead
of china or glassware, chalking each piece with the price mark as it was
dug from its nest of straw and paper.
"How do you do!" she would say. "What can I do for you?" And in that
moment she had you listed, indexed, and filed, were you a farmer
woman in a black shawl and rusty bonnet with a faded rose bobbing
grotesquely atop it, or one of the patronizing East End set who came to
Brandeis' Bazaar because Mrs. Brandeis' party favors, for one thing,
were of a variety that could be got nowhere else this side of Chicago. If,
after greeting you, Mrs. Brandeis called, "Sadie! Stockings!"
(supposing stockings were your quest), you might know that Mrs.
Brandeis had weighed you and found you wanting.
There had always been a store--at least, ever since Fanny could

remember. She often thought how queer it would seem to have to buy
pins, or needles, or dishes, or soap, or thread. The store held all these
things, and many more. Just to glance at the bewildering display
outside gave you promise of the variety within. Winnebago was rather
ashamed of that display. It was before the day of repression in
decoration, and the two benches in front of the windows overflowed
with lamps, and water sets, and brooms, and boilers and tinware and
hampers. Once the Winnebago Courier had had a sarcastic editorial
about what they called the Oriental bazaar (that was after the editor,
Lem Davis, had bumped his shin against a toy cart that protruded
unduly), but Mrs. Brandeis changed nothing. She knew that the farmer
women who stood outside with their husbands on busy Saturdays
would not have understood repression in display, but they did
understand the tickets that marked the wares in plain figures--this berry
set, $1.59; that lamp, $1.23. They talked it over, outside, and drifted
away, and came back, and entered, and bought.
She knew when to be old-fashioned, did Mrs. Brandeis, and when to be
modern. She had worn the first short walking skirt in Winnebago. It
cleared the ground in a day before germs were discovered, when
women's skirts trailed and flounced behind them in a cloud of dust. One
of her scandalized neighbors (Mrs. Nathan Pereles, it was) had taken
her aside to tell her that no decent woman would dress that way.
"Next year," said Mrs. Brandeis, "when you are wearing one, I'll
remind you of that." And she did, too. She had worn shirtwaists with a
broad "Gibson" shoulder tuck, when other Winnebago women were
still encased in linings and bodices. Do not get the impression that she
stood for emancipation, or feminism, or any of those advanced things.
They had scarcely been touched on in those days. She was just an
extraordinarily alert woman, mentally and physically, with a shrewd
sense of values. Molly Brandeis never could set a table without
forgetting the spoons, or the salt, or something, but she could add a
double column of figures in her head as fast as her eye could travel.
There she goes, running off with the story, as we were afraid she would.
Not only that, she is using up whole pages of description when she

should be giving us dialogue. Prospective readers, running their eyes
over a printed page, object to the solid block formation of the
descriptive passage. And yet it is fascinating to weave words about her,
as it is fascinating to turn a fine diamond this way and that in the
sunlight, to catch its prismatic hues. Besides, you want to know--do
you not?--how this woman who reads Balzac should be waiting upon
you in a little general store in Winnebago, Wisconsin?
In the first place, Ferdinand Brandeis had been a dreamer, and a
potential poet, which is bad equipment for success in the business of
general merchandise. Four times, since her marriage, Molly Brandeis
had packed her household goods, bade her friends good-by, and with
her two children, Fanny and Theodore, had followed her husband to
pastures new. A heart-breaking business, that, but broadening. She
knew nothing of the art of buying and selling at the time of her
marriage, but as the years went by she learned unconsciously the things
one should not do in business, from watching Ferdinand Brandeis do
them all. She even suggested this change and that, but to no avail.
Ferdinand Brandeis was a gentle and lovable man at home; a testy,
quick-tempered one in business.
That was because he had been miscast from the first, and yet