Fanny Herself | Page 6

no theater invitations, no lunches or dinners. This was business,
she told herself; more than business--it was grim war.
They still tell of that trip, sometimes, when buyers and jobbers and
wholesale men get together. Don't imagine that she came to be a
woman captain of finance. Don't think that we are to see her at the head
of a magnificent business establishment, with buyers and department
heads below her, and a private office done up in mahogany, and

stenographers and secretaries. No, she was Mrs. Brandeis, of Brandeis'
Bazaar, to the end. The bills she bought were ridiculously small, I
suppose, and the tricks she turned on that first trip were pitiful, perhaps.
But they were magnificent too, in their way. I am even bold enough to
think that she might have made business history, that plucky woman, if
she had had an earlier start, and if she had not, to the very end, had a
pack of unmanageable handicaps yelping at her heels, pulling at her
skirts.
It was only a six-hour trip to Chicago. Fanny Brandeis' eyes, big
enough at any time, were surely twice their size during the entire
journey of two hundred miles or more. They were to have lunch on the
train! They were to stop at an hotel! They were to go to the theater! She
would have lain back against the red plush seat of the car, in a swoon of
joy, if there had not been so much to see in the car itself, and through
the car window.
"We'll have something for lunch," said Mrs. Brandeis when they were
seated in the dining car, "that we never have at home, shall we?"
"Oh, yes!" replied Fanny in a whisper of excitement.
"Something--something queer, and different, and not so very healthy!"
They had oysters (a New Yorker would have sniffed at them), and
chicken potpie, and asparagus, and ice cream. If that doesn't prove Mrs.
Brandeis was game, I should like to know what could! They stopped at
the Windsor-Clifton, because it was quieter and less expensive than the
Palmer House, though quite as full of red plush and walnut. Besides,
she had stopped at the Palmer House with her husband, and she knew
how buyers were likely to be besieged by eager salesmen with cards,
and with tempting lines of goods spread knowingly in the various
sample-rooms.
Fanny Brandeis was thirteen, and emotional, and incredibly receptive
and alive. It is impossible to tell what she learned during that Chicago
trip, it was so crowded, so wonderful. She went with her mother to the
wholesale houses and heard and saw and, unconsciously, remembered.
When she became fatigued with the close air of the dim showrooms,

with their endless aisles piled with every sort of ware, she would sit on
a chair in some obscure corner, watching those sleek, over-lunched,
genial-looking salesmen who were chewing their cigars somewhat
wildly when Mrs. Brandeis finished with them. Sometimes she did not
accompany her mother, but lay in bed, deliciously, until the middle of
the morning, then dressed, and chatted with the obliging Irish chamber
maid, and read until her mother came for her at noon.
Everything she did was a delightful adventure; everything she saw had
the tang of novelty. Fanny Brandeis was to see much that was beautiful
and rare in her full lifetime, but she never again, perhaps, got quite the
thrill that those ugly, dim, red-carpeted, gas-lighted hotel corridors
gave her, or the grim bedroom, with its walnut furniture and its
Nottingham curtains. As for the Chicago streets themselves, with their
perilous corners (there were no czars in blue to regulate traffic in those
days), older and more sophisticated pedestrians experienced various
emotions while negotiating the corner of State and Madison.
That buying trip lasted ten days. It was a racking business, physically
and mentally. There were the hours of tramping up one aisle and down
the other in the big wholesale lofts. But that brought bodily fatigue only.
It was the mental strain that left Mrs. Brandeis spent and limp at the
end of the day. Was she buying wisely? Was she over-buying? What
did she know about buying, anyway? She would come back to her hotel
at six, sometimes so exhausted that the dining-room and dinner were
unthinkable. At such times they would have dinner in their room
another delicious adventure for Fanny. She would try to tempt the
fagged woman on the bed with bits of this or that from one of the many
dishes that dotted the dinner tray. But Molly Brandeis, harrowed in
spirit and numbed in body, was too spent to eat.
But that was not always the case. There was that unforgettable night
when they went to see Bernhardt the divine. Fanny spent the entire
morning