The Vertical City | Page 4

condiments, and wears his elk's tooth dangling from his waistcoat
pocket and mounted on a band of platinum and tiny diamonds.
Mothers of debutantes were by no means unamiably disposed toward
him, but the debutantes themselves slithered away like slim-flanked
minnows.
It was rumored that one summer at the Royal Palisades Hotel in
Atlantic City he had become engaged to a slim-flanked one from Akron,
Ohio. But on the evening of the first day she had seen him in a bathing
suit the rebellious young girl and a bitterly disappointed and
remonstrating mother had departed on the Buck Eye for "points west."
There was almost something of the nudity of arm and leg he must have
presented to eighteen's tender sensibilities in Mr. Latz's expression now
as he sat well forward on the overstuffed chair, his overstuffed knees
strained apart, his face nude of all pretense and creased with anxiety.
"That's about the way of it, isn't it?" he said again into the growing
silence.
Suddenly Mrs. Samstag's fingers were rigid at their task of lace making,
the scraping of the orchestral violin tearing the roaring noises in her
ears into ribbons of alternate sound and vacuum, as if she were closing
her ears and opening them, so roaringly the blood pounded.
"I--When a woman cares for--a man like--I did--Mr. Latz, she'll never
be happy until--she cares again--like that. I always say, once an

affectionate nature, always an affectionate nature."
"You mean," he said, leaning forward the imperceptible half inch that
was left of chair--"you mean--me--?"
The smell of bay rum came out greenly then as the moisture sprang out
on his scalp.
"I--I'm a home woman, Mr. Latz. You can put a fish in water, but you
cannot make him swim. That's me and hotel life."
At this somewhat cryptic apothegm Mr. Latz's knee touched Mrs.
Samstag's, so that he sprang back full of nerves at what he had not
intended.
"Marry me, Carrie," he said, more abruptly than he might have, without
the act of that knee to immediately justify.
She spread the lace out on her lap.
Ostensibly to the hotel lobby they were as casual as, "My mulligatawny
soup was cold to-night," or, "Have you heard the new one that Al
Jolson pulls at the Winter Garden?" But actually the roar was higher
than ever in Mrs. Samstag's ears and he could feel the plethoric red
rushing in flashes over his body.
"Marry me, Carrie," he said, as if to prove that his stiff lips could repeat
their incredible feat.
With a woman's talent for them, her tears sprang.
"Mr. Latz--"
"Louis," he interpolated, widely eloquent of eyebrow and posture.
"You're proposing, Louis!" She explained rather than asked, and placed
her hand to her heart so prettily that he wanted to crush it there with his
kisses.
"God bless you for knowing it so easy, Carrie. A young girl would
make it so hard. It's just what has kept me from asking you weeks ago,
this getting it said. Carrie, will you?"
"I'm a widow, Mr. Latz--Louis--"
"Loo--"
"L--loo. With a grown daughter. Not one of those merry-widows you
read about."
"That's me! A bachelor on top, but a home man underneath. Why, up to
five years ago, Carrie, while the best little mother a man ever had was
alive, I never had eyes for a woman or--"
"It's common talk what a grand son you were to her, Mr. La--Louis--"

"Loo."
"Loo."
"I don't want to seem to brag, Carrie, but you saw the coat that just
walked out on Mrs. Gronauer? My little mother she was a humpback,
Carrie, not a real one, but all stooped from the heavy years when she
was helping my father to get his start. Well, anyway, that little stooped
back was one of the reasons why I was so anxious to make it up to her.
Y'understand?"
"Yes--Loo."
"But you saw that mink coat. Well, my little mother, three years before
she died, was wearing one like that in sable. Real Russian. Set me back
eighteen thousand, wholesale, and she never knew different than that it
cost eighteen hundred. Proudest moment of my life when I helped my
little old mother into her own automobile in that sable coat.
"I had some friends lived in the Grenoble Apartments when you
did--the Adelbergs. They used to tell me how it hung right down to her
heels and she never got into the auto that she didn't pick it up so as not
to sit on it.
"That there coat is packed away in cold storage now, Carrie, waiting,
without me exactly knowing why, I guess, for--the one little woman in
the world besides her I would let so much as touch its hem."
Mrs. Samstag's lips parted, her teeth showing through