Free Back STreet by Fannie Hurst

twenty out of the fifty dollars a month she now earned in the store, where by the same devastation of death she had become an outsider; but her universe had slipped suddenly, like land, sliding into a sea of bewilderment.
    To think! Papa, sitting there so normally over coffee boiled with milk and sugar in it! And then, two evenings later, lying boxed, his face that had always been swept by heavy breathing, lying covered by a wooden lid, like merchandise on a store-shelf.
    Elementary wonder at death’s impartiality was out over Ray. Adolph could conceivably be dead to Tagenhorst or Freda, but to have left her like that. Without a word! Without a look back. With the passing of her mother, there had been only the rather terrified awe of the child. But Adolph had come so far into life with her. And she had not even closed his eyes in death, or seen to it what kind of socks he wore in his coffin. He had been borne, horizontal, bobbing, on the six broadcloth shoulders of six Turnverein members, out of the front door, carried tilted, down the front steps and along the red-painted brick walk, to a hearse with wooden plumes on its four corners. Adolph had gone to God without so much as a backward glance at his daughter left alone among the strangers—Tagenhorst, Heymann, Freda, and Marshall.
    As she lay on her bed in the dark hours before dawn, half awake and half submerged under the depression that made these slow awakenings her horror, it required all her energy to force herself to rise to face the days.
    Risen, and with the normal circumstances of the morning taking shape, she found that depression, in a large measure, lifted, and life became a matter of rushing ahead of who was sure to monopolize it, into the bathroom, buttoning into your shoes, buckling into your corset, looping and swirling at your pompadour, hooking, hitching into your petticoats, corset-cover, shirtwaist, and skirt, boiling your egg, and usually eating it standing beside the kitchen stove, and then bolting for the car if the weather was bad, or, if it was fine, leading your bicycle out from under the hall stairs.
    Usually on Sunday morning, these indeterminate months following the death of Adolph, when the house was plastered with a “For Sale” sign and Marshall appeared now every fortnight or so from Youngstown in the capacity of advisor to his mother, Freda stole into bed beside Ray.
    There was talk of moving to Youngstown, where, it developed,Marshall had an eye to a coal business of his own, everything of course subservient to the disposal of the house, so that it might be a comfortable widow who could one of these days turn her face toward setting herself and her son up in business in the nearby town.
    The prospect, however, was clouded somewhat for both Tagenhorst and her daughter by the uncertainty into which matters were further thrown by the failure of Hugo Hanck to precipitate his attentions to Freda by an offer of marriage.
    “Ray,” trebled Freda, one of those Sunday mornings when she had climbed from her mother’s bed and padded across the hall into Ray’s, “what is adultery?”
    “Why, Freda Tagenhorst, what’s on your mind?”
    “What is adultery?”
    “You know as well as I do.”
    “Honestly, Ray, I don’t. Of course I know it is something bad, but I don’t know what.”
    “You know your Commandments, don’t you? You’ve gone to Sunday school all your life.”
    “Yes, but I don’t mean the thou-shalt-not kind of adultery they talk about in the Bible. I mean real adultery right here in Cincinnati.”
    After all, what a child she was, lying there pink and soft and strangely kitten-like, her flaxen braids across the pillow and her softy young breasts breathing of the little excitement her question seemed to inspire.
    “Adultery, Freda, is not being true to the person to whom you are married.”
    “Oh, then it isn’t just something that any man can commit against a girl?”
    “Yes, any man who is not true to his wife