Back Street: Vintage Movie Classics (A Vintage Movie Classic) - Softcover

Buch 3 von 10: A Vintage Movie Classic

Hurst, Fannie

 
9780804170673: Back Street: Vintage Movie Classics (A Vintage Movie Classic)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0804170673 ISBN 13: 9780804170673
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

The bestselling story behind Ross Hunter’s classic melodrama starring Susan Hayward and John Gavin. 
 
When “fly girl” and gorgeous socialite Ray Schmidt first meets Walter Saxel in Cincinnati, their attraction is instant and everlasting. As their bond deepens, Ray finds herself envisioning a future with Walter, until one fateful day when the settling of her family affairs interferes with their plans to meet, and his relationship with another woman forms. Though years pass and Ray manages to carve out a life for herself in New York City, Walter remains in her memory, and a chance run-in with him leads them both to fall into their former ways. What unfolds is the fascinating tale of what life was for selfless, devoted Ray, a prisoner to her love for the one man who would never fully love her back.
 
Originally published in 1931, this bestselling classic novel about the heartbreak of living along the “back streets” of a man’s life was adapted into film three times.

With a new foreword by Cari Beauchamp.

Vintage Movie Classics spotlights classic films that have stood the test of time, now rediscovered through the publication of the novels on which they were based.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Fannie Hurst (1889-1968) was an American novelist. Born in Hamilton, Ohio, and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, she graduated from Washington University in St. Louis in 1909. Hurst was a member of the Lucy Stone League, the Urban League, and was appointed to the National Advisory Committee to the Works Progress Administration in 1940. She was also a delegate to the World Health Organization in 1952. She published over twenty novels and story collections in her lifetime.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

One evening in one of those Over-­the-­Rhine cafés which were plentiful along Vine Street of the Cincinnati of the nineties, a traveling salesman leaned across his stein of Moerlein’s Extra Light and openly accused Ray Schmidt of being innocent.

“I know! You’re one of those cheating girls who act fly but aren’t. You’ll lead a man on, but you won’t go all the way.”

At the implication and all that went with it, Ray’s hand flew to her tippet, color ran beneath her tan pallor, and as usual when under stress, she rolled her eyes and became flippant.

“Try me,” was what she said, with little sense of the outrageousness of such a remark.

“That’s exactly what I have been trying to do all evening,” said the traveling salesman who, having exhibited what was for him an unprecedented astuteness in his summary of Ray Schmidt, now leaned to pinch her knee softly underneath the table.

Ray was forever being pinched underneath tables. As far back as she could remember, as a child and then as a girl growing up on Baymiller Street, boys had been fond of pinching and pulling her toward them for kisses.

“Spooning” was not unpleasant, particularly in the evening, when somehow the boys’ faces receded out of a pimply reality into the velvet tunnels of Cincinnati’s low kind of darkness. With the boys whose faces persisted in jutting lumpily, even out of cover of nighttime, Ray simply had not the heart to follow the slightly disgusted impulse to push them away.

One “spooned” to be kind. It gave you the reputation of being “fly,” no doubt of that, particularly if, like Ray, you were endowed with that subtle womanish dimension known as “style.” Ray had that. When she even so much as walked past the Stag Hotel, skirts held up off the sidewalk with that ineffable turn of wrist which again denoted “style,” there was that in her demeanor which caused each male head and eye to turn.

Sometimes they made kissing sounds with their lips, past which she sailed with her head high.

But the fact was that more usually than not Ray had attired herself, at length and with great detail, for this rapid sail past the Stag Hotel. The turning of the heads set agog within her a sense of excitement. It made life seem to quicken, as she felt the eyes burn along her well-­corseted back. It was as if she could feel, with the very taper of her torso into a waistline that two ordinary hands could come within an inch of spanning, the rhythm of being well-­proportioned. Nor was she above straining her ears from beneath their pompadour for the bits of applause that were sometimes carried along to her.

“Hot baby!”

“You’d look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two!”

“Sweet Marie, come to me!”

“She’s a daisy!”

Ray’s longish eyelids would properly drop like two slow fans, and she would remark, if her stepsister Freda happened to be along, “See anything green?” But deep within her would begin to run the stirring saps of her body. The contour of her breasts, flung high by corsets, felt beautiful, and so did the movement of her flaring hips and the strength in the calves of her legs as, beneath two petticoats and a Spanish-­flounced skirt, they hurried her along in their strong black cotton stockings.

Privately her own as were these sensations that lay warmly in her body, the bold fact was that the eyes of the men seemed to bring them pleasantly awake. It was a greater treat to the senses, even more thoroughly delighting, than to indulge in her favorite habit of lying back in a warm bath with a copy of The Wages of Sin, by Lucas Malet, held open to its place and tied with twine to the faucet to facilitate page turnings.

These Narcissus-­like delights of hers branded the daughter of old Adolph Schmidt, during the various stages of her girlhood, as boy-­crazy, fly, swift, fresh, shady, gay, and even fast.

Men laid hands too readily on Ray Schmidt. She was not past slapping them off her thighs or the slim ledge of her hip, but the smile belied the fake anger in her gray eyes.

“Ray lets the boys get fresh with her,” was the sotto voce indictment of Baymiller Street, even back in the days before she had lengthened her skirts, put up her hair, and developed to its fullest sense that promise of “style” which had already characterized her as a child.

It was well-­known along Baymiller that Schmidt did not even try to keep (much less succeed in keeping) his daughter off the streets—­that he let her run wild, as the saying went—­that it was not unusual, indeed habitual, for her, at fifteen, to remain out on the stoop with two, three, and sometimes one of the boys; and more than one head in curlpapers, popping out of a window after ten, had beheld her kissing good ­nights, “spooning.”

Boys carried home Ray’s schoolbooks for her, just the ordinary boys who ran shouting about the streets after school, and stood for as long as an hour at the iron front gate, jiggling about in the spotty conversation of adolescence and ending with last-­tag bouts and much body-­mauling of Ray.

A fresh child.

When she was only thirteen, Bertha Auth, a neighboring child of a prosperous local builder, had already been forbidden to play with her because Ray kissed boys.

That hurt her, terribly. Bertha, forbidden, made Ray feel dirty and contaminating. You kissed boys, well, chiefly because you happened to be the sort of girl the boys wanted to kiss. True, the way it made you feel reminded you of the ice in the gutters when it began to thaw in spring and started to flow with that beautiful spiral glassy sound. The best part of it all though was the fact that the boys wanted to kiss you and got pleasure. They didn’t clamor for the osculatory favors of Bertha or, for that matter, Freda Tagenhorst, who was prettier than Ray, and who at fourteen was to become Freda Schmidt by virtue of her mother’s marriage to Ray’s father.

This impulse to please was part of the very texture of Ray. It pleased the boys to kiss and fondle her. They breathed hard and were eager. Even when they had pimply faces, which offended her, and crusty hands from after-­school chores and skating bare-handed on the canal, she bore with their embraces for the apparent ecstasy it was hers to bestow upon just an ordinary schoolboy of shuffling feet, unkempt hair, and ill-­hung clothes.

It was not nice, and she knew it; and she suffered when the sweet and acquiescing friendship of Bertha was withdrawn, or when her stepmother bawled reprimands. But just the same, at nineteen, it was as characteristic of her as it had been at fourteen, that a traveling salesman, in the very act of making so acute an observation as, “You’re one of those girls who act fly but aren’t,” should, unreprimanded, pinch her knee under the table.

How dared he? Why was she so acquiescent? Why, in the language of her stepmother, did she not “haul off” and slap the face of any man who dared get fresh with her? A man expected it. A man respected you if you did. Went on getting fresher if you didn’t.

Ray knew that. She knew it as well as she knew she was sitting in a hall, Over-­the-­Rhine, being pinched on the knee by a traveling salesman who was no more to her than the ten or twenty others who streamed through her father’s store each year.

This one’s name was Michel Prothero, and he lived on Staten Island, New York, and was a married man, quite pretentiously so, and carried a photograph...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2014
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0804170673
ISBN 13 
9780804170673
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
480
Kontakt zum Hersteller
EDITIONS GALLIMARD
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Via Verdi, 8.
Assago Milano
20090
Italien

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