Edna Ferber: Fanny Herself

10. CHAPTER TEN (continued)

And meanwhile she was feasting on those faces in the crowds. Those faces in the crowds! They seemed to leap out at her. They called to her. So she sketched them, telling herself that she did it by way of relaxation, and diversion. One afternoon she left her desk early, and perched herself on one of the marble benches that lined the sunken garden just across from the main group of Haynes-Cooper buildings. She wanted to see what happened when those great buildings emptied. Even her imagination did not meet the actuality. At 5:30 the streets about the plant were empty, except for an occasional passerby. At 5:31 there trickled down the broad steps of building after building thin dark streams of humanity, like the first slow line of lava that crawls down the side of an erupting volcano. The trickle broadened into a stream, spread into a flood, became a torrent that inundated the streets, the sidewalks, filling every nook and crevice, a moving mass. Ten thousand people! A city! Fanny found herself shaking with excitement, and something like terror at the immensity of it. She tried to get a picture of it, a sketch, with the gleaming windows of the red brick buildings as a background. Amazingly enough, she succeeded in doing it. That was because she tried for broad effects, and relied on one bit of detail for her story. It was the face of a girl--a very tired and tawdry girl, of sixteen, perhaps. On her face the look that the day's work had stamped there was being wiped gently away by another look; a look that said release, and a sweetheart, and an evening at the movies. Fanny, in some miraculous way, got it.

She prowled in the Ghetto, and sketched those patient Jewish faces, often grotesque, sometimes repulsive, always mobile. She wandered down South Clark street, flaring with purple-white arc-lights, and looked in at its windows that displayed a pawnbroker's glittering wares, or, just next door, a flat-topped stove over which a white-capped magician whose face smacked of the galley, performed deft tricks with a pancake turner. "Southern chicken dinner," a lying sign read, "with waffles and real maple syrup, 35@." Past these windows promenaded the Clark street women, hard-eyed, high-heeled, aigretted; on the street corners loafed the Clark street men, blue-shaven, wearing checked suits, soiled faun-topped shoes, and diamond scarf pins. And even as she watched them, fascinated, they vanished. Clark street changed overnight, and became a business thoroughfare, lined with stately office buildings, boasting marble and gold-leaf banks, filled with hurrying clerks, stenographers, and prosperous bond salesmen. It was like a sporting man who, thriving in middle age, endeavors to live down his shady past.