



Produced by Judith Boss





BUNNER SISTERS

By Edith Wharton

Scribner's Magazine 60 (Oct. 1916): 439-58; 60 (Nov. 1916): 575-96.




PART I




I

In the days when New York's traffic moved at the pace of the drooping
horse-car, when society applauded Christine Nilsson at the Academy of
Music and basked in the sunsets of the Hudson River School on the walls
of the National Academy of Design, an inconspicuous shop with a
single show-window was intimately and favourably known to the feminine
population of the quarter bordering on Stuyvesant Square.

It was a very small shop, in a shabby basement, in a side-street
already doomed to decline; and from the miscellaneous display behind the
window-pane, and the brevity of the sign surmounting it (merely "Bunner
Sisters" in blotchy gold on a black ground) it would have been difficult
for the uninitiated to guess the precise nature of the business carried
on within. But that was of little consequence, since its fame was so
purely local that the customers on whom its existence depended were
almost congenitally aware of the exact range of "goods" to be found at
Bunner Sisters'.

The house of which Bunner Sisters had annexed the basement was a private
dwelling with a brick front, green shutters on weak hinges, and a
dress-maker's sign in the window above the shop. On each side of its
modest three stories stood higher buildings, with fronts of brown stone,
cracked and blistered, cast-iron balconies and cat-haunted grass-patches
behind twisted railings. These houses too had once been private, but now
a cheap lunchroom filled the basement of one, while the other announced
itself, above the knotty wistaria that clasped its central balcony, as
the Mendoza Family Hotel. It was obvious from the chronic cluster
of refuse-barrels at its area-gate and the blurred surface of its
curtainless windows, that the families frequenting the Mendoza Hotel
were not exacting in their tastes; though they doubtless indulged in
as much fastidiousness as they could afford to pay for, and rather more
than their landlord thought they had a right to express.

These three houses fairly exemplified the general character of the
street, which, as it stretched eastward, rapidly fell from shabbiness to
squalor, with an increasing frequency of projecting sign-boards, and of
swinging doors that softly shut or opened at the touch of red-nosed men
and pale little girls with broken jugs. The middle of the street was
full of irregular depressions, well adapted to retain the long swirls of
dust and straw and twisted paper that the wind drove up and down its sad
untended length; and toward the end of the day, when traffic had been
active, the fissured pavement formed a mosaic of  hand-bills,
lids of tomato-cans, old shoes, cigar-stumps and banana skins, cemented
together by a layer of mud, or veiled in a powdering of dust, as the
state of the weather determined.

The sole refuge offered from the contemplation of this depressing waste
was the sight of the Bunner Sisters' window. Its panes were always
well-washed, and though their display of artificial flowers, bands of
scalloped flannel, wire hat-frames, and jars of home-made preserves, had
the undefinable greyish tinge of objects long preserved in the show-case
of a museum, the window revealed a background of orderly counters and
white-washed walls in pleasant contrast to the adjoining dinginess.

The Bunner sisters were proud of the neatness of their shop and content
with its humble prosperity. It was not what they had once imagined it
would be, but though it presented but a shrunken image of their earlier
ambitions it enabled them to pay their rent and keep themselves alive
and out of debt; and it was long since their hopes had soared higher.

Now and then, however, among their greyer hours there came one not
bright enough to be called sunny, but rather of the silvery twilight hue
which sometimes ends a day of storm. It was such an hour that Ann Eliza,
the elder of the firm, was soberly enjoying as she sat one January
evening in the back room which served as bedroom, kitchen and parlour
to herself and her sister Evelina. In the shop the blinds had been drawn
down, the counters cleared and the wares in the window lightly covered
with an old sheet; but the shop-door remained unlocked till Evelina, who
had taken a parcel to the dyer's, should come back.

In the back room a kettle bubbled on the stove, and Ann Eliza had laid a
cloth over one end of the centre table, and placed near the green-shaded
sewing lamp two tea-cups, two plates, a sugar-bowl and a piece of pie.
The rest of the room remained in a greenish shadow which discreetly
veiled the outline of an old-fashioned mahogany bedstead surmounted by a
chromo of a young lady in a night-gown who clung with eloquently-rolling
eyes to a crag described in illuminated letters as the Rock of Ages;
and against the unshaded windows two rocking-chairs and a sewing-machine
were silhouetted on the dusk.

Ann Eliza, her small and habitually anxious face smoothed to unusual
serenity, and the streaks of pale hair on her veined temples shining
glossily beneath the lamp, had seated herself at the table, and was
tying up, with her usual fumbling deliberation, a knobby object wrapped
in paper. Now and then, as she struggled with the string, which was too
short, she fancied she heard the click of the shop-door, and paused
to listen for her sister; then, as no one came, she straightened her
spectacles and entered into renewed conflict with the parcel. In honour
of some event of obvious importance, she had put on her double-dyed and
triple-turned black silk. Age, while bestowing on this garment a pat