Algren at Sea (30 page)

Somebody was always excommunicating me.

This time it was my mother who thought the action was comical and my father who went around growling that somebody ought to have that milk-delivery kid locked up before he started thinking about girls.

So far as I know, Johnny never got any ideas about girls that were any funnier than anybody else's.

In the late sunflowered summer of nineteen-and-eighteen nobody played Cops and Robbers any more. Some of us had to be Allies and some of us had to be Huns. Those who were Huns had to die or run when stuck by a sunflower stalk-bayonet. Most Huns chose to die, as that was not only more dramatic but much braver. Some died face-down, some leaped as though blown—if we had a few yards of barbed wire I'm sure we would have had volunteers for impalement.

Then the Huns rose as Allies, Brave American Boys, Heroic French-men,
and Noble English, and it was the turn of those who had so recently been victorious to decide which was better, retreat or death.

But on Sundays there was no war. That was the day I escorted Ethel to John The Greek's at Seventy-first and Vernon. Ethel would order a strawberry sundae and I would order chocolate and John would put a roll in the player-piano and, pumping away, no hands on the keys, would sing—
or—

In the cornstalked autumn of nineteen-and-eighteen my father bought me a new pair of roller skates, so I could use one for a new pushmobile. He helped me screw the front wheels on so that it would swing a corner. He bought me a bell for the handlebars, and then I punched holes in an old tomato can, hung it by a wire below the bell, and stuck a candle in the can.

When my father got off the Seventy-first Street trolley with his lunch box under his arm, he saw me flickering, he heard me ringing toward him in the dark. And I carried his lunchbox for him all the way home.

I did not know, then, how much this meant to him. I know now. It meant more than a father's pride in having a son. It meant he had a son to whom
he
had given a home. His own father had been an Indiana squatter who had deserted wife and sons on unclaimed land near Black Oak. Now he knew he was doing better for his own than his father had done for him.

He had come off the farm, with a brother, to see the World's Fair of 1893. They had seen Little Egypt dance, but neither had done any dancing since. One to the steel mills and one to the garages—their fun times had been few and now were fewer.

But before his marriage my father had gone, once or twice or perhaps oftener, to the Columbia Dance Hall on North Clark where musicians, calling themselves “McGuire's Ice-Cream Kings,” had worn white pants.
And a “Special Introducer” had stood by to introduce backward youths to up-to-date ladies who knew The Speedy Three-Step.

He had also been to Heinie Kabibbler's saloon, where he'd been given a slit mug of beer. When he'd lifted it to his mouth, the beer had spilled down the front of his shirt.

He remembered Patrick Prendergast, a thirty-year-old newsboy who had handed a revolver to Sergeant McDonnell of the Desplaines Street Station, one October evening of 1893, and explained, “I've just killed the mayor.”

He had shot Carter Harrison in the mayor's home out of a fantasy that Harrison had promised to make him Corporation Counsel. For his poor judgment and accurate aim, Prendergast The Newsboy had been hanged.

Both my mother and father had been scandalized by Bad-News Tillie, who had told a grocer that she'd like to do her Daddy in—and she didn't mean her father—a couple of hours before Tillie's Daddy slipped on a bar of soap while bathing and broke his neck. It looked like more bad news for Bad-News Tillie until her lawyer pointed out that the bar Daddy had slipped on was a different brand than the one Tillie had bought from the grocer. That had been good news for Bad-News Tillie.

Both my parents had been to the Electrified Fountain in Lincoln Park and had gone together to the Bismarck Gardens; that once stood where the Marigold Gardens now stand.

My father was a workingman in a day when the working hour was from 6:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M. He left the house before daylight six days a week and returned home after dark six days a week, year in and year out.

He worked for McCormick Reaper and Otis Elevator and Packard and The Yellow Cab Company in a time when there were no sick leave, no vacations, no seniority, and no social security. There was nothing for him to do but to get a hold as a machinist and to hold on as hard as he could for as long as he could.

He was a good holder, but he was unable to hold on to any one job because he was as unable to give orders as he was to take them. He was a tenacious holder; but, after four or five years he would hit a foreman. This would happen so suddenly, so blindly, that he would be as stunned by it as the man he had hit. There was never an understandable provocation.

When he walked into the kitchen at noon with his tool chest under his arm, my mother knew it had happened again. The first time this happened
I was frightened, because I had never seen him in the middle of a weekday. My mother was going to go for him now like never before, I felt.

That was one time she didn't go for him at all.

Yet for days we lived under an oppression of which none but the tool chest in the kitchen spoke. On the morning I rose to find the tool chest and the old man gone to work together, life began once more.

He was a fixer of machinery in basements and garages who had seen the Electrified Fountain in Lincoln Park.

My father was a farm youth who had come to the city to see Little Egypt dance, and had stayed on to work. For many great plants that offered him twice the wages that others were getting for doing the same work.

My father liked getting double wages, and would stay on the job loyally until some picket would take him aside and ask him how he would like to have his head blown off his shoulders.

My father would say that he would like to wait until after lunch if he wasn't asking too much.

He had witnessed the fight between police and anarchists on the Black Road near the McCormick works. He had heard Samuel Fielden speak on the lakefront. Yet his most vivid memory was of Honeythroat Regan singing
If He Can Fight Like He Can Love / Goodby Germany.

My father avoided being killed in situations simmering with violence only because he didn't know anything was cooking.

 

That autumn my mother took me to see my grandmother and grandfather. We walked together below the Lake Street El, and a grandfatherly light fell through the Lake Street ties, all the way to The Westside House.

The Westside House was where my grandfather sat sealing cigars of his own making with a lick of his tongue. The red band with which he bound each cigar said each was a Father & Son Cigar.

And the old man had promised that, one day, he would tell me a secret he had never told any of his other grandchildren.

Neither of us knew that it was his last autumn.

And the secret that I was never to tell was that he himself, personally, my own grandfather, had thought up the name of the Father & Son Cigar! That he was therefore the
inventor
of the Father & Son Cigar! And that he had applied for a patent on the name:
Father
&
Son Cigar.

And that it was a
good
cigar.

I was proud to have the man who had invented the Father & Son Cigar for a grandfather.

Then he made the wooden half-figure of a clown on his worktable blow real smoke at me, and we went upstairs to dinner.

Behind my grandfather's Westside House stood the
Sommerhaus,
a little old-world cottage with blinds.

It was always summer in the
Sommerhaus.

The old man sat at dinner with his wife at his right hand and all his married daughters, and all his married sons, and his grandchildren running in and out of The Westside House. He was proud of being a Civil War veteran and that all his grandchildren had been born in The States. But I was the only one in that whole tribe for whom he made a wooden clown that blew real smoke.

I was the only one the old man ever told
who
thought up the name of the Father & Son Cigar.

And it was a
good
cigar.

After dinner Uncle Bill sat at the player piano and played
The Faded Coat of Blue
and Aunt Toby sang the words. Aunt Toby didn't look exactly faint and hungry the way it said in the song—
but I figured it must be because she'd just had dinner.

Then in no time at all it was time to go home, and I walked back with my mother below the Lake Street El, listening to her humming cheerfully— it had been a good day.

And a grandfatherly light like yellow cigar smoke drifted down between the Lake Street ties.

All the way home.

 

That Halloween Ethel and I put on false-faces and went up and down Seventy-first Street chalking windows of laundry, undertaker, delicatessen and butcher shop. Dotty as ever, Ethel chalked a cross on John The Greek's, and I wrote below the cross—
Everything inside is a penny!
and we ran off screaming. On my way home from the Park Manor School the next noon, all the store windows had been washed clean except John The Greek's.

John's window stayed chalked. On Sunday morning police broke the lock and found John hanging by his belt above his candy tins.

Now I knew what I had sensed in that rage behind the evening cross: there
was
a fury padfooting the world.

“Gawd called him home,” Ethel explained contentedly.

I began to skip cracks in the sidewalk. I skipped the cracks with particular care when passing The Hanged Man's Place. Frost froze the cracks over and The Hanged Man's windows went white.

I rubbed off the frost with my mitten and peered in: Dust and cold had laid their gray hands across Green River and Coca-Cola. The great jar of fresh strawberry syrup had fermented, then split the bowl and bubbled over the counter: it hung in a long frozen drip, like a string of raw meat.

The magic of strawberry had been hung. The magic of its smell and the magic of its color.

Hanged.

In a freezing dust.

That night I said the German prayer my mother had taught me out of her own childhood:

Yet somewhere between St. Valentine's Day and The Place Where Ice Cream Came True I had realized that where God's colors raged behind a lifted cross was no business of mine. His colors were for people who lived upstairs. Not for people who lived down.

Chicago is fond of the image of itself as a row-de-dow young peasant with a healthy stink going straight to his pigs ticking after brawling on bar whisky all night—Ho! Ho! Ho!—hog butcher to the world and all of that—but actually Row-De-Dow pulled off his sweatshirt and sat down to a glass-topped desk about the time we got electricity in City Hall.

It used to be a ball-every-night town, but now it's a Friday-and-Saturday-night town, and not much doing on Fridays. Time was when you couldn't walk down West Division without seeing five people being bounced for creating a disturbance in a bar, but now it's a rarity if a customer
raises his voice to a bartender. It's nice, of course, that we're so much nicer than we used to be—but are we? Isn't it even nicer to punch somebody in the nose instead of merely smiling politely and finding out where he works so he'll never know who had him fired? The good thing about arguing with a hog butcher is that you know where you're at. Nobody knows what a businessman is thinking.

There are no painted women waiting under gas lamps here any more. Chicago is a middleman in business-blues who has one daiquiri before dinner and the filet better be just as he ordered it or somebody is going to catch hell. In his gardened and glass-walled nest high above the light-filled boulevard, the hog butcher's grandson can feel he has done pretty well for himself. And he has.