Rodin's Debutante (6 page)

Not so New Jesper. My father liked to explain that our town was built for heavy industry, a blue-collar town with blue-collar values. Except for the Bing Company, these industries were owned by men in Pittsburgh and Detroit and the local managers were hired help along with the people who worked the assembly lines. When World War II came, New Jesper prospered and the population doubled to close to forty thousand. Puerto Ricans and Negroes from the southern states arrived to find work, and they were not always welcomed by the second-generation Serbs, Poles, Germans, and Swedes, who thought of themselves as guardians of New Jesper's hard-won way of life, God-fearing, law-abiding, prideful, and strict. When the war ended, the town began a long decline, a twilight that has lasted to the present moment. The steel mill closed. The auto parts factory moved south. Lake commerce dwindled. The harbor was converted to a marina for the yachts of the North Shore rich; their own towns did not allow marinas because they wished to keep their beaches clean for swimming and the view from the bluff unspoiled. New Jesper struggled to convert itself from heavy industry to a service economy but with only marginal success. Its workers were not trained in service and—well, it was not men's work, no sweat, no heavy lifting, no union. The downtown continued to decay as unemployment grew. None of this set New Jesper apart from any of a hundred small mill towns of the Midwest and Northeast. What was unique was the presence of the Bing Company, family-owned and staffed by men and women from the same small town in Bohemia, where they had crafted musical instruments. Bing prospered during the war, having converted to the manufacture of swagger sticks for the United States Army. And when the war ended, Bing went back to tennis rackets and for a time ran three shifts a day as the sport gained in popularity. From the 1920s until well into the Carter administration, wherever you went in America and people asked where you were from and you answered honestly, they would laugh and say, Ah! Where they make the tennis racket! And recite the radio jingle,
Bing Bing Bing, the Tennis Machine.
My father always found the reference irritating and the jingle infuriating, as if New Jesper had no other claim to fame. But the truth was, it didn't. Hershey was where they made the candy bars and Milwaukee where they brewed the beer and New Jesper where they made tennis rackets. The Bing racket was high-end equipment, like a Balabushka pool cue or a Purdey shotgun. Old Walter Bing, who managed the company until well into his nineties, never changed the design or the materials that went into it. He disliked plastics and had even less use for aluminum, and so sales fell and by 1980 the company was out of business, a victim of technological progress. The only growth industry in New Jesper was the center of its civic life, the courthouse with its full complement of judges, clerks, and bailiffs, and the army of private lawyers, most of whom lived out of town. The courthouse and its annex was a turn-of-the-century stone pile of a building whose marble floors echoed like a tuning fork. The lights sometimes failed. The elevator was often out of service. My father didn't mind the inconvenience. The building had grandeur. For many years he tried without success to place the building on the National Register of Historic Places. That happened finally in 1999, but by then my father was long gone.

New Jesper was a fine place to grow up in, its streets lined with chestnut trees and elms and oaks. In the summertime you could ride your bike all over town and not see the full sun, only its shafts of light through branches thick with leaves, chestnuts scattered everywhere. At one time the downtown had an oak at each pedestrian intersection, but the merchants complained that they interfered with foot traffic so the city council ordered their removal. A women's group organized a protest, but the protest went nowhere and one by one the heavy trees were removed, leaving the downtown bare as a settlement in Arizona or Utah. Still, the public school system was excellent, staffed mostly by middle-aged women of frosty temperament and high expectations, though few of its high school graduates went on to college. College was not the normal aspiration for the sons and daughters of blue-collar mill workers for whom English was very much a second language. The sons followed their fathers into the mills, and the daughters their mothers into marriage, usually after a stint as a clerk in one of the two downtown department stores. This was before and during the war, in retrospect a dynamic parenthesis in the progress of things in the small towns of the Midwest. The war was much distant, present in newspaper headlines and the conversations of adults at the dinner table, unless a father or a son was away fighting in it, and that was not the case in my family. The terrible details of the struggle were known only to the combatants. Reversals were concealed by the authorities and meanwhile the place names flew by. Saipan. Ploieşti. My friends and I graduated from Cowboys and Indians to a game we called War, heroic leathernecks battling the sly Japanese, surely the main enemy. There were many German-speaking families in our town and no one wished to make their lives more uncomfortable than they already were. I suppose that was the reason, looking back on it. Bloodthirsty Tojo was the greater threat to domestic tranquillity. At any event, in those years New Jesper prospered, the factories running two and three shifts a day. Work was available to anyone who wanted it and wages were high. Everything changed after the war.

MOST DAYS AFTER SCHOOL
my friend Dougie Henderson and I would scurry down below the hill looking for adventure that could not be found among the mowed lawns and shaded porches of the neighborhood. We carried air rifles for rabbits and the occasional raccoon. A ten-minute walk on the path through the underbrush at the base of the bluff took us to the railroad tracks. The path wound through a marsh, standing water that in summer was fetid, the water black and clammy as ink, boiling with mosquitoes. The underbrush was so tangled you could not see through it. The lay of the land down below the hill was a different country, untamed and unsupervised, and it was ours, Dougie's and mine. Also, it was inhabited. Along the way we found empty whiskey bottles and crushed cigarette packs, evidence of adult life. We had a hilarious time imitating drunkards, weaving and stumbling incoherently. As we approached the tracks we threw away the bottles and moved with care, Indian fashion. In a thicket off the path was a concrete root cellar, origin unknown; there were no houses anywhere in sight. But we were always careful to look inside, pushing away the brambles that hid the entrance. The root cellar was usually undisturbed and that made it more mysterious still. We listened carefully for the freight train that lumbered by at slow speed, fifteen or twenty miles an hour. The trains came up without warning. The air seemed to stiffen and suddenly the engine surged by pulling a load of fifty freight cars with the red caboose bringing up the rear. Every few weeks a train came by bearing battle tanks on flatcars, causing us to wonder what need they had for tanks in Milwaukee. Soldiers lounged on the flatcars and when they saw us they would give a casual military salute, the sort of salute a professional soldier would give to a civilian. We tried to get to the tracks before four o'clock in the afternoon, in time to watch the passenger express from Chicago, bright yellow coaches and the steam engine in front. The express hurtled by at such speed that we could not see the passengers but always waved at them, imagining the day when we would be aboard, bound for Milwaukee or the Twin Cities on business, nonchalantly reading a newspaper and enjoying a cocktail and a cigarette. The train was there and gone in seconds.

There were tramps down below the hill, men riding the rails to get to somewhere else. Dougie and I were told never to approach them for any reason whatsoever, but when we saw a tramp, which was seldom, he looked harmless enough, always unshaven and badly clothed but not threatening in any way. They were not interested in children and seemed to inhabit a world of their own, always moving on. There was a kind of romance to it, men without women or families, waiting for something to turn up. The tramps we saw were old, at least as old as our parents and some much older. They had evidently led hard lives, though neither Dougie nor I could have said what a hard life constituted, beyond shabby clothing and an untrimmed beard and eyes that did not seem fully focused. Dougie said they looked uncoordinated, borrowing the expression from our gym teacher.

Once a month or so a tramp showed up at our back door and asked for food. My mother would give him fruit, apples or bananas, and when I delivered it to him he would invariably nod and thank me and walk slowly away, down below the hill in the direction of the railroad tracks, retracing his steps. Asking for food, he always held his cloth cap in his hand. These men were very much a part of our lives and at the same time invisible. We never saw the same tramp twice and yet we did not differentiate among them. Their threadbare clothes were a kind of uniform. Where had they come from? Where were they going? My father said you found tramps anywhere there was a railroad. He called them hard-luck cases. Broken homes, he explained, along with "early defeats" leading to a loss of purpose in life, aimlessness and dependence on whiskey, but all the same, subject to the identical laws and penalties as anyone else. In that way, my father said, justice was blind.

Along the railroad tracks were the remains of fires and always an empty bottle of whiskey nearby, along with cigarette stubs and apple cores and discarded bits of clothing. Looking at their camps, Dougie and I couldn't piece together the lives of these men, not that we tried very hard. They were beyond our understanding and certainly beyond our help, and they seemed very far away from the poise—I suppose the better word is coordination—of our own fathers, part of another world altogether, a respectable, successful world. The tramps were the inhabitants of the uncivilized country down below the hill, a small, mean world with the promise and variety of a set of railroad tracks—except, of course, to Dougie and me, who saw it as a form of liberty, re-lease from the coat-and-tie milieu of our fathers.

When we reached the tracks we always paused for a cigarette, Old Golds for Dougie, Chesterfields for me, filched from cigarette packs at home. Something lawless about it, casually smoking a cigarette as freight trains lumbered by, and then snapping the butt at the rails and watching the shower of sparks. Often we would climb atop a switching box in order to see the lake a half mile distant, a sliver of blue beyond the bulk of the auto parts factory. Our terrain was so rough it was difficult reconciling it with the flash of color on the horizon. In summer we saw the sails of small boats and that was more incongruous still, the graceful lines of the vessels in sharp contrast to the underbrush and stunted trees around us, the clouds of mosquitoes and the dead campfires of the tramps. In the damp prairie cold of January and February ice built up along the lake, white replacing blue. The harbor was frozen all the way to the breakwater and sometimes beyond. The lakefront was out of reach because the auto parts factory stood in the way, the factory bounded by a chain-link fence with razor wire along the top. The rumor in town—vigorously denounced by my father—was that secret work was proceeding inside, something important to do with the war effort, and that New Jesper should be proud to be summoned to play a role. Once, standing at the fence and looking inside to see the secret work for ourselves, Dougie and I were shooed away by an indignant watchman. Goddamned kids, he shouted at us, but we thumbed our noses at him. The fence that kept us out also kept him in, though it took Dougie to notice that he was wearing a revolver in a holster and was carrying a two-foot-long billy club in his fist. We assumed that the fence was there to protect the factory and its secret work from the tramps and that set us to laughing because the tramps were so uncoordinated, as Dougie said. None of them had the cunning or initiative of Japanese spies. They were down and out.

I suppose Dougie and I were eight or nine years old when we saw our first tramp. He was asleep with his head resting on a discarded rail tie. He looked deflated, collapsed like a rag doll. I thought he was dead but said nothing about that to Dougie. We were twenty feet from him, staring at him as if he were an animal in a zoo. The tramp looked up, startled, and seeing we were boys and not rail agents, let out a high-pitched whoop and then smiled broadly.

You boys have a smoke for an old man?

Dougie and I looked at each other.

Give us a smoke, the tramp said.

I threw him a Chesterfield, underhanding it so that it bounced at his feet.

Match, he said sharply, so sharp it was almost a snarl.

I threw him a book of matches. He caught it, lit the cigarette, and sat Indian fashion, his arms on his knees. He put the matches in his shirt pocket.

Now where are you boys from? I'll bet you're from up there on the hill.

That's right, Dougie said.

Live in a fancy house, I'll bet.

We've got to be going, I said.

Stay awhile. Have a smoke.

We have to go home, Dougie said.

You just got here.

We said we would be home.

Up there on the hill, he said.

Dougie shrugged. Everyone lived on the hill.

Sit awhile, the tramp said. We can visit. What's your name?

Dougie and I took a step backward.

I got boys your age, the tramp said. But I don't know where they are. I don't know where they live. The tramp exhaled a great cloud of tobacco smoke and watched it disperse in the breeze. Last time I heard they was down south somewheres. But I can't remember the name of the town. I prefer riding the rails and one of these days I'll get back down south. I only need some money. I need some dollars.

Dougie and I nodded.

My name is Minning. Earl Minning. You boys got any dollars on you? I'll bet you do, coming from up there on the hill. The tramp smiled unpleasantly and when he began to struggle to his feet Dougie and I took another step backward and ran away like rabbits. He yelled after us, Come back, come back, you little bastards. But we ran and ran through the underbrush. I could hear Earl Minning behind us, his footfalls and heavy breathing, and when I stumbled and fell I expected his rough hand on my head, but when I turned he was not there. I sensed him nearby but I could not see him. Dougie was up ahead yelling at me to get up and run but I was frozen stiff, my knee bloody from the fall. A sour odor was in my nostrils and I knew it was Earl Minning and I had no money to give him. At last I was on my feet, and my fear vanished. I joined Dougie and we trotted up the hill until we reached my house. My mother was in her garden and when she saw us tumble out of the underbrush she asked us what was the matter, and we replied that we were footracing and nothing was the matter. I did not want her to know that we had come upon anyone down below the hill, certainly not a tramp. We regarded the place as private, our own domain, exclusive. We were not intruders; Earl Minning was the intruder. But I also knew for a certainty that he did not wish us well. From the expression on his face he did not wish anyone well. And all these years later I continue to wonder what brought him to that place, his children down south somewhere, he himself riding the rails.