For that matter, I had no sympathy for myself. I confessed that I had this coming, a high-minded Jewish schoolboy, too high-and-mighty to be Orthodox and with his eye on a special destiny. At home, inside the house, an archaic rule; outside, the facts of life. The facts of life were having their turn. Their first effect was ridicule. To throw my duds into the alley was the woman’s joke on me. The druggist with his pain-sensitive head was all irony. And now the barman was going to get his fun out of my trouble before he, maybe, gave me the seven cents for carfare. Then I could have a full hour of shame on the streetcar. My mother, with whom I might never speak again, used to say that I had a line of pride straight down the bridge of my nose, a foolish stripe that she could see.
I had no way of anticipating what her death would signify.
The barman, having me in place, was giving me the business. And Moose (“Moosey,” the Greek called him) had come away from the door so as not to miss the entertainment. The Greek’s kangaroo mouth turned up at the corners. Presently his hand went up to his head and he rubbed his scalp under the black, spiky hair. Some said they drank olive oil by the glass, these Greeks, to keep their hair so rich. “Now give it to me again, about the dentist,” said the barman.
“I came looking for him, but by now he’s well on his way home.”
He would by then be on the Broadway—Clark car, reading the Peach edition of the
Anna cooked dinner after work, and when Philip came in, my father would begin to ask, “Where’s Louie?”
“Oh, he’s out delivering flowers,” they’d tell him. But the old man was nervous about his children after dark, and if they were late he waited up, walking—no, trotting—up and down the long apartment. When you tried to slip in, he caught you and twisted you tight by the neckband. He was small, neat, slender, a gentleman, but abrupt, not unworldly—he wasn’t ignorant of vices; he had lived in Odessa and even longer in St. Petersburg—but he had no patience. The least thing might craze him. Seeing me in this dress, he’d lose his head at once. I lost
“What’s your family, what does your dad do?” asked the barman.
“His business is wood fuel for bakers’ ovens. It comes by freight car from northern Michigan. Also from Birnamwood, Wisconsin. He has a yard off Lake Street, east of Halsted.”
I made an effort to give the particulars. I couldn’t afford to be suspected of invention now.
“I know where that is. Now, that’s a neighborhood just full of hookers and cathouses. You think you can tell your old man what happened to you, that you got picked up by a cutie and she stole your clothes off you?”
The effect of this question was to make me tight in the face, dim in the ears. The whole cellar grew small and distant, toylike but not for play.
“How’s your old man to deal with—tough?”
“Hard,” I said.
“Slaps the kids around? This time you’ve got it coming. What’s under the dress, a pair of bloomers?”
I shook my head.
“Your behind is bare? Now you know how it feels to go around like a woman.”
The Greek’s great muscles were dough-colored. You wouldn’t have wanted him to take a headlock on you. That’s the kind of man the Organization hired. The Capone people were now in charge. The customers would be like celluloid Kewpie dolls to the Greek. He looked like one of those boxing kangaroos in the movies, and he could do a standing jump over the bar. Yet he enjoyed playing zany. He could curve his long mouth up at the corners like the happy face in a cartoon.
“What were you doing on the North Side?”
“Delivering flowers.”
“Hustling after school but with ramming on your brain. You got a lot to learn, buddy boy. Well, enough of that. Now, Moosey, take this flashlight and see if you can scrounge up a sweater or something in the back basement for this down-on-his-luck kid. I’d be surprised if the old janitor hasn’t picked the stuff over pretty good. If mice have nested in it, shake out the turds. It’ll help on the trip home.”
I followed Moose into the hotter half of the cellar. His flashlight picked out the laundry tubs with the hand- operated wringers mounted on them, the padlocked wooden storage bins. “Turn over some of these cardboard boxes. Mostly rags, is my guess. Dump ‘em out, that’s the easiest.”
I emptied a couple of big cartons. Moose passed the light back and forth over the heaps. “Nothing much, like I said.”
“Here’s a flannel shirt,” I said. I wanted to get out. The smell of heated burlap was hard to take. This was the only wearable article. I could have used a pullover or a pair of pants. We returned to the bar. As I was putting on the shirt, which revolted me (I come of finicky people whose fetish is cleanliness), the barman said, “I tell you what, you take this drunk home—this is about time for him, isn’t it, Moosey? He gets plastered here every night. See he gets home and it’ll be worth half a buck to you.”
“I’ll do it,” I said. “It all depends on how far away he lives. If it’s far, 111 be frozen before I get there.”
“It isn’t far. Winona, west of Sheridan, isn’t far. I’ll give you the directions. This guy is a City Hall payroller. He has no special job, he works direct for the ward committeeman. He’s a lush with two little girls to bring up. If he’s sober enough he cooks their dinner. Probably they take more care of him than he does of them.”
“First I’ll take charge of his money,” said the barman. “I don’t want my buddy here to be rolled. I don’t say you would do it, but I owe this to a customer.”
Bristle-faced Moose began to empty the man’s pockets—his wallet, some keys, crushed cigarettes, a red bandanna that looked foul, matchbooks, greenbacks, and change. All these were laid out on the bar.
When I look back at past moments, I carry with me an apperceptive mass that ripens and perhaps distorts, mixing what is memorable with what may not be worth mentioning. Thus I see the barman with one big hand gathering in the valuables as if they were his winnings, the pot in a poker game. And then I think that if the kangaroo giant had taken this drunk on his back he might have bounded home with him in less time than it would have taken me to support him as far as the corner. But what the barman actually said was, “I got a nice escort for you, Jim.”
Moose led the man back and forth to make sure his feet were operating. His swollen eyes now opened and then closed again. “McKern,” Moose said, briefing me. “Southwest corner of Winona and Sheridan, the second building on the south side of the street, and it’s the second floor.”
“You’ll be paid when you get back,” said the barman.
The freeze was now so hard that the snow underfoot sounded like metal foil. Though McKern may have sobered up in the frigid street, he couldn’t move very fast. Since I had to hold on to him, I borrowed his gloves. He had a coat with pockets to put his hands in. I tried to keep behind him and get some shelter from the wind. That didn’t work. He wasn’t up to walking. I had to hold him. Instead of a desirable woman, I had a drunkard in my arms. This disgrace, you see, while my mother was surrendering to death. At about this hour, upstairs neighbors came down and relatives arrived and filled the kitchen and the dining room—a deathwatch. I should have been there, not on the far North Side. When I had earned the carfare, I’d still be an hour from home on a streetcar making four stops to the mile.
Toward the last, I was dragging McKern. I kept the street door open with my back while I pulled him into the dim lobby by the arms.
The little girls had been waiting and came down at once. They held the inner door for me while I brought their daddy upstairs with a fireman’s-carry and laid him on his bed. The children had had plenty of practice at this. They undressed him down to the long Johns and then stood silent on either side of the room.
This, for them, was how things were. They took deep oddities calmly, as children generally will. I had spread his winter coat over him.
I had little sympathy for McKern, in the circumstances. I believe I can tell you why: He had surely passed out many times, and he would pass out again, dozens of times before he died. Drunkenness was common and familiar, and therefore accepted, and drunks could count on acceptance and support and relied on it. Whereas if your troubles were uncommon, unfamiliar, you could count on nothing. There was a convention about drunkenness,
