the narrow corridor in his burly, sauntering, careless way. You won’t remember your Uncle Philip. He had played college football, and he still had the look of a tackle, with his swelling, compact forearms. (At Soldier Field today he’d be physically insignificant; in his time, however, he was something of a strongman.)
But there was the long strip of carpet down the middle of the wall-valley, and no one was coming to rescue me. I turned back to his office. If only a patient were sitting in the chair and I could see Philip looking into his mouth, I’d be on track again, excused from taking the woman’s challenge. One alternative was to say that I couldn’t go with her, that Philip expected me to ride back with him to the Northwest Side. In the empty office I considered this lie, bending my head so that I wouldn’t confront the clock with its soundless measured weights revolving. Then I wrote on Philip’s memo pad: “Louie, passing by.” I left it on the seat of the chair.
The woman had put her arms through the sleeves of the collegiate, rah-rah raccoon and was resting her fur- bundled rear on the banister. She was passing her compact mirror back and forth, and when I came out she gave the compact a snap and dropped it into her purse.
“Still the charley horse?”
“My lower back too.”
We descended, very slow, both feet on each tread. I wondered what she would do if I were to kiss her. Laugh at me, probably. We were no longer between the four walls where anything might have happened. In the street, space was unlimited. I had no idea how far we were going, how far I would be able to go. Although she was the one claiming to be in pain, it was I who felt sick. She asked me to support her lower back with my hand, and there I discovered what an extraordinary action her hips could perform. At a party I had overheard an older woman saying to another lady, “I know how to make them burn.” Hearing this was enough for me.
No special art was necessary with a boy of seventeen, not even so much as being invited to support her with my hand—to feel that intricate, erotic working of her back. I had already
“Where are we headed?”
“If you have to go, I can make it on my own,” she said. “It’s just Winona Street, the other side of Sheridan Road.”
“No, no. I’ll walk you there.”
She asked whether I was still at school, pointing to the printed pages in my coat pocket.
I observed when we were passing a fruit shop (a boy of my own age emptying bushels of oranges into the lighted window) that, despite the woman’s thick-cream color, her eyes were Far Eastern, black.
“You should be about seventeen,” she said.
“Just.”
She was wearing pumps in the snow and placed each step with care.
“What are you going to be—have you picked your profession?”
I had no use for professions. Utterly none. There were accountants and engineers in the soup lines. In the world slump, professions were useless. You were free, therefore, to make something extraordinary of yourself. I might have said, if I hadn’t been excited to the point of sickness, that I didn’t ride around the city on the cars to make a buck or to be useful to the family, but to take a reading or this boring, depressed, ugly, endless, rotting city. I couldn’t have thought it then, but I now understand that my purpose was to interpret this place. Its power was tremendous. But so was mine, potentially. I refused absolutely to believe for a moment that people here were doing what they thought they were doing. Beneath the apparent life of these streets was their real life, beneath each face the real face, beneath each voice and its words the true tone and the real message. Of course, I wasn’t about to say such things. It was beyond me at that time to say them. I was, however, a high-toned kid, “La-di-dah,” my critical, satirical brother Albert called me. A high purpose in adolescence will expose you to that.
At the moment, a glamorous, sexual girl had me in tow. I couldn’t guess where I was being led, nor how far, nor what she would surprise me with, nor the consequences.
“So the dentist is your brother?”
“In-law—my sister’s husband. They live with us. You’re asking what he’s like? He’s a good guy. He likes to lock his office on Friday and go to the races. He takes me to the fights. Also, at the back of the drugstore there’s a poker game….”
“Well, no, he doesn’t. He says, ‘What’s the use? There’s too much to keep up or catch up with. You could never in a thousand years do it, so why knock yourself out?’ My sister wants him to open a Loop office, but that would be too much of a strain. I guess he’s for inertia. He’s not ready to do more than he’s already doing.”
“So what are you reading—what’s it about?”
I didn’t propose to discuss anything with her. I wasn’t capable of it. What I had in mind just then was entirely different.
But suppose I had been able to explain. One does have a responsibility to answer genuine questions: “You see, miss, this is the visible world. We live in it, we breathe its air and eat its substance. When we die, however, matter goes to matter, and then we’re annihilated. Now, which world do we really belong to, this world of matter or another world, from which matter takes its orders?”
Not many people were willing to talk about such notions. They made even Stephanie impatient. “When you die, that’s it. Dead is dead,” she would say. She loved a good time. And when I wouldn’t take her downtown to the Oriental Theatre she didn’t deny herself the company of other boys. She brought back off-color vaudeville jokes. I think the Oriental was part of a national entertainment circuit. Jimmy Savo, Lou Holtz, and Sophie Tucker played there. I was sometimes too solemn for Stephanie. When she gave imitations of Jimmy Savo singing “River, Stay Away from My Door,” bringing her knees together and holding herself tight, she didn’t break me up, and she was disappointed.
You would have thought that the book or book fragment in my pocket was a talisman from a fairy tale to open castle gates or carry me to mountaintops. Yet when the woman asked me what it was, I was too scattered to tell her. Remember, I still kept my hand as instructed on her lower back, tormented by that sexual grind of her movements. I was discovering what the lady at the party had meant by saying, “I know how to make them burn.” So of course I was in no condition to talk about the Ego and the Will, or about the secrets of the blood. Yes, I believed that higher knowledge was shared out among all human beings. What else was there to hold us together but this force hidden behind daily consciousness? But to be coherent about it now was absolutely out of the question.
“Can’t you tell me?” she said.
“I bought this for a nickel from a bargain table.”
“That’s how you spend your money?”
I assumed her to mean that I didn’t spend it on girls.
“And the dentist is a good-natured, lazy guy,” she went on. “What has he got to tell you?”
I tried to review the mental record. What did Phil Haddis say? He said that a stiff prick has no conscience. At the moment it was all I could think of. It amused Philip to talk to me. He was a chum. Where Philip was indulgent, my brother Albert, your late uncle, was harsh. Albert might have taught me something if he had trusted me. He was then a night-school law student clerking for Rowland, the racketeer congressman. He was Rowland’s bagman, and Rowland hired him not to read law but to make collections. Philip suspected that Albert was skimming, for he dressed sharply. He wore a derby (called, in those days, a Baltimore heater) and a camel’s-hair topcoat and pointed, mafioso shoes. Toward me, Albert was scornful. He said, “You don’t understand fuck-all. You never will.”
We were approaching Winona Street, and when we got to her building she’d have no further use for me and send me away. I’d see no more than the flash of the glass and then stare as she let herself in. She was already feeling in her purse for the keys. I was no longer supporting her back, preparing instead to mutter “Bye-bye,” when she surprised me with a sideward nod, inviting me to enter. I think I had hoped (with sex-polluted hope) that she
