It is interesting, given his proclivity, that everything in Jack Junior’s real world happened when he was “twelve or so,” “twenty-two or -three.” Later it drove his father a little crazy, a perfect example in the father’s mind of the exotic futility of the son’s abilities; this was a man who, every day of his life, checked the exactitude of the date on every page of his newspaper, who numbered his achievements by such dates, every memory recorded by a number of significant intractability. Ten. Thirty. One thousand nine hundred twenty-nine. On that date his newspaper announced the pending economic collapse of a hundred million lives. “Yes,” Jack Junior would remember later, “I was about sixteen.”
He and I were different in a lot of ways, and as we got older he got more and more like who he was and I got more and more like who I was. He always needed people around him, he was always taking them into his orbit; down at his paper he’d be mixing it up with the printers or whomever, his sleeves up to his elbows and his hands black from ink and blue from the metal filings beneath the first level of flesh. He put up with things for which, from his own family, he wouldn’t have had the patience; sometimes I thought he had more patience with those he employed than with those he loved. By the time I was nearly twenty I felt as though I had no patience for anyone.
If you’d called him a reformer or liberal he would have stared at you aghast. If you’d called him a crusader he would have been disgusted. Later after my mother was gone, close to the second world war, I’d hear people in bars call him a crusader. When they called him this it wasn’t meant as a compliment. But when I was younger, after I began hearing the music in the fields, I woke one night to a red glow over the ridge down by the creek; the Negro’s mill was afire. The Klan had come over from Indiana at the news that a woman in Gary had been affronted by a colored man in broad daylight. Given the broad daylight, you might have thought they’d have a better idea of who it was, but it probably didn’t matter; they picked on the first colored man they came across and the fact that he was in another state just made it all the more inconvenient in terms of legal prosecution. The Negro got out of it roughed up but alive. Pop ran about seven or ten stories on it and got copies into Gary. He shamed two states into extradition proceedings. He was always running stories about the Indians too. But call him a crusader, he had no use for it.
In fact Jack Senior considered himself rather a conservative, in that his values were unabashedly traditional, and his self-identification, when asked about his politics, was simply “Patriot.” This in an age mesmerized by the convulsions of the East, in which the vanguard held hopes that had nothing to do with countries. “Prattle,” said the father to one-worldism.
Still, in the son Jack Senior saw an inner withdrawal that struck him as luxurious and irresponsible. This triggered an argument. It was late in the day and they were driving back from visiting Bart and his new fiancée in Milwaukee, and from Chicago where Jack Junior had applied for admission to the university. The road curled above them like a blue vapor and across the valley in the wet rust of twilight the wheat silos of the farms, burning moments before, were doused to silver. When the valley went dark the sky went riverblack, houses and barns cauterized in stabs of gold and slash-red. Into the dark father and son drove angry and speechless. Finally the father sighed. “I know you’re not like others. I know you hear things others don’t hear, I know you hear your music. But all the more reason, you know. All the more reason. You’re curt sometimes. You’re abrupt. You ought to think about other people sometimes.”
“I don’t give a damn about other people,” the boy said.
The older man was crestfallen. They got home and parked the car. The boy had a lump in his throat; hating himself, he said to his father as they walked to the house, “I didn’t mean that.” He had meant something else. He had meant he felt alone next to his father who knew people so easily. He had meant that no matter how hard he tried, he could not be who his father was, his father who got more and more like who he was. The father barely heard him. “I didn’t mean it, Pop,” the boy pleaded. At the door Jack Senior nodded.
When he was admitted to the university, the month before the economic collapse of a hundred million lives, Jack Junior filed his papers under the name of John Michael Lake (no junior), which was a fiction, not so much to mute the gunfire of the father as to escape the symmetry of the son.
Bart first married in the last years of the nineteenth century, when Jack Senior was still a boy; for that matter Bart was still a boy, barely twenty. By the time he was thirty the marriage had ended, the young wife having met a saloon keeper about whom she made no secret of her excitement. Jack Senior would later conclude Bart’s drinking started in those days as he wandered saloon to saloon looking for the man who had stolen the wild Mrs. Lake. One night he found the saloon, with the man, with Mrs. Lake, upon which confrontation the new couple demonstrated to the abandoned husband the full extent of their crashing passion, in a kiss that couldn’t begin to match the demonstrations Bart had seen in his
