A Century of Progress (8 page)

On to the third site. Here the perfect location would have been in someone’s back yard, and here Norlund directed Jerry to mount a telephone pole in the adjoining alley.

Norlund was working back and forth between the converging lines in the planned pattern, filling in both of them from west to east. The truck, with Jerry driving most of the time, zigzagged north and south, gradually working its way east.

By the time they had the first eight units planted, darkness was threatening. They had worked right through what must have been Jerry’s regular dinnertime, and through lunchtime by Norlund’s biological clock. At last he noticed that he was hungry.

“Jerry, I think we got to knock off for the day. No way we can go on doing this after dark. Tell you what, I’ll drive you home and pick you up again in the morning.”

“Great. Sure.” And Jerry watched avidly as Norlund counted out dollar bills into his hand, one for every hour that they’d worked together. “Hey, don’t forget, you’re having dinner with us. Judy and her old lady are really expecting you.”

“I’m looking forward to it.” And strangely enough he really was. Usually Norlund didn’t particularly enjoy meeting strangers. But right now he had the sensation that if he closed his eyes and relaxed for more than a second, the world of the Thirties might evaporate away from around him, leaving him God knew where. Contact with other people might make a web to hold him in.

They had already reached the western boundary of Chicago, and now they drove on into the city. The only immediately apparent indication was in the design of the street signs. Norlund continued to let Jerry do the driving, while he himself sat in the right seat, observing and contemplating. “Where you from, Mr. Norlund?” “New York. The company’s based there.” If he’d told the truth, that he was a native Chicagoan, efforts to pin him down further would have followed.

“Yeah? My Mom lives in New York now. My Dad’s still over in the old country. He went back a few years ago.”

Norlund did not respond, and conversation died for a time. He found it easy to fall into his own thoughts. Watching the twilight streets go past, the old-fashioned streetlights coming on, mile after mile of houses and stores and shops and small factories, lights everywhere coming on against the night, he beheld a half-remembered city. The buildings were mostly smaller and dingier than those of the Chicago he thought he could remember from his childhood. There were the street names, time-proof incantations he had used and lived with for most of his life.

With each block he traveled, the sensation was stronger of imminent return to a childhood home, though his own neighborhood had been some distance from this one. This world was saying to him that yes, he could go home again . . .

So familiar were the endless blocks of working-class houses, mile upon mile of them. And yet, so different was this from the childhood world that he had thought he remembered. Even now, with darkness fully fallen, he could see how many FOR RENT signs were on houses, apartments, stores. There was furniture, piled on a sidewalk, a human figure in a rocking chair beside it with blanket over knees. Eviction, nowhere to go; it happened. This year the hard times of the Depression were at their hardest. The people Norlund saw were generally shabbier than he remembered people being, the children more ragged . . . and it struck him now, as it had never struck him in his childhood, that he had yet to discern a black or an oriental face among the thousands to be seen along these streets. Chicago’s black ghettos in nineteen thirty-three, he seemed to recall, would be limited to the south side, and form only a comparatively small part of that vast region. And nobody in America would call a black slum a ‘ghetto’ yet—a ghetto was still a European Jewish quarter.

“What’s your wife’s name, Jerry?”

“Judy. Her family name is Monahan. Her folks are Irish, I told you that. Norlund’s Scandinavian, ain’t it?”

“Yep.”

A streetcar, a lumbering rectangular dinosaur of wood and metal, groaned around a corner nearby, steel wheels fighting with screams of rage against unyielding steel tracks. The single eye of the dinosaur glared at them, the overhead trolley threatened them with blue-white lightning as it stuttered along its wire.

Now Jerry was driving past a huge brick Catholic church, St. Something-or-other, Chicago pseudo-Gothic. Norlund had gone to a Lutheran church early in life, when he’d been made to go to church. He had alternated between feeling rather superior to those who were led from Rome, and vaguely envious of them for some reason he couldn’t quite pin down.

On the next intersection, each corner building held a storefront. One small bakery, one barbershop with painted pole, a placard in the window advertising LEECHES. Two other stores with whitewashed windows, closed and FOR RENT.

Now down a side street Norlund glimpsed an enormous factory building, fairly new, eight or ten stories high and a block square, almost completely dark now and grim as a prison. There were probably ten thousand potential workers within walking distance, among these blocks of houses, two-flats, and small apartments. The factory reared up among them as Norlund imagined that a medieval cathedral might have risen from its town or village. And suddenly another eerie twinge went through his spirit—the realization that as far as he knew, travel into the past was not limited to only fifty years . . .

Jerry turned a corner, and Norlund saw the factory again. One entrance of the huge building was a cave-like door big enough for trucks, and from this mouth a small body of workers was now issuing. Norlund could see them plainly under the garish streetlight that guarded the factory entrance. They had, almost to a man, lunch pails under their arms, cloth caps or battered hats on their heads. Their feet were dragging now, their movements slowed by what must have been a long punishing shift at whatever machines they served inside. These men were the lucky ones, the employed. Norlund wondered if Jerry’s father-in-law might be among them.

Jerry swerved the truck suddenly. He swore at a passing horse-drawn wagon, illegally lightless and hard to see in the dark street. Some junkman or peddlar, crying his daily chant no more, quietly heading home.

And then Jerry was pulling the truck over to the dark curb, parking in front of a close-packed row of small houses. There was no problem in finding a parking space.

On the front steps of the nearest house sat a figure mottled by leaf-shadows from the nearest streetlamp. A stocky, graying man rose to greet them as they alighted from the truck. He had a quart beer bottle on the step beside him, and a glass in hand.

“Mr. Norlund, this’s Mike. Judy’s dad.”

Mike Monahan was muscular, going to fat. As his evening leisure suit he wore a white cotton undershirt with narrow shoulder straps, over his work pants. His handshake was firm, and his greeting hearty, though most of it was drowned out by the shrieking of children going up and down the sidewalk on roller skates. Their noise was very little different from that of their grandchildren half a century away.

Monahan still shook Norlund’s hand. “Sit down, have a beer.”

“Be glad to.”

But it was not to be, not yet. The two women of the house had been watching for the arrival and had come out, and now Norlund was going to have to go into the house and be welcomed properly. Mrs. Monahan was small, mousy, and apologetic as she insisted on having her own way. Judy looked worn and brave. Her prettiness was of a type that Norlund thought might fade quickly. Several half-grown children that Norlund took for Judy’s younger siblings also milled about, indoors and out, taking off roller skates and wanting to know if this was the weekend they would at last get to go to the Fair, and when the ice cream was going to be opened. The two girls were in dresses, the two boys in knickerbockers with largely destroyed knees—school’s out for the summer, save your good clothes was evidently the plan. Norlund had completely forgotten knickers, though he’d worn them often enough himself, God knew. How things were starting to come back now . . .

At last he was able to get back out of the house, full glass of beer in hand, to rejoin Monahan on the cooler front porch . . . but the women had faked them out; it was now time to go back inside and eat dinner. Since the arrival of the eminent visitor, Mrs. Monahan had been in open debate with herself as to whether the kitchen would do for him to eat in, or whether the cloth-covered table in the dining room would be required. Norlund now settled the matter by plunking himself down at the kitchen table, establishing his beer glass on the worn oilcloth there, and letting those who would come and join him.

Everyone besides he and Jerry had already eaten dinner, but there were two pork chops apiece being kept warm for them—Norlund suspected that Jerry would have gotten only one if he hadn’t been bringing an employer home. There were mashed potatoes with butter—it was real butter, naturally—and fresh peas with the irregular look and fine taste of having just come from someone’s garden.

Judy had damp brown curls, and a graceful way of leaning sideways as she moved about helping with kitchen tasks while balancing her baby on one hip. She paused, standing over Norlund, in the act of giving him his knife and fork. “Jerry didn’t say much on the phone about what kind of work it is.”

“I asked him not to.” Norlund spoke loudly enough for the other people in the room to hear; he had no doubt that they were interested. “So you can understand if I still want to keep it confidential.”

Mrs. Monahan went into another low dialogue with herself, the burden of this one being that no one was listening in on any business conversations, or had any intention of prying.

Jerry looked up, chewing on a pork chop. “I did tell ‘em it was Radio Survey Corporation.”

“That’s okay,” said Norlund. He’d gotten rid of his coat and tie and hat, and sat with his sleeves rolled up, eating hungrily.

“Them big corporations,” began Mike, evidently triggered by a key word; and then let the rest of his sentence drown in a gulp of beer, as if at the last moment he’d had second thoughts about speaking his feelings on corporations to this particular guest, who after all had to be some part of management.

“They do a lot of things they hadn’t ought to do,” Norlund supplied. Then it occurred to him to wonder if Mike might be confusing his fictitious firm with RCA, which was certainly big. Well, Norlund wasn’t going to try to straighten him out.

The subject of baseball came up, as if from nowhere, safe and comfortable for the men to talk about. It was Jerry’s contention that in a few years night baseball was going to become a reality; there was a lot of talk about it already. Monahan couldn’t see it happening—star players would be beamed, hit on the head with fly balls coming down out of the night, and the owners would see that their investment was being damaged. Norlund managed not to take sides—actually he couldn’t remember when night games had really started.

Now the kids were leaving the kitchen, taking dishes of ice cream with them, heading for the living room where Norlund could hear someone turning on the radio.

“The world’s gonna change in a few years,” Jerry was asserting. He spoke with assurance, like a man who had a job, even if temporary. “There’ll be more than night baseball happening. You’ll see. This Depression’ll come to an end like nothing you’ve seen before.”

“You been reading too many of them damn magazines,” Mike grumbled. But he was smiling lightly and there was no force in his crabbing. Having another job in the house probably took some strain off everybody’s nerves.

A steam or hot-water radiator at one side of the kitchen was serving as a summer catch-all table. Among the old magazines that were lying on the radiator, Norlund discerned some science fiction pulps. On a cover he picked out the names of H. P. Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smith.
Astounding Stories
with SALVAGE IN SPACE, by Jack Williamson.

“God damn,” said Monahan, unable to keep entirely away from disputatious subjects. “Roosevelt is doing something, at least.”

His wife murmured expostulations at his language, but they were automatic and went unheeded. Her small form was bent in front of the wooden icebox, trying to do something difficult at floor level. The two men native to the house were just vanishing toward the living room, glasses in hand, to listen to the radio. Norlund realized suddenly what Mrs. Monahan was about.

“Here, let me help you with that.” And he bent beside her to lift out the heavy pan of melt water from under the appliance. He manhandled the pan over to the white enameled sink, and poured it out. The lady’s nervous chatter thanked him, and informed him that some day she wanted an electric refrigerator, or maybe a gas model like one of those new Electroluxes.

Norlund put the drain pan back under the icebox. Then from the cold radiator he picked up a piece of cardboard about a foot square. An advertisement was printed in the middle of it, and at each edge was a two-digit number in large bold numerals. Each number appeared upright when its edge was up. If they had sent someone younger, Norlund thought to himself with satisfaction, how would that person have managed this? Would they have been able to deduce what this card is?

“How many pounds, Mrs. Monahan?” he asked.

“Seventy-five, if you don’t mind.” Apologetic, as if she were asking Norlund to carry it in himself. “In this heat it goes so quickly. Put the card right here in the kitchen window, if you please; the ice wagon comes down the alley.”

Norlund propped the card up in the window, so the large 75 was right side up and visible from outside.

Now the kids were calling to them from the front room that Amos n’ Andy was coming on. The two women in the kitchen responded as if to an offer of paid work.

Awarded a place of honor as guest, Norlund in the living room sat back in one of the better chairs, while the other adults took chairs and sofa and the kids sprawled on the floor. Presently Judy had to take the squalling baby away and change it. Norlund sat back, listening comfortably, closing his eyes. The taxicab company and its problems came back as if he had last heard about them only yesterday.