Algren at Sea (29 page)

Then the fly-a-kite spring came on, and I fled through the ruins of Victory Gardens pulling a great orange grin of a kite higher than the cross of St. Columbanus, with Ethel behind me.

When it soared so high it no longer grinned, I anchored it and Ethel sent a message up
I Love My Savior.
I don't know yet what had frightened that kid so.

Yet that whole blue forenoon she stayed in continuous touch with the Virgin Mary, assisted by an unlikely assortment of angels, dead uncles, saints, martyrs, erring friends and, of course,
Gawd.
The kite went to work for the church. It became a Jesuit kite scouring Heaven for proselytes. Ethel ran home and came back with a cup of holy water to help it. I made no protest when she sprinkled me. She was older and infinitely wiser than myself.

“I'm a Catholic now,” I announced that night at supper.

“Eat your soup,” my mother instructed me.

“Ethel baptized me.”

“That takes a priest. Eat your soup.”

“I want to see the face of Gawd.”

“Eat your soup.”

I ate the soup, yet I brooded.

Nobody knew I was brooding until I looked at the bread pudding with distaste. Then it was plain something had gone wrong.

So my sister ate it for me and helped my mother with the dishes while I sat on, bread-puddingless, till the last dish was stacked.

Ethel burst into our kitchen. She was weeping with anger or disappointment—“I'm running away from home! I'm going to live with you!”

My father looked at my mother for an explanation. My mother looked at Ethel.

Her father had died without last rites and her mother had paid a priest a hundred dollars to keep her late husband from spending eternity in Purgatory. Now the priest, Ethel told us between sobs, had returned to tell the family that all the hundred dollars had done was to get the old man to his knees. It would take another hundred to get him out. But Ethel's mother had answered, “If the old man is on his knees, let him jump the rest of the way,” and had sent the priest on his way. Her mother's blasphemy had provoked Ethel's decision to run away from home.

Ethel's mother opened the kitchen door, tossed in an armful of the girl's clothing onto the floor—“And don't come home!” she announced, and slammed the door on her pious daughter.

The castout girl stood silently. Then her features began working.

“He'll never see the face of Gawd!” she howled her grief and love. “He'll never see
His
face!”

“Then let him look at His ass,” my father decided firmly.

 

On weekdays I got a penny for candy and blew my nose into a rag. But on Sundays I got a dime and a clean handkerchief.

Weekdays afforded only such mean choices as that between two yellow jawbreakers or a piece of chewing wax shaped like a wine bottle, containing a few drops of sugar water. But Sundays one chose between a chocolate, vanilla, or strawberry sundae.

Sunday was for sundaes, and Ethel was my girl because I was the one with the dime. Ethel gave me orders on weekdays because she was closer to Gawd. Sunday was my day because I was closer to John The Greek.

John The Greek's was the place where ice cream came true. In John The Greek's country, maraschino cherries lived atop vanilla ice-cream cones. There strawberries loved whipped cream and whipped cream loved pineapple and pineapple must have loved banana, for it ran down both sides of banana splits.

It was all butter-cream frosting, there where caramels lived in candy pans and Green River fizzed beside marzipan. It was always root-beer and ginger-ale time at John The Greek's; there it was always time for lemonade with a cherry in it. There where butterscotch and maple embraced as one.

Ethel's church was St. Columbanus. Mine was The Store Where Ice Cream Came True.

Even there Ethel couldn't forget Gawd. That kid was dotty on Jesus. As soon as John brought us ice water she'd start sprinkling me. As the day was warm I didn't mind the wetting. But as she'd already used Holy Water without doing any good, I couldn't see how a couple of glasses of soda-fountain water would do any better.

And as though that weren't superstition enough for Sunday, she warned me not to step on a crack dividing the sidewalk. Gawd would strike me dead if I did.

“Dare
me.”

“I
dare
you.”

“Double
-dare me.”

“Double-dare and
triple
-dare you.”

Wow.

I came down with both feet flat on a crack and didn't miss one all the way home.

I had dared, double-, and triple-dared Gawd, and He hadn't done a thing.

 

My mother never entertained notions. With her, every notion immediately became a conviction. And, once she had one, there was no way either of prying her off it or of prying the conviction off her.

I began addressing valentines, as our winter life began addressing spring, to bring to my second-grade teacher. There were forty-eight kids in that class, and Miss Burke was to call out the names on every valentine in a kind of election to determine who was the most popular girl and the most popular boy in the class.

“Are you sending one to Mildred Ford?” my mother asked.

That I had a valentine for every other kid in the class but none for Mildred, wasn't because I had anything
against
her. It was just that I felt it would be better for
her
if I didn't send any. Mildred Ford was the only colored kid in the Park Manor school, and
I
hadn't sent for her I was sure. It was only that I felt it would be best for everybody if we proceeded more gradually toward integration. On a different holiday, in another school. Promotion to second-class citizenship, coming too suddenly, can leave a person unbalanced for the rest of his life.

“Are
you sending Mildred Ford a valentine?” my mother repeated.

It ought to have been plain enough to her that, when there are forty-seven people on one side and one on the other, it isn't going to help anybody to change the ratio to forty-six to two. Yet I sensed that this wouldn't convince her, so I ignored the question a second time.

She scooped up my tableful of heart-shaped greetings, arrows with bows, tears with vows.

“If you don't send a valentine to everyone you can't send
any
to
anybody.”

“Nobody sent Mildred any last year, Ma,” I fell back on precedent.

“Then
this
is the year to start.”

“But
nobody
sends a valentine to a
nigger,
Ma.”

As Governor Faubus was to express it in later years, the situation had become untenable.

“You
do,” was the decision.

From that verdict there was no appeal.

The valentine that Mildred received from me possessed as much wit as one penny could buy. It showed a tearful puppy pleading: “Don't Treat Me Like a Dog. Be My Valentine.”

That was about as far as
anybody
could go and still stay segregated in 1918.

All I could see of her, from where I sat, was a pair of nappy pigtails tied with blue-ribbon bows, bent above a reluctant valentine.

I never spoke to Mildred Ford; she never spoke to me. Yet by one shuttered glance, passing through a door while I stood to one side to let her pass, she acknowledged my gift.

“You're on the other side,
Stay
there,” that glance plainly told me.

A few weeks after, in Sunday weather, Ethel and her mother, my mother and myself, put swimming suits in a basket lunch and went picnicking in Jackson Park.

A replica of Columbus' flagship had been rotting on the Jackson Park lagoon since 1893. We took our lunch on the sunny grass in view of the
Santa Maria's
bulging hulk.

I was too big to change to a swimming suit in front of women, my mother felt. If I wanted to go swimming I had to go to the men's bath-house. Fair enough—but I had to keep my winter underwear on! Those were
orders.

I didn't realize what a skinny kid wearing a man's trunks looks like in public when he is wearing them over long flannels, but when Ethel's mother began to laugh I began to get the idea. When my mother laughed I knew: I was a pitiful sight. But when Ethel laughed I slugged her. My mother promptly slugged me.

First she had caused my public humiliation, then she'd hit me—I began to bawl.

Ethel's mother promptly slugged Ethel simply to make matters even. Ethel began to bawl. Matters were evened, so I quit bawling. When I quit, Ethel quit.

Nobody was mad at anybody—until her mother and mine left us alone a little later. Ethel took one more look at the longies—but she didn't laugh. She knew better now. All she did was express a kind of overall disdain.

“You
send valentines to niggers,” she observed.

I didn't crack her.

“I
send valentines to
everybody,”
I answered with a disdain quite as derisive as her own.

Mildred Ford had been wrong. If I didn't send valentines to everybody, I couldn't send them to anybody. I needed her to send a valentine to as much as she needed me to receive one.

No, she didn't want me on
her
side. I didn't want to be on her side.

Yet I was there all the same.

 

My mother's idea of making things up to me for the battle of the
Santa Maria
was a promise to cut down my Uncle Harry's Spanish-American naval uniform. Uncle Harry had died of yellow fever in Cuba in 1898, but, twenty years afterward, his uniform still hung in our clothes closet awaiting the final trump. The promise was that I could wear it to school on the anniversary of the sinking of the battleship
Maine.

To be the only kid in the school with a colored sweetheart was tough, but the prospect now offered was too much. I believe that it was the first time I stood my mother off successfully.

Yet in pauses in our play Ethel would now survey me gravely—then give me a smile of thinnest mockery as she saw me once more in a swimming suit drawn over a suit of long underwear. Ground lost by such experience is never regained.

As the roll-a-hoop spring came on as blue as peace. By the light that now lingered, the light that held, I stood bowed against the gas-lamp crying warning—“eight—nine—ten—
redlight!
” As the roll-a-hoop spring raced to a summer of redlit pursuit.

And our Edison Vic hit a crack—the same crack every time—

I also worked up a bit on Uncle-Theodore-The-Great-Lakes-Sailor coming home drunk which my mother said she could live without.

A terrier got hit in the street by a car that kept going. We heard its yelp and watched it drag itself to the curb. Ethel gave it last rites.

The next morning she got me out of bed to give it a Catholic burial. I hadn't even known the brute was a Christian.

We took turns digging with a toy shovel. When it was deep enough Ethel began crossing herself, and I stepped back until she should tell me to throw in the deceased.

Crazy Johnny Sheely came up, put his container of six quarts of milk down, and took the shovel from me. The grave wasn't deep enough, it looked to Johnny.

At his first stroke, the shovel bent and Johnny looked humiliated.

“Wait for me,” he asked us. We stood around until he came back bearing a man-sized shovel.

Johnny dug until we grew tired of watching him and wandered off to find four-leaf clovers. When we came back he had dug himself down to his waist.

The dead terrier lay beside the milk. Ethel threw in a prayer for Crazy Johnny and I practiced crossing myself until it was time for lunch.

From our front window, I watched Johnny digging for his life. He had, it was plain, forgotten both dog and milk, dirty home and dirty mother. In the early afternoon Ethel came down to fetch me, and we went out to watch Johnny for lack of anything else to do. A crowd had gathered.

“You're going to catch it if you don't get home,” Ethel shouted down into the hole from which we could see Johnny's dark, sweat-tousled
head. Her answer was a shovelful of dirt from which we both jumped back.

Johnny dug until we saw his mother coming—somebody had snitched! This was a formidable harridan who supported half-a-dozen nutty sons and nuttier daughters by her backyard dairy, doing more herself than her whole nutty brood combined. Johnny tried to scramble out but couldn't get a hold. His mother had to get two of his nutty brothers out of bed to pull him up.

When they got him up, without a word they both began punching him, while his mother slapped him with the broad of her hand. Johnny ducked into a running crouch and all three followed, punching and slapping, the old woman carrying the soured milk in her left hand while she slapped at his ears with her right. The battle went across South Park Avenue, with Ethel and I following, drawn by flying joy, through a narrow way between buildings and up the alley between South Park and Vernon Avenue, when Ethel's mother and mine both hollered us back into our own yards. I don't remember whether the terrier ever got buried.

I know the great hole remained there until my father filled it, with the shovel Johnny had left, and Ethel and I had to return the shovel as some sort of punishment. Nobody knew what we had to be punished for, but my punishment now was always the same: “You're excommunicated,” my father told me. I don't see how my father was qualified to excommunicate anybody, but he did it all the same.