Pride
DedicationTo my parents:
Sarah Amelia
1905â1980
Albert Henry
1902â1975
What are we But family?
Praise for William
Wharton's Books
O
n October 6, 1938, in Wildwood, New Jersey, a lion, part of a “Wall of Death” motorcycle act, escaped from his cage on the boardwalk and killed a man.
On that day, Neville Chamberlain was negotiating with Adolf Hitler, giving him a large part of Czechoslovakia called the Sudetenland. It was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Jews throughout the world prayed, fasted, repented, atoned. They had little idea how, during the next seven horrible years, there would be much for all to atone.
Ann Sheridan sued for divorce and Martha Raye prepared to marry David Rose.
There was much labor unrest. The Great Depression was slowly lifting, and working men, though glad to be working again, were asking for a fairer share in profit and a promise of more job security. The A.F. of L. was preparing to shut down auto plants. The C.I.O. in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, was battling company police at the steel mills. There was a garbage and trash collectors' strike in Philadelphia, involving police intervention, violence, and labor retaliation.
The day that lion escaped, I was one month short of my twelfth birthday. The previous summer I'd seen the “Wall of Death” motorcycle act. It was the summer, also, when I first experienced a sexual as compared to a religious ejaculation.
There are some events that mark watersheds or cusps in life. The escape of that lion was one for me. It became a subconscious symbol, a foreboding, of all the violence and violation possible in life.
I began having a recurring nightmare. It haunted me for more than six years and lasted until W.W. II, when I went off and gathered material for worse nightmares.
In my “lion nightmare” I'm living on a street much like the one described by Dickie in this book. I stand behind the front door to our house and look out through the glass panes, across our porch, down our front steps. Lions are strolling, stalking the streets, the lawns; they lurk silently between porches.
My mother and father, my sister, my grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, and neighbors are walking around. They pay no attention to the lions.
With great trepidation, I dash out to warn them of the danger, their peril. But they ignore me, laugh, insist the lions are only friendly kittens.
In despair, I scamper back behind the security of my impervious front door. I watch as those I love are mauled, killed, destroyed by these marauding beasts.
Invariably, I woke from this dream sobbing uncontrollably, swallowed in a deep sense of loss.
This novel, despite the factual reality of the original tragedy, is a work of fiction. The characters, situations, sequences, and events are products of my imagination. Any relationship to real events is purely coincidental.
Perhaps, in writing this, I am trying at last to exorcise
my
lions in the night, my personal succubi, or perhaps I'm still helplessly attempting to warn people of hidden dangers from behind my seemingly secure front door. I don't know; it doesn't matter.
But let us now begin, as Dickie Kettleson tells us about
his
pride,
his
territory.
WILLIAM WHARTON
W
here I live, in Stonehurst Hills, there are rows of houses with alleys between them. These aren't the same kind of alleys they have down in Philadelphia at my grandfather's house. Those rows down there are older, were built before so many people had automobiles.
The rows we live in here, in Stonehurst, were built
after
the world war, when people started needing garages because they had cars.
At my grandfather's, the alleys are only narrow walkways, wide as an ordinary sidewalk, with metal fences along the edges. There are gardens outside the back of each house, little tiny lawns, with flowers in the summer, lots of sunflowers and hollyhocks.
Also, at my grandfather's house, you open two slanted cellar doors in the back garden and go down steps into the cellar, because those houses are built on flat streets, not hills.
Our alleys here were mostly built so cars could get into the garages. These garages are built under each of the houses. The alleys are wider, but, even so, it's hard for two cars to pass in our alley, especially where there are still old-style porches with steps sticking out.
In our alley, the pavement's cracked up so there's nothing but pebbles and broken chunks of pavement. Also, everybody puts trashcans, ashcans, or garbage cans back there and the street cleaner never comes down the alley so it's all dirty and smelly.
The kitchens in our rows open onto the back porches. These porches are at least ten feet up in the air. If it weren't for them, you could walk out the kitchen door, step off a brick cliff, and kill yourself.
Whenever we'd knock down one of those old-style porches, my Dad'd always nail a few boards across the kitchen door, temporarily, so somebody wouldn't forget and wind up smashed dead.
Our side of the alley is higher than the other because these rows are built along the side of a small hill. I guess that's why they call this part where we live Stonehurst Hills. It's a nice-sounding name for just rows of houses.
Our back porches are built out into the alleys and aren't much. Each house in our row is sort of a reversed twin of the one next door. The old-style back porches were built so there was only one set of steps going up to each pair of houses. I don't exactly know why they built those steps anyway; it's easier, and makes more sense, to go through the kitchen, down the cellar stairs and out through the cellar door; that's what everybody does.
The back porches are mostly used only to walk out on and hang clothes. Each house has a pulley clothesline going across the alley to the back of a house on the next street.
Our pulley has a line across to the McClosky place on Greenwood Avenue.
They
have one coming across to our place. All down the alley there are these pulleys with clotheslines.
The McCloskys are probably the only people we even know over on Greenwood Avenue. Nobody knows anybody on another row. In fact, I'm afraid to
walk
along Greenwood Avenue; there are some mean, tough kids living there, especially down near the end on the other side of the areaway. Practically none of them go to St. Cyril's where I go; mostly they go to Stonehurst, that's the public school.
I don't know when everybody agreed to put up those pulleys but it gives each house a chance to hang out clothes. In winter, or when it rains, we hang clothes in the cellar. On Mondays, in good weather, when most of the women in our neighborhood do the wash, you can hardly see down our alley for the wet clothes hanging out. Walking down that alley, coming home from school on Monday for lunch, there are so many clothes dripping it's like walking through a rainstorm. And, on any day, there are almost enough clothes so you feel as if you're walking under a tent.
There are fifty houses in our row, on our side of the street, the seventy hundred block of Clover Lane. There's just that narrow areaway going through the alleys halfway down. The areaway is between 7048 and 7046. Our house is 7066.
The houses across the street, in front, uphill from us, have the odd numbers. There aren't any numbers on houses in back alleys, the way there are on front. I know the McCloskys' house must be 7067 Greenwood though I've never checked. It has to be.
As I said, we live on a hill. You wouldn't know it, walking along any of the streets like Clover Lane or Radbourne Road or Greenwood Avenue because they're all straight around the side of the hill. But going the
other
way, it
is
a hill. Radbourne Road is higher than Clover Lane and even the other side of Clover Lane is higher than our side. Our front lawn is flat but the lawns on the other side of the street are hills. It's nicer having a flat front lawn for a garden but the hills are good for playing King of the Hill or digging tunnels.
One time I went into the front bedroom of Jimmy Malony's house across the street on the hill side. I looked out his window there and could see all the way down the hill, all the way to Baltimore Pike almost. It was something I hadn't expected. Jimmy'd taken me up to his parents' room to show me some of his mother's underwear but the view out that window interested me more.
We can't see over top of the houses on Greenwood Avenue from
our
back bedrooms. Those houses are a little bit lower than our houses, so we drive
up
a small hill to get into our garage and they go
down
a little one to get into theirs. Still, we aren't high enough so we can see over the houses on the other side of our alley. We just look smack into their windows surrounded by brick wall.
There are twelve steps up to the front porches of houses on the high side of Clover Lane. When you're on the front porch of Jimmy Malony's house you look right across into the bedroom windows of our side, but the street with the lawns and everything make it a long way across, so they probably can't see anything, even with a spyglass.
It's down in the alley where the iceman comes. He carries ice up the porch stairs if there are steps left: I mean if Dad and I haven't built the new kind of porches without steps. If we
have
, the iceman comes through the cellar and up the cellar steps.
Most everybody has a yellow card in the kitchen window if they want ice; sometimes it's in the cellar window. It has 25, 50, 75, and 100 printed in the corners. You turn it up to how many pounds of ice you want. If you don't want any, you turn it backward. A few people are starting to have refrigerators now and don't have cards in the windows.
If you're in the alley when the ice truck comes, the iceman will always chip off a piece of ice for you, or sometimes there are pieces of ice splintered off from where he's split a chunk of ice before. The floor part of the ice truck is wooden, soaked wet all the time and with shining silver metal tracks to make the ice slide easier. The iceman can cut off perfect cubes of ice or larger pieces just using his icepick. Sometimes it only takes one or two swings and he gets it cut through. He has a pair of big ice tongs and uses them to pick up the ice and throw it over his back onto a wet burlap sack. Our iceman is short, but he's really strong. I don't know where he lives and he doesn't speak much American.
Also, the man who sells fruits and vegetables comes through our alley. His truck is old and painted dark green. He stops the truck and yells, “Fresh fruits, fresh vegetables,” but if you didn't know, you wouldn't know what he's saying: he runs it all together and practically sings. He's Italian and is hard to understand.