True Detective (5 page)

Also, by century's turn, my father was in love. Having been denied the education Louis got, he'd taken to reading, even before his union interests led him into books on history and economy. Perhaps that was where my father's capacity for smugness and contempt came from: he had the insecurity-based arrogance of all self-educated men. At any rate, it was at a cultural study program at Newberry Library that he met another (if less arrogant) self-educated soul: Jeanette Nolan, a beautiful redheaded young woman who was a bit on the frail, sickly side. In fact, it was repeated bouts of illness keeping her out of school that led her into reading and self-study (I never found out exactly what her health problems were, though I've come to think it may have been her heart). But this only made her all the more appealing to Pa. After all, his two favorite authors were Dumas and Dickens (although he once admitted to me his disappointment when he discovered that the same Dumas wasn't responsible for both
Camille
and
The Three Musketeers;
he had gone through many a year wondering at the versatility of the author Alexandre

Dumas, till he found out that
pere
and
fils
were different people).

Not long after she and my father started to court, Pa landed in court, then in jail: his work with unions was repeatedly bringing him into conflict with cops, and his arrest came during a textile plant strike, landing him a month in Bridewell Prison.

Which was a hellhole, of course. A sandstone hellhole with no heat, no toilet facilities other than a five-gallon bucket in the corner of a rusty, paint-peeling cell with two wall-suspended bunks with straw mattresses and wafer-thin blankets, and a stench you could almost see. No water in the cells, though each morning at six, prisoners were given a few moments at a trough with cold running water before one of the two cell-mates got his turn at joining the parade of slop cans, which were carried from the cells and dumped outside in huge cesspools and then scrubbed clean with chemicals. And once a week, a gang shower. The shower came in handy after a week in a clay hole, which is where Pa was assigned: a stone quarry; a deep pit where big pieces of limestone got turned into little ones.

Pa was used to hardship: Aunt Anna had seen to that. And he was pretty healthy: he had the same framework as me, roughly six feet with one-eighty or one-seventy attached to it. But one month in Bridewell took its toll even on a healthy man, and he came out twenty pounds lighter- meals ran to a breakfast of bread and dry oatmeal, lunch of bread and thin soup, supper of bread and a concoction that was peas and fragments of corned beef swimming in something unidentifiable, all servings negligible, with the three pieces of bread the only thing that got him and the other prisoners through the day (one odd thing: Pa often said it was the best fresh-baked bread he ever ate), and he had a cough from breathing quarry dust, and was of course very proud of himself for the moral victory' of going to jail over a union matter, and loved his martyr's role.

But Jeanette was not impressed, not with the glory aspects of it, anyway. She was horrified at the condition Pa was in after Bridewell, just as she'd been horrified the times she'd cleaned and bandaged him after strike-related beatings. Before he went to Bridewell, he'd proposed marriage; he'd asked her permission to ask her parents for her hand. She had said she'd think about it. And now she said she'd many him on one condition…

So Pa left union work.

Pa was no stranger to Maxwell Street; he'd been there, from time to time, passing out political and union literature. He didn't want to work for a "capitalist" institution, like a bank (he'd leave
that
to his brother Louis); and he couldn't work in a factor)' he'd been black-listed from most Chicago plants, and the ones where he wasn't black-listed would only present the temptation of future union work. So he opened a stall on Maxwell Street selling books, used and new, with an emphasis on dime novels, which, with school supplies- pencils, pens and ink, notebooks- attracted kids, who were his best customers. Occasionally, a parent frowned upon the union and anarchist literature that rubbed shoulders with Buffalo Bill and Nick Carter on Pa's stall; even the similarly politically conscious Jeanette was critical of this, but nothing could sway Pa. And Maxwell Street was a place where you could get away with selling just about anything.

About a mile southwest of the Loop, Maxwell Street was at the center of a Jewish ghetto a mile square, give or take, and on Maxwell Street it was mostly the latter. The Great Fire of 1871, thanks to Mrs. O'Leary's less-than-contented cow purportedly kicking a lantern over, left Maxwell Street, which was just south of the O'Leary barn, untouched. The Maxwell Street area had a big influx of new residents from the burned-out areas of Chicago, and the now densely populated area attracted merchants- most of them Jewish peddlers with two-wheeled pushcarts. Soon the street was teeming with bearded patriarchs, their caftans brushing the dusty wooden sidewalks, their black derbies faded gray from days in the sun, selling. Selling shoes, fruit, garlic, pots, pans, spices…

By the time Pa opened a stall there, Maxwell Street was a Chicago institution, the marketplace where the rich and the poor would go for a bargain; where awnings hung from storefronts to the very edge of the wooden stalls crowding the curb, the walkway between so dark a tunnellike effect was created, and lamps were strung up so bargain hunters could see what they were getting- but not
too
many lamps, and not
overly
bright, because it wasn't to the seller's advantage to let the buyer get
too
close a look at the toeless socks, used toothbrushes, factory-second shirts, and other wonders that were the soul of the street. Whether the street had a heart or not, I couldn't say, but it did have a smell: the smell of onions frying: even the smell of garbage burning in open trash drums couldn't drown
that
out. Accompanying the oniony air were the clouds of steam rising from the hot dogs; and when the onions met the hot dogs in a fresh bun. that was as close to heaven as Maxwell Street got.

Pa and his bride moved into a one-room tenement flat at Twelfth and Jefferson, in a typical Maxwell Street-area building: a three-story clapboard with a pitched roof and exterior staircase. There were nine flats in the building and about eighty people; one three-room flat was home for an even dozen. The Hellers, alone in their one room, sharing an outhouse with twenty or thirty of their fellow residents (one outhouse per floor), had room to spare, and maybe that's what led to me.

I would imagine Pa was living your typical quiet life of desperation: his union work, which meant so much to him, was in the past; taking its place was his stall, in an atmosphere more openly capitalistic than the banks he loathed (and Pa was a well-read, intellectual type, remember; irony didn't get past him).

So all he had in life was his beloved Jeanette, and the promise of a family.

But mother was still frail, and having me (in 1905) damn near killed her. A midwife/nurse from the Maxwell Street Dispensary, pulled her- and me- through; and, later, diplomatically suggested to them, separately and together, that Nathan Samuel Heller be an only child.

Big families were the rule then, however, and a few years later, my mother died during a miscarriage; the midwife didn't even make it to the house before my mother died in my father's bloody arms. I think I remember standing nearby and seeing this. Or maybe my father's quiet, understated but photographically vivid retelling (and he told me this only once) made me
think
I remembered, made me think it came back to me from over the years. I would've been about three, I guess. She died in 1908.

Pa didn't show his feelings, it wasn't his way. I don't remember ever seeing him weep. But losing mother hit him hard. Had there been relatives on either side of the family that Pa was close to, I might've ended up being raised by an aunt or something; there were overtures from Uncle Louis, I later learned, and from mother's sisters and a brother, but Pa resisted them all. I was all he had left, all that remained of her. That doesn't mean we were close, though, despite the fact that I was helping at the stall by age six; he and I didn't seem to have much in common, except perhaps an interest in reading, and mine was a casual one, hardly matching his. But I was reading Nick Carter by age ten and used hardbacks of Sherlock Holmes soon after. I wanted to be a detective when I grew up.

Conditions in the neighborhood got worse and worse; shopping in the Maxwell Street Market could be an adventure, but living there was a disaster. It was a slum: there were 130 people crowded in our building now, and the father and son who shared one room were looked upon with envy by their neighbors. There were sweatshops which of course got my union-in-his-blood father's ire up- and diseases (mother had had influenza when the miscarriage took her. and Pa used to blame the flu for her death, perhaps because in some way it absolved him); and there was the stink of garbage and outhouses and stables. I attended Walsh school, and while I managed not to get involved directly, there were gang wars aplenty, bloody fights in which kids would slash each other with knives and fire pistols at one another. And that was the six- and seven-year olds; the older kids were
really
tough. I managed to live through two years of Walsh before Pa announced we were moving out.
When
? I wanted to know. He said he didn't know, but we
would
move.

Even at age seven (which is what I was at the time) I knew Pa wasn't much of a businessman; school supplies and dime novels and such made for a steady, day-to-day sort of income, but nothing more. And while he was a hard worker. Pa had begun to have headaches what years later might have been called migraines- and there were days when his stall did not open for business. The headaches began, of course, after Mother died.

It couldn't have been easy for him, but Pa went to Uncle Louis. He went, one Sunday afternoon, to Uncle Louis' Lake Shore high-rise apartment in Lincoln Park. Uncle Louis was an assistant vice-president with the Dawes Bank now; a rich, successful businessman; in short, everything Pa was not. And when Pa asked for a loan, his brother asked, why not go to my
bank
for that? Why come to my home? And why, after all these years, should I help
you
?

And Pa answered him. As a courtesy to you, he said, I did not come to your bank; I would not want to embarrass my successful brother. And an embarrassment is what I would be, Pa said, a Maxwell Street merchant in ragged clothes, coming to beg from his banker brother; it would be unseemly. Of course, Pa said, if you
want
me to come around. I can do that; and I can do that again and again, until you finally give me my loan. Perhaps, Pa said, you do not embarrass easily; perhaps your business associates, your fancy clients, do not mind that your brother is a raggedy merchant- an anarchist- a union man; perhaps they do not mind that we both were raised by a whorehouse madam; perhaps they understand that your fortune was built upon misery and suffering, like their fortunes.

With the loan, my father was able to start a small bookstore in the part of North Lawndale we knew as Douglas Park, a storefront on South Homan with three rooms in the rear: kitchen, bedroom, sitting room, the latter doubling as my bedroom; best of all was indoor plumbing, and we had it all to ourselves. I went to Lawson school, which was practically across the street from Heller's Books. And the school supplies Pa sold, in addition to the dime novels he continued to stock, kept his store afloat. In twelve years he'd paid Uncle Louis back; that would've been about 1923.

I didn't know it then, because Pa never showed it, but I was the center of his life. I can see that now. I can see that he was proud of the good grades I got; and I can see that the move we made from Maxwell Street to Douglas Park had mostly to do with getting me in better, safer schools and very little to do with improving Pa's business- he still wasn't much of a businessman, stocking more political and economic literature than popular novels (Pa's idea of a popular novel was Upton Sinclair's
The Jungle)
, refusing to add the penny candy and junk toys that would've been the perfect commercial adjunct to the school supplies he sold, that would've brought the Lawson kids in, because the school supplies and dime novels were the only concession he'd make to commerce, the only room he'd sacrifice to his precious books. And he didn't stock the religious books that would've sold well in this predominantly Jewish area, either; a taste for kosher food was about as Jewish as Pa got, and I guess the same has proved true for me. We're that much alike.

He wanted me to go to college; it was his overriding dream. The dream was no more specific than that: no goal of a son as a doctor, or a lawyer; I could be anything I wanted. A teacher would've pleased him. I think, but I'm just guessing. The only thing he made clear was his hope that business- either on Uncle Louis' high scale or his own low one- would be something I'd avoid; and I always assured him that he needn't worry about my following either of those courses of action. The only thing I had tried to make clear, since I was about ten years old, was my desire to be a detective when I grew up. Pa took that as seriously as most fathers would; but some kids
do
grow up to be firemen, you know. And when I kept talking about it on into my early twenties, he should've paid attention. But that's something parents rarely do. They demand attention; they don't give it. But then the same is true of children, isn't it?

To his credit, when he gave me the five hundred dollars he'd been saving for God knows how long, he said that it was a graduation gift, no strings, though he admitted to hoping I would use it for college. To my credit, I did; I went to Crane Junior College for two years, during which time Pa's business seemed to be less than prospering, with him alone in the shop, closing down occasionally because of headaches. When I went back to help him there, he assumed I was working to save up and go on for another two years of college. I assumed he realized I'd decided two years was enough. Typically, we didn't speak about this and went our merry private ways, assuming the hell out of things.