Nothing so inevitably blackened my heart as an obligatory Sunday at the Shadyside Presbyterian Church: the sight of orphan-girl Liz’s “Jesus” tricked out in gilt; the minister’s Britishy accent; the putative hypocrisy of my parents, who forced me to go, though they did not; the putative hypocrisy of the expensive men and women who did go. I knew enough of the Bible to damn these people to hell, citing chapter and verse. My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves. Every week I had been getting madder; now I was going to plain quit. One of these days, when I figured out how.
After the responsive reading there was a pause, an expectant hush. It was the first Sunday of the month, I remembered, shocked. Today was Communion. I would have to sit through Communion, with its two species, embarrassment and tedium—and I would be late getting out and Father would have to drive around the block a hundred times. I had successfully avoided Communion for years.
From their pews below rose the ushers and elders—everybody’s father and grandfather, from Mellon Bank & Trust et cetera—in tailcoats. They worked the crowd smoothly, as always. When they collected money, I noted, they were especially serene. Collecting money was, after all, what they did during the week; they were used to it. Down each pew an usher thrust a long-handled velvet butterfly net, into the invisible interior of which we each inserted a bare hand to release a crushed, warm dollar bill we’d stored in a white glove’s palm.
Now with dignity the ushers and elders hoisted the round sterling silver trays which bore Communion. A loaded juice tray must have weighed ten pounds. From a cunning array of holes in its top layer hung wee, tapered, lead-crystal glasses. Each held one-half ounce of Welch’s grape juice.
The seated people would pass the grape-juice trays down the pews. After the grape juice came bread: flat silver salvers bore heaps of soft bread cubes, as if for stuffing a turkey. The elders and ushers spread swiftly and silently over the marble aisles in discreet pairs, some for bread cubes, some for grape juice, communicating by eyebrow only. An unseen organist, behind stone screens, played a muted series of single notes, a restless, breathy strain in a minor key, to kill time.
Soon the ushers reached the balcony where we sat. There our prayers had reached their intensest pitch, so fervent were we in our hopes not to drop the grape-juice tray.
I passed up the Welch’s grape juice, I passed up the cubed bread, and sat back against my coat. Was all this not absurd? I glanced at Linda beside me. Apparently it was not. Her hands lay folded in her lap. Both her father and her uncle were elders.
It was not surprising, really, that I alone in this church knew what the barefoot Christ, if there had been such a person, would think about things—grape juice, tailcoats, British vowels, sable stoles. It was not surprising because it was becoming quite usual. After all, I was the intelligentsia around these parts, single-handedly. The intelligentsium. I knew why these people were in church: to display to each other their clothes. These were sophisticated men and women, such as we children were becoming. In church they made business connections; they saw and were seen. The boys, who, like me, were starting to come out for freedom and truth, must be having fits, now that the charade of Communion was in full swing.
I stole a glance at the boys, then looked at them outright, for I had been wrong. The boys, if mine eyes did not deceive me, were praying. Why? The intelligentsia, of course, described itself these days as “agnostic”—a most useful word. Around me, in seeming earnest, the boys prayed their unthinkable private prayers. To whom? It was wrong to watch, but I watched.
On the balcony’s first row, to my right, big Dan had pressed his ruddy cheeks into his palms. Beside him, Jamie bent over his knees. Over one eye he had jammed a fist; his other eye was crinkled shut. Another boy, blond Robert, lay stretched over his arms, which clasped the balcony rail. His shoulders were tight; the back of his jacket rose and fell heavily with his breathing. It had been a long time since I’d been to Communion. When had this praying developed?
Dan lowered his hands and leaned back slowly. He opened his eyes, unfocused to the high, empty air before him. Wild Jamie moved his arm; he picked up a fistful of hair from his forehead and held it. His eyes fretted tightly shut; his jaws worked. Robert’s head still lay low on his outstretched sleeves; it moved once from side to side and back again. So they struggled on. I finally looked away.
Below the balcony, in the crowded nave, men and women were also concentrating, it seemed. Were they perhaps pretending to pray? All heads were bent; no one moved. I began to doubt my own omniscience. If I bowed my head, too, and shut my eyes, would this be apostasy? No, I’d keep watching the people, in case I’d missed some clue that they were actually doing something else—bidding bridge hands.
For I knew these people, didn’t I? I knew their world, which was, in some sense, my world, too, since I could not, outside of books, name another. I knew what they loved: their families, their houses, their country clubs, hard work, the people they knew best, and summer parties with old friends full of laughter. I knew what they hated: labor unions, laziness, spending, wildness, loudness. They didn’t buy God. They didn’t buy anything if they could help it. And they didn’t work on spec.
Nevertheless, a young father below me propped his bowed head on two fists stacked on a raised knee. The ushers and their trays had vanished. The people had taken Communion. No one moved. The organist hushed. All the men’s heads were bent—black, white, red, yellow, and brown. The men sat absolutely still. Almost all the women’s heads were bent down, too, and some few tilted back. Some hats wagged faintly from side to side. All the people seemed scarcely to breathe.
I was alert enough now to feel, despite myself, some faint, thin stream of spirit braiding forward from the pews. Its flawed and fragile rivulets pooled far beyond me at the altar. I felt, or saw, its frail strands rise to the wide tower ceiling, and mass in the gold mosaic’s dome.
The gold tesserae scattered some spirit like light back over the cavernous room, and held some of it, like light, in its deep curve. Christ drifted among floating sandstone ledges and deep, absorbent skies. There was no speech nor language. The people had been praying, praying to God, just as they seemed to be praying. That was the fact. I didn’t know what to make of it.
I left Pittsburgh before I had a grain of sense. Who IS my neighbor? I never learned what the strangers around me had known and felt in their lives—those lithe, sarcastic boys in the balcony, those expensive men and women in the pews below—but it was more than I knew, after all.
YEARS BEFORE THIS, on long-ago summer Sundays, before Father went down the Ohio and ended up selling his boat, he used to take me out with him on the water. It was a long drive to the Allegheny River; it was a long wait, collecting insects in the grass among the pebbles on shore, till Father got the old twenty-four-foot cabin cruiser ready to go. But the Allegheny River, once we got out on it, was grand. Its distant shores were mostly wooded on both sides; coal barges, sand barges, and shallow-draft oil tankers floated tied up at a scattering of docks. Father wore tennis shoes on his long feet, and a sun-bleached cotton captain-style hat. He always squinted outside, hat or no hat, because his eyes were such a pale blue; the sun got in them. He was so tall he had to lean under the housetop to man the wheel.
We stopped at islands and swam. There were wooded islands in the river—like Smoky Island at Pittsburgh’s point, where Indians had tortured their English and Scotch-Irish captives by night. The Indians had tied the soldiers and settlers to trees, heaped hot coals on their feet, and let their small boys practice archery on them. Indian women heated rifle barrels and ramrods over fires till they glowed, then drove them through prisoners’ nostrils or ears. The screams of the tortured settlers on Smoky Island reached French soldiers at Fort Duquesne, who had handed them over to the Indians reluctantly, they said. “Humanity groans at being forced to use such monsters.”
Father and I tied up at Nine-Mile Island, upstream from Smoky Island, and I j
umped from a high rope-swing into the water, after poor Father told me all about those boaters’ children who’d been killed or maimed dropping from this very swing. He could not bear to watch; he shut his eyes. From the tree branch at the top of the ladder I jumped onto the swing; when I let go over the water, momentum shot me forward like a slung stone. I swam up to find the water’s surface again, and called to Father onshore, “It’s okay now.”
Our boat carved through the glossy water. Pittsburgh’s summer skies are pale, as they are in many river valleys. The blinding haze spread overhead and glittered up from the river. It was the biggest sky in town.
We rode up in the locks and down in the locks. The locks scared me, for the huge doors that locked out the river leaked, and loud tons of water squirted in, and we sat helpless below the river with nothing to do but wait for the doors to give way. Enormous whirlpools dragged at the boat; we held on to the lock walls, clawed, with a single hand line and a boat hook. Once I dropped the boat hook, a new one with a teak handle, and the whirlpools sucked it down. To where? Where did the whirlpools put the water they took, and where would they put you, all ground up, if you fell in?
Oh, the river was grand. Outside the lock and back on the go, I sang wild songs at the top of my voice out over the roaring boat’s stern. We raced under old steel bridges set on stone pilings in the river. How do people build bridges? How did anyone set those pilings, pile those stones, under the water?
Whenever I was on the river, I seemed to be visiting a fascinating place I had forgotten all about, where physical causes had physical effects, and great things got done, slowly, heavily, because people understood materials and forces.
Father on these boat outings answered my questions at length. He explained that people built coffer dams to set bridge pilings in a river. They lowered a kind of big pipe, or tight set of walls, to the bottom, and pumped all the water out of it; then the men could work there. I imagined the men piling and mortaring stones, with the unhurried ease of stone masons; they stood on gasping catfish and stinky silt. They were working under the river, at the bottom of a well of air. Just a few inches away, outside their coffer dam, a complete river of water was sliding downhill from western New York to the Gulf of Mexico. Above the workers’ heads, boats and barges went by, their engines probably buzzing the cofferdam walls. What a life. Father said that some drowned in accidents, or got crushed; it was dangerous work. He said, answering my question, that these workers made less money than the men I knew, men I privately considered wholly unskilled. The bridge pilings obsessed me; I thought and thought about the brave men who built them in the rivers. I tried to imagine their families, their lunches, their boots. I tried to imagine what it would feel like to accomplish something so useful as building a bridge. What a queer world was the river, where I admired everything and knew nothing.
Father explained how to make glass from sand. He explained, over and over, because I was usually too frightened to hear right, how the river locks worked; they ran our boat up or down beside the terrible dams. The concrete navigation dams made slick spillways like waterfalls across the river. From upstream it was hard to see the drop’s smooth line. Drunks forgot about the dams from time to time, and drove their boats straight over, killing themselves and everyone else on board. How did the drunks feel, while they were up loose in the air at the wheels of their boats for a split second, when they remembered all of a sudden the dam? “Oh yes, the dam.” It seemed like a familiar feeling.
On the back of a chart—a real nautical chart, with shoals and soundings, just as in Life on the Mississippi—Father drew a diagram of a water system. The diagram made clear something I’d always wondered about: how water got up to the top floors of houses. The water tower was higher than the highest sinks, that was all; through all those labyrinthine pipes, the water sought its own level, seeming to climb up, but really still trickling down. He explained how steam engines worked, and suspension bridges, and pumps.
Father explained so much technology to me that for a long time I confused it with American culture. If pressed, I would have claimed that an American invented the irrigation ditch. Certainly the coffer dam was American, I thought, and the water tower, the highway tunnel—these engineering feats—and everything motorized, and everything electrical, and in short, everything I saw about me newer than fishnets, sailboats, and spoons.
Technology depended on waterworks. The land of the forty-eight states was an extended and mighty system of controlled slopes, a combination Grand Coulee Dam and Niagara Falls. The water fell and the turbines spun and the lights came on, so steel mills could run all night. Then the steel made cars, millions of cars, and workers bought the cars, because Henry Ford in 1910 had come up with the idea of paying them enough to buy things. So the water rolled down the continent—just plain fell—and everyone got rich.
Now, years later, Father had picked Amy and me up after church. When we got out of the car in the garage, we could hear Dixieland, all rambling brasses and drums, coming from the house. We hightailed it inside through the snow on the back walk and kicked off our icy dress shoes. I was in stockings. I could eat something, and go to my room. I had my own room now, and when I was home I stayed there and read or sulked.
While we were making sandwiches, though, Father started explaining the world to us once again. I stuck around. There in the kitchen, Father embarked upon an explanation of American economics. I don’t know what prompted it. His voice took on urgency; he paced. Money worked like water, he said.
We were all listening, even little Molly. Molly, at four, had an open expression, smooth and quick, and fine blond hair; she was eating on the hoof, like the rest of us, and looking up, a pale face at thigh level, following the conversation. Mother futzed around the kitchen in camel-colored wool slacks; she rarely ate.
Did we know how water got up to our attic bathroom? Money worked the same way, he said, worked the way locks on the river worked, worked the way water flowed down from high water towers into our attic bathroom, the way the Allegheny and the Monongahela flowed into the Ohio, and the Ohio flowed into the Mississippi and out into the Gulf of Mexico at New Orleans. The money, once you got enough of it high enough, would flow by gravitation, all over everybody.
“It doesn’t work that way,” our mother said. She offered Molly tidbits: a drumstick, a beet slice, cheese. “Remember those shacks we see in Georgia? Those barefoot little children who have to quit school to work in the fields, their poor mothers not able to feed them enough”—we could all hear in her voice that she was beginning to cry—“not even able to keep them dressed?” Molly was looking at her, wide-eyed; she was bent over looking at Molly, wide-eyed.
“They shouldn’t have so many kids,” Father said. “They must be crazy.”
The trouble was, I no longer believed him. It was beginning to strike me that Father, who knew the real world so well, got some of it wrong. Not much; just some.
Part Three
PITTSBURGH WASN’T REALLY ANDREW CARNEGIE’S TOWN. We just thought it was. Steel wasn’t the only major industry in Pittsburgh. We just had to think to recall the others.
Andrew Carnegie started out in Pittsburgh as a tiny bobbin boy, and ended up a tiny millionaire; he was only five feet three. When he was twenty-four, having scrambled, he became superintendent of the Western Division of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Whenever wrecks blocked the railroad tracks, Carnegie showed up to supervise. He hopped around the wrecked freight cars; he ordered the big workmen to lay tracks around the wrecks or even, quick, to burn the wrecks to save the schedule. He liked to tell about one such night, when an enormous, unknowing Irish workman picked him straight up off the ground and set him aside like a gate, booming at him, “Get out of the way, you brat of a boy. You’re eternally in the way of the men who are trying to do their job.”
The Carnegies emigrated from Scotland when Andrew was thirteen. A bookish family of Lowland Scots radicals, they championed universal suffrage, and hated privilege and
hereditary wealth. “As a child,” he recalled, “I could have slain king, duke, or lord, and considered their death a service to the state.” When later Edward VII offered him a title, he refused it.
The then fashionable suburb of Homewood, where young Carnegie moved with his mother in 1859, was part of an old estate. The center of life there was the estate house of eighty-year-old Judge William Wilkins and his wife, Mathilda. Wilkins had served in government under three Presidents and returned to Pittsburgh; Mathilda Wilkins was from a prominent family whose members had served in two cabinets. The Civil War was then heating up, and the talk one social evening was of Negroes. Young Carnegie was among the guests. Mrs. Wilkins complained of Negroes’ “forwardness.” It was disgraceful, she said: Negroes admitted to West Point.
“Oh, Mrs. Wilkins,” Carnegie piped up. He was then only in his twenties, but a man of convictions, which he didn’t shed when he visited the great house. “There is something even worse than that. I understand that some of them have been admitted to heaven!”
“There was a silence that could be felt,” Carnegie recalled. “Then dear Mrs. Wilkins said gravely:
“‘That is a different matter, Mr. Carnegie.’”
Carnegie started making steel. He wrote four books. He preached what he called, American style, the Gospel of Wealth. A man of wealth should give it away for the public good, and not weaken his sons with it. “The man who dies rich, dies disgraced.”
In 1901, when he was sixty-six, Carnegie sold the Carnegie Company to J. P. Morgan, for $480 million. His share came to $250 million. Carnegie added this sum to his considerable other wealth—he had to build a special steel room in Hoboken, New Jersey, to house the bulky paper bonds, pesky things—and set about giving it away. He managed to get rid of $350 million of it before he died, in 1919, leaving for himself while he lived, and his family when he died, very much less than a tithe.
An American Childhood Page 19