“That’s what I try to tell Ed,” Margaret said, “but.” She shrugged, and pointed up toward the house.
I knew Ed and Pat were up there plotting and planning. Thompson had been wounded. There was blood in the water. The aldermen that had been supporting him were looking for another leader.
That night at dinner I was surprised to hear Pat explaining how city politics were really an ancient Irish invention.
“While European countries were allowing themselves to be ruled by a king, the clans in Ireland were governing themselves. Each chieftain had to depend on the loyalty of the men under him. They weren’t like the English or the French or those other kings who inherited their positions, and told the people that God had set them up for the job.”
“The divine right of kings,” I said.
“Right. Those fellows said all the land belonged to them and people paid them taxes for the privilege of living in their kingdom. And they had to serve the king. Slaves really. But it was different with the Irish. The clan owned the land in common, and the chieftain was elected. When one chieftain died all the male members of his family gathered, and that was quite a few, because everyone was related to everyone else, and no one was concerned if some of the fellows had been born outside of his official marriage, or marriages.
“I’d say there was a bit of politicking during the process, and jobs were promised. When the chieftain got into office, he had to take care of those who put him there, so he passed out what we call patronage, and every family got their share because somebody belonging to them was on the inside. I’m not saying the chieftain didn’t skim off a bit for himself, but,” Pat said, “the ancient Irish weren’t that bothered about material possessions. In fact, some monk that came over with the Normans condemned the whole place because he couldn’t understand why the Irish wasted time on parties, when they could be making money.”
“Some things don’t change,” I said.
The next morning, Ed told me that he and Pat had decided on the chieftain they were going to support. The best way to get the Irish to work together was to unite behind someone who hadn’t been involved in previous battles. Anton Cermak was a tough, smart politician who’d managed to get the support of the Poles, Lithuanians, Germans. He had a ready-made coalition for the Irish to step into.
“There will be an Irish mayor of Chicago one day. Just not right now,” Ed said.
Good, I thought that next morning. Ed and Pat have stopped trying to manage Thompson. They’re ready to take him on. I was on the pier taking the mail from the driver of the Chris-Craft who delivered the mail on this great chain of lakes by boat. A thick packet for Ed. I found him sitting under the pine tree sipping his coffee.
He opened the envelope, took out some papers. “Oh hell,” he said. “Wilcox again. The two latest editions.”
The reverend himself had sent them to Ed at the lake, letting us know he was aware of the location of Ed’s summer retreat.
Ed handed one copy to me. I wondered what it cost Wilcox to publish Thunderin Every Little While. At least a dozen pages with plenty of pictures. Expensive to print the thousands and thousands of copies he distributed to downtown newsstands where a regular parade of office boys from city hall bought the latest issue.
This one seemed to be about the rise of Moe Annenberg from a quick-with-his-fists newsie to a head of circulation for both the Trib and the Hearst papers. According to Wilcox, Moe was a gun-toting gangster who strong-armed the newspapers onto the streets and made enough first to buy papers himself, then start both the Racing Form and a wire service that sent results from tracks all over the country to illegal horse parlors.
A gambler pure and simple, Wilcox said. He referred to Annenberg as the “Israelite” in the same way he called Ed and the other Irish fellows “Papists.”
Now I heard Ed laugh. “Listen to this, Nonie,” Ed said and started reading from the paper. “Jack O’Brien, head of the janitors’ union, has stopped giving positions to his cousins. Did he run out of jobs? No, he ran out of cousins.”
I smiled but then I saw Ed turn the page, read for a minute, then slap the paper down.
“What? What?” I asked.
“Wilcox is quoting,” Ed said, and began reading. “The great writer Victor Hugo said ‘The history of men is reflected in the history of the sewer. The sewer is the conscience of the city. The social observer must enter these shadows for they form part of his laboratory.’”
“So what?” I said. “Did I ever tell you I lived next door to Victor Hugo’s house on the Place de Vosges? It’s a museum now and…” But Ed wasn’t listening to me.
“This next bit is all about me,” he said. “Supposedly I’ve used the sewers to betray the people of Chicago. I conspired with Pat Nash to gouge the taxpayers for every foot of sewer pipe laid. He said that I was appointed chief engineer of the Sanitary District by a corrupt system so my cronies and I could rob the taxpayers. Jesus, Nonie, he’s got a list of every business we’ve ever given a contract to. This is awful,” he said.
Ed set the paper down.
I picked it up. “Dear God,” I said. “Look what he’s advertising for the next issue. ‘Ed Kelly’s Incompetent Cousin and Her Immoral Past.’ What are we going to do, Ed?”
“I can’t do anything. Pat says we just have to ignore him. Can’t give his ravings any attention.”
Both of them afraid. Geeze Louise! “Maybe you can’t do anything, but I will.”
The next morning I was on the train back to Chicago.
* * *
“Because you are evil, Miss Kelly.” Wilcox’s voice was flat and even, with a little bit of downstate Illinois in his accent. “An abomination and so is your cousin. Why is it that you people have so many relations? The higher races seem to be declining, while you foreigners multiply like rabbits. Sad really.” He shook his head. A man bearing his burden with patience and understanding.
I sat in the dining room of his bungalow on the Northwest Side, a neighborhood of neat brick houses lined up together on a grid of streets with a small town feel. The large round table was covered with papers piled up in leaning towers, while the seats of the eight chairs held stacks of newspapers. The floor was a maze made up of walls of fat manila folders.
Wilcox had been startled when I arrived at his door. “How dare you come here?” he said. “How did you find me?”
“Your address is on Thunderin,” I said. Was he wearing the same suit he’d had on at the funeral? Couldn’t close one jacket over that stomach. A blob, alright.
He waved me in through a normal-enough-looking living room into his hive of accusation and innuendo. He cleared a chair and, after I sat down, began to explain in that oddly expressionless voice why Ed was the Devil’s tool and I was one of Satan’s helpers. “Your photographs distort the truth, Miss Kelly,” Wilcox said, in that eerily earnest way.
“What? I take pictures of new construction but also track meets and basketball games and folk dancers…”
“Yes. Propaganda that lures the unsuspecting masses into these dens of iniquity, where they are brainwashed into supporting corrupt politicians.”
“For heaven’s sake, Mr. Wilcox, people play checkers, put on plays in the fieldhouses, and have cooking classes.”
“All the while being told that Ed Kelly and his Democratic cronies have given them this opportunity. But the Lord has intervened. He has sent William Hale Thompson to stamp out the vintage where the grapes of wrath were stored.”
And now Wilcox laughed. A high-pitched kind of cackle.
“Then why don’t you leave us alone? Give Ed a break. After all, Buckingham Fountain, the aquarium, the planetarium … Big Bill Thompson takes credit for them all now. It’s just crazy to keep going after Ed and me. I’m not important.”
“Oh, you’re not the first to impugn my sanity. All crusaders are considered unbalanced. But I’m being led, Miss Kelly. Led by a light beyond my understanding. Sometimes even I, myself, don’t know where my inspiratio
n comes from.” He gestured at the newspapers. “A hint. A few words on a page can open a Pandora’s Box of vile corruption. I will show how Mayor Thompson was able to rescue these projects from the clutches of corrupt men, who intended them to be simply get-rich-quick schemes for Kelly and his cronies.”
“Well, maybe the companies that did the building made some money, but what’s wrong with that? I don’t see you going after George Pullman for his profits.”
“Pullman produces something tangible. You people don’t. It’s your fanciful nature. Never contributing anything solid to the world. Song and dance men the whole lot of you.”
“You mean the Irish?”
“Of course. You’re the most dangerous of all the mongrel groups invading our country because you can learn to walk and talk like your betters. At least the other inferior races can be identified.”
And now Wilcox leaned over the table toward me.
“Darkness, Miss Kelly. They are marked with darkness. The black skin of the Negro is the most evident. But look into the eyes of the Jew, the Italian, the Mexican, the Eastern European; nature gives us markers. But you Irish managed to inbreed with your Nordic masters, and so deceive the observer.”
What was this man going on about? And go on he did.
“Science, Miss Kelly, science. All explained by Madison Grant. Here.”
He handed me a brown book with a title in gold letters, The Passing of the Great Race. I turned the pages as he talked. Maps with arrows, and page-long paragraphs.
“My family, Wilcox, is Nordic, as were the colonial settlers of America. We carry the genes of the race that produced the knights of chivalry, those designed by the Lord God to rule the lesser races. But that mandate has broken down because you people, the Alpines and the Mediterraneans, have come together producing the Capones, the Nittis, the Torrios.”
“Come on, Mr. Wilcox, don’t you think it was Prohibition that produced the bootleggers? Everybody went for a piece of the pie.”
“If Prohibition had been applied correctly we would not be facing the disaster we are. The Nordic races have been committing race suicide. We must make ourselves pure. Stop letting the mongrels poison us with their liquor and music. Young people of fine families are lured into speakeasies, where jungle music and alcohol addles their brains, leading to,” he lowered his voice, “race mixing, Miss Kelly. Race mixing. But thanks to Madison Grant, steps have been taken. Those of our rulers who still have clear Nordic reasoning have outlawed immigration from the inferior countries. Perhaps,” he said, “Providence will take a hand, as it did in Ireland. If only God’s work had been allowed to go forward, my task would have been so much easier, because you, and your kind, would not exist. The Lord God smote the land and punished the idolaters, but in those days America was too naive to understand the consequences of opening her doors. If only, if only…”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Are you talking about the potato blight? The Great Starvation?”
“I’m referring to how the laws of nature right the balance when an inferior race outbreeds its master. Read this,” and he pushed a pamphlet toward me. “The addendum to The Passing of the Great Race explains that famine is a tool of science.”
“Famine,” I said. “Famine’s not even the right word. There was plenty of food in Ireland, raised by the people who were starving, but it was taken by the landlords for rent and…” but Wilcox was holding up his hand.
“Nature finds ways to cull the herd, Miss Kelly. The mistake was that man interfered with Her work.”
“Interfere? The British government allowed a million people to starve to death.”
“Exactly. Only a million. Not nearly enough. And then poor America, with our misguided sentimentality, stopped Nature’s work by offering refuge to those who should have died where they were.”
And he smiled at me. Oh God, I thought, where do I start?
“The Irish built this city. This country. Fought for America in every war, and these new immigrants will do the same.” And now he actually patted my arm.
“We will stop you.” He pushed a chart over to me. There were four drawings. The first showed an ape. In the second the ape features became those of an Irish man, with a clay pipe and a caipín.
“Oh please,” I said. “This is ridiculous.”
“This illustration was done by a prominent professor of eugenics, Miss Kelly. So dress yourselves up as you will, I will expose you. ‘By their fruits you will know them.’ The wolves in sheep’s clothing, be they top hats or fur coats, will be stripped bare.”
He pounded a fist on the table.
“I plan an entire issue of Thunderin around this.” He tossed a photo of Tim McShane himself onto the table. And then a shot of me in my trouser suit, taking a photograph.
“It will be quite an issue, Miss Kelly. Thunderin indeed. I wouldn’t ordinarily be concerned with someone like you, though you are being paid to do a ridiculous job. In fact I told the young man that. But he persuaded me that your past needed to be exposed.”
I stood up, looked down at Wilcox, close enough to smell the starch in his shirt. This fellow comes to work in his dining room, I thought, but still dresses every morning in the same suit and tie, with a boiled collar that cut into his flabby neck. A nut, Ed had said, but a dangerous nut.
“What young man?” I asked him.
“One of my many citizen reporters. I always put a few lines in Thunderin inviting anyone with information to get in touch with me, and offer to reward their diligence.”
“You pay people for tips? But anyone could say anything.”
“Oh, I check my sources carefully, and confirm their reports with records and documents. I’m aware that disgruntled relatives may have vindictive motives, but that doesn’t mean that what they say isn’t true.” He took a paper from the open file. “For example, I have your name on a passenger list on a boat docking at Le Havre in January, 1912.”
“So what?”
“Well, that tallies with this young man’s story that you fled Chicago because of an illicit relationship with Mr. McShane.”
“You can’t know that,” I said.
“I can’t, but your nephew Mr. Kelly can. He brought me a letter from his mother, who was an eyewitness to your disgrace.”
Oh no, Henrietta! And the young man must be … “Toots,” I said. “Toots Kelly informing on me, but Mr. Wilcox, my nephew is unbalanced. He’d say anything for money.”
Wilcox scrabbled through more papers. “Do you deny that you took up residence in Paris and supported yourself by dubious means for nearly ten years?”
“Dubious? Nothing dubious about it, Mr. Wilcox. I worked with a great couturier.…”
“Oh, yes, I have a note on that. Here it is—Madame Simone, who illegally copied designer fashions for the tourist market. A crime that’s taken very seriously in France. And you were her accomplice.”
“But Toots couldn’t know that.”
“According to this letter his mother does.”
I thought of the times Henrietta had quizzed me about my fancy clothes, accused me of spending fortunes, and how I’d told her about Madame Simone’s business, and my job scouting new designs for her by going to fashion shows in the great houses. Damn.
“But your readers couldn’t possibly care about such frivolous things,” I said. I started pacing now, weaving around the paper towers.
“They care about the men who served our country in the Great War, and then were subjected to inferior medical treatment at the hands of untrained women like you and Margaret Kelly who probably did more harm than good,” he said.
I stopped pacing. “Now that is crazy. I worked as a nurse’s aide and did a good job. Our hospital served thousands of soldiers.”
“Oh, please, Miss Kelly, the low morals of the so-called nurses in France are well known. What respectable woman would volunteer to handle the lower extremities of strange men?”
“These were soldiers wounded in battle. Mrs. Vanderbilt
ran the hospital, for heaven’s sake.”
“A divorced and remarried woman, rejected by society.” As Wilcox went on about the loose morals of nurses in general, and those in France particularly, I remembered all those awful songs implying that we “Red Cross Girls” were no better than we should be. Why is it that whenever women step up they get slapped down?
I remembered Henrietta’s questions, her curiosity and disgust. What had I said to her? Probably something smart about how I’d been a regular Mademoiselle from Armentières. Why is it that I’m compelled to shock Henrietta?
And, of course, Margaret had worked beside me in the hospital, so anything Wilcox said about me could be applied to her. I thought of those brutal days and nights. The lack of sleep, the heartbreak when a soldier would die, or, even worse, we’d heal a fellow only to see him sent back to the front to be killed.
My mind started throwing up jagged bits of memory—young Johnny who’d left our ward for Gallipoli, and those Canadian soldiers being led from ambulances, their eyes bandaged because they had been blinded by mustard gas. And Margaret in the midst of the chaos, cool, competent, and caring. And now this bastard dares to turn our service against us? He held up another sheet of paper. “And on your return you took up again with the same gangster who was suspected in the murder of his own wife.”
“I did not.”
“Even inviting him to a family wake.”
“That’s not true.”
“Really? And isn’t it a fact that this criminal, this McShane, was murdered only yards from the funeral home, with you yourself present.”
“I-I…” What could I say?
He smiled now. “I plan to devote an entire issue of Thunderin to you.”
Irish Above All Page 15