by Peter Orner
Miriam was grateful to Hollis for providing them with a new perspective. “It’s important,” she said, “that these boys from the suburbs see the South Side.” Now Popper wonders if Hollis was grateful, too, that he had an excuse to go to Comiskey. Of course, he was working. He had to take a couple of nine-year-olds on a field trip. He was working. And he must have known that his and Manny’s excitement over Orta’s home run was a sham, that for them it was all about the exposed flesh. Even so, for Hollis the night seemed not to go slow enough.
LOCAL NAZIS
Miriam said that although she personally supported the efforts of the American Civil Liberties Union to protect free speech, you boys are, of course, free to draw your own conclusions. These particular Nazis were a Chicago-born band of undergrown twenty-year-olds. They heard some Jews lived in Skokie. So they applied for a permit to march. First the court said yes. Another court said no. A third court said yes. It was very confusing. On the appointed day, the Nazis were late. As they waited with the rest of the crowd, Miriam extolled the virtues of civic democracy. Look at this turnout! It’s the First Amendment in action. Cops in riot gear lined Touhy Avenue as the Skokie elderlies shouted and waved the hard Polish sausages they’d brought to plunk on the heads of the little pimpled Hitlers. Not that anyone got a glimpse of them over the heads of the shields and helmets. Nobody could even hear them saying, “Heil Hitler,” they were saying it so quietly. An old man shouted, “Speak up! I can’t hear anything. Florence, can you hear what they’re saying?”
Another woman screeched, “Manslaughter them. I’ll do it with my own hands. I’ll manslaughter each and every one of them.”
“Now there’s a new verb,” Miriam said. “You don’t hear verbs like that every day.”
“Let’s go throw rocks at their heads,” Popper said.
“Honey, these poor misguided loons wouldn’t know a Jew from Jehovah. Have some more grapes.”
“But they’d know me,” Manny said.
“That’s true, Manny, they would,” Miriam said. “But here’s my thought. Everybody’s worst nightmare is to be ignored. Try it sometime, boys. Ignore somebody. You’ll drive them bananas. I say, Let the loons lark. I’m not saying this works every time or in every circumstance.”
EARLY FROST
The Des Plaines River flooded the golf course at Migweth Country Club, and then there was an early frost and the whole place was like the hugest skating rink ever created, acres and acres of ice, except that if you wore skates you’d cut through it too easily. So they bandaged their socks with garbage bags and slid across eighteen holes. All the time screaming their heads off to the trees: No blacks, no Jews, Mexicans work in the kitchen! The frozen green goose shit they threw at each other like bullets. The clubhouse, a mock castle with turrets and battlements rising in the distance. Someday, Manny said, we’ll storm that dumbass fortress.
THE MAYOR
They have vilified me, they have crucified me, yes, they have even criticized me.
—Richard J. Daley, 48th mayor of Chicago
It turned out he was mortal.
In December of 1976, Philip came home and bowed his head at dinner and said, “There will be no other mayor like the mayor.” He paused, looked around the table in case anybody had a challenge to that. Popper started to eat. They were having chicken and corn on the cob from the Kentucky Fried Chicken that is no longer on Central Avenue across from Jewel. Popper always ate the chicken after the corn. He took his buttered bread in one hand and his corn cob in the other and rolled the cob around in the butter. Buttered bread is always better than the corn and the corn is always better than the chicken. Nobody else was eating. That big striped bucket plump in the middle of the table.
“Daley’s been dead since he ordered the cops to shoot to kill looters in ’68,” Leo said. Popper kept mowing his corn, being sadly finished now with the buttered bread.
“Looters?” Philip said. “You want to tell me about looters? Tonight?”
“Humpty Dumpty,” Leo said. “A boss, a dictator.”
“I remember that night,” Miriam said. “I watched it from the window.”
“Look at your food, Leo,” Philip said. “This chicken, Mayor Daley raised it. He fried it up. That piece of corn. Mayor Daley grew it. The bread, he milled it. He brewed this beer. Your shoes—look at your shoes. The mayor cobbled them. Everything we have—What, Miriam, you’ve stopped cooking?”
“And all the king’s horses,” Leo said.
“What about the Colonel?” Popper said.
“The whole city was dark,” Miriam said. “But there was this pulsing glow, like the sun was rising at the wrong time of day—”
7
FIE, FIE, FIE! PAH, PAH!
WUNDERKINDS
Chicago, 1977
The Rosencrantz kids were gifted. They played flute, cello, harpsichord, electric guitar. At meals one of them was liable to break into an aria.
“Wildly gifted,” Martha Rosencrantz would say. “I honestly don’t know where they come by it. Hal and I are only just above average intelligence ourselves.”
And gifted, Leo and Alexander were given to understand, is a far cry from clever. Leo was clever. Eli, Leah, and Jacob Rosencrantz had left clever in the dust as soon as they’d learned to walk, which was four to six months earlier than average children.
In the basement of their Lincoln Park townhouse they painted elaborate Diego Rivera–style murals, putting their own faces on the bodies of peasant beasts of burden to show their solidarity with the poor.
Hal Rosencrantz was a partner in a venerated white-shoe law firm. He and Philip had done some business together. One day Hal said, “Phil, why not bring the wife and kids into the city next Saturday?”
And so it began. The Saturday trips to the Rosencrantzes’ townhouse on Cleveland Avenue in Lincoln Park.
The Rosencrantz kids only mingled with the Poppers because their parents had decreed it. Yet the arrival of these country cousins from the suburbs was an opportunity for the Rosencrantz kids to demonstrate their latest expressions of genius. Walking along the dark upstairs corridor of the townhouse was like being swallowed down a long throat. To see: a hand-written draft of Eli’s second novel. Or his 3-D model, built to scale, of Jupiter and its sixty-one moons.
Another time, Leah explained, in detail, the eating habits of her tropical fish.
This one eats this one and that one eats that one—and her—see her? The one with the beard?—she eats them all.”
As they stared into that green gloom, Jacob, the kinder one, the only Rosencrantz incapable of looking down on anybody, including Poppers, waltzed into Leah’s room on his hands and proceeded to conduct a ventriloquized conversation between his feet.
Ah, Sir Barnaby! What a surprise, I didn’t expect to see you on that leg!
Simon, old boy, the shoe must be on the other foot today! I can’t think of any other plausible explanation.
Ah, I see the young Poppers have arrived! How fortuitous! I was just beginning to think I’d be marooned—stuck in the mire if you will—with La Famiglia Rosencrantzia for the rest of my days.
Books! They didn’t merely have books on their bookshelves. The Rosencrantzes didn’t merely read books. The Rosencrantz townhouse itself was built of books, open books, scattered books, living books. To a Rosencrantz, a shelved book was a defunct book was a dead book. A book was something that you ought to be in the middle of, so as to be able to say, such as when the situation arose after Popper puked on the floor of Eli’s bedroom, “How ironic, just yesterday I was reading The Anatomy of Melancholy and there’s that part where Burton talks about the spleen being a greater indication of character than the brain…”
“Wait,” Leo said. “What’s a spleen?”
“Don’t you even go to school?” Eli said.
“Anyway, Burton is wrong,” Leah said. “If character is fate, the spleen is only incidental.”
There was always a book tented on the banister, halfw
ay up. Cervantes was in the upstairs bathroom for longer stays; Emily Dickinson in the powder room for quicker ones. Not only were there no televisions at the Rosencrantzes’, they were constantly reminding you that there were no televisions at the Rosencrantzes’. The rectangle of imbecility, Eli once intoned, quoting a family friend, is a vast wasteland.
“I’ll bet you have a TV in every room in Highland Park,” Leah said.
“One in the kitchen,” Popper said, “another in the basement, one upstairs, one in our mom and dad’s—”
“See?” Leah said. “See? That’s civilization? That’s progress?”
If it all sounds like hell on earth, it must be said that it was and it wasn’t. Saturdays at the Rosencrantzes’ had a way of transforming the Poppers. It all seems so ridiculous now, but then it was serious, deadly serious. Saturday was the day the Poppers would come together to shore up what was left.
CLASS
The Rosencrantzes were classier than the Poppers. At least the Poppers thought so. The Rosencrantzes were more educated, more cultured, more sophisticated conversationally. It wasn’t about money. This may be because class is so often defined not by those who have it but by the people who are worried sick they don’t. How can you buy it if the whole point is you can’t buy it?
The Rosencrantzes had deep Chicago roots. They were part of the migration of German Jews who’d come to the city before the Civil War. A Rosencrantz was a captain in the 83rd Illinois Infantry and fell at Chancellorsville. Hal’s father was once a law partner of Abraham Lincoln’s son, Robert. Family lore even had it that one brave member of the illustrious family perished battling the Great Chicago Fire while the Rosencrantz survivors stood ready, alongside legendary men like Potter Palmer, to re-raise greatness out of the ashes. I will rebuild my buildings at once, Palmer shouted. Put on an extra force, and hurry up the hotel!
Philip and Miriam Popper, on the other hand, considered themselves Russian Jews, although they were descended from Polish/Hungarian Jews on Philip’s side and Lithuanian/Polish Jews on Miriam’s. Only a generation or two out of the shtetl, they were the grandchildren of bookbinders, junkmen, small-time salesmen, decendants of the great hoards of Eastern European Jews who settled in Chicago in the twenties and thirties. Give us your poor, your dirty, your needy, the German Jews said, and we will help them (with a vast array of charity programs), and also we will condescend to them. For years and years, we will condescend to them.
By the 1970s the distinction was hardly noticed, and this is trod ground. Hardly noticed but noticed. A sense of superiority dies hard, a sense of inferiority even harder. So the residue of the distinction remained, if unspoken.
Yet worse than what their grandfathers may or may not have done for a living was the fact that Philip and Miriam Popper had moved to the suburbs. The first chance they could, they up and moved north while people like the Rosencrantzes had, gallantly, in spite of everything—the crime, the terrible public schools, the black people (shhhhhhh)—chosen to remain steadfast in their city. Now that’s class. So part of the motivation for these new Saturday trips was the fact that Philip and Miriam were seeking a kind of penance for having abandoned the city. Of Highland Park, Philip would say something like, “Talk about Dullsville. We keep waiting for something to happen, anything, and nothing ever does…”
And Miriam: “Yet just the other day, Judy Dombrowski got her purse snatched in Hubbard Woods. Hubbard Woods! And everybody goes on about how there’s no crime on the North Shore.”
Once, on the way home from the Rosencrantzes’, Leo asked, “So why don’t we move back if you guys hate Highland Park so much?”
“Oh, honey,” Miriam said. “We’re just making conversation.”
March 13, 1945
You know I’ve been thinking—There really are only two great emotions out here—fear and loneliness—Fear of course is always present, although after a while you learn to shrug it off or rationalize it—except occasionally when it grips you in spite of everything you can do—then you sweat—but for most of us, our fear is in anticipation—although the other day when one of those bastards came over us so low we could have touched him—we didn’t have a chance to be afraid—It happened too quickly—He was over and gone—But loneliness—that’s with us constantly—day and night—and, oh, you can’t know how it hurts—
THE MUSIC OF THE LANGUAGE
Her small face hidden behind giant sunglasses, Miriam liked to watch people watch her, because she was never sure she was as beautiful as people were always falling all over themselves insisting. An unlit cigarette between her fingers, red-tipped from her lipstick. Philip, hearty, ruddy-faced, windblown even when he was inside. And the two boys in their scratchy gray wool shorts and clip-on ties. They always had to dress up when they went into the city. Weren’t they little wild-haired clones of their jaunty father?
Each of the Rosencrantzes had a large, impressive head mounted on a less significant body. Hence, to the Poppers, they were walking talking human embodiments of the life of the mind. Physically, Hal Rosencrantz was the least assuming of them all. He had the big head, yes, but also extremely narrow eyes and appropriately tiny glasses. He seemed to be going bald only on one side of his head. Miriam once said on the way home that Hal was poetic-looking. Philip asked what she meant by that, and Miriam couldn’t explain, except to say that Hal looked like a person who might write poems.
“Hal’s a partner at Abramson and Smoot, Miriam. A senior partner. He represents General Electric and the Continental Bank.”
Martha was stockier than her husband and had a heavier face. Leo said she looked like Henry Kissinger.
“Try to have a little sense of decency, Leo,” Miriam said. “Just try. If for nothing at all, then for me.”
Long after Saturdays at the Rosencrantzes ended, Popper would think of Martha’s hugs, how when they arrived at the door she would mash him and Leo together and coo, Oh, my minikins. Oh, my lambs.
Jacob and Leah took after their father, though Leah had much bigger eyes and more hair. Jacob wore huge Coke-bottle glasses that were always falling off his face. He also had a set of braces that gleamed in his mouth when he smiled, like a miniature power station. Eli looked like his mother, only more pompous in the eyes.
So it’s possible that, in spite of their intellectual superiority, there may have been times, fleeting moments, when the Rosencrantzes envied the Poppers. Their healthy suburban glow, their simple familial bonds. Because there was always turmoil in the townhouse. Eli was jealous of Jacob. He couldn’t understand how his brother could elicit both awe and admiration. Didn’t the two cancel each other out? Leah often felt rejected by her mother. She once confided to Miriam (people were always confiding to Miriam) that Martha didn’t consider her a committed enough feminist. What am I supposed to do? Burn down Soldier Field? Run for Congress? I’m only twelve and a half. Miriam, laughing quietly, soothing: Oh, you’re fine, Leah, you’re just fine. Martha herself seemed to mostly ignore Hal, who sometimes seemed to mind and other times seemed relieved. His eyes would roam up to the ceiling while Martha was talking, and Martha was usually talking.
Philip would take long walks with Hal. They’d talk politics. Or they’d play chess in Hal’s study. Once, on the drive home—Leo and Popper slumped against each other, worn out by the three-ring circus of Rosencrantzian brilliance—Philip wondered out loud if Hal was letting him win.
“He nearly always castles late. This is a man who does algebra for fun in his spare time. You think he’s throwing the games?”
Miriam yawned. “Maybe you’re just good at chess, Phil.”
Her own time with Martha was a whirlwind of lectures, meetings, volunteer work, self-improvement. There were betterment association meetings, garden clubs. Martha and Miriam delivered books and pencils to the needy children of Cabrini Green. They cheered for Bella Abzug at the Civic Auditorium. They attended monthly gatherings of the Alliance Française, where Chicago women discussed all things French in French.
This excluded Miriam from understanding much of what they were saying, but did not prevent her, as she put it, from enjoying the music of the language.
Martha asking, “From where, Miriam, did you say you were from again? Boston?”
“No, not Boston. I’m from Fall River, Textile Capital of the World.”
“When was that, darling?”
“The 1870s.”
Miriam, who had not yet graduated college (she was finishing classes toward her degree at DePaul and working on her teaching certificate). Miriam, the poor misinformed woman from the hinterlands who’d come to Chicago to marry a lawyer. Marrying up, for heaven’s sake! Dear dear girl, don’t you know that’s all behind us now?
FIGHTING JANE
She used to be one of the wonderful people.
—Michael Bilandic (forty-ninth mayor of Chicago) on Jane Byrne (fiftieth mayor of Chicago)
All over now, and this not much of a secret, anyway. Still, it’s never been told before. In the ’78 campaign, Jane Byrne’s enemies couldn’t use it against her because they weren’t sure whether the story would help her or hurt her. In politics you can’t run the risk that embarrassing someone might actually make them look more human. Voters like a human being once in a while. And that’s why everybody loved Jane—at first. After a while, she got a little too human.
If Mayor Daley was the Popper family’s benevolent deity, then Jane Byrne was their nutty fairy godmother. (Not to mention that Mayor Byrne, too, like the old man, steered city business to Philip’s law firm.)
Miriam said she was a great role model for not just girls but boys, too! Chicago’s own Margaret Thatcher.
One night, Miriam was making herself a martini. Philip burst in the house door, breathless. He growled low, “I got something juicy.”