A nurse came up to him and stood beside him fidgeting with a paper and pencil. He looked up at her, she had pink cheeks and pretty dark eyelashes. “You mustn’t let it get you,” she said. He grinned. “Oh, I’m all right. . . . I just got out of bed from a touch of flu, it sure pulls down your strength.”
“I hear you were an aviator,” she said. “I had a brother in the Royal Flying Corps. We’re Canadians.”
“Those were great boys,” said Charley. He wondered if he could date her up but then he thought of Ma. “Tell me honestly what you think, please do.”
“Well, it’s against the rules, but judging from other cases I’ve seen her chances are not very good.”
“I thought so.”
He got to his feet. “You’re a peach, do you know it?” Her face got red from the starched cap to the white collar of her uniform. She wrinkled up her forehead and her voice got very chilly. “In a case like that it’s better to have it happen quickly.” Charley felt a lump rise in his throat. “Oh, I know.” “Well, goodby, Lieutenant, I’ve got to go about my business.” “Gee, thanks a lot,” said Charley. When he got out in the air he kept remembering her pretty face and her nice lips.
One slushy morning of thaw in early March Charley was taking a scorched gasket out of a Buick when the garage helper came and said they wanted him on the phone from the hospital. A cold voice said Mrs. Anderson was sinking fast and the family better be notified. Charley got out of his overalls and went to call Hedwig. Jim was out, so they took one of the cars out of the garage. Charley had forgotten to wash his hands and they were black with grease and carbon. Hedwig found him a rag to wipe them off with. “Someday, Hedwig,” he said, “I’m going to get me a clean job in a draftin’room.”
“Well, Jim wanted you to be his salesman,” Hedwig snapped crossly. “I don’t see how you’re going to get anywheres if you turn down every opportunity.” “Well, maybe there’s opportunities I won’t turn down.” “I’d like to know where you’re going to get ’em except with us,” she said. Charley didn’t answer. Neither of them said anything more in the long drive across town. When they got to the hospital they found that Ma had sunk into a coma. Two days later she died.
At the funeral, about halfway through the service, Charley felt the tears coming. He went out and locked himself in the toilet at the garage and sat down on the seat and cried like a child. When they came back from the cemetery he was in a black mood and wouldn’t let anybody speak to him. After supper, when he found Jim and Hedwig sit ting at the diningroom table figuring out with pencil and paper how much it had cost them, he blew up and said he’d pay every damn cent of it and they wouldn’t have to worry about his staying around the goddam house either. He went out slamming the door after him and ran upstairs and threw himself on his bed. He lay there a long time in his uniform without undressing, staring at the ceiling and hearing mealy voices saying, deceased, bereavement, hereafter.
The day after the funeral Emiscah called up. She said she was so sorry about his mother’s death and wouldn’t he come around to see her some evening? Before he knew what he was doing he’d said he’d come. He felt blue and lonely and he had to talk to somebody besides Jim and Hedwig. That evening he drove over to see her. She was alone. He didn’t like the cheap gimcracky look her apartment had. He took her out to the movies and she said did he remember the time they went to see The Birth of a Nation together. He said he didn’t, though he remembered all right. He could see that she wanted to start things up with him again.
Driving back to her place she let her head drop on his shoulder. When he stopped the car in front of where she lived, he looked down and saw that she was crying. “Charley, won’t you give me a little kiss for old times?” she whispered. He kissed her. When she said would he come up, he stammered that he had to be home early. She kept saying, “Oh, come ahead. I won’t eat you, Charley,” and finally he went up with her though it was the last thing he’d intended to do.
She made them cocoa on her gasburner and told him how unhappy she was, it was so tiring being on your feet all day behind the counter and the women who came to buy things were so mean to you, and the floorwalkers were always pinching your seat and expecting you to cuddlecooty with them in the fittingbooths. Some day she was going to turn on the gas. It made Charley feel bad having her talk like that and he had to pet her a little to make her stop crying. Then he got hot and had to make love to her. When he left he promised to call her up next week.
Next morning he got a letter that she must have written right after he left saying that she’d never loved anybody but him. That night after supper he tried to write her that he didn’t want to marry anybody and least of all her; he couldn’t get it worded right, so he didn’t write at all. When she called up next day he said he was very busy and that he’d have to go up into North Dakota to see about some property his mother had left. He didn’t like the way she said, “Of course I understand. I’ll call you up when you get back, dear.”
Hedwig began to ask who that woman was who was calling him up all the time, and Jim said, “Look out for the women, Charley. If they think you’ve got anything they’ll hold onto you like a leech.” “Yessir,” said old man Vogel, “it’s not like ven you’re in the army yet and can say goodby, mein schatz, I’m off to the vars, now they can find out vere you live.” “You needn’t worry,” growled Charley. “I won’t stay put.”
The day they went over to the lawyer’s office to read Ma’s will, Jim and Hedwig dressed up fit to kill. It made Charley sore to see them, Hedwig in a new black tailored dress with a little lace at the throat and Jim dressed up like an undertaker in the suit he’d bought for the funeral. The lawyer was a small elderly German Jew with white hair brushed carefully over the big baldspot on the top of his head and goldrimmed pincenez on his thin nose. He was waiting for them when they came into the office. He got up smiling solemnly behind his desk littered with bluebound documents and made a little bow. Then he sat down beaming at them with his elbows among the papers, gently rubbing the tips of his fingers together. Nobody spoke for a moment. Jim coughed behind his hand like in church. “Now let me see,” said Mr. Goldberg in a gentlesweet voice with a slight accent like an actor’s. “Oughtn’t there to be more of you?”
Jim spoke up. “Esther and Ruth couldn’t come. They both live on the coast. . . . I’ve got their power of attorneys. Ruth had her husband sign hers too, in case there might be any realestate.” Mr. Goldberg made a little clucking noise with his tongue. “Too bad. I’d rather have all parties present. . . . But in this case there will be no difficulty, I trust. Mr. James A. Anderson is named sole executor. Of course you understand that in a case like this the aim of all parties is to avoid taking the will to probate. That saves trouble and expense. There is no need of it when one of the legatees is named executor. . . . I shall proceed to read the will.”
Mr. Goldberg must have drafted it himself because he sure seemed to enjoy reading it. Except for a legacy of one thousand dollars to Lizzie Green who had run Ma’s boardinghouse up in Fargo, all the estate, real and personal, the lots in Fargo, the Liberty bonds and the fifteenhundreddollar savings-account were left to the children jointly to be administered by James A. Anderson, sole executor, and eventually divided as they should agree among themselves.
“Now are there any questions and suggestions?” asked Mr. Goldberg genially.
Charley couldn’t help seeing that Jim felt pretty good about it. “It has been suggested,” went on Mr. Goldberg’s even voice that melted blandly among the documents like butter on a hot biscuit, “that Mr. Charles Anderson, who I understand is leaving soon for the East, would be willing to sign a power of attorney similar to those signed by his sisters. . . . The understanding is that the money will be invested in a mortgage on the Anderson Motor Sales Co.”
Charley felt himself go cold all over. Jim and Hedwig were looking at him anxiously. “I don’t understand the legal talk,” he said, “but what I want to do is get mine as soon
as possible. . . . I have a proposition in the East I want to put some money in.”
Jim’s thin lower lip began to tremble. “You’d better not be a damn fool, Charley. I know more about business than you do.”
“About your business maybe, but not about mine.”
Hedwig, who’d been looking at Charley like she could kill him, began to butt in: “Now, Charley, you let Jim do what he thinks best. He just wants to do what’s best for all of us.”
“Aw, shut your face,” said Charley.
Jim jumped to his feet. “Look here, kid, you can’t talk to my wife in that tone of voice.”
“My friends, my dear friends,” the lawyer crooned, rubbing his fingers together till it looked like they’d smoke, “we mustn’t let ourselves be carried away, must we, not on a solemn occasion like this. . . . What we want is a quiet fireside chat . . . the friendly atmosphere of the home. . . .”
Charley let out a snorting laugh. “That’s what it’s always been like in my home,” he said halfaloud and turned his back on them to look out of the window over white roofs and iciclehung fireescapes. The snow, thawing on the shingle roof of a frame house next door, was steaming in the early afternoon sun. Beyond it he could see backlots deep in drifts and a piece of clean asphalt street where cars shuttled back and forth.
“Look here, Charley, snap out of it.” Jim’s voice behind him took on a pleading singsong tone. “You know the proposition Ford has put up to his dealers. . . . It’s sink or swim for me. . . . But as an investment it’s the chance of a lifetime. . . . The cars are there. . . . You can’t lose, even if the company folds up.”
Charley turned around. “Jim,” he said mildly, “I don’t want to argue about it. . . . I want to get my share of what Ma left in cash as soon as you and Mr. Goldberg can fix it up. . . . I got somethin’ about airplane motors that’ll make any old Ford agency look like thirty cents.”
“But I want to put Ma’s money in on a sure thing. The Ford car is the safest investment in the world, isn’t that so, Mr. Goldberg?”
“You certainly see them everywhere. Perhaps the young man would wait and think things over a little. . . . I can make the preliminary steps . . .”
“Preliminary nothing. I want to get what I can out right now. If you can’t do it I’ll go and get another lawyer who will.”
Charley picked up his hat and coat and walked out.
Next morning Charley turned up at breakfast in his overalls as usual. Jim told him he didn’t want him doing any work in his business, seeing the way he felt about it. Charley went back upstairs to his room and lay down on the bed. When Hedwig came in to make it up she said, “Oh, are you still here?” and went out slamming the door after her. He could hear her slamming and banging things around the house as she and Aunt Hartmann did the housework.
About the middle of the morning Charley went down to where Jim sat worrying over his books at the desk in the office. “Jim, I want to talk to you.” Jim took off his glasses and looked up at him. “Well, what’s on your mind?” he asked, cutting off his words the way he had. Charley said he’d sign a power of attorney for Jim if he’d lend him five hundred dollars right away. Then maybe later if the airplane proposition looked good he’d let Jim in on it. Jim made a sour face at that. “All right,” said Charley. “Make it four hundred. I got to get out of this dump.”
Jim rose to his feet slowly. He was so pale Charley thought he must be sick. “Well, if you can’t get it into your head what I’m up against . . . you can’t and to hell with you. . . . All right, you and me are through. . . . He dwig will have to borrow it at the bank in her name. . . . I’m up to my neck.”
“Fix it any way you like,” said Charley. “I got to get out of here.”
It was lucky the phone rang when it did or Charley and Jim would have taken a poke at each other. Charley answered it. It was Emiscah. She said she’d been over in St. Paul and had seen him on the street yesterday and that he’d just said he was going to be out of town to give her the air, and he had to come over tonight or she didn’t know what she’d do, he wouldn’t want her to kill herself, would he? He got all balled up, what with rowing with Jim and everything and ended by telling her he’d come. By the time he was through talking Jim had walked into the salesroom and was chinning with a customer, all smiles.
Going over on the trolley he decided he’d tell her he’d got married to a French girl during the war but when he got up to her flat he didn’t know what to say, she looked so thin and pale. He took her out to a dancehall. It made him feel bad how happy she acted, as if everything was fixed up again between them. When he left her he made a date for the next week.
Before that day came he was off for Chi. He didn’t begin to feel really good until he’d transferred across town and was on the New York train. He had a letter in his pocket from Joe Askew telling him Joe would be in town to meet him. He had what was left of the three hundred berries Hedwig coughed up after deducting his board and lodging all winter at ten dollars a week. But on the New York train he stopped thinking about all that and about Emiscah and the mean time he’d had and let himself think about New York and airplane motors and Doris Humphries.
When he woke up in the morning in the lower berth he pushed up the shade and looked out; the train was going through the Pennsylvania hills, the fields were freshplowed, some of the trees had a little fuzz of green on them. In a farmyard a flock of yellow chickens were picking around under a peartree in bloom. “By God,” he said aloud, “I’m through with the sticks.”
Newsreel XLVIII
truly the Steel Corporation stands forth as a corporate colossus both physically and financially
Now the folks in Georgia they done gone wild
Over that brand new dancin’ style
Called Shake That Thing
CARBARNS BLAZE
GYPSY ARRESTED FOR TELLING THE TRUTH
Horsewhipping Hastens Wedding
that strength has long since become almost a truism as steel’s expanding career progressed, yet the dimensions thereof need at times to be freshly measured to be caught in proper perspective
DAZED BY MAINE DEMOCRATS CRY FOR MONEY
shake that thing
Woman of Mystery Tries Suicide in Park Lake
shake that thing
OLIVE THOMAS DEAD FROM POISON
LETTER SAID GET OUT OF WALL STREET
BOMB WAGON TRACED TO JERSEY
Shake That Thing
Writer of Warnings Arrives
BODY FOUND LASHED TO BICYCLE
FIND BOMB CLOCKWORK
Tin Lizzie
“Mr. Ford the automobileer” the featurewriter wrote in 1900,
“Mr. Ford the automobileer began by giving his steed three or four sharp jerks with the lever at the righthand side of the seat; that is, he pulled the lever up and down sharply in order, as he said, to mix air with gasoline and drive the charge into the exploding cylinder. . . . Mr. Ford slipped a small electric switch handle and there followed a puff, puff, puff. . . . The puffing of the machine assumed a higher key. She was flying along about eight miles an hour. The ruts in the road were deep, but the machine certainly went with a dreamlike smoothness. There was none of the bumping common even to a streetcar. . . . By this time the boulevard had been reached, and the automobileer, letting a lever fall a little, let her out. Whiz! She picked up speed with infinite rapidity. As she ran on there was a clattering behind, the new noise of the automobile.”
For twenty years or more,
ever since he’d left his father’s farm when he was sixteen to get a job in a Detroit machineshop, Henry Ford had been nuts about machinery. First it was watches, then he designed a steamtractor, then he built a horseless carriage with an engine adapted from the Otto gasengine he’d read about in The World of Science, then a mechanical buggy with a onecylinder fourcycle motor, that would run forward but not back;
at last, in ninetyeight, he felt he was far enough along to risk throwing up his job with the De
troit Edison Company, where he’d worked his way up from night fireman to chief engineer, to put all his time into working on a new gasoline engine,
(in the late eighties he’d met Edison at a meeting of electriclight employees in Atlantic City. He’d gone up to Edison after Edison had delivered an address and asked him if he thought gasoline was practical as a motor fuel. Edison had said yes. If Edison said it, it was true. Edison was the great admiration of Henry Ford’s life);
and in driving his mechanical buggy, sitting there at the lever jauntily dressed in a tightbuttoned jacket and a high collar and a derby hat, back and forth over the level illpaved streets of Detroit,
scaring the big brewery horses and the skinny trotting horses and the sleekrumped pacers with the motor’s loud explosions,
looking for men scatterbrained enough to invest money in a factory for building automobiles.
He was the eldest son of an Irish immigrant who during the Civil War had married the daughter of a prosperous Pennsylvania Dutch farmer and settled down to farming near Dearborn in Wayne County, Michigan;
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