The River Queen
Page 18
I stroll through Kessler’s Park along the river up to the town square. In the shade of tall trees I stand before the statue of Stephen A. Douglas. It was here that they had their sixth debate. In a tone filled with irony and intelligence, Lincoln drove home his legal arguments against slavery and stated as he would so many times that the Constitution of the United States declares that all men are created equal.
I have to admit that Quincy is, as the drunken people on the boat said the night before, a nice town. It is true that its main street is spelled Maine Street (only later do I realize that Vermont and New Hampshire precede it). The dresses on display in the shop windows are circa 1950 and even then I’m not sure my mother would have worn them, but the town square is lovely and I enjoy the shade. I’m standing beneath the trees, wondering if my father ever stood here. And where he might have lived and worked.
I am not on some secret discovery, some mystery tour. I do not expect to unearth anything I didn’t know. I doubt that he had a clandestine past or lived another life, though he played his personal feelings close to the vest. I just would like to walk in his steps one more time and perhaps better understand a person I’m not sure I really knew.
Two elderly women are sitting on a park bench and for some reason I think they might know. “Excuse me,” I ask. They look identical as if they must be sisters. “But do either of you know where an old department store might have been?”
“Oh maybe you mean the old Carson Pirie store?”
“I think it was over there on the corner of Fifth.”
The other shakes her head. “I’m not sure it was.”
“Well, it was definitely on a corner nearby.”
Then the younger one says, “You should go over to the library. You know, they have a local history room. Maybe you can find out something there.…”
I head along Maine, then down Sixth until I find the library. When I walk into the library, I am struck by the coolness inside. Air conditioning. I’ve been in the heat and elements for days. My skin is bronzed. I am wearing no makeup. I am filthy, sweating, and I’ve been more or less in the same clothes, not to mention underwear, for days. Suddenly I find myself in a room full of people in ironed blouses, crisp linen shorts. They have pedicures and shaved legs.
I am feeling like a derelict and must look the part as I ask the librarian if someone can help me with some Quincy, Illinois, history. She tells me that Iris Nelson is the librarian who works in the historic section and points through some double glass doors.
Iris Nelson is shelving some old phone books in the historic section of the library. She’s an attractive blond woman, wearing a salmon-colored blouse and beige slacks. I’m in baggy pants, a T-shirt, and flip-flops. I tell her that my dad lived in Quincy and may have worked at Carson Pirie Scott. I want to see if there is any record. Iris begins to take down telephone books and census reports from the early 1920s. But I am fixated on her manicure. As she sits across the table from me, I stare at her nails—perfectly trimmed, painted a shade of salmon pink to match her blouse. Now I do feel like someone who has just gotten off the boat, which, of course, I have.
We can’t find my father’s name in the resident census or employers’ directories, but I tell Iris that I am interested in the history of Quincy and Hannibal. She starts talking about Illinois as a free state and how Missouri came into the Union as a slave state. Iris sits down. “You know,” she says, “the trailhead for the Underground Railroad was here in Quincy. There is a great abolitionist tradition in this town.”
I recall my high school history days and some of the things my mother taught me. Illinois, which had been part of the Northwest Territory, which included Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin, became a state in 1818. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 forbade slavery in the territory or in the states that were eventually formed as a result of it. While Illinois had seen some slavery under the French and British rule, it would soon die out. It would continue in some way in the form of “indentured servitude.” But basically by 1839 the Illinois prairie was populated by farmers and artisans who had not practiced slavery in thirty years. Free people throughout Illinois worked for wages and liberal-minded settlers came from all over the continent to live in Illinois.
But Missouri was another story and its history is diametrically opposed to its neighbor across the river. Missouri was part of the Louisiana Purchase, which Thomas Jefferson had bought from France for fifteen million dollars. Under the French and Spanish, slavery had been allowed in the territory and it was deeply entrenched. When Missouri sought to become a state in 1817, it asked to enter as a slave state. However, this would have upset the balance between free and slave states. After much debate in Congress, the Missouri Compromise was reached. Missouri was admitted as a slave state and the northern portion of Massachusetts was carved out to become the free state of Maine.
From their beginnings Illinois was a free state and Missouri a slave state and what separated them was a short mile of river. No other state this far north was a slave state and Missouri essentially became an island of slavery in an otherwise free territory. As Iris Nelson is explaining to me about Quincy’s role in the Underground Railroad, I’m thinking about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Jim, the runaway slave. At one point in the novel Huck considers bringing Jim across the river, but then makes some excuse. The bounty hunters might catch Huck this way. But in truth, as Iris explains it to me, many slaves made their way from Missouri to the start of the Underground Railroad in Quincy in this way. It would have been a sensible thing for Huck to try.
“So,” I ask Iris, “why didn’t Huck just bring Jim across the river? It would just be a mile, right, and he’d reach freedom?”
Iris gives me a knowing smile. “Right. But then Mark Twain wouldn’t have had a story to tell, would he?”
After an hour or so I leave the library. I learned nothing about my father’s presence here, but I did learn some things about Mark Twain and slavery in Missouri. Now my idea of going to Cairo on the River Queen feels tainted. As I walk back into town, it’s boiling hot and I’m dying for an iced coffee, but nothing is open. I head back toward the river.
We push on into the hot dry heat of the late afternoon. There’s twenty river miles and one lock and dam between Quincy and Hannibal and Jerry wants to make it before dark. As we head south, Jerry is poring over our maps. It’s broad daylight so it can’t be that he’s worried about shoals or getting lost. “What is it, Jer?” I ask. “What’re you looking for?”
“I’m looking for that island your dad told you about.” The island. I’d almost forgotten that it would be between Quincy and Hannibal. But Jerry remembered. Now I’m looking too. Somewhere in this stretch of twenty miles is the island my father visited with his friends. I want to know its name. I want to know where it is. I wish I could call him and ask.
I shake my head. “It’s all right,” I tell Jerry. “We can’t really know, can we?”
And Jerry nods, agreeing with me. “Nope,” he says, a resigned sound to his voice, “I guess we can’t.”
HANNIBAL
30
“YOU KNOW,” my father began, “the river is different up here than it is in Hannibal.” I’d taken him out to breakfast at Heinemann’s in Whitefish Bay in Wisconsin. My father loved breakfast and I was glad to have him alone. My mother was jealous of the attention he always received. It made her angry when we’d sit and talk to him, and she believed, perhaps rightly so, that we were ignoring her. But, as my father liked to say, you couldn’t get a word in “edgewise” if she was around.
That morning my father was all dressed up in a brown camel coat, brown fedora, tweed jacket, and silk tie. He was cold even though it was spring. At that time in his life, he was always cold.
We both ordered scrambled eggs, hash browns, crisp, and wheat toast. He was living dangerously and asked for a glass of fresh squeezed juice. “I’m going to be 103 years old,” he told the waitress, and she almost fell on the floor.
“Yes, of course, I know.” He told me about living in Hannibal a dozen times. In fact he’s told all of his stories dozens of times and it seemed as if he’d reached the end of the line with no more to tell. I braced myself for a rerun.
“Well, I lived in Hannibal. Right next to the house Mark Twain lived in. He’d been dead, oh, ten years when I lived there, and I don’t think he’d been back to Hannibal in twenty, but they still remembered him. You know why they called him Mark Twain, right?”
“It’s the pilot’s cry when they’re marking the depths…”
“That’s right. His real name was Samuel Clemens.” Of course I knew all of this. I knew that Samuel Clemens tried out many pseudonyms before he landed on the one that became his signature. “See, if you listen, you learn. Anyway, his house wasn’t any bigger than four booths in this restaurant.”
“It must be a museum now,” I said.
“Well, I don’t know how more than one person at a time could go through it. It wasn’t bigger than your upstairs bathroom. Anyway I worked in retail. Ladies’ garments.”
“You mean like dresses, blouses?” I actually didn’t know my father worked in ladies’ garments.
“Shoes, slips, bras. The whole thing.”
“What year was that, Dad?”
“Oh, it was 1921 or 1922. No, it must have been later because that spring, just before I moved to Hannibal, our downstairs neighbor murdered her husband. My parents were very good friends with him. You know, he took her on a cruise, then came home and he’s shaving one morning and she blows his head off.”
“That’s awful,” I said, shocked.
“Seems he brought his mistress along on the cruise as well. She was in the next stateroom.” My father gave a wave of his hand. “That kind of thing happened all the time.”
“It did?” I asked, amazed. I wanted to know more about the downstairs neighbor and his mistress and the wife who blew him away, but our eggs came and my father was on another trajectory. He poked at his hash browns. “I wanted them crisp.”
“Shall we send them back?”
He gave a wave of his hand. “Naw, it’s all right.” But I could tell he was disappointed. He took a few bites of his eggs and the hash browns. “Not so bad. But I like them crisp.” Then he took a sip of juice. “Now that’s good juice. Here, have some.” He pushed the glass my way. “Where was I? Let’s see, I was twenty-three years old. So it was later. It was 1925. Anyway, I worked for Klein’s Department Store and one day Mr. Klein came in. He came all the way from New York. They were a chain of retail stores. I’m sure you’ve heard of them. Klein’s.”
I nodded, though I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard of Klein’s.
“Anyway, Mr. Klein came in. He was bald as a bat. At that time I had a full head of hair, you know. In 1925 I had hair as thick as yours. So Mr. Klein comes in and the first thing he does is yank on my hair. He says, ‘How’d you get a head of hair like that? How come I’m rich and bald and you work for me and haven’t got a pot to piss in and you’ve got a head of hair like that?’ Mr. Klein liked to joke around, though I only met him once or twice in the year I lived in Hannibal. Anyway, I had hair then, in 1925, but by the time I was thirty-three, ten years later, all my hair was gone. You know that, right? You’ve got the portrait.”
“The portrait?”
“You know, the picture. We called them portraits then. That’s because you went to a studio and sat for them. It wasn’t a painting, but we called them portraits. That picture of me. There were only three copies made and one of them is hanging in your house. On your gallery wall.”
The waitress came by with her manager to make sure everything was all right. “Your eggs are getting cold,” she said. “Shall I heat them up for you?”
“Naw, I’m just talking,” my father replied in his most polite voice.
“He’s 102 years old,” she told her boss.
“You must be kidding,” the boss said, shaking my father’s hand. “What’s your secret?”
“Nothing in excess,” my father said, admonishing them both.
I was watching their little exchange, trying to envision this portrait of my father. I have a whole wall of pictures. Ancestors and new arrivals. Those gangsterlike shots of my father from the 1920s. My husband’s family. Our daughter floating on a raft. Then I see it. In a dark suit, pinstriped shirt, his hands folded across each other, a soft smile on his face. He’s holding something in his hand—a pipe, I think. Something he doesn’t smoke. I’ve had this picture for many years. I’ve probably walked by it ten thousand times, but I’ve never given it much thought.
“So I never told you about this portrait, did I?”
I shook my head, nibbling on my now cold toast. “It was from 1935 and I was working on the Chicago Board of Trade. On the summer weekends we’d go out to Union Pier and there was this girl from Memphis. But her family summered in Chicago. They had a house on Lake Michigan and we became friendly. She was from the Bloch family. I’m sure you’ve heard of the Blochs from Memphis.”
I nodded, though I never had.
“A very rich girl. Anyway, I dated this Bloch girl a few times one summer, but then the summer was over and she was going back to Memphis.”
“Were you still in Hannibal?”
My father waved his hand in the air. “No, you aren’t paying attention. I told you. I was in Chicago. At the Board of Trade. Hannibal was a long time ago. This is about the portrait.”
I wasn’t exactly paying attention. I thought he was telling me a river story, but now his tale had taken a bend I hadn’t expected to Union Pier and a girl from Memphis I’d never heard him mention before.
“Anyway, this girl, the Bloch girl, her father committed suicide in 1929. She was a pretty girl. She had red hair like a fire and very green eyes. She reminded me of a party. She was bright and pretty. I liked her and I suppose I felt badly for her because of what had happened in her life. So when she was going back to Memphis I asked her if, when the holidays rolled around, she’d like a gift from me. If there wasn’t something I could send her so she would remember me. And she said that she would like a portrait of me. That was all. She just wanted a portrait of me. Now there was this very famous portrait photographer in Chicago, his name was Seymour. He did all kinds of photographs and he was very expensive. So I went over to Seymour’s studio one day…”
I wasn’t completely following the story now about how my father went over to Seymour’s studio. I was thinking about the neighbor whose wife blew him away and the rich girl whose father killed himself and who wanted a picture of my father to remember him by.
“What happened to her father?”
“Well,” my father said, taking a bite of his eggs, “that’s an interesting story. You see, this man, her father, Mr. Bloch, he had a grocery store in Memphis. He was quite successful, but he heard that there was a new kind of grocery store starting up in Minneapolis. A grocery store where employees didn’t wait on you. Instead you served yourself. So he told one of his employees that he wanted him to go up to Minneapolis and find out just what kind of new grocery store was being started up in Minneapolis. So the employee went up and said he’d be back in a week or two. Well, a week went by, two, four, six weeks. That employee never came back.”
“What happened to him?”
“I don’t know. They never found him.” My father gave me an impatient look. “This isn’t a story about the employee who disappeared.” My father made a little explosion sign with his fingers. “It’s about the portrait. But since you asked, I’m telling you about Mr. Bloch.”
I nod. “Okay.”
/> “So Mr. Bloch sends another employee up to find the one that never came home. His name was Clarence Saunders and he told Mr. Bloch that in Minneapolis the grocery stores were changing and someone had an idea called self-service. He told Mr. Bloch all about how the customers never had to wait for the next clerk but could take the items off the shelves themselves. Butter, rice, beans. They just reached up and took it and put it into a cart. Saved a lot of time. Well, Saunders explained this to Mr. Bloch and they opened a store together. It was called the Piggly Wiggly and it was the first supermarket. Ever heard of that?”
I said I had and my father seemed pleased. “Well,” he said, “at least you know something.”
“But what about her father?” This story, like so many of my father’s, begins on the river, then meanders away much as the river side-winds, leaves its bed, only to come back to itself downstream.
“If you listen, I’ll tell you. You keep interrupting me. I’m losing the thread. God, it’s freezing in here.” He pulled his coat around his thin, frail body. “Anyway, they did very well with the Piggly Wiggly until 1929 and the market crashed. The two men lost everything, and Mr. Bloch, who had a 250,000-dollar life insurance policy, jumped out of a window so his family could have the money. He didn’t want his family to have to start over. That’s when they changed the law about life insurance policies and suicide. In 1929. And that’s how his daughter became rich.”
He paused to take another bite. “Good eggs,” he said, “but they’re ice cold. Anyway, all this girl wanted was a picture of me. I would’ve sent her a gold bracelet if she’d asked, but that’s not what she wanted. She wanted a portrait. So I went over to Mr. Seymour’s one day. And there was a doctor there. A famous Chicago doctor. I don’t remember his name. But he was having his picture taken. Mr. Seymour was taking it like this and like that.” My father turns and dodges, showing me how Mr. Seymour was taking pictures. “Anyway, the doctor recognized me and he says to Mr. Seymour, ‘Oh, you have to take that man’s picture because he’s a famous man. He’s on the Board of Trade. You’ve got to take his picture.’