“Watch this!”
The switch clicked. Instantly the room was flooded with a wave of pink light that was pure perfume of illumination.
“Now that is a real lamp!”
The Old Man backed away in admiration.
“Hey wait. I want to see how it looks from the outside.”
He rushed into the outer darkness, across the front porch and out onto the street. From a half block away he shouted:
“Move it a little to the left. Okay. That’s got it. You oughta see it from out here!”
The entire neighborhood was turned on. It could be seen up and down Cleveland Street, the symbol of his victory.
The rest of that evening was spent in honest, simple Peasant admiration for a thing of transcendent beauty, very much like the awe and humility that we felt before such things as Christmas trees and used cars with fresh coats of Simonize. The family went to bed in a restless mood of festive gaiety. That is, everyone except my mother, who somehow failed to vibrate on the same frequency as my father’s spectacular Additional Major Award.
That night, for the first time, our home had a Night Light. The living room was bathed through the long, still, silent hours with the soft glow of electric Sex. The stage was set; the principal players were in the wings. The cue was about to be given for the greatest single fight that ever happened in our family.
Real-life man and wife, mother and father battles rarely even remotely resemble the Theatrical or Fictional version of the Struggle between the Sexes. Homes have been wracked by strife and dissension because of a basic difference of opinion over where to go on a vacation, or what kind of car to buy, or a toaster that made funny noises, or a sister-in-law’s false teeth, not to mention who is going to take out the garbage. And why.
In all my experience I have never known homes that had the kind of fights that appear in plays by Edward Albee and Tennessee Williams. It would never have occurred to my father to bellow dramatically in the living room, after twenty-seven Scotches:
“You bitch! You’re not going to emasculate me!”
The Old Man would not have even known what the word “emasculate” meant, much less figure that that’s what my mother was up to.
On the other hand, my mother thought “emasculation” had something to do with women getting the vote. But, in any event, Sex is rarely argued and fought over in any household I ever heard of, outside of heaving novels and nervous plays. That was not the kind of fights we had at home. There was no question of Emasculation or Role Reversal. My mother was a Mother. She knew it. My Old Man was … the Old Man. He knew it. There was no problem of Identity, just a gigantic clash of two opposing physical presences: the Immovable Body and the Force That Is Not To Be Denied.
The lamp stood in the middle of the window for months. Every night my mother would casually, without a word, draw the curtains shut, while Bing Crosby sang from the old Gothic Crosley:
“Hail KMH/Hail to the foe
Onward to victory/Onward we must go.…”
the theme song of the Kraft Music Hall. The Old Man would get up out of his chair. Casually. He would pull the curtain back, look out—pretending to be examining the weather—and leave it that way. Ten minutes later my mother would get up out of her chair, casually, saying:
“Gee, I feel a draft coming in from somewhere.”
This slowly evolving ballet spun on through the Winter months, gathering momentum imperceptively night after night. Meanwhile, the lamp itself had attracted a considerable personal following among cruising prides of pimply-faced Adolescents who night after night could hardly wait for darkness to fall and the soft, sinuous radiation of Passion to light up the drab, dark corners of Cleveland Street.
The pop company enjoyed sales of mounting intensity, even during the normally slack Winter months. Their symbol now stood for far more than a sickeningly sweet orange drink that produced window-rattling burps and cavities in Adolescent teeth of such spectacular dimensions as to rival Mammoth Cave. Night after night kids’ eyes glowed in the darkness out on the street before our house, like predatory carnivores of the jungle in full cry. Night after night the lady’s leg sent out its silent message.
The breaking point came, as all crucial moments in History do, stealthily and on cats’ feet, on a day that was notable for its ordinariness. We never know when lightning is about to strike, or a cornice to fall. Perhaps it is just as well.
On the fateful day I came home from school and immediately opened the refrigerator door, looking for Something To Eat. Seconds later I am knocking together a salami sandwich. My Old Man—it was his day off—is in the John. Hollering, as he always did, accompanied by the roar of running water, snatches of song, complaints about No Pressure—the usual. My mother is somewhere off in the front of the house, puttering about. Dusting.
Life is one long song. The White Sox have won a ball game, and it’s only spring training. The Old Man is singing. My brother is under the daybed, whimpering. The salami is as sweet as life itself.
The first fireflies were beginning to flicker in the cottonwoods. Northern Indiana slowly was at long last emerging from the iron grip of the Midwestern Winter. A softness in the air; a quickening of the pulse. Expectations long lying dormant in the blackened rock ice of Winter sent out tentative tender green shoots and yawned toward the smoky sun. Somewhere off in the distance, ball met bat; robin called to robin, and a screen door slammed.
In the living room my mother is talking to the aphids in her fern plant. She fought aphids all of her life. The water roared. I started on a second sandwich. And then:
CAAA-RAASHH!
“… oh!” A phony, stifled gasp in the living room. A split second of silence while the fuse sputtered and ignited, and it began.
The Old Man knew. He had been fearing it since the very first day. The bathroom door slammed open. He rushed out, dripping, carrying a bar of Lifebuoy, eyes rolling wildly.
“What broke!? What happened?! WHAT BROKE!!?”
“… the lamp.” A soft, phony voice, feigning heartbreak.
For an instant the air vibrated with tension. A vast magnetic charge, a static blast of human electricity made the air sing. My kid brother stopped in mid-whimper. I took the last bite, the last bite of salami, knowing that this would be my last happy bite of salami forever.
The Old Man rushed through the dining room. He fell heavily over a footstool, sending a shower of spray and profanity toward the ceiling.
“Where is it? WHERE IS IT!?”
There it was, the shattered kneecap under the coffee table, the cracked, well-turned ankle under the radio; the calf—that voluptuous poem of feminine pulchritude—split open like a rotten watermelon, its entrails of insulated wire hanging out limply over the rug. That lovely lingerie shade, stove in, had rolled under the library table.
“Where’s my glue? My glue! OH, MY LAMP!”
My mother stood silently for a moment and then said:
“I … don’t know what happened. I was just dusting and … ah.…”
The Old Man leaped up from the floor, his towel gone, in stark nakedness. He bellowed:
“YOU ALWAYS WERE JEALOUS OF THAT LAMP!”
“Jealous? Of a plastic leg?”
Her scorn ripped out like a hot knife slicing through soft oleomargarine. He faced her.
“You were jealous ’cause I WON!”
“That’s ridiculous. Jealous! Jealous of what? That was the ugliest lamp I ever saw!”
Now it was out, irretrievably. The Old Man turned and walked to the window. He looked out silently at the soft gathering gloom of Spring. Suddenly he turned and in a flat, iron voice:
“Get the glue.”
“We’re out of glue,” my mother said.
My father always was a superb user of profanity, but now he came out with just one word, a real Father word, bitter and hard.
“DAMMIT!”
Without another word he stalked into the bedroom; slammed the door, emerged wearing a sweatsh
irt, pants and shoes, and his straw hat, and out he went. The door of the Oldsmobile slammed shut out in the driveway.
“K-runch. Crash!”—a tinkle of glass. He had broken the window of the one thing he loved, the car that every day he polished and honed. He slammed it in Reverse.
RRRRAAAWWWWWRRRRR!
We heard the fender drag along the side of the garage. He never paused.
RRRRAAAWWWWWRRROOOOMMMM!
And he’s gone. We are alone. Quietly my mother started picking up the pieces, something she did all her life. I am hiding under the porch swing. My kid brother is now down in the coal bin.
It seemed seconds later:
BBBRRRRRAAAAAWWWRRRRR … eeeeeeeeeh!
Up the driveway he charged in a shower of cinders and burning rubber. You could always tell the mood of the Old Man by the way he came up that driveway. Tonight there was no question.
A heavy thunder of feet roared up the back steps, the kitchen door slammed. He’s carrying three cans of glue. Iron glue. The kind that garage mechanics used for gaskets and for gluing back together exploded locomotives. His voice is now quiet.
“Don’t touch it. Don’t touch that lamp!”
He spread a newspaper out over the kitchen floor and carefully, tenderly laid out the shattered fleshy remains. He is on all fours now, and the work began. Painfully, hopelessly he tried to glue together the silk-stockinged, life-size symbol of his great victory.
Time and again it looked almost successful, but then he would remove his hand carefully.… BOING! … the kneecap kept springing up and sailing across the kitchen. The ankle didn’t fit. The glue hardened into black lumps and the Old Man was purple with frustration. He tried to fix the leg for about two hours, stacking books on it. A Sears Roebuck catalog held the instep. The family Bible pressed down on the thigh. But it wasn’t working.
To this day I can still see my father, wearing a straw hat, swearing under his breath, walking around a shattered plastic lady’s leg, a Freudian image to make Edward Albee’s best efforts pale into insignificance.
Finally he scooped it all up. Without a word he took it out the back door and into the ashbin. He sat down quietly at the kitchen table. My mother is now back at her lifelong station, hanging over the sink. The sink is making the Sink noise. Our sink forever made long, gurgling sighs, especially in the evening, a kind of sucking, gargling, choking retch.
Aaaagggghhhh—and then a short, hissing wheeze and silence until the next attack. Sometimes at three o’clock in the morning I’d lie in my bed and listen to the sink—Aaaaaggggghhhh.
Once in a while it would go: gaaaaagggghhhh … PTUI!—and up would come a wad of Mrs. Kissel’s potato peelings from next door. She, no doubt, got our coffee grounds. Life was real.
My mother is hanging over her sink, swabbing eternally with her Brillo pad. If mothers had a coat of arms in the Midwest, it would consist of crossed Plumbers’ Helpers rampant on a field of golden Brillo pads.
The Old Man is sitting at the kitchen table. It was white enamel with little chipped black marks all around the edge. They must have been made that way, delivered with those flaws. A table that smelled like dishrags and coffee grounds and kids urping. A kitchen-table smell, permanent and universal, that defied all cleaning and disinfectant—the smell of Life itself.
In dead silence my father sat and read his paper. The battle had moved into the Trench Warfare or Great Freeze stage. And continued for three full days. For three days my father spoke not. For three days my mother spoke likewise. There was only the sink to keep us kids company. And, of course, each other, clinging together in the chilly subterranean icy air of a great battle. Occasionally I would try.
“Hey Ma, ah … you know what Flick is doing … uh.…”
Her silent back hunched over the sink. Or:
“Hey Dad, Flick says that.…”
“WHADDAYA WANT?”
Three long days.
Sunday was sunny and almost like a day in Midsummer. Breakfast, usually a holiday thing on Sundays, had gone by in stony silence. So had dinner. My father was sitting in the living room with the sun streaming in unobstructed through the front window, making a long, flat, golden pattern on the dusty Oriental rug. He was reading Andy Gump at the time. My mother was struggling over a frayed elbow in one of my sweaters. Suddenly he looked up and said:
“You know.…”
Here it comes! My mother straightened up and waited.
“You know, I like the room this way.”
There was a long, rich moment. These were the first words spoken in seventy-two hours.
She looked down again at her darning, and in a soft voice:
“Uh … you know, I’m sorry I broke it.”
“Well …” he grew expansive, “It was … it was really pretty jazzy.”
“No,” she answered, “I thought it was very pretty!”
“Nah. It was too pink for this room. We should get some kind of brass lamp for that window.”
She continued her darning. He looked around for a moment, dropped the Funnies noisily to get attention, and then announced in his Now For The Big Surprise voice:
“How ’bout let’s all of us going to a movie? How ’bout it? Let’s all take in a movie!”
Ten minutes later we’re all in the Oldsmobile, on our way to see Johnny Weismuller.
The drizzle had become a full rain by the time I realized I was the only one left in the windswept garden of the Museum of Modern Art. The lights were on inside, warm and glowing, and I could see a pink arm reaching skyward. I went back in to have another last, loving look at IT HASN’T SCRATCHED YET.
XI FLICK MAKES AN ARTISTIC JUDGMENT
“How come they called it that?”
I laughed my notorious ironic cackle:
“It’s some kind of soap or something.”
“You mean they named a statue after soap?”
Flick squeezed his bar rag juicily onto the duckboards behind the mahogany. I had a vague feeling that the beer was beginning to get to me.
“Well … it’s a slogan.”
Behind us, all around us, everywhere, the jukebox boomed heavily and then stopped abruptly.
“Fer Chrissake, I can’t see why they named a statue after soap.”
“Well, I told you, you gotta be With It.”
“Nuts.”
Once again I was reminded forcibly that I was back in the Midwest, very far from the effete East.
An uproar broke out in one of the booths back in the gloom near the wall. Two structural ironworkers were loudly Indian-wrestling.
“I’ll be right back.”
Flick’s jaw squared as he darted from behind the bar. I watched in the mirror as he quelled the battle, fed the combatants two more boilermakers, and returned.
“I’m not as tough as I used to be,” said Flick matter-of-factly. “I argue more these days.”
I remembered the day well when Flick in his salad period had thrown three Tin Mill Reckoners out on the street in quick succession, which is the Hohman equivalent of taking on King Kong, Gargantua, and Gorgeous George simultaneously.
“I noticed they stopped,” I said.
“Well, they’re on my bowling team. They’d better.”
We sat silently for a moment as old friends will when in the midst of a reminiscing orgy. Flick slid another beer toward me.
“That reminds me, Flick. Is it still where it used to be?”
“Yep.”
A minute later I was back at the bar, ready for more action and more beer. A faint snow was falling from the lead-colored skies. The wind rattled the plate glass windows of Flick’s Tavern. Across the street the plastic streamers snapped and fluttered over the rows of like-new, mint-condition, creampuff, fully loaded, ready-to-go-specials. The Used-Car lot is a kind of shrine in Northern Indiana.
“You mean girls ride motorcycles in New York?”
“That is not all they do.”
“Boy. New York sure sounds like a crazy place. I wa
nted to take my wife to see the Fair, but I couldn’t get away.”
“You didn’t miss much.”
Flick snapped a pretzel in two, moodily.
“Just the same, I’d a liked to have gone. I sure remember that one they had in Chicago.”
“Oh come on, Flick. We were just little tiny kids.”
“Yeah. But I remember it.”
I sipped my beer and thought about that for a few seconds.
“You know, Flick, I read somewhere that John Dillinger, the old bank robber, used to go to that fair and ride the Sky Ride, between heists.”
“I’ll be damned. He was from Indiana, wasn’t he?” Flick’s Hoosier pride welled to the surface.
“You’re damn right, Flick. You know, I remember only one thing about that fair.”
XII THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN
Right there on the Lake, next to the Outer Drive, they began to build a model of Fort Sheridan. This was a fort that was operating during Indian times on the site of Chicago. It was the scene of several very bloody Indian battles. And here they were once again putting this fort together log by log in a perfect reproduction of the original. It sat there looking out over the cold blue water, and you could see it from the car. It was brown and low, and looked like it was made out of Lincoln Logs. To a kid, forts are very big things. I asked my father, driving the Olds:
“What is that?”
“Fort Sheridan.”
“Oh.”
“Yup. They’re building a World’s Fair.”
At that time the shore stretched empty and white, with little tufts of grass here and there, almost to the Fields Museum and down to the cold water, with only Fort Sheridan in the middle of the emptiness.
And, sure enough, a World’s Fair began to grow. It spread outward like a mushroom patch from the tiny fort, and grew and grew and grew. Month by month, year by year, great blue and yellow and orange buildings right out of the land of Oz blotted out the Lake, until the tiny fort disappeared behind them all. Mile after mile was covered with this fantasy, this wonderland, this land of real, genuine, absolute Magic.
In God We Trust Page 9