A Woman of Uncertain Character: The Amorous and Radical Adventures of My Mother Jennie (Who Always Wanted to Be a Respectable Jewish Mom) by Her Bastard Son

by Clancy Sigal

  How different from the way Joe Franklin is growing up! Despite my best efforts, our kid is organized in playdates, sleepovers, Little League, Fall Ball, piano lessons, even something weirdly called “free play.” All life in my universe is geared to kids, kids, kids, a heavy load to put on them. Whatever happened to the healthy boredom of children for parents and vice versa, the benign disinterest that releases both of them into their legitimately separate worlds?

  Fantastically, we Lawndale latchkey cadets grew up unimpeded by adult supervision and “time management,” let alone academic stress. Little League, AYSO, and organized sports did not exist, at least that we knew of. A self-governing anarchy ruled our improvised games, which had no beginnings or ends or positive reinforcement (“Good eye, Kevin!” “Great cut, Justin!”), just peggy-move-up from sunup to sundown and taking your lumps if you screwed up on the base path. The notion that grown-up men should boss around (coach) children’s games was bizarre; any adult male seen hanging around a boys’ sandlot game would instantly have come under suspicion from the old grannies who were the neighborhood’s informal police. Perverts and pedophiles were not unknown, but I don’t remember anything like the current lynch-mob hysteria.

  Take Stash, a new Rocket who was an immigrant from Lithuania, a bit older than us although in the same school grade, a gregarious if vaguely troubled guy. For a while we were tight as two clams. Later, while the rest of us were away in military service, he pulled prison time as a twice-convicted pedophile for molesting little girls in the neighborhood, and eventually was tackled after one of the fathers chased him down and nearly took off his head with a hatchet. Soon after his release from Joliet prison, he visited Jennie and me to weep repentance at our kitchen table. After he left, my mother sighed, “Those poor little girls,” adding, “and poor Stash.”

  The Stash outrages created no vigilante panic, only a kind of stoic pity for both predator and victims. And no TV to broadcast the news region-wide and tell us what to think and how to feel. I doubt if even local rabbis and priests spoke about it from the pulpit, although his crimes were known to all. The Pulaski Avenue police were told to keep an eye on him and that was it. Too lenient? Perhaps.

  Today, kids like my son are vastly more protected from felons like Stash. Convicted child abusers by law must register as sex offenders, and there are nightly news reports of angry, fearful residents rallying to harass these men-monsters out of town. In Whatcom County, Washington, two sex offenders were murdered by a stranger who accessed their names from the sheriff’s sex offender database. A recent San Diego Web site that listed the names of local sex criminals had one million hits overnight. I’m sure all of these Internet inquirers were caring parents interested solely in the welfare of their children.

  Yes, sure.

  I do not believe in lost innocence. We Rockets were guilty as charged, free and lawless, afraid of a featureless future but without the vocabulary yet to fully install our terrors. The world outside might assault us but corporate Walt Disney hadn’t yet gotten around to it. There was no TV, no car pools, no room of one’s own; America was not yet obsessively child centered. In our Lawndale culture it was a given that children’s things were of infinitely less interest than adult things. At the movies, aside from Our Gang shorts and Buck Rogers serials, all ages—seniors and seven year olds—watched the same adult fare: Myrna Loy in a silk chemise tossing off martinis with her alcoholic detective husband in The Thin Man or Joan Crawford trying on diaphanous slips in an endless series of working girl-gone-wrong weepies; even on Saturday children’s matinees the triple features starred what today would be regarded as middle-aged actors, Tracy, Gable, Harlow, and Colbert. PG would have been laughed out of court.

  In a time of economic terrorism—the Depression—we boys (but not the more family-protected girls) were let loose to fend for ourselves and each other. I suppose the long-term effects of our stressed-out parents’ random wrath are still with us, and linger on in our children and their children, who may catch the anxiety virus without knowing quite where or why. But at the time, despite cockroaches in the bed, horseshit in the alley, and rats in the garbage, we boys, insulated by the cruel sweet narcissism of seedling adolescence, loved each other. For some of us, it was as close to love as we would ever know.

  A part of me never left Lawndale, not really. After I grew up and emigrated to England, I found excuses to visit Chicago on this or that pretext, before and after Martin Luther King was shot and GVS burned out in the ’68 riots. Compulsively, I found myself wandering alone in a North Lawndale that was now almost entirely African-American and Soweto-like in devastation, and where neighborhood blacks were so flabbergasted at seeing a strolling white man that hardly anybody bothered to hassle me. When Studs Terkel fixed me up with a friend of his, a black postal worker and his family who lived in one of my old buildings on Sawyer Avenue, I visited them several times, noting that the father kept a shotgun under the couch. Al, my host, would stand at his second-floor window speaking into his telephone to guide me from one phone kiosk to another as if I was landing on an aircraft carrier in a crosswind. (“Now walk a little faster, don’t take the alley shortcut, see those guys on the stoop? just circle around and stop for nothing—”) The Harrison District police, on whose blotter I was memorialized as a child, let me ride along with them as they night-patrolled the alleys of my youth, their hands gripping guns under their clipboards; most carried snub-nosed .38s taped to their ankles. Who could blame them? North Lawndale is the city’s deadliest neighborhood.

  I saw shootings, knifings, the aftermath of rape and murder. A street boy named “Dragon,” age sixteen, died in my arms from a tiny, almost invisible hole in his chest as he lay half-seeing on Pulaski Avenue near a room where Jennie and I once rented. The detective filling out a form wrote DOA on it. I said, “He’s still alive.” The cop shoved Dragon with the toe of his shoe; the boy’s eyes fluttered once and shut forever. “No he’s not,” the detective said.

  Dragon was me with a black skin in a later time.

  Rockets Forever

  That same night, all adults now, we gathered in Heshie Wolinsky’s living room in Morton Grove, a Chicago suburb where a number of the other Rockets had settled near one another. Julie Wax, Mendy, Legs Glasser, Deaf Augie, and Albie were at Heshie’s along with Heshie’s grim-lipped wife, who parked herself on a chair, arms folded, eyes fixed straight ahead, disapproving of something, everything. We chewed over old times, exchanged medical problems, perfectly amiable and genial for guys who never expected to live beyond twenty-one. I’d made the mistake of arriving in a Lincoln Town Car, to which Rent-a-Budget had upgraded me, but the boys seemed to have forgiven my rudeness.

  Toward the end of a nostalgic evening, Heshie, ordinarily the most levelheaded Rocket, burst out: “Clarence, you sonofabitch bastard, I begged you to stay in Chicago. Your mother practically got down on her knees and pleaded with me to argue you from going away. And you turned your backs on us all. Did it make you happy? Like fuck it did!”

  I looked around at the other Rockets: the carpenter, the liquor store owner, the social worker, the phone company line installation foreman, the furniture salesman, and Heshie, who said he had worked as a metallurgist at the same steel-making company for thirty years.

  I stammered something feeble about having to follow my own destiny

  Heshie leaned forward fiercely. “And I went further with Faith Levin in Garfield Park than you ever did.”

  What? He’s kidding. We were fifteen. Faith Levin was one of the neighborhood girls who let you go that little inch lower or higher. I furtively glanced at Mrs. Wolinsky, who was staring cold fire at me.

  Heshie’s fury was uncontainable. The other Rockets looked on pleasantly.

  “Faith told me everything! Everything you did!” Heshie screamed. He got up so abruptly that for a moment I thought he was going to hit me. “I went further!”

  My unwilled thought was, That slut Faith Levin. Then I made my second mistake.
I laughed. “Heshie,” I said, “that was years ago.”

  Heshie got up and ran past his dour, angry wife into the kitchen and slammed the swinging door, which made dying whooshing sounds. One by one, the Rockets rose, rather formally, shook my hand, and departed. Mrs. Wolinsky sat glued to her chair staring at me. Eventually I said good night and slipped out, too.

  I’d been set up. But why? Was it the Lincoln Town Car? Or abandoning Chicago? What? My mind reached back to our basement clubhouse and to any possible sins I’d committed so mortal as to be unforgivable after all this time. Yes, I’d once made fun of Augie’s deafness, tripped Mendy down a flight of school stairs, which had broken his wrist, cheated at cards with Albie—but surely the years had absolved me. Apparently not all the Rockets agreed. For the first time in my life I wished I had a “spiritual advisor” to help me atone for an unspecified crime I had committed by escaping from Chicago’s tender strangle. Well, I’d have to work my way back to salvation….

  6 Ring Wise

  FOR DAD, OUR FAMILY Hand Laundry was turning out to be maybe an offer he should have refused. It was slow work organizing the comrades into a rival union to the Teamsters, and the store was running downhill fast. This was definitely not what he had bargained for when he first tipped his Homburg to the plump redheaded Jennie on the picket line in 1919. It’s possible their role models were incompatible. She was keen on the romantic Greenwich Village lovers, John Reed and his freedom-seeking consort Louise Bryant; Dad’s role model was more like the “Manassa Mauler,” heavyweight champ Jack Dempsey.

  Sharing angry scowls, bared teeth, panther’s eyes, black brows, and unshaved chins, Dempsey and Dad might have been brothers. Dempsey, like my father, had been a “slacker” in World War I, unwilling to join up, and, also like Dad, had been an itinerant laborer who rode freights and camped in hobo jungles as a roustabout youth. The champ’s trademark was brutal early-round knockouts, but he didn’t become a popular favorite until he lost the title to Gene Tunney in the “long count” bout when the referee let Tunney recover from a knockdown and win the fight. Afterwards Dempsey told his wife, “Honey, I forgot to duck.”

  I forgot to duck, too.

  When the mood was on him Dad tried to inject courage into me by teaching me the Dempsey style, crouched, stalking, crowding the opponent, and not pulling punches. Much to Jennie’s disapproval, he’d improvise a boxing ring in the back of the laundry and show me how to bob, weave, feint, and, above all, throw a rifle-straight sockerino without hesitation. It’s the closest we ever got together, me shuffling around him, terrified of body contact with hostile intent, backing off, pushing my hand out weakly for fear of retribution, my coward’s eyes locked into his flashing glare, growing clumsier by the second. In school-yard brawls, I was famous for “fighting like a girl” by scratching, hairpulling, screaming, going absolutely nuts, which was my way of blanking out fear of close combat. But you couldn’t do that with Dad, who insisted on strict ring etiquette and punches that really hurt. The one time I lost it and launched myself at him with a high-pitched feminine scream and clawlike fingers, he stopped, astonished, and simply knocked me down with a punch to my jaw. He stood over me, shaking his head. “Who teaches you this stuff?”

  Of course he blamed Jennie.

  My father did not gratuitously beat me up, ever. Instead, when discipline was called for, like so many men of his generation he took a leather shaving strap off a wall hook and whopped my ass with it despite, and I suspect because of, my mother’s intervention. “Leo, slaght nist der kint. Mir sind a haim,” she’d cry. (Don’t hit the child. We are a family.) My Dad would step back and raise his hands in mock surrender, with a smile that said to me, What kind of kid needs a skirt to save him?

  I kept wanting to prove to Dad that I was who I pretended to be with my pals, a tough guy. So sometimes I’d swallow my fear and ask him to step into the “ring” to teach me how to box properly, and he’d say, “Not when your mother’s around.” Just once, when she was off at a meeting of her Riga-Baltic Progressive Ladies Society, he took me up, instructing me how to assume the Dempsey crouch, chin tucked into my left shoulder with my right hand cocked for an explosive haymaker, then he circled in front of me: “Okay hit me, sonny boy.” The dread moment. I threw a punch as hard as I could without the banshee scream. It bounced off his arm. “Okay okay,” he snorted a breath, shuffling in front of me, and whap! stars exploded and the hard wooden floor rushed up to my aching head. Dad said, “I forgot to tell you about the rabbit punch.”

  What did I have to do to win his approval?

  If I couldn’t beat up Leo Sigal, I could at least whip everyone else around me, so I tried Dad’s rabbit punch on the back of Ike Lerman’s head and he hit me with his shoe, so I shot him in the face with my rubber gun, which caused Julie Wax to pick up a half-eaten coconut custard pie from a garbage can and push it into my face and since Julie was a better fighter than me I made a scandal of myself by turning around to hurl acorns at ringleted yeshiva bocchim on their walk to temple. “Why do you do these things?” Ma asked. She’d never get it. In my misbegotten brain I thought if I beat up enough people Dad would love me more. But I explained to Ma, best I could, how I was two people, Kid Good who had no control over Kid Evil. Today my Joe gives me exactly the same reason for his disobedience.

  Dad came and left us according to laws of his own nature and how badly our business was doing, vanishing without a word or a note and months later reappearing as if he’d just stepped out for a moment to the corner drugstore for a tin of Prince Albert tobacco. Yet even in his absences he was present in me, a living force, as I ascended a scale of delinquency that was sure to impress him. Shoplifting, hubcab-stealing, reasonless fistfights, baseball card scams, I was a one-man riot of petty crimes that had to get Dad’s attention, even if from afar. One way or another, he’d be so proud of his son.

  In the escalating quarrels between Jennie and Leo (“There are no jobs!” “Go out and look, you won’t find them in a pinochle deck!”), her cold contempt locked into his self-defense where I instinctively sided with Dad, for whom I felt absolute love and awe. Why did Ma have to get at him so?

  But it was Jennie who owned me and poured everything she had into me. Raised, suckled, fed, showed me how to tie my shoelaces, dressed me warm for the snow, knotted my tie the first day of school, was there when I came home, expressed outrage or sorrow at my behavior, received my lies, signed my report card, was there. I nearly hated her for it at times.

  Because Dad was mostly gone he was a mythical figure in the shadows; Jennie was my reality, and I preferred living in the myth.

  Until her string snapped.

  Cook’s Boy

  “Ayeeee!”

  I ignored her cry for help because my head was stuck in the small Bakelite Admiral desktop radio where The Romance of Helen Trent was blotting out the streetcar traffic outside.

  “Ohhhhh—” A groan.

  Aged eleven, I strolled out the back door of the Family Hand Laundry to see Jennie wrestling herself out of an open manhole cover in the narrow passageway that ran along the backs of the Kedzie Avenue shops. She had accidentally fallen in all the way up to her hip, the skirt of her housedress jammed against the pubics, one naked leg completely out of sight, the other askew on the pavement, as she used her elbows for leverage to keep from sinking further into the sewer below. The earth was about to swallow her up, my dream of orphanhood about to be realized; the Marks Nathan orphan home would have to take me now. She looked so absurd I laughed. As she sweated and struggled to extricate herself, she looked up at me in mute appeal, so I stepped over her truncated body and put my hands under her armpits to leverage her out of the open manhole, then let her lean on me as a crutch to limp into the store’s back room. One of her legs already was purple and bruised. I sat her down, opened up a package of Pall Mall cigarettes she always carried in her housecoat pocket, lit it with a kitchen match, and gave the smoking life preserver to her. Her eyes welled with tear
s she refused to shed.

  “Why did you laugh at me?”

  My usual helpless shrug. How to explain the comic terror of the world turning on its head?

  “It looked funny,” I muttered.

  She sprawled in the kitchen chair, her bruised leg straight out in front of her, staring at her prince.

  “Sometimes,” she observed, “I don’t understand you.”

  There was no way for an eleven-year-old to explain the ambivalence of his feelings of being caught between a mother who was always there and a drop-in dad who wasn’t. Leo might came on tough but Ma was the real balabusta, the undisputed boss; and bosses, in our worldview, were to be reviled. But what if your mother is your balebos, the woman who wears the pants as so many wives and mothers did in the Depression? There is a confusion of sexual identities, and, though the anxiety this causes may be useful to a future writer, it can tear a kid apart.

  I like to pretend it’s all behind me now. But there he is, Joe, the age I was then, in all his glory, acting out the emotions that I—and most of my soldiers’ generation—covered up under penalty of going mad. Joe, too, is fighting a two-front war against my wife and me, for his viability and independence. Good luck to him.

  A few days after Ma dropped into in the manhole in the summer of ’37, with Dad temporarily back in the store, she simply lost patience with things in general and took off with me in a Greyhound bus with a direct connection to South Haven, Michigan, Chicago’s major Jewish summer vacation colony, a borscht belt without the mountains. Dad was left behind to manage the unmanageable store. “Let’s see how he likes it for a change,” she said.

  All the way to the Michigan state line I hummed Tommy Dorsey’s “Music, Maestro, Please” and when that didn’t get her attention crooned the words into her ear, “Tonight we musn’t dream of love …” She sighed contentedly, “My little Caruso.”