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

  Jennie sat down on the ruined bed to survey the damage. Then out came the usual Pall Mall to clear her mind.

  I was surprised at how unsurprised she was. My mind raced through a list of my potential assassins but there were too many to count, topped by Melvin Abrams whom I’d tripped and sent sprawling down the stairs at Howland Elementary and who now wore his broken wrist in a plaster cast which he swung at me in the playground like a medieval mace.

  Jennie chain-smoked and was figuring how to tell the Orkins, to whom we owed back rent.

  She decided: “Forget it, it’s just one of those things.”

  Not to me, it wasn’t. Fists and chunks of coal inside ice-snowballs were legit but bombs were not.

  “Why would anyone do this to us?” I asked.

  At first, she dodged my questions, then said, “It wasn’t us they were after.”

  “Who then?”

  She was silent.

  Light bulb flashes on. She was the target.

  Jennie sighed, “We’ll move again. It’s a bad neighborhood.” That was crazy, the neighborhood was all I had.

  “We calling the cops?” I asked. She gave me her patented are-you-out-of-your-mind? look and stubbed out her cigarette.

  “I’ll take care of it,” was all she said, gathering up the burned bedsheets.

  I’ll take care of it. Kids’ minds are like Enigma decoding machines, and suddenly, in that bomb-seared room, I flashed on a picture of Jennie not as my mother but as a woman with a separate secret life independent of me. She was Greer Garson, who had a dark secret. It made sense. I blurted:

  “I’m a bastard like those kids in the movie, right?”

  Her back to me, Ma’s reply came as quick and trite as Garson’s dialogue: “There are no illegitimate children, only illegitimate parents!”

  Bull’s-eye! Somehow Blossoms in the Dust and the blast in our bed had temporarily shaken Jennie loose from her impulse to cover up.

  I parked myself on the scorched bed. “Ma, honest, double cross my heart and hope to die, it’s great to be illegitimate.” The words tumbled out before my brain thought them.

  And then, because I believed it was a cute and obliging thing to do, I quoted lines from the poet Ogden Nash, whose doggerel was to me the height of sophistication:

  The work that killed her saved my mother’s life.

  … our parents forgot to get married

  Our parents forgot to get wed

  Did a wedding bell chime

  Our parents were always somewhere in bed …

  Completely out of character, Jennie burst into tears, her shoulders convulsively shaking with the effort to hold them in. She held onto the edge of the bed to steady herself, then got up and went to the busted window to look out, and I went to stand next to her. We made no move to clean up. For the longest time she simply stared out.

  I slipped between her and the window to shield her from whatever it was outside. The person who had done this had to be female, I knew, because the previous week, on my own, I’d gone to Hitchcock’s Rebecca and found out all about a woman’s twisted heart. Somewhere out there was a wronged wife with a vengeance lust, just like Max de Winter’s jealous housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers.

  I came into Jennie’s arms, a rare event between us, and for once said the right thing.

  “Whatever happened, Ma, we didn’t do anything wrong.” We. Her and me.

  I went into a boxer’s crouch just like Dad taught me, feinting a mock slo-mo uppercut to her chin, my body language saying, Hey it doesn’t matter nor anything else you’re doing on the q.t., it’s all jake with me.

  And that was that. Nothing more that day or ever afterward was said about it. Flame-haired Greer Garson, her hair the exact color of Jennie’s at the age she gave birth to me, gently shut the door on the secret Ma had borne so heavily for so long, so alone.

  On the following Monday after school, I went to the Douglas Park branch library and requested a dictionary at the reference desk. I looked up “illegitimate,” which said “against the law; illegal; born out of wedlock.” How satisfying. Wedlock certainly was how you’d describe what Jennie and Leo had going; the word itself suggested a jail. And “against the law” and “illegal” were nothing new since we’d lived so much of our lives on the other side of the penal code. It took a few days for me to completely register my new status, but the more I thought about it the better I liked it. Indeed, I began to look around at the other Rockets with a certain pitying condescension because—unless I was wrong—none of them bore the mark of my distinctive bastardy. I loved new words and looked this one up in other languages. Bastardo, batarde, salaud, cabron, mamzer, wang ba dan … and walked around the neighborhood talking quietly to myself, cabron, wang ba dan …

  A perfect fit.

  And I vowed that, whatever other sins I might commit against Jennie, that’s one she wouldn’t have to suffer. This we’d do together.

  Before Karl Marx There Was Billy Jurges

  I was six, nine, and twelve when the Chicago Cubs, the city’s stellar team until the White Sox broke an eighty-eight-year curse by winning the 2005 World Series, won their last three National League pennants, long before a fan (Steve Bartman, may God protect him) tipped the ball out of Moises Alou’s glove causing the mentally shaken team to lose a 2003 World Series chance to the Florida Marlins. That’s when the Cubs rocked, and I drew the natural conclusion that hard times bred hard men who could swing a bat somewhere other than on a picket line. My passion for the big red C inside the blue circle was nearly pathological. I memorized the lineup and batting averages (nobody, in an era when players drank in the dugout, bothered to count fielding stats), and talked myself to sleep mumbling a slow poetic reading of the Cubs’ team roster. Gabby Hartnett, Babe Herman, Hack Wilson, Phil Cavaretta, Stan Hack, Woody English, KiKi Cuyler, Big Bill Lee, Lon Warneke—In time, I was absolutely certain to replace Cuyler as the Cubs’ center fielder. I had the chatter, the pepper and the right moves; all I needed was a decent mitt and talent.

  Most other Rockets were White Sox fans, but what other team than the Cubs could boast an infielder like iron man Billy Jurges, shot twice by his mistress Violet and then returns to the lineup in three weeks?

  I lived for spring Opening Day, as a fan and as a sandlot pickup player. None of this Little League shit, no grown-ups admitted. At summer’s dusk, I’d stroll out to an empty lot, which was grown over with the most amazing variety of exotic weeds and city-flowers, stand alone on a nonexistent pitcher’s mound, in my hand a beaten-up Wilson softball with the horse-hide half torn off showing the core of packed rubber bands, and mimic the windup-and-delivery moves I’d heard described on Pat Flanagan’s tickertape radio commentaries. (Flanagan, like his downstate colleague “Dutch” Reagan, had a genius for faking the action on games played hundreds of miles away from his broadcast booth.) I had a beautiful follow-through kick.

  I don’t remember my father or mother or anyone else’s parents ever attending a Rockets ball game: an adult hanging around a kids’ playground would have drawn the attention of a policeman or prying bubbeh. Benign neglect by grownups—better yet, being bored by us—was a liberating force. Today, Little League, with us caring parents, supportive coaches, hired umpires, bat bags, masks, shin guards, and uniforms, strikes me as an absurdity. Yet, despite all, I have become a Little League dad of the worst sort. If Joe strikes out looking, it’s a knife in my heart; he makes a nifty force-out at second, my soul sings. I’m in seventh heaven when he’s up there pitching. Such cool control! My little Roger Clemens. But when Coach removes Joe to give other kids a chance on the mound and puts him in right field—the daydreamer’s position, my favorite—I find myself in such a (silent) rage that it’s easy to sympathize with the Texas “cheerleader mom” who plotted to murder her daughter’s main rival at high school. As usual, baseball is a mirror of my true character.

  This season, Joe and I have been pitching and catching a lot of ball together, fielding webjams (line driv
es he has to stretch for like Willie Mays), everything but sliding, which we both hate. At dusk when the light isn’t so good—that’s my story—I drop the ball now and then. “Let’s face it, Clancy,” he comes up to plop the ball into my Derek Jeter-signed glove. “You’re not much good at anything except being a Dad.”

  War in Europe broke out on September 3, 1939. The Cincinnati Reds whipped the Cubs five nil in the series.

  Overnight, Billy Jurges faded in favor of “Peter Wimpole,” a name I wholly invented for an English boy my age in an imaginary gas mask who cowered in an air raid shelter. My Peter, a mental composite of newsreel images of children evacuated from about-to-be-blitzed London, became my very personal responsibility. I’d talk to him about the war, his favorite Royal Air Force planes, his family, is the gas mask sweaty? and was farm life hard on a city boy? Of all my pretend friends, from Tarzan to Prince Valiant, Peter Wimpole became the best because I had created him myself.

  The 1939 baseball season was a bust anyway. The Cubs came in fourth in the pennant race, which I blamed on manager/catcher Gabby Hartnett’s purchase of the pitcher Dizzy Dean from our archrivals, the St. Louis Cardinals. It was obvious that Dean was a spy sent in from the German-filled town of St. Louis to destroy the Cubs’ World Series chances.

  To hell with baseball, anyway. Well, almost.

  9 Die, Yankee Dog!

  Let’s remember Pearl Harbor

  As we go to fight the foe

  And remember Pearl Harbor

  As we do the Alamo …

  —jukebox favorite

  7:55 A.M. HONOLULU TIME. In Chicago it’s a cold bright Sunday noon. People look up at the clear blue sky only rarely when they hear the engine drone of an overhead plane or the strange feathery rustle that sparrows and finches make when they impulsively dart around in packs. THWACK! I strong-armed the thread-trailing softball over the roofs of parked cars, over the heads of the Horowitz brothers on base, and it sailed up the street to land on the stoop of our latest home at 4104 Grenshaw by the Sears railroad siding on Chicago’s west side. It was the longest hit I’d made in pickup baseball all year. Finally, at fifteen I was getting into my stride as the next “Hammerin’ Hank” Greenberg, the Detroit Tigers’ first baseman.

  Jennie, in a flapping flowered housedress exposing her naked thigh, instantly shattered my Hall of Fame dream when she came stumbling down the stone steps of the two-family graystone residence screaming, “The Japanese! Bombing Hawaii!” Rounding second base between manhole covers, I was mortified by another one of her lies; lately she’d been doing it a lot. “Ma,” I yelled, “g’wan home, okay, you’re embarrassing me.” What would she think of next?

  Jennie’s cry of havoc in her housedress shamed me on the street. Normally she never left the house in anything but full Lane Bryant-and-Max Factor armor, so either she’d blown a gasket or the unthinkable had happened, the Japanese had actually torpedoed my winter baseball schedule. Soon there would be snow on the streets and I’d have no chance to practice my up-from-the-knees swing, the Super Jew swat. And, as neighbors came running into the street and Ma’s tale was confirmed, I was totally pissed because the Pearl Harbor attack simply didn’t fit in with my carefully constructed analysis of world events. How could I be so wrong?

  In the 1940s you were not considered off-the-planet weird if you were into hard-core politics as well as street corner gangsterism. It was a sort of white ethnic pre-Blackstone P Rangers thing. (Later the Rangers would rule Lawndale.) Some boys coped with the “threat of world fascism” by invoking comic book fantasies—Captain Marvel zaps Adolph Hitler—others by denying it, but a few of us adopted a coping strategy of trying to understand as a way of saving our sanity.

  For Midwesterners, certain truths were inalienable. First and foremost, “war is a racket,” in the immortal words of Major General Smedley Butler of the Marine Corps. The Pacific ocean was an unconquerable American lake, Europe the source of all our troubles. War profited only the “merchants of death,” the profit-greedy weapons makers who fanned the fires of brainless nationalism. Simple. America should stay out of other people’s fights. Or, as the popular radio comic, Eddie Cantor, sang every Sunday night, “Let them keep it over there.” Jennie and I argued about it at the time, she the pacifist claiming that Jews had no choice but to fight Hitlerism and I, a lover of military paraphernalia but raised in an antiwar anti-imperialist atmosphere, thinking Why not make common cause with German workers? My feelings about the coming war were all tangled up in other tensions between Ma and me. We fought out our personal and sexual conflicts on a world map, Oedipus at the kitchen table arguing his heart out.

  Our quarrels had gotten more intense after September 15, 1940, a few days after my fourteenth birthday, when three hundred Spitfires rose in the skies over southern England to fling themselves against five hundred Nazi Dornier bombers and their Messerschmitt 109 fighter escorts. It tore me up to betray my imaginary friend Peter Wimpole, but you had to hold the line somewhere, right? In vain, Jennie pointed to the contradiction between my hatred of war and my consuming, obsessive identification with Movietone newsreels of the London children with their brave tearful smiles and gas masks. “Just like your father,” she said. “Right hand a stranger to your left hand.” So? If it was good enough for Leo Sigal, it was excellent for me, I brayed.

  4104 West Grenshaw was only a couple of streets away from Rocket territory, but by the mere act of moving across the Pulaski Road streetcar line I’d exiled myself from our home turf. I was lonely for the boys and kept looking for a substitute Rocket, only to find him in a pale-faced, four-eyed geek with a heart murmur, the kind of kid no self-respecting Rocket ever normally associated with. Never before had I chosen a friend for his brain power, an ultimate betrayal of the Rocket code.

  The new companion of my fears was Barney (Baruch) Herzog, who had a fiercely engaged mind locked inside his shiny high-domed forehead, and a suicidally depressed older sister locked in a dark back room of the family apartment over a butcher’s on Sixteenth Street. Back in the old neighborhood, I would not have given Barney a second glance; but ever since Jennie moved us to the hinterland west of Pulaski, coincident with the first blitz attacks on London, Barney and I had struck up a strange, mismatched friendship. I felt hugely protective toward him because I was his only friend in high school.

  The qualities that put other kids off Barney, his stubbornly belligerent integrity and fierce mode of arguing, were the things that attracted me to him. We’d debate over anything, the shape of postage stamps from Chad, how to spell chlorophyll, but most especially, and bitterly, over American intervention in the coming war. After several fist fights in which I pulled punches because of his heart condition—he hated me for this (“Hit me! Hit me! I’m normal!” he’d cry)—we finally shook hands on a mutually acceptable compromise. Despite a successful fascist uprising in Spain when we were eleven, despite Hitler’s march into Austria and Czechoslovakia, despite the Nazi invasion of Poland and the German bombs rained on London’s children, the war in Europe, we kept telling ourselves, was essentially an “imperialist adventure” dreamed up by DuPont, Vickers, Krupp, and all the other death merchants. Therefore, the only sane response to the war makers was something like the ill-fated Ludlow Referendum, a Congressional proposal requiring a nationally held election before the country could go to war.

  “Don’t you go back on it,” Barney warned.

  “Don’t you,” I said more strongly than I felt.

  Essentially, our radical critique was rooted in a mainstream mind-set that was an almost perfect fit with the established radical pacifism I was born into. From the earliest possible age, I hated war, no doubt partly from a desire to wipe out the war between my parents, but also as a kid’s response to a world collapsing around his ears. The whole “isolationist” popular culture of the Midwest—against involvement in foreign wars—was especially prevalent among ex-soldiers denied their promised World War I bonus by both a Republican (Herbert Hoover) and a
Democratic president (Franklin D. Roosevelt). A sizeable fraction of the heartland’s population, much of it German immigrant stock, in Wisconsin, Minnesota, North and South Dakota, and Illinois, was opposed to, or lukewarm about, this new “Good War.” “Pulling England’s chestnuts out of the fire” was a commonly heard phrase, trumpeted by the region’s most widely read newspaper, the Chicago Tribune. An often radical pacifism was the conventional wisdom in prairie states like Illinois. Once, in a failed experiment at giving me “culture,” my mother briefly pushed me into a Workmen’s Circle school on Ogden Avenue, where on the classroom wall hung a grisly photograph of a living soldier with his face blown away from forehead to chin. For me, this faceless guy became a central image of any war—a warning, a nightmare.

  That Sunday evening, December 7, after my ball game, Barney Herzog and I met as usual over a Monopoly board in his family’s gloomy flat. “Roosevelt got us into this war,” Barney asserted, moving to Park Avenue, and for the first time I wavered. “Maybe,” I replied feebly, going to Jail, “it’s all a misunderstanding,”—like the U.S. navy vessel Panay that the Japanese “mistakenly” bombed in the Yangtse river. Barney angrily scooped up much of my real estate. “Why were our sailors guarding Standard Oil barges? Any fool can see the Rockefellers are behind it!” He shook a stack of toy currency at me, his eyes piercing me through his thick bottle lenses. “Don’t give up the ship. Fire when ready, Ridley. Horatius at the bridge. Defend the Alamo, Clarence.”

  But our united front was crumbling under the pressure of the war itself. Even though my imaginary English pal, Peter Wimpole, was pressing me to have a rethink, I couldn’t bear letting Barney go, the only boy I’d found on the west side to share my mind with. I had a premonition, the seed of a tremendous guilt, that the attack on Pearl Harbor was going to make Barney lonelier for the rest of his life because I, his only friend, might abandon him to the jocks and yahoos. Unlike me, he was powerless against loneliness and the world’s scorn; at school, nobody chose him for anything, he stank at P. E., was too good at books, and refused to tell dirty jokes. His clever mind and stricken heart, the angry cerebral look of him, put off the other kids. I was his island of safety, he was my braver unconforming self.