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

  Mrs. Strauss raised a third, dubious alternative. Since my IQ and general aptitude tests slotted me as “low normal” but with a faint trace of numeracy, “in your own best interests” I could be placed in Jones Commercial, Chicago’s only public high school specializing in business skills. No more options, no further leniency.

  In my ever-growing experience with them, caseworkers named Strauss, Adler, and Loeb were usually high-German Jews from Lake Shore Drive, Chicago’s Park Avenue, who looked upon us street yids as inferior and barely salvageable beasts.

  Mrs. Strauss stared at me with concern and loathing. I was the nightmare that justified her charity avocation, an unredeemed Jewish bum, ah yunge stain in an orange satin shirt I wore specially for my trial.

  I looked over at Jennie. She gave away nothing.

  The fix was in. My sins were listed in the file folder that lay open on the table. Riot and affray (the Angie Lombardo fiasco); shoplifting (accomplice to stealing a Raleigh bicycle piece by piece from the Sears and Roebuck basement display); disturbing the peace and defacing religious property (“BANISH GODS FROM THE SKIES AND CAPITALISTS FROM THE EARTH” scrawled in Crayola crayon on synagogue steps); assault, along with Julie Weinberg and other Rockets beating up an older guy who had taken Julie’s sister into the park bushes; leaving a dead rat in the desk drawer of the algebra teacher (Miss Busby) at school; etc., etc. Compared to Bed-Stuy or Compton today, nothing.

  Across the social workers’ table I gave Jennie my Jimmy Cagney stare and she gave me back her Barbara Stanwyck glare, both of us full of guilt and self-justification.

  “I’ll take Jones,” I muttered. Business school. That meant I wouldn’t get my hands dirty.

  “How’s that? Speak up, young man,” said Mr. Watkins.

  I sold my soul. “Jones,” I repeated.

  Mrs. Strauss stood up. The Jewish Social Service Bureau and the Probation Department would be “monitoring my conduct” and any serious infraction would necessitate—their language—a “reassessment of my educational opportunities.” Meaning, juvie detention at Montefiore.

  But I wasn’t a criminal, just an ordinary west side boy who had come to somebody’s attention.

  Mrs. Strauss smiled and reached over in a maternal gesture to gently muss my helmet of thick black hair, combed straight back like Dad’s, and shrank back as if touching dog turd. She stared down at her hand, gooey with my soft perfumed varnish of Wildroot Crème Oil. I beamed. It looked just like jizzem.

  Jennie and I rode home on the streetcar in silence.

  “Ma,” I said.

  “Not a word,” she snapped.

  “But why?”

  She turned to look right into my eyes.

  “Your father isn’t here anymore. I am. Get used to it.”

  Jennie and I were approaching critical mass. In the house, I’d sway my hips and hold out my arms for her to dance with me while I crooned the Peggy Lee hit, “Why Don’t You Do Right?”, or idly toyed with her red, slightly graying hair at the dinner table (“Stop it, you know I hate that!”), or blow down the back of her neck as I zipped up her dress before she went out, all the while mimicking my current idol, the Glenn Miller saxophonist, ape-jawed Tex Beneke, fingering his instrument and wailing my heart out in tuneless howling songs of hunger and temptation. We had gone beyond incest to something too electric to touch.

  After lights out, sleeping close together on separate beds, our habit was to call out softly to each other in the darkness across the oceanic space that separated us, a good night consisting of words I picked up in Miss Adamson’s Spanish class. We would reach out and caress each other’s hand.

  “Buenas noches,” I’d murmur.

  I could not fall asleep without receiving my mother’s benediction in return.

  “Buenas noches,” with a Yiddish-Jewish-Ukrainian lilt.

  Inevitably, one night, pretending to be asleep, I crawled off the couch and into her Murphy bed, snuggling up against her bare arm, my hand on her hip. It felt warm and cozy, a blissful return to childhood.

  Her body grew rigid. Pretending to sleepwalk, I retreated to my couch and began to snore.

  That’s when a frightened Jennie blew the whistle for the social workers to come blasting in like SWAT cops.

  On a snowy Monday morning, on a side street called Plymouth Court in Chicago’s Loop a block away from the burlesque district, like a bank robber I cased Jones Commercial’s old building to figure what gang of guys went there. I waited, and waited. At last, among the crowd of girls, two or three boys filed in, silent and carrying briefcases, heads down as if following an invisible track, to be swallowed up by the chattering crowd.

  Nobody had told me.

  Jones was a girls’ school.

  Never before or since have I felt under such sustained assault on my sexual ego as at Jones. My self-image as a Lawndale lover and carnal know-all collapsed overnight. One or two girls on a streetcorner, even a giggling clique, I could hondle or outmaneuver. But all these Amazons-in-being at Jones? Their very existence—their femaleness—threatened my existence. There were too many of them to single out for fantasy—almost. On top of which I was sweet on one girl, Beatrice Podolnyi, a sexually fully developed classmate in typing and steno class. The awful thing was, she was friendly, charming, tactful, lovely. Nice. And she treated me like a … pal.

  In my first Jones Commercial semester I got into a fight in the neighborhood with a gang of “goy boys” outside a Madison Street bowling alley. They jumped me on a Jewish holiday. (Them: “Hey, kid, what church you go to?” Me (quickly looking around for spires): “Um, St. Barrabas …” Them: “There ain’t no such church.” Bam! Right in my mouth.) I spent that weekend anxious about what I would look like on Monday with a puffed split lip and a cut over my eye. I needn’t have worried because at school nobody noticed. Like Jesus I could have spilled my blood right in front of them and they would have walked on past. Suddenly I was aware of my acne, mismatched socks, oversize ears and gargoyle presentation-of-self. They didn’t notice. Beatrice most painfully of all.

  I’d show them.

  But they showed me.

  Frances, or Frankie, Lebedeff, known as “Slugger,” was the only one of Jones Commercial’s four hundred girls who came from my own Lawndale neighborhood. Most of the other girls were Wasp or Catholic from high schools way out across the racial divides, in enemy country, from schools like Sullivan, Gage Park, and Maria Assumpta. The girls looked like they all had meathead brothers who drank beer in taverns called Policek’s or Hruba’s or O’Reilly’s. You could tell by the virginal way they fixed their hair, not a perfect follicle out of place, no eye shadow, the merest trace of lipstick, intimidating crosses on their healthy chests, that Jones girls were what I wasn’t used to: nice.

  Except for Slugger, who was built like the ten-sport Olympic athlete Babe Didrickson; a solid chunk of female, except breastier and with two prominent gold teeth. Her lay-down-collar blouses showed a startling amount of cleavage; she even walked like a stripper, swinging her hips, free and easy, well oiled. Slugger’s “steady” was my fellow Rocket, Legs Glasser, who’d dropped out of school to be a full-time bookie’s runner at Putty Anixter’s poolroom and to raise the cash to get married. They were spoken for, foreordained: to the best of my knowledge, they are still married to each other.

  Slugger was intimidatingly sexual. When Legs came visiting they held hands and snogged in the hallways, yet no teacher dared confront Slugger, who exuded a faint air of physical threat, a Lawndale survival tool even for girls. Curiously, she was popular with the other Miss Prims at Jones because she was so openhearted and easy about herself in ways they could only envy. Her rough husky laugh echoed through the whitewashed halls; it was like having Mae West enrolled at your school.

  I hung about on the fringe of Slugger’s clique, neither a full-fledged boy nor an honorary girl but an in-between, bristling with unvoiced, sexually indeterminate rage, I suppose because my “masculine identity” was under
siege at Jones, an ultimate humiliation for a machismo boy. Over time in the old neighborhood, I had painstakingly sculpted a whole new persona for myself: not one-ball-down one-ball-up crybaby Fatty, but a sixteen-year-old faithful copy of my Dad, a suave ready-to-rumble man-about-town. But at Jones Commercial, in my newly bought second-hand business suit, garrot tie, neatly parted hair sans Wildroot, shined Florsheims, and filed fingernails inspected every morning by Mrs. Craig, the typing-and-stenography teacher, I was Señor No Balls, looking more like a department store floorwalker than a hoodlum movie star like George Raft. But with Montefiore reformatory hanging over my head and my every step under the scrutiny of a juvenile court judge, what choice did I have except to knuckle under?

  Being a boy in a girls’ school is no fun except in theory. This was it, your life was on a path as straight as a Chicago street, you were going to work for a living forever plus a day. Ma and Dad had ironed starched collars, I would wear one for the rest of my life.

  Every morning when I swung into Plymouth Court off Harrison Street it felt like walking the Last Mile to the gallows. Hardly anybody else seemed to mind as much as I did; the girls were happy to be in Jones because most came from Depression-damaged families and were drawn by Jones’s promise of a marketable skill and a job, a future. Before marriage, of course; the role model was Ginger Rogers in Kitty Foyle, who married the boss’s son. But where was the role model for the only boy in Jones’s one hundred-year history to major in stenography?

  Billy Rose, Fanny Brice’s showman-songwriting husband (“Does the Spearmint Lose Its Flavor on the Bedpost Overnight?”), was held out to me as a possible inspiration. Famously, he had started out by winning a “world’s fastest stenographer” contest at sixteen. Maternally buxom, florid-faced Mrs. Craig, my sharp-eyed typing and secretarial teacher, was encouraging. “Mister Rose is of your persuasion, isn’t he, Clarence? His real name is Sam Rosenberg, but he didn’t let that stop him …”

  For four long semesters I drifted along in a kind of neutered haze in Jones’s waxed-to-perfection halls. We were expected to be, and were, little business robots. Clarence B. Carey, the school principal, a former Hearst newspaper editor, liked to call us “Jones Incorporated.” His pledge to students, always honored, was to find every graduate a paid job as a clerical employee for a major company like Pullman, R. R. Donnelly, Armour, Swift, McCormack, the Board of Trade and other pillars of Chicago’s war-flush businesses—all of them patriarchal, hierarchical, and bitterly antilabor. Ironically, our school was located close by Haymarket Square, site of the 1886 riot where eight policemen and four bystanders were blown up by a bomb hurled by nobody knows whom during an anarchist meeting. The four German immigrants framed and hanged for the crime—Albert Parsons, August Spies, George Engle, Adolph Fischer—were honored names in our home. My mother was a friend of Albert Parson’s widow, Lucy, who had died only last year in a house fire.

  How could Jennie have flung me into this training ground for scabs?

  Tap tap, tap TAP TAP, slap a crashing right hook to the Underwood typewriter carriage return, stare straight ahead at the blackboard, both eyes up, head erect, shoulders back. Tap tap, tap TAP TAP. The mesmeric clatter of machines launched me into an out-of-body experience, floating me like a hundred-eyed spider up to the ceiling to swoop back down on the typing class of Jones girls, with their neatly combed tied-at-the-nape spinster-style buns, this divine hell of cascading hips, breasts, naked legs, hair, eyes, necks, ears, more breasts, a Busby Berkeley chorus line of erupting nubility, a regiment of bras under skintight sweaters near to bursting at the nipple, my maddening eye searches under the warp of faux-angora for the ski-jump silhouette, avalanches of flat, full, and fuller chests. Exhale, inhale. O God. I’m going to faint.

  My fuse overloaded, I got into the habit of excusing myself in class to go into the boys’ bathroom and, locking myself in a cubicle, whack off to a mental harem of Jones girls, as many of them as I could cram into my overcrowded fantasies. Two, three, four times a day, whence I emerged from the bathroom pale, drained, and exhausted. I could hardly lift the basketball in the tiny gym where the Jones boys, all five of us, met for phys ed under the mistrustful eye of Miss Sibley, who had short hair and Bronko Nagurski calves. I’d come from Marshall High, the All-City hoop champs, and I wanted to show Lawrence, Leo, and Donald some tricky west side moves. But, weakened by what Father Lenihan ticketed as the sin of self-abuse, I stumbled around the court like a zombie.

  Then one day while everyone else was in class, I emerged from the bathroom in a half-daze only to encounter Slugger stubbing out a furtive cigarette and staring at me from across the hall. Smiling broadly, she strolled over and hooked her arm in mine. “I know how to stop Legs doing that. Need some help?” I gave her a punch, she pushed me back, and our buddyship was sealed.

  And then the movie star Errol Flynn got me into the worst trouble of my life.

  “OH-H-H, ERROL! HEY, LOVER MAN! WOO-WOO!”

  Rockets, on their way to after-school jobs in the Loop, were in the habit of stopping by Jones Commercial and, with all the might of their sixteen-year-old lungs, hurling insults and obscenities they hoped would rub it in that I was no longer in Marshall High with them. By sheer luck, one of their shouts hit the mark too well.

  “’Bye, Errol. See you in jail!”

  Instantly, the contagion spread from the snow-covered sidewalk outside Jones into its classrooms and hallways.

  A few of the girls, leaning on the frosty windowsills whenever the Rockets paraded by, picked up on it. “Hel-lo, Errol,” they’d warble, “how’s Peggy?” or “Oh-h-h-h, Errol, sweetheart …” or “Clarence, I mean Errol, you make my heart go pitter-patter. Ha ha ha!” Like a virus, the joke propagated all over the school, teasing, taunting, kidding, sickening me with its cruel mockery. Until last year I’d been an overweight, ungainly, waddling kid with an undescended testicle and women’s breasts I was so ashamed of that I hid in an ROTC uniform rather than expose my naked body in swim class. Back then everyone seemed privy to the secret that I was faking it as a man. “What’s up with our little girl?” Dad would say to Jennie. Some joke. Being in a young ladies’ school affirmed my nullity: “Jones Incorporated” robbed me of the one thing I’d made of myself, a street guy with a smart mouth. It pushed me back to being, once again, a potential hermaphrodite, a canceled check.

  The bitter irony was that it was my uber-hero Errol Flynn who was laying a stone on my grave. For years on the street I’d copied his Robin Hood derring-do, his crooked grin, the pugnacious set of his jaw so like my Dad’s, his daring swordplay and defiant laughter in the face of overwhelming odds, my wool cap set exactly at his cocky angle. But in reality, Robin had been caught cheating on Maid Marian. Presently, Flynn was on trial in a Los Angeles federal court facing prison for the statutory rape on his yacht of two fifteen-year-old girls, one of them a stunning brunette sex dream named Peggy La Rue Satterlee. Jones Commercial girls spoke of little else outside the classroom.

  And then the busy little bees of their darting tongues stung me.

  “Errol, sweetheart …”

  Teasing, pitiless, persistent, strident, up and down Jones’s waxed-floor corridors, on the staircases, in the lunchroom, Errol this and Errol that, it got so I was afraid even to go to the bathroom to jerk off because I was so sure everyone’s eyes were on me. (My basketball game improved markedly.) At first flattered, I realized what they were telling me: I was a monster not of sexuality but of comic ridicule, the very opposite of cute and dashing. It soon got worse, much worse. A sort of hysteria erupted and swiftly spread. Girls I didn’t even know jeered right in my face. “Errol Errol …” Gargoyle-sneering, inflamed, goading. Nothing so bad had ever happened to me in the neighborhood; I would have fucking killed anyone who persecuted me like this. But who could I slug at Jones without bringing down on my neck the Damocles sword of a juvenile judge and the Jewish Social Service Bureau? It was all the fault of my stool pigeon mother.

  As the
Flynn trial went to jury in L.A. amidst banner headlines, the voices at Jones took on a screeching, openly hostile tone. These well-mannered bobby soxers were metastasizing into cawing crows, throwbacks to their village grandmothers hurling scorn at some strange man because they had no other outlet for their oppression. And then the name-calling turned physical.

  Even the nicest girls joined in. Girls I hadn’t even looked at. Joyce and Margly and Ardell and Betty Jane and Edith and Fern and a flying squadron of Marys poked me in the ribs, trod on my heels, elbowed me aside on the stairs, slammed sledgehammer blows on my back. “Oooooooo Errol, you send me … Darling, Errol, I’m not doing anything Saturday night. Ha ha ha ha.”

  What made it infinitely worse was that Beatrice Podolny, a gentle and lovely girl, the only classmate I dared to be in love with, also turned on me, screaming with horrible laughter and yes, actually kicking me!

  Then they began pulling my hair.

  I dreaded leaving class because it was like walking into a flock of vampire bats. Everyone in school, including teachers, knew what was going on and nobody stopped it. Something had happened to transform these Miss Prims into the worst bullies I had ever faced in my life. Who could I complain to? I could stop this bullshit with a single punch—and end up behind Montefiore’s high yellow walls.

  “Hey, quit your kidding … okay I get it … enough already …” I pleaded, my whole personality collapsing in a final cringing and whining indignity. But begging the girls to stop only inflamed them more.

  Half a dozen of them would surround me in the hallway and pick, pick, pick at my clothes, tear at my hair, or knee me from behind. One morning after accounting class, I felt a stinging sensation on my neck. A girl had raked her unlacquered nails like a dagger just below my ear. The pocket handkerchief I put there came away stained with blood.