by Clancy Sigal
I dropped my books to look after myself.
Still the girls kept at it, their hot little angry eyes devouring me with a kind of aimless joy.
“BACK OFF, YOU PIGS!”
Slugger Lebedeff stepped between the bullies and me swinging her books like a scythe to clear an enemyless space around us. Instantly the commotion died. She was magnificent, standing over me like a gladiator in a skirt. The girls, shocked, retreated. Slugger’s big brown eyes flashed fury. Where had she been all this time?
“Back the fuck off!” She again lunged out with her books sending the girls scurrying. Fuck?! At Jones. One never used bad language at Jones Inc.
The hallway emptied in an eyelash as the bell rang for eleven o’clock classes. Slugger used a handkerchief to dab at my neck. “The fucking asshole bitches.” She breathed fire and for a minute I thought she was going to hit me. Then she flashed her tremendous toothy smile. “Rockets forever.”
“You won’t tell the guys, will you?” I beseeched her.
“Tell what?” she shrugged.
Relief oozed out of me. Slugger was the one person in the world I knew I could count on.
All that last semester we were inseparable. Wherever I walked at Jones in class or hallway, Slugger was a comforting—and menacing—presence. We began riding the same Roosevelt Road streetcar downtown so she could take me to school. My bodyguard.
On graduation night, with her fiance Legs Glasser and my mother Jennie in the audience, Slugger and I strode onto the stage, together, clasping hands, my champion. Rockets forever.
True to its word, Jones found me work as a junior mail clerk with the firm that had the longest antiunion record in America, the Pullman Company at 221 South State Street. In late ’44, coinciding with the Battle of the Bulge, I was drafted. Actually, I volunteered for induction because all the Rockets were gone to the military and I hated being left behind. On my first furlough home, I returned to Jones slim, trim, proud, hard and healthy, and confident in my dress uniform, a sharply tailored “Ike” jacket, paratrooper bloused trousers, dubbined combat boots, my overseas cap with its distinctive blue piping set at a bombastic angle and—chickenshit, this—wearing my Marksman’s medal. I was due to join the Fourth Infantry Division on its way to the Pacific fighting.
I felt terrific, but also had a moment’s uneasiness as I pushed open the big bronze doors of Jones Commercial, arriving in time for change of class when the hallways were full of chattering girls. Everyone I’d graduated with was gone but these others would do; they looked like my former tormentors, even if they gave the visiting soldier admiring glances. (I knew what evil they were capable of.) The hallways emptied on the bell as I slipped into the main office to flip through the faculty mail. The system was, the mail carrier dumped incoming correspondence into a shallow open wooden box so that teachers had to sort through their colleagues’ letters to find their own. Senders’ return addresses were open to inspection and to my delight the most conservative Republican teachers were still getting mail from Communist front organizations on whose lists I’d placed them. Mrs. Craig, so dubious about Jewish boys, even had a fund-drive letter from Freiheit, the Communist Jewish newspaper. Hot dog!
I wandered up and down the stairs, in and out of the corridors, peeking through the glass-paneled doors. Up on the second floor there they were, still at it, Mrs. Hawkins, Mr. Wilkinson, Miss Thorning, Misses Jex, Lynch, Noelle, and—of course—Mrs. Craig, who taught me the only useful trade I’ve ever known, typing. Then it was time to go. But I badly wanted to leave something behind. So, in the dead center of the hall on the superhumanly polished floor that hardly showed scuff marks of generations of girls, I did a little jig in my hobnailed combat boots, stomping down hard, hard, hard, again and again. My boots set up a fabulous racket. Whomp! Whomp! Whomp! Doors swung open, teachers’ heads popped out, Miss Birmingham, Mr. Deal, Miss Bittle. I gave the floor one or two final LOUD licks with my boots, then leaped as high as I could into the air and came down so hard that I left serious gashes.
Thrilled, redeemed, I ran downstairs to the ground floor and I did an impromptu dance outside the principal’s office, where it made a glorious noise. When more doors flew open and plump Mr. Carey emerged pop-eyed from his inner cubicle followed by his clerks and I was sure to have everyone’s attention, I raised my arms and flexed my muscles like Tarzan and let out a tremendous jungle yell:
“ERROL FLYNN! ERROL FLYNN! ERROL FLYNN!”
12 To Name Is to Empower
1943–44:—London V-2 “flying bomb” attacks. PT 109’s skipper Lt. John F. Kennedy saves a crewman’s life in Pacific. U.S. Marines slaughtered when Tarawa atoll assaulted. Janis Joplin born. “Don’t Fence Me In” a hit song.
THE PEARL HARBOR CATASTROPHE was anything but catastrophic for us. The war brought prosperity, or at least a living, to many west side Chicago homes. It also served as an escape valve for all the family pressures that had been building up during ten years of privation. Parents were now at work all day, and kids—prototeenagers—started earning money and the right to live as they pleased. Between Jennie and me, a divorce was pending courtesy of the U.S. army, yet neither of us wanted to let go of the other until the last possible moment. I was the last Rocket standing, all the others having gone into uniform, and each time I tried to enlist in a different branch Ma and I went through a silent little tearless drama of splitting up, packing a shaving kit, strapping a money belt to my naked waist, but there was always an anticlimax when the Navy, Army Air Corps, Marines, and even the Coast Guard rejected me for one small reason or another (bad lungs, flat feet, that tricky testicle, etc.). However, as the war abruptly turned bad in the summer of ’44 when I was seventeen, climaxing in the butchery at the Battle of the Bulge, even the blind, lame, and halt were selected. So my turn had to come next.
Eight of nine Rockets had gone into the infantry (Mendy already had a Bronze Star), and I assumed this was my fate. Dying in battle would be a cinch compared to my unwholesome fear of being buried under a Star of David headstone inscribed “Clarence.” No sir, no way. All that D-Day summer, I experimented first with this, then that new name that I wanted to look just right in a warrior’s cemetery. I’d wander off into new neighborhoods, never Angie Lombardo’s, and introduce myself as Alex, Pat, Jack, Reggie (after one of my favorite radio sleuths), whatever occurred to me at the time. Nothing quite fit.
Then a cleft palate and a speech defect transformed me overnight from a nice little semi-suicidal Jewish boy with absolutely no future into a full-blooded American ready to take my place on the stage of history.
Waiting for my draft papers, I had a part-time stock-boy job at a Loop department store, Goldblatt’s, the pearl of its seven-store chain. The job was fine because mostly I chatted up the sales girls or rode the escalators listening to the Mills Brothers—“You Always Hurt the One You Love”—piped in through the public-address system. Goldblatt’s, with its Corinthian plaster columns, heavy scent from the cheap perfume counters, and constant whoosh of the circulating system of pneumatic tubes delivering customers’ cash and receipts, intoxicated me. It was impossible for even the laziest worker (me) to get fired because wartime businesses were so man-starved. Even when Louis, one of the Goldblatt proprietorial brothers, a small dark man with eyes in the back of his head, erupted in rage at my idleness and chased me onto an escalator, my arms heaped with fake-fur winter coats, and tried to strangle me in a fury at how I was wasting his money, it never occurred to Mr. Goldblatt to fire me. Kids ruled.
Chester, my supervisor in a subbasement department titled “Will Call,” was a partially disabled fellow with a gimpy leg and a malfunctioning palate that gave him a speech disorder. His life wasn’t easy, and I didn’t make it easier by dodging work assignments, which kept him constantly on the public address wailing, shouting, and pleading my name except that the best he could manage with “Clarence” was a strangled thick-tongued “Ku-la-n-see.” “Cla—ence! Ku—lans! Kulansee!” eternally ricocheted
through the store because I was usually asleep curled up inside a hollowed-out counter.
Kulansee!!!! A music department salesgirl giggled when she heard it and told her best friend in Notions who shouted it across the aisle to a passing inventory clerk who mentioned it to a spring frock buyer who told a freight elevator operator and in no time I was …
CLANCY!
Chester had touched me with fairy dust and made me into … well, what was a Clancy?
Not knowing made me feel powerful. This new Clancy was my unmapped future.
Now anything was possible.
In Old Celtic Clancy means “offspring of a redheaded soldier” and if that doesn’t describe Jennie and me, what does?
Jennie in the Snow
A hard sleety snow buffeted the four of us as we trudged up a slushy sidewalk in the Detroit suburb of Royal Oak, Michigan. We—that is, Jennie, my fellow Rocket Nate Manoff in a Sad Sackish 85th Division private’s uniform, his girlfriend Louise, and me in my George Raft velvet collar topcoat—(I was waiting for my draft papers)—approached the only house on the block without Yule trimmings, a plain wood two-story with a snowed-in front porch. In a small nervous voice Louise whispered, “There’s my dad. Oh, God help me.”
Royal Oak was the home of America’s most notorious anti-Semite, the radio priest, Father Coughlin, who’d been so wildly popular that the Pope himself had to slap a lock on his mouth. By some wretched coincidence Nate, on his last furlough before shipping overseas, had met Louise Whittacre, daughter of a Ford foreman and a Christian Fronter from Royal Oak, at a serviceman’s canteen in Detroit. Nate, with his large nose, small stature, and hunched shoulders, looked unmistakably like some bigot’s idea of a Jew, while Louise, with her uptilted prom-queen nose and long dark straight hair, was Miss Gentile America. Both sets of parents—Jewish and anti-Jewish—freaked out beyond reason upon learning of the liaison. The young unnerved couple had begged my mother to intervene and use her negotiating skills to save them from the wrath of their rampaging hormones.
Louise’s father, Mr. Whittacre—it had to be him—stood on his porch in blue overalls holding a short-barrel 12-gauge shotgun on us. He levelled the gun and yelled, “Go back where you came from—and take that Jewish-loving whore with you!” He meant his only daughter Louise. Except for us, leaning into the driving snow, the street was deserted. I liked the formality of his “Jewish,” not kike, sheenie, or Hebe.
How has it come to this? Nate is nineteen, she is seventeen. He has a three-day pass from nearby Camp Custer, she is serving doughnuts to GIs, and somehow in the jam-packed city they find a motel room for the night. Nate goes on to Chicago where his mother screams bloody murder when she finds in his pants pocket the motel bill for “Mr. & Mrs. Nathan Manoff.” Nate makes the mistake of his life by confessing all to his mom which brings on a threat—not to be taken altogether lightly on the west side—of suicide; Mrs. Manoff, devoutly Orthodox, phones the Whittacres in Detroit, Mr. Whittacre locks Louise in her room, Louise escapes out a back window to plead with Nate to rescue her; Nate panics and calls in my mother, who grabs a train for Detroit in the middle of a wartime winter. Now watch:
With a sawed-off aimed squarely at us, Louise begins shaking uncontrollably, trying to wriggle free of Jennie’s iron grip but held firmly on the sidewalk in front of her father’s shotgun. Mr. Whittacre is a dead ringer for Walter Brennan as a very angry Judge Roy Bean in The Westerner. Nate places his arm around Louise, which Jennie smartly slaps away. Whittacre twitches with the effort not to pull the triggers. Now Nate, too, attempts unsuccessfully to escape my mother’s grip but Jennie won’t let go of him either. “Don’t you two dare move,” Jennie commands them in her strike-captain voice. Then she ventures one foot on the lower step of the porch, fishes a Pall Mall from her purse, and politely asks Dad Whittacre for a match. He stares down at her: “Don’t smoke.”
As we near freeze to death on the sidewalk, Jennie launches her pitch. Oh, I knew that tone, the soft soap. Tranquilized and tranquilizing, calming, steady, soothing, no hint of argument or provocation, burbling about the weather, how pretty Mr. Whittacre’s street looks in the snow, just like a picture postcard, the hardship of wartime travel—all without a word from Whittacre or his wife peering at us through her front window curtains. I am pissing in my pants with cold. Jennie flashes her Little-Eva-on-the-ice-floe smile. “Sir, I am a little chilled down here. A hot cup of tea inside?”
I think she is crazy.
Whittacre looks uncertain what to do with his shotgun. Jennie, little step at a time, eases up next to him on the porch and implores, “Or even a small glass of water?” I like that “small.” What an actress! How can he shoot a shivering Chicago Jewess over a little water?
I can’t recall how, but moments later we are all tensely seated in their living room with Dad Whittacre, having parked the shotgun in a corner, proudly showing off Louise’s baby photos. Jennie commiserates. “Tell me, tell me, what happens?” she laments. “Such darling children when they’re little.” She stares disapprovingly at Louise and Nate—and me. “Now look at them.” She shakes her head. “Stubborn. Stubborn as mules. My son over there. I could tell you stories. What is he doing in Detroit in the dead of winter when he should be home with me?” Whittacre relaxes in a wicker chair. “Oh, I don’t know,” he allows, “Detroit isn’t as bad as they say. Would be fine if not for the niggers and Jews, beggin’ your pardon, missus.” Jennie just sits there nodding agreeably. I suspect Mrs. Whittacre knows Ma’s game but is too paralyzed by having a Jewess in her house—three Jews!—to call her on it.
All through the early evening, talking soothing conceding sympathizing—by some magical alchemy of the negotiating process, Jennie parleys a settlement of sorts with the Whittacres. Even though I am there in the room, I don’t exactly know how she does it. In the end, Whittacre and his wife, step by painstaking step, agree to (a) forgive Louise this one time (b) keep her at home but not locked in her room (c) loan her money to enroll for a freshman year at Wayne State College and (d) let Louise reimburse him by working part-time (“The wage I sweat for is not going to pay for her defiling the Lord Jesus,” Mr. W says affably.) In return Nate agrees to stay away from Louise until the following summer, during which he may phone but not visit. While she is grounded Louise must faithfully attend church, but she will not be compelled to appear in front of the congregation to confess her sin as Mr. W at first demanded. In six months there will be a second family conference to decide Louise’s long-term future. “You see,” my mother sweetly concludes, “nobody gets anything their own way in this life. We all give up something. Your daughter has stumbled, but as good Christians you have your obligation to redeem, to lift her up. In God’s good time, that is. Don’t you agree?”
Aghast, I stare at her. The Whittacres are mesmerized. Buying it.
Our skins intact, Jennie and Nate and I skedaddle, leaving Louise behind in the house to her fate. As we slip and slosh down the snow-banked street with white flurries floating down in the lamplight Nate, almost fainting with relief, turns to my mother. “Hey, Jennie, some performance!”
Jennie stops abruptly to face Nate. “You silly—” she searches for the right American word. “—twerp!”
We shuffle on in the snow looking for a taxi on Christmas Eve. I say, “Ma, maybe we should take Louise with us, they’ll kill her.” Jennie shakes her head. “I know his type. He’ll scream from mitvag to dornstag. He’s common. Very common. But you notice? I made him swear on the family Bible. I’ve worked down South where he’s from. Usually they don’t kill in cold blood.”
“I like that ‘Usually,’” Nate says.
“Shut up,” Ma says. “Twerp.”
Of course, Nate Manoff broke the pact by sneaking back to Detroit to see Louise Whittacre while her parents were away on a religious retreat and found Louise in bed with a sailor whom she later married but not before she brought the sailor to Chicago for my mother’s blessing. Nate came back from the war, having lan
ded at Omaha Beach on D-Day-plus-one, missing two of his clarinet fingers, then, like most Rockets, he married a local Lawndale girl. On his wedding day he rang up my mother and me, cohabiting again in our usual one-room flat, this time in Los Angeles. Nate said, “Thank God for Jennie. Louise’s father was right. She was a whore. Your mother saved my life.”
After hanging up I turned to Jennie. “Ma,” I asked, “did you believe any of that stuff in Whittacre’s house?” She lit another Pall Mall before replying.
“Whittacre wanted to make a deal,” she said. “Any fool could see that. But there was nobody to make a deal with. He was helpless. I just made it easy for him.”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “But,” she said, “if it was you who wanted to jump into bed with that slut Louise I would have pulled the trigger on her myself.”
13 Divorce, Chicago Style
1944:—D-Day landings in Normandy. Attempt to assassinate Hitler fails. President Roosevelt elected to unprecedented fourth term.
A STRANGE PEACE SETTLED on my mother and me as a wartime couple. Most of the outstanding issues between us seemed to have been settled or set aside for payment at a later date. We were like two punched-out boxers hanging onto each other in the last round. Because I’d soon follow the other Rockets into uniform, there was nothing left to fight about. Our divorce had already been negotiated, so we could let go and enjoy the west side’s pervasive sense of relief that the worst was over, maybe not in the war itself but in our lives. Something good and greedy was happening to Jennie and me.
The blood cost was high. Gold Stars for a dead son, husband, or brother were showing up everywhere on Lawndale windows, but if it didn’t happen to you personally, or somebody you were close to, you rode a wave of optimism that things were getting better and might even stay that way for a while. Somewhere somehow an idea had taken hold that the war was turning into a great social crusade that would slay the dragon of mass unemployment once and for all. Life was opening up.