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

  Neither Jennie nor I had reckoned on a wild card, the jealousy devil biting my ass. The Corpuscles were taking my mother away from me, I felt, and in a sulk I distanced myself from them and slithered back to the streets to try to regain what I’d lost, my Rocket soul. But all the others were in the military (and Stash in jail) and our basement clubhouse had been taken over by a bunch of younger kids, sixth graders, who called themselves the Daring Dragons and stared at me as if I was the Old Man of the Mountain until, flustered, I backed out in confusion. Upstart little pishers.

  My own choices were to resume my post on the street corner in full zoot suit regalia to hang out with the pishers and 4-Fs or to take up again with the Corpusclers and their new den mother Jennie. But I needed my mama.

  In moments alone I needled her, “You going Communist on me, Ma?” Out came the usual ciggie, the lit match, the lazy smoke ring, looking me in the eye as she suddenly belted out her version of the Communist anthem, the “Internationale.”

  “Arise, ye prisoners of starvation

  Arise, ye RED SHIT of the earth …”

  And howled with laughter at her joke on me.

  P.S. The Corpuscle Quartet lives on in two-and-a-half of its members. After the war, Max Weinstock went to work as a laborer in a steel mill to “colonize” for the party and then became a probation officer in California and had second thoughts about his youthful radicalism, which he said was out of touch with the real human natures of the hardened criminals, rapists, and murderers he dealt with daily. He lost his mind, probably because of an undiagnosed brain tumor, and reverted to exquisite recall of ancient ideological disputes; he couldn’t let them go. In our last dinner together, at Alice Waters’s restaurant, Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, he giggled a lot, slapped his knee, shouted old-time slogans, called the nearby customers “comrade,” and dredged up from his relapsed memory, sneeringly or straight I couldn’t tell, the words of the Russian writer Ostrovsky that were printed in Communist membership booklets,

  Man’s dearest possession is life, and it is given him to live but once. He should so live that dying he can say, “All my strength and all my life have been given to the finest cause in all the world: the struggle for the liberation of mankind….

  Over their coq au vin and apple martinis the Chez Panisse patrons looked extremely uncomfortable at Max’s outbursts and several chose to move to distant tables. I got angry at them and began shouting, too. “What are you scared of? Somebody raised his voice. Big deal. So NPR won’t hire him. Enjoy your meal!” When I said goodbye to Max, he held my hand on his porch and just couldn’t stop laughing at a joke he saw and, at the time, I didn’t. He’s gone now, the boy who believed he could box the circle and resolve every human contradiction through sheer brain power and the force of the Hegelian dialectic. He couldn’t play baseball, football, or buck-buck, but he was Casey at the Bat when it came to having the courage of his convictions.

  Ginger, despite his small frame, also “went into steel” for the Party, sweeping floors and shoveling coal, and survived the McCarthy period when factory workers were flinging lefties like him from top floor windows. Eventually he went on to grad school, took his degree in psychology and became warden of a shelter for homeless boys precisely as he once had been. At our last meeting Ginger professed blank ignorance of our shared past and had to be prompted by his wife to whom he apparently told everything before self-obliterating his political memory, a common condition among “ex-es.”

  Art, the singing satiric troubadour, Lenny Bruce avant le mot, now a scientist on the East Coast, and I are in almost daily contact. Recently he wrote me about his feelings as a young Communist. “It was as raw as naked sex standing up. I never had felt a part of the life around me before I attended [an AYD meeting] … What I felt was an apparently spontaneous and sincere outpouring of warmth and friendship directed at me, personally … I just bathed in it. Joining the party was like getting a medal for service and bravery … If there was a secret handshake, I never learned it. If the feeling of exaltation, of being a comrade among comrades, would not last forever, I could not imagine that it would dissolve. Hey, we were the Corpuscle Quartet and wouldn’t ever break up.”

  But we did.

  D-DAY—WE INVADE HITLER’S EUROPE! the headlines screamed, and it was happening without me.

  The Rockets had gone, and now the Corpusclers, Max (tanks), Art (Merchant Marine and Navy), and Ginger (infantry). Jennie knew she was going to lose me, and at odd moments I’d catch her looking at me as if she was saying goodbye to a seventeen-year-old person neither of us knew very well anymore.

  At Christmas, during the Battle of the Bulge, I was drafted into the infantry. Jennie helped me pack a small bag and gave me a double-thick baloney sandwich laced with Hellman’s mayo and French’s mustard for the troop train that would take me to Fort Sheridan. Awkwardly, we embraced, not knowing where to put our arms and lips. Her self-control was unshakable. We had agreed she’d stay in the apartment and not walk me down to the corner bus. “’Bye, Jennie,” I waved in the hallway. She just stood there mutely and as I went down the stairs I prayed she’d keep her cool.

  Outside a cold snowless day. The Douglas Boulevard bus came and I boarded it. When it began to move I turned in my back-row seat and my heart squeezed hard. Jennie had come out of the building in her housecoat and was running after the bus to keep up with it. Then the driver shifted into drive and rumbled away, leaving her on the sidewalk still running and stumbling, a dwindling figure in the west side landscape. Finally the little person stopped and put her apron up to her eyes.

  At Fort Sheridan I got into the chow line served by fantastic-looking Afrika Korps POWs tanned and hard from the desert war. These were the Nazi giants I wanted to fight? Immediately, I shriveled down to midget size, but as always the wise guy in me came to the rescue. On the off chance there was a secret Red among them I began whistling what I’d always been led to believe was an antifascist tune, “Hans Beimmler.” (“Eine kugel kam geflogen/Aus der “Heimat fur in her …”) The largest POW, an immense guy, sidled up to me inquiring in thickly accented English, “You are Jair-man?” I almost dropped my food tray and stuttered, “J-jew.” He went back to the line of POW servers and whispered to them and they grinned at me, nodding agreeably. Then they all began humming “Hans Beimmler,” in unison, only it sounded like the Nazi anthem “Horst Wessel,” fiery and threatening. (Later, I learned it was an old German folk tune.) My skin crawled. I had to make a gesture, anything. I’d prepared for this moment for years. I had the power. I was an American soldier, they were my prisoner. So why did I feel like theirs?

  I wanted Hitler to know I was from Lawndale, where we took no shit. I went back to the chow line for seconds and as I moved down the serving line I blasted out into the faces of the German POWs the Rockets’ marching song, our nonsensical defiance of everything in life that wanted to kill us:

  We’re the Knutes of Rocket High school

  Colors black and blue, bumdebumdebum

  We always Knute our blair boys

  And our fitzes too, bumdebumdebumdebum …

  Don’t Knute your blair too often

  Or you will not be, be, be, be

  A Knute of good old Rocket High School

  K-N-O-O-T!!

  War Is the Health of the State

  We were soldiers long before the draft notices came. In the limited anarchy of the streets, we kids ruled ourselves, but our moms, dads, and surrounding culture drilled home a contrary lesson, the discipline of keeping pain to ourselves. From Jennie and her generation we learned, despite all our wild games, to shut up and keep marching or die. And then the U.S. Army made official what we’d always known as children, taking shit (orders) was the key to life.

  Rewards for military obedience were real. I had never been better fed, clothed, and looked after than in the service. I made Staff Sergeant and temporarily commanded a regiment (in the absence of a drunken colonel) as Sergeant Major until one of “my” men p
ut an M-1 rifle up against my chin and swore he’d blow my Jew-face off if I made the troops do anymore morning phys ed. Yet I almost re-upped because I’d found a home in the army. When two of my buddies saw me with reenlistment papers at the separation center at Camp Roberts, California, they wrestled the forms away from me and flushed them down the toilet. One of them sneered, “You’re a chickenshit with stripes. I just saved your life, you jerk,” which woke me up to my new civilian reality: the Hitler war was over, the Cold War was starting, and, this time, whoever it was had his sights set squarely on me.

  * Lenin’s notoriously dowdy wife

  15 Venus, Released

  AFTER I LEFT FOR the service, Jennie embarked on a secret mission to track down Leo Sigal in New York under cover of visiting her sister Pauline. My Aunt Fannie testified, “Jennie was crazy about that no-good man. She never even bothered to see Paulie. One thing only on Jennie’s mind, that animal Sigal.” I don’t know if Jennie found my dad or what happened if she did, but when she returned to Chicago she packed up and put 3,000 miles between her and Manhattan, emigrating to postwar Los Angeles to find work in the prospering summer garment industry. In L.A., she settled down as an hourly machine operator at Catalina Swimwear, joined the union, paid her dues, struck when called out, but no longer leaped on tables to stir up the workers or lead wildcat strikes. “The Spanish are coming in with their own language, their own ways,” she observed of the wave of immigrant Latina women supplanting the older generation of Jewish needle trades workers. “Let them organize themselves.” Let them organize themselves? I’d never heard such words from Jennie before. She was getting tired.

  Physically, she was running down—she had put in a five- or six-day week, eight or more hours a day for forty years without letup—and confessed that sometimes while running the machine her mind got caught up in its implacable puk-puk-puk-puk rhythm, taking her back as in a dream to the past and her childhood. She feared going insane. “How would you deal with a crazy mom, Kalman?” She’d shake her head as if to throw off the weight of memory. “But you,” she commanded, “you stay sane, hear? For me.” I was her last great hope.

  As Jennie aged, she became more disappointed in herself for what she felt she had not accomplished compared to her heroines, the President’s wife, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, and Dorothy Thompson, a glamorous and popular newspaper columnist. “Ma,” I’d say, “be realistic.” Meaning, you’re an immigrant girl who left school at twelve, led her first sweatshop strike at thirteen (“The boss hated us going to night school so he kept turning the time clock back, the schnorrer”) and carried a bastard child from a fugitive lover. “Be realistic,” I’d repeat.

  Ma would scan me through her veil of Pall Mall cigarette smoke, “I was realistic—and look where it got me. Dreams are the only real thing. They matter. Hold on to them even when they drive you crazy. You’re old enough now to listen to yourself.”

  Jennie never lost her pride, laced with disenchantment, at what unions had accomplished for their members, even if it hurt her that the younger workers had no idea of the sacrifices of her generation that built the labor movement. “We gave them more money and a better life but where was their education?” It was hard for her to accept that a buck fifty more hourly wage wasn’t accompanied by a huge explosion of interest in Dostoevsky and Verdi. She’d point to the tiny sixteen-inch TV I’d bought her for Christmas. “That’s an education?”

  When I’d lugged the second-hand TV up to her apartment she at first locked it in a closet and regarded it as a personal enemy, although I did once catch her watching I Love Lucy. “I personally knew Lucy when she was a socialist,” Jennie said and I thought, Ma’s losing it for sure. Later it came out in a House UnAmerican Activities session that Lucille Ball had indeed once registered to vote Communist. O Lucy! What would Ricky say? So, even if Jennie’s knees and fingers were stiffening, her mind shone in the old way.

  After the war I moved in with her as a college boy, which crimped both our styles. She badly wanted a grandchild but I was already mentally zipping my bags to get out of the country before somebody nailed me for something. The FBI, two agents with the usual Marine buzz-cut I named “Mutt” and “Jeff” after old-time cartoon characters, regularly dropped by Jennie’s apartment house in L.A.’s Pico-Vermont district to grill her about me, and of course she was unnervingly polite, served them coffee and cake, and sent them away, their ears burning with, “Do your mothers know what you do for a living?” Jennie couldn’t do much about the FBI chief, J. Edgar Hoover, but when I told her that the L.A. police department Red Squad was also snooping around and taking photographs of me, she called in one of her markers from the mother of L.A. Chief of Police William Parker, a notorious conservative. Mrs. Parker lived in our building and she and Jennie had struck up an unlikely friendship based on Ma knowing how to locate home fabrics wholesale. Now Ma went downstairs to have a private chat with the chief’s mother and a day later I lost the Red Squad tail. “What did you tell her, Ma?” I was curious. Jennie replied, “I said, “What if the damn Communists took over and made life miserable for her son? How would she feel?” She got it right away.”

  Anything else?

  “Oh sure,” Jennie added. “I cried and said I was so upset I couldn’t go bargain hunting with her anymore. That’s what did it. She’s got a heart like a stone rock.”

  Smile!

  When a Hollywood studio blacklisted me, and I embarked on a series of “nothing” jobs (as Jennie called them)—taxi driver, banana boat dock worker, saw mill operator—she moved swiftly to repair the damage by quitting Catalina Swimwear to hire me as her short order cook in a hamburger stand she rented in a supermarket at a southwest corner of Los Angeles. “This is our big chance to break out,” she vowed. Oh, yeah. Even if the market hadn’t been collapsing into bankruptcy, myself as chatty chef Emeril of the flat-patty sizzler and Jennie as welcoming waitress, it reeked of the Grenshaw Home for the Aged as a money loser.

  To attract male customers because aircraft plants were located nearby, Jennie bought a stack of fashion magazines and then came to work with her thick gray/auburn hair tied back in a ponytail like teenage Gidget, wearing Hazel Bishop indelible lipstick, June Cleaver twinset “pearls” and noisy bracelets. Anything to bring in customers.

  Unfortunately, my slapdash cooking lost us business in a rush to the exits which were usually clear of clientele anyway because the mark of Cain was on the defunct store. Every hour on the hour like a cuckoo clock the desperate manager popped out of his second floor office to prowl the balcony cheerleading into his p.a. system, “Smile … everybody, smile! Happy faces! Remember—a smile is a frown upside down!!” Ma and I would look at each other and say, “Go ahead, you smile first.” “No, you first.” And crack up.

  Then one day she said, “Make me a hamburger so I can have a taste.” She had never before eaten one of my dishes, preferring to brownbag it. I cooked her a Super Clancy Special with all the trimmings and set it down in front of her. She studied it, took a bite, a second bite, put the hamburger down, and inquired, “That’s what you’ve been giving our customers?” “Sure thing, Ma.”

  She started to laugh, took off her greasy apron, tossed it behind the coffee maker and said, “Let’s get out of this funeral home before they arrest you as a mass murderer.”

  I tossed away my apron too, and rather jubilantly we strolled out of the cavernous, ruined market, leaving behind our very last chance to break out, whatever that meant.

  In Los Angeles, wherever and whoever her body lay with, Jennie’s emotional life was again centered almost entirely on women, two in particular: Charlotte, the teenager, abandoned by the Navy Pier sailor in Chicago, who had followed Ma to the West Coast, got her a new life and job as a waitress; and Dinah Farrar, a very soigné fashion designer at Catalina Swimwear who also came West from Regal Frocks in Chicago. Dinah, Charlotte, and Jennie became a threesome on dates together to Vegas and Tijuana clubs. Charlotte told me, “Your mother loved danci
ng. She’d put that wild red henna in her hair, get her nails painted blood crimson and off we’d go. Check into a hotel, put on fancy dresses, order room service and kick back. Guys half her age would see her coming and fall over their own feet to get Jennie to dance with them—her more than me, and I’m eighteen years younger. Jennie liked men and they liked her. A guy didn’t need to be political for her to go stark raving mad over him.”

  Dinah, with her slightly aristocratic manner, didn’t trouble to conceal her dislike of me as an unmannerly klutz. Her aquiline nose seemed to quiver in my presence, as if scenting a bad odor, and we bristled around each other. She was extremely close to, and protective of, Jennie, two women of a certain age on the loose while sharing a subtly scornful attitude to men in general, based, no doubt, on experience. At the same time, Jennie was clearly the leader in their Vegas/Tijuana forays on the wild side. I was a little afraid of Dinah’s high style and intimacy with Jennie. Later, when I read an “explicit” biography of the woman Jennie most admired, Eleanor Roosevelt, whom Jennie had once met and (to her immense pride) debated with on one of Mrs. Roosevelt’s charity tours of the Lower East Side, I began to get it that both Dinah and my mother came from a Victorian-values generation where it was possible to be fond of, deeply close to, another woman without necessarily fucking each other. But sexualizing my mother was a habit hard to break. When I asked young Charlotte if Jennie and Dinah Farrar were “something more” she stared at me coldly. “You know Clancy, I’ve never told you this. But you really are stupid and age hasn’t improved you. Your mother found it impossible not to love.”