by Marc Simon
“Yeah, well, we were all young once.”
“I used to think, I got a good woman that wasn’t afraid to marry a Jew, and now I’m a family man and, you know, I never had no family of my own, no brothers and sisters, no parents, grew up under my uncle’s roof, so I figured a family would be nice and all. But by the second boy, a lot of things, they just went flat for me.”
“And then I came along.”
“You. And Alex.”
“Yeah, Alex.” Her eyes brightened for a second, but then she looked away. “Listen, Abe, I’d love to listen to your life story some more some time, but you got guests and I’m freezing my ass off.”
Abe touched her hip. “You gotta go?”
She pressed his hand against her. “Honey, I’m taking a chance being here as it is. What if one of the boys from The Wheel seen me out here yapping it up with you? It don’t look right, with your wife still warm in the grave. Don’t look like that, I ain’t trying to be mean, but she is. So anyway, I’ll see you when I see you—how about a couple of Saturdays from now, at The Wheel, all right? I’m working Friday nights and Saturdays there for John now. I just come by today to pay my respects, to say I’m sorry.”
Someone inside the house shouted Abe’s name. He looked back, then at her. “Well, thanks.”
“So anyway.” What was she supposed to say now? That she loved him? That she wanted them to have a life together? Did she? She kissed him on the cheek and walked away.
He watched her go. It was all he could do not to follow after her.
Peck’s shout hit him in the back of the neck. “Abe? What are you doing out in the cold? Everybody’s waiting for you.”
*
By five o’clock, the booze and food were gone and so were the visitors. Abe sat in a chair holding a cigar, but he didn’t want a cigar. Here one moment, gone the next. How did you figure it? Why was it Irene and not him? No reason at all. No sense trying to figure it out, either. Leave all that to the rabbis and the priests. God’s gonna do what He’s gonna do, and that’s it, and there not a goddamn thing a preacher or a doctor on an Indian chief can do about it. The best thing to do is get drunk. Maybe there was some beer left in that keg. His thoughts drifted to Delia and what she might be doing at the moment.
Alex’s scream came from the living room.
Arthur yelled. “Dad, Alex fell off the sofa.”
Alex said, “Arthur pushed me.”
“Did not.”
“Did, too.”
Abe sighed. So this was what he was in for. “Come in here, the both of you.” Arthur trailed Alex, so Abe knew he’d started it. “Boys, it’s been a long day. Don’t fight now, your mother wouldn’t like it.”
That shut them up. He’d have to remember to use that line again. “Do you miss your mother, boys?”
Alex said, “No, Daddy.”
“You don’t?”
“I can talk to her whenever I want.”
Arthur said, “Don’t be stupid, she’s dead. I told you she was gonna die last week, didn’t I?” He began to sob.
The neighbors had washed the dishes, put the food away and taken the trash out, so the downstairs was as clean as if Irene had done it. But without her, the house seemed preternaturally quiet. Every so often, Arthur looked up toward the second floor as if he heard something, too, like Benjamin had. Alex slept on the sofa, a little island of peace, and he looked so beatific Abe wished Irene were there to see him.
The sun was almost gone. “Boys,” Abe said, “it’s been a long day. It’s time we all went to bed.” He stretched and wondered what it would be like tomorrow, when the reality of Irene’s death began to sink in, both to the boys and to him. He was thankful that Alex was so young. He’d probably be the first to get over it.
Arthur surprised him when he said, “Dad, can we sleep with you tonight?”
Abe had sleeping on the living room sofa, fearful of getting into the bed where Irene had died so miserably. But with his sons along, well, he had to start sometime. “All right. Bring your blankets and pillows and wake Benjamin.”
They were all asleep at eight the next morning, until Alex woke up and announced, “Where’s Momma?
Chapter 13
Billy Sunday was no stranger to Pittsburgh. From 1888 to 1890 he had manned center field for the soon-to-be defunct Pittsburgh Alleghenys. Although he was a poor to mediocre hitter—during his Pittsburgh years, his batting averages were .230, .240 and .257—the crowds loved his derring-do on the base paths and his hawk-like patrolling of center field. One sports reporter gushed, “The whole town is wild for Sunday.”
Twenty-four years later, the town was wild for Sunday again. The former ballplayer now was the Reverend Billy Sunday, and in January of 1914 he set up his evangelical ministry in a tented tabernacle in the Oakland section of town, fittingly enough less than a mile from the city’s new baseball stadium, Forbes Field. Over the next few months, Billy would deliver 124 services, drawing nearly 1.6 million townsfolk—way more than the Pirates would draw that year—eager to hear his pitch.
Ida had gotten an earful about the magical Mr. Sunday from her neighbor across the street, Delores Hertzel, who urged her to accompany her to see the man and the miracle. However, Ida wasn’t much for the miraculous. “I needed a miracle four years ago, when my poor daughter died, only twenty-seven, with three boys and everything to live for.”
Delores wasn’t about to take no for an answer. “Perhaps the miracle you’ve been overlooking is your grandson Alex, and the fact he’s alive, that The Dip didn’t take him along with your Irene. Perhaps the good Lord has a plan for him. Perhaps his arms are part of the plan, too.”
“Perhaps you should keep it to yourself. I’m not interested.”
In fact, during the four years following Irene’s death, the two things that interested Ida the most were medicating herself with gin or Irish whiskey and caring for her tiny grandson Alex. He lived at Ida’s house Monday through Friday, and at Abe’s on weekends, an arrangement that Abe had contentiously yet reluctantly agreed to, figuring that even though it broke up his family, what choice did he have? He was in no position to give the boy the attention he demanded, and the older boys were in school all day, at least when Arthur wasn’t playing hooky.
Delores finally wore Ida down. On a windy Saturday night toward the end of January, as the full moon intermittently flashed through the clouds of soot that wafted up from the Second Avenue rolling mills, the two women stepped down from the Negley Avenue trolley and into the throng pressing toward Reverend Sunday’s makeshift house of worship. Despite her skepticism, Ida felt herself getting swept up in the fervor.
The sidewalks overflowed with some 20,000 or so parched souls, come to look for sustenance from Reverend Billy—men on crutches, women in wheelchairs, the deaf leading the blind, the able-bodied leading the crippled, the daft, the doubters, the poor, the soon-to-be-poor, and everyday hardworking people, all politely pushing and shoving their way in closer, as close as they could come to the reverend, in their heavy coats and boots, sneezing and coughing and smoking and screaming and laughing, thrilled to be in that number marching to salvation.
Although they had arrived early and they could get no closer than twenty yards of the man, Delores and Ida could hear Billy loud and clear as he cavorted across the stage. Defying the chilly air as much as the forces of evil, Billy had discarded his white linen suit coat, and beads of sweat poured down his face. He preened and gestured like a fighting rooster, locked in a one-sided conversation with the Devil, as if the Antichrist were sitting cross-legged on a stool in front of him. He went so far as to threaten to punch the Devil in the nose and kick his teeth down his throat, to the roars and laughter of the crowd.
Ida thought she’d never heard such malarkey in her life, and was ready to leave, Delores or no Delores, but during one of Billy’s dramatic pauses there was a gap in the crowd in front of her, and she happened to lock eyes with the reverend. In that instant, it was revealed to her
via his blue-eyed intensity and toothy smile that she was meant to be there, that she was meant to believe. The rest of the crowd and the world melted away. She thought she heard him say, “Sister, you must be saved by the blood of the lamb.” She clutched Delores’s arm for balance; with the sudden lightness that came over her, she felt as if she might float away, and in that moment, she was Billy’s, hook, line and sermon.
Leaving Alex in the care of Margaret Conroy, her next-door neighbor, she and Delores went back to hear Billy preach every day that week, and every day Ida dropped a dollar and change into the hat that circulated around the room. She wished she could have given more to support such a pious, driven man who’d chosen to bring God’s message to the multitudes free of charge. She needn’t have worried. The Pittsburgh campaign was very good to Billy. By the end of his eight-week stay, the reverend had pocketed nearly $35,000.
She stopped going to mass completely. All that kneeling and praying, the vagueness of the Latin, the solemnity, the confessions, the rituals, the guilt, the alabaster statues of an agonized Christ, it all seemed so stodgy and dreary and cold compared to the vibrancy of Reverend Sunday and the spark he had kindled in her life. A thought hit her like a line drive from Billy’s bat: Reverend Sunday just might be Alex’s salvation. She imagined herself and her grandson, hand in hand, his long right arm reaching up toward the heavens, walking the sawdust trail in front of the stage, and perhaps a mere touch from Billy would cure him once and for all, even him out, make him grow like a normal boy.
Almost six now, Alex was the size of a well-proportioned 18-month-old boy, except for his arms, which at rest hung down a touch over two inches below his knees. His brothers called him Stretch, which he hated.
It had taken him weeks to accept living away from the house on Mellon Street, since he insisted over and over that his mother would be coming back and he needed to be there when she did. On the first morning he was scheduled to go to Ida’s house, he held onto the frame of his mother’s bed so tightly, Abe had had to pry his long arms away.
Alex missed his father, especially in the evenings before bedtime, when Abe would hold him in his lap and let him read the newspaper to him, the comforting smell of cigar smoke on his father’s fingers. He hated to be away from his brothers, too, from the joking and teasing and game playing, and the snores and farts at night in their bedroom.
However, he did like his grandmother’s cooking, which was a vast improvement on his father’s tasteless meat and potatoes, which he cooked on Sunday and reheated the rest of the week. In the hope of stimulating his growth, Ida fed him copious amounts of rich foods: breakfasts of eggs and bacon or sausage, oatmeal with sugar, cinnamon, raisins and cream; farmer’s cheese, macaroni and cheese and fat sandwiches and cookies for lunch; and dinners of pork chops with gravy, meatloaf and mashed potatoes with butter and buttered beans, creamed vegetables, chicken and dumplings, liver and onions, all served with glasses of buttermilk or chocolate milk. And for dessert, pies with ice cream, chocolate fudge cake, and more sugar cookies. Alex devoured everything, in portions astonishingly large relative to his size, all to no avail. Ida wondered where it all went—until it was time to empty his chamber pot.
Having his own bedroom was another issue. It was too big, too quiet, too clean. He much preferred to be stuffed in with Arthur and Benjamin, fighting and giggling and pinching each other, than be left alone at night in his mother’s childhood bedroom, with its frilly curtains and flowered wallpaper. On those nights, when he felt particularly lonely, Alex would drag his blue blanket into Ida’s bedroom and curl up at her feet, next to the orange Maine Coon cat Jack.
He spent a lot of time reading. He’d tired of his A Child’s Life of Christ and started on Ida’s encyclopedia, beginning with Volume A-Ar. Straddling the open book, he often reading out loud to Jack, who seemed to regard Alex with a mixture of reverence and horror, alternately nuzzling his legs and hiding from him under a large horsehair chair.
On a sunny Tuesday morning, two weeks after Ida’s lightning conversion to Sunday-ism, she burst into the living room carrying a large tin bucket. She tore open the tall cabinet where she kept her liquor. She grabbed a nearly full fifth of Irish whiskey and proclaimed in a strident voice, as if she were the keynote speaker at a Women’s Christian Temperance Union meeting, “Whiskey has its place. Its place is in Hell,” which was one of Reverend Sunday’s most quotable lines regarding proper location of alcoholic beverages.
Alex looked up from the encyclopedia. “Grandma, see the picture. The giant anteater.”
Ida paused, but not with wonder at Mymecophaga Tridactyla. She stared long and hard at the bottle in her hand. “I must be strong. I must be strong for the Lord, and for you, dear Alex.”
“Anteaters, they eat ants. It says an anteater has no teeth but its tongue is two feet long.” Alex stuck his tongue out as far as he could. “How long is my tongue, Grandma? I ate an ant once in the backyard. It was brown but it tasted bad.”
“You ate what?”
“My tongue. Look. How long is it?”
Ida pulled off a bottle cap. She poured the liquor into the bucket “I’m sending you to Hell.”
“Benjamin says ‘Hell’ is a dirty word.”
In five minutes, Ida emptied the entire contents of her liquor cabinet: two quarts of Irish whiskey, a fifth of sloe gin, a pint of rye, a bottle of sherry and a bottle of apricot brandy. She poured the bucket down the drain in the kitchen. The liquor fumes hovering over the sink drifted to her face and made her feel light-headed, either with exhilaration or remorse, she wasn’t sure, but now that she had started down the path of righteousness there was no turning back.
She went back to the living room. Alex was still in his pajamas. “Alex, time to get dressed.”
“Why?”
“Come on.”
Upstairs, as Alex played with toy soldiers, Ida went through his wardrobe. Most of his clothes were hand-me-downs from his brothers’ toddler outfits, which Irene had had the foresight to save and which Ida had to tailor to accommodate Alex’s unique physique. She pursed her lips. If she were going to take him to a Billy Sunday service, he needed to be dressed properly. It wasn’t that the crowds that came to the prayer meetings were particularly well clad. In fact, Ida had been appalled at the slovenliness of the mill workers, coal miners, day laborers and city workers, and especially their children, who looked like so many refugee ragamuffins. She was determined that her grandson needed to be dressed like a little gentleman when he met up with Reverend Sunday, even if it meant taking an advance on her next month’s budget.
“Alex, let’s get you washed up. It’s time to go shopping.”
Alex jumped up and down. “Woolworth’s, Woolworth’s.”
Ida picked him up and hugged him tightly. “Not today, my handsome boy. We’re going to Kauffman’s.”
Ida took close to an hour to get ready, for one didn’t go downtown to Kaufmann’s, Pittsburgh’s premiere department store, looking like a housewife in the midst of cleaning the toilet. She tried on three outfits before she decided on a light blue wool suit and white blouse, her Easter outfit, the one she’d decided on for Billy’s service that evening. She even powdered her face and put on lipstick for the first time since her daughter’s funeral.
With Alex by her side, they barely made it past Kauffmann’s cosmetics counter when women shoppers began to glom onto them. At first Ida felt important, as if she were the grandmother of a child movie star, but after a few moments of tolerating the clutches and grabs at her grandson, she reverted to her safer, surlier self and robustly pushed away the curiosity seekers.
They boarded the elevator and rose toward the fifth floor, Children’s Wear. As the elevator began to climb, Alex said, “Grandma, the room is moving. Where are we going? Up to the sky? It’s too dark.”
Elmer Setich, the normally stoic operator, laughed out loud. “Ain’t he a cute pup. First time on an elevator, sonny? Say, how old is he, lady?”
Alex
said, “I’m almost six.”
“Go on with you. You are?”
“But, Grandma, where does this go?”
“Up to our floor. You’ll see.” She laughed. “Full of questions, night and day.”
As the other passengers stared straight ahead, Alex lifted the billfold of Walter Blaney, a saturnine man who was assistant manager, Men’s Furnishings. Blaney half turned, as if he noticed a slight movement in his back pocket, but, elevator etiquette being what it was, he remained silent, his eyes tightly focused straight ahead, until he got off on Four.
Two stops later, Alex dropped the emptied billfold on the elevator floor as he and Ida got off. Later that day, Setich turned the wallet into Kaufmann’s Lost & Found department, but not before he pocketed thirty-two cents from the change compartment.
Ida and Alex strolled through the toddler’s section. Alex ran his fingers over everything he could reach. Two saleswomen tripped over each other trying to wait on them. They showed Ida a variety of shorts, shirts, coats, a checked suit and a tiny sailor’s suit, all in two sizes—one for his arms, one for the rest of him—per Ida’s instructions. “Oh,” said Louise Beverson, the senior sales clerk, “he’ll look like a handsome little doll. Blue is his color.”
Ida was pleased with the attention. “Alex,” she said, “what do you think?”
“I want that.” He pointed to an orange cap with a wide brim on top of a manikin.
With three duplicate outfits over her arm, Miss Beverson said, “Will you be taking them with you today?”
“Just the new suit.
“The cap, Grandma.”
“And the cap. You can send the others. All right, Alex?”
“Okey dokey.” Alex put the cap on his head and turned the narrow brim sideways, so he’d look like a boy he’d seen illustrated in a magazine.
“Isn’t he the cutest little monkey? Where did you get those arms, dear?”
Alex looked at his grandmother. “Jesus.”
It was two o’clock by the time they left Kaufmann’s and three by the time they arrived home. Alex had fallen asleep on the trolley. Ida carried him upstairs and placed him down on her bed. She lay down beside him, pulled up the quilt and reached her forearm around his shoulder. She closed her eyes and dreamed of Billy.