The kids made bonfires in the vacant prairie lots on the chilly autumn evenings, and roasted potatoes, making them black on the outside, and soft and white within. In winter they skated on a pond by the church. For the hot summer days, Goldie made homemade root beer. People kept ducks and geese, and grew big vegetable gardens, following the motto “Garden Plots to Kaiser Blot.” Gerson himself had a half acre of tomatoes and onions planted across the street—which he worked joyfully, missing the farm, though Goldie did not want him working there on Sundays. Even if they did not go to church, she did not want others to see him working like a farmer with everyone else in their Sunday clothes. Horse-drawn wagons brought blocks of ice from Wisconsin for wooden iceboxes, and neighbors like Mrs. Sheeley kept cows, employing her oversized, feeble-minded son Johnny to carry bottles of milk to customers, and whacking him across the head when he got distracted. Father O’Brien bred Belgian hares on the church grounds. There was a country smell, of manure and cut hay, mixed with coal smoke from the Illinois Central Railroad, which gave the sunset sky a reddish glow.
The neighborhood was mostly Irish, which must have pleased Goldie, since it gave her something to complain about. “It’s those Irish bums again,” she’d mutter when there was trouble anywhere in the neighborhood. She even worked for the Republican presidential candidate Charles Evans Hughes in 1916 because Woodrow Wilson was another “Irish bum.” Wilson’s ancestors were English and Ulstermen, and had as much to do with the Sheeleys and O’Connors of Park Manor as the man on the Moon, but that did not concern Goldie, who could not be moved from an opinion. In boxing during the 1920s, she picked handsome Gene Tunney over Jack Dempsey because Tunney was a gentleman and Dempsey was an “Irish bum.” No, Gerson would argue, Tunney was a sissy—Dempsey was the real fighter. In reality, Tunney’s parents were from County Mayo, while Dempsey was part Jewish and Cherokee. But Goldie had her convictions, and always won by the long count.
Nelson’s unorthodox religious education began in Park Manor. Despite being ostensibly Jewish, the family kept a Bible with both testaments, in which the dates and addresses of the children’s births were recorded. Though Nelson was attracted by St. Columbanus and wanted desperately to attend, Nelson’s mother sent him to the public Park Manor school and the nearby Congregationalist Church Sunday school, to counter the Irish Catholics and because he “ought to go and learn something.” Gerson disagreed—why should his son learn about Jesus Christ? “He gave us nothing but trouble,” Gerson scowled. But Nelson liked Sunday school—especially after he found a five dollar bill at the annual picnic. He also got his first exposure to the impractical philosophy that blessed are the poor in spirit, and that it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. It was a curious lesson in a material age, in a material city, about which Rudyard Kipling complained that people “talked money through their noses.”
Nelson’s other early religious instruction came from his little girlfriend Ethel, whose mother rented the upstairs flat. Ethel had lost her father, and she filled her imagination with a highly colored, pierced-bleeding-Sacred-Heart-and-holy-card style of Catholic faith, infecting Nelson with its violent poetry. Older by one year, Ethel would command little Nelson to watch the sunset behind the St. Columbanus cross to see God’s face. She would baptize him repeatedly—even if it was just with the ice water from the candy store on Seventy-First Street. When Nelson flew an orange kite on a spring day near the church, Ethel sent up a message of love to her savior. “It became a Jesuit kite scouring Heaven for proselytes,” Nelson remembered. Nelson was not allowed to go into the church itself, but Ethel introduced him to the symbols he later gave to his characters—the crosses for suffering, the nails for punishment, God’s sudden abandonments. As Ethel marked crosses on store windows on Halloween, the children Sophie and Frankie in The Man with the Golden Arm marked them on doors on the Feast of the Epiphany.
Over supper one evening, after Ethel had instructed Nelson to imagine God’s blood burning in the sooty sunset sky, Nelson told the family that he had become a Catholic. No, his mother told him, you need a priest for that, Nelson recalled in his memoirs. Then Ethel came down into their kitchen, in tears. Her father had died without last rites, and her mother had paid a priest $100 to save him from purgatory. The priest felt another $100 was needed for full salvation, but Ethel’s mother thought he could make it the rest of the way himself. Ethel had fled from the blasphemy, weeping that her father would never see God’s face.
“Then let him look at His ass,” retorted Gerson.
On another occasion, Nelson remembered how he and Ethel had lured poor backward Johnny Sheeley from his milk rounds to give a little white terrier, struck by a car, a Christian burial. Johnny got in trouble from his harridan mother, and Gerson told Nelson he was excommunicated.
Nelson mimicked his father’s skepticism. When Ethel warned him against stepping on sidewalk cracks, for fear God would strike him dead, Nelson stepped on them all. He triple dared God, and nothing happened. Ethel warned that trouble would get him yet. He still planned to marry her. Using the dime allowance he got on weekends, he squired her to his own church, the candy store church of John the Greek, who was “a dirty old man,” another neighbor girl remembered. But for Nelson, here was an ice-cream paradise, with whipped cream and butterscotch, pecans and cherries, ginger ale and root beer and strawberry syrup. John the Greek would sit at the player piano and sing a warning for immigrants who did not love their new country enough:
Go back from whence you came
Whatever land its name
Nelson started selling newspapers by a corner tavern—the two-cent, red, white, and blue Saturday Evening Blade and the Abend-post—for Mr. Kooglin. To carry them, Nelson, likely with his father’s help, made a pushcart out of an upright wooden orange crate and a single roller skate. Nelson sometimes enjoyed the punk thrill of skimming off a customer’s change—returning two cents for the nickel instead of three, or giving no change at all. He fixed a mount for a candle at the top of his pushcart, and a bell to ring. The little candle flickered and glowed far below the gaslights, as he went to meet his father in the evening, getting off the Seventy-First Street trolley with its green window shades after a long day’s work. Father and son would walk home, holding hands. The neighborhood bully, Baldy Costello, once stole Nelson’s cart, sending copies of the Abendpost flying. Baldy put it on the trolley tracks, and Bernice rescued it before it was run over. But it was Gerson who fixed everything with Mr. Kooglin over the missing papers. Nelson made another cart out of a wagon top he found in a weekly excursion with Gerson to the junkyard and wheels from his old baby carriage. Gerson was happy to have a son to provide for because his own father hadn’t done so for him.
But for all his heavy sense of responsibility, Gerson had a temper problem. After a few years of holding some machinist job, he would hit a foreman for some mysterious reason. “When he walked into the kitchen at noon with his tool chest under his arm, my mother knew it had happened again,” Nelson remembered. Typically, there was raging by hot-tempered Goldie, who never let Gerson forget that he never made foreman. For days the family “lived under an oppression of which none but the tool chest spoke.” Then Gerson would find work again.
Despite these lapses, the family managed to stay middle class, in the go-go days of Chicago’s teens and twenties, when the city surged and sprawled into the prairie, pushing up skyscrapers, and there was work for the skilled, even if they were occasional brawlers. They never had a car, but Gerson was enterprising enough to build a one-car garage in the back of their two-flat to rent. They did not go hungry. Besides his Sunday nickels, Nelson got pennies on week-days, to spend on licorice whips or yellow jawbreakers or strips of ten White Sox player cards, dipped in wax to keep them sturdy for use as currency in junior dice games, or to trade for marbles. The Abrahams kept a cat, which Goldie believed would not hunt mice because Nelson had snipped its whiskers short with n
ail scissors in a moment of childish sadism or curiosity. There was a piano and an Edison Victrola with a trumpet in the front room. Irene might have played the piano—she later worked for music publishers. Nelson liked to play the Victrola, especially the record “America, I Love You,” which had a crack in it and got stuck at the line “A nation’s devotion-devotion-devotion,” which drove his sister crazy.
A portrait of heroic Uncle Harry was framed above the piano, and Harry’s woolen coat of faded blue with its brass buttons hung in a closet. Goldie offered, or threatened, to cut it down for Nelson to wear to school on the anniversary of the sinking of the USS Maine. Nelson begged off that one, but he could not get out of other embarrassing Goldie notions, like her insistence that he had to wear long woolen underwear under his bathing suit on a trip to the Jackson Park lagoon. The saintly Ethel laughed at him.
Goldie used to do more than nag Nelson into compliance—she had a furious temper and would hit him, sometimes with a broom. He remembered how she once knocked him halfway across the kitchen, though it is hard to say if she was unusually brutal or just typical of her time, when most children were hit regularly. Gerson hit him, too—Nelson remembered how his father knocked him over when he tried to imitate a tightrope walker by standing on his head. This was a little too much eccentricity for Gerson, too much art. “Why can’t you be a good boy like I was when I was a boy?” he wondered.
Nelson came to regard Goldie as clumsy, always cleaning like a servant, singing to herself as she worked:
I’m as reckless as I can be
I don’t care what becomes of me.
But she did care—she was relentlessly middle class, and Nelson’s friend Dave Peltz thought this was part of Nelson’s problem with her. Goldie was a “loving, concerned mother,” but “straight as an arrow,” and Nelson did not have much patience with that, Peltz recalled. “If his mother had been a whore he would have loved and adored her.” Nelson also disliked her cooking—Art Shay joked that Algren’s warning “Never eat at a place called Mom’s” came not from bad diner experiences but from his mother’s kitchen. She would say “pregrant” for “pregnant” and “anulimum” for “aluminum”—perhaps because of her lack of education, or her own stubbornness. In 1921 crazy Baldy Costello was convicted of murder and “elexecuted.” “Electrocuted, Mother,” Nelson would correct, exasperated. He paid attention to the sounds of words—his sensitivity to the way they could be bent and spindled was fed by one of his favorite books, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Algren biographer Bettina Drew recounted a story Nelson told his first wife about how his mother ordered him outside to go ice skating, but he did not want to, and rather than openly defy her, he sat shivering in a box for hours. The story may demonstrate Goldie’s fierceness, but it also says something of Nelson’s own perverse stubbornness—he would have been warmer skating, but he would rather suffer than do something he had not chosen to do.
Despite her own deficiencies, Goldie was literate and wanted her children to better themselves. The first book he remembered—which he thought his mother may have read to him—was Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses:
In the darkness shapes of things;
Houses, trees and hedges,
Clearer grow; and sparrow’s wings
Beat on window ledges.
Bernice also joined in this campaign of education, reading Nelson George Eliot’s Silas Marner when he was ten. Nelson later said he did not remember much about this story of disgrace, false accusation, and redemption by love, but he loved having it read to him. Lying on his bed, he studied the book’s cover and title while watching Bernice, slim and fair, silhouetted by the lamplight. Bernice loved books and disdained convention, declaring herself an atheist as a teenager. She was also a theater buff, and regularly brought home the glamour of the motion pictures from the Park Manor Theater. Nelson ate Goldie’s chicken soup and bread pudding out of free dishes decorated with the faces of silent-screen stars—Blanche Sweet, Wallace Reid, and Viola Dana.
Goldie was interested in disasters, like the “fatal accidence” collected by Sophie in The Man with the Golden Arm. When Nelson was six, she took him all the way downtown to see the SS Eastland turned on its side in the Chicago River, where 844 men, women, and children had died. They had been working families, about to go on a summer picnic sponsored by the Western Electric Company on July 24, 1915, and the misbalanced tub with a concrete floor had tipped over as they waved good-bye to their friends on shore. It was a popular spectacle—on the day of the tragedy, a janitor from a nearby building charged a dime each to let the curious see the bodies laid out in a makeshift morgue. Nelson stared into the sulky brown water, imagining the little boys and girls in their summer best, sailor suits and pale lawn dresses, hopelessly sucked below the steel hulk. All the way home, Goldie spoke of the Chicora as the great maritime tragedy of the age.
Goldie could also be ahead of her time, too far ahead for Nelson’s childish inclinations. The South Side in the teens was still mostly dominated by the Irish and Poles, Lithuanians and Slovaks, working for McCormick and the stockyards. But black people were also coming in from the South for the plentiful factory jobs, escaping lynchings and near-slavery as sharecroppers to find a better life of hostile white immigrants, brutal cops, and restrictive housing covenants in the North. Chicago’s black population more than doubled during World War I to 125,000 people. Most lived in the Bronzeville area, around Thirty-First Street and Michigan Avenue, but at least one family had settled in Park Manor, for in Nelson’s enormous class of forty-eight children, there was one black girl, Mildred Ford, her pigtails tied in blue bows. Nelson remembered addressing valentines to forty-six children, but not Mildred. Goldie wondered where Mildred’s card was. When Nelson protested that nobody sent valentines to blacks, Goldie scooped up his bundle of penny greetings and said if he did not send a valentine to Mildred, he could not send one to anyone. So he had to comply. The card showed a tearful puppy with the plea “Don’t Treat Me Like a Dog, Be My Valentine,” Nelson recalled. Mildred looked at the card but would not speak to him. On the way out of the classroom at Park Manor School, she gave him a look that said clearly that there were two sides, and he was on the other one. Later, Ethel, snickering at the wool underwear beneath Nelson’s bathing suit, mocked him for it: “You send valentines to niggers.” Nelson, already a Swedish-German-Jewish alien among Irish Catholics, had somehow ended up with Mildred, whether she wanted him there or not, among the most outside of outsiders.
That next summer, he learned just how apart the sides were. A seventeen-year-old black youth named Eugene Williams swimming at the Twenty-Seventh Street beach drifted across an imaginary segregation line to Twenty-Ninth Street. He did not know about a confrontation earlier in the day when some African Americans had walked into what was considered a white space. White men threw rocks at him, and he drowned. Black onlookers asked a policeman to arrest the man who had thrown the stones, but the policeman refused. Fights broke out and more rocks were thrown, leading to Chicago’s biggest race riot. After four days, 23 blacks and 15 whites were dead, 342 blacks and 178 whites were injured, and 1,000 homes had burned. Black commuters going home from work were dragged from streetcars, beaten, and killed. Most of the fighting took place a couple of miles north of Park Manor, but Nelson would have seen the smoke that summer floating beyond the White City amusement park at Sixty-Ninth Street, and Goldie would have been eager to explain what it all meant.
Park Manor held its own horrors. On Halloween Nelson and Ethel put on false faces and went up and down Seventy-First Street chalking store windows. Nelson wrote “Everything inside is a penny!” on John the Greek’s candy store, and the kids ran off screaming. The next day, all the windows were washed clean but John’s. The police broke the lock and found the amiable priest of Nelson’s ice-cream cathedral hanging by his belt. Perhaps whatever the neighborhood suspected him of doing had caught up with him, and he wanted to avoid shame and the C
ook County Jail. Terrified, Nelson now avoided the sidewalk cracks in front of the candy store. That winter, he rubbed the frost off the window of the abandoned shop and saw how the chocolate and pineapple syrup had burst from their jars, flowed over the counter, and stiffened in the cold. He remembered how the long drip of strawberry hung frozen from the counter “like a strip of raw meat.”
There were other sorrows—at school, he fell in love with a girl named Geraldine Crow, who played Snow White in the school play. Nelson was the magic mirror, telling the wicked queen with earnest passion that while she was fair indeed, “Snow White is fairer far.” Geraldine died during an epidemic of black diphtheria that winter, along with two other children from Park Manor School. When Nelson was nine, the Spanish flu swept the city, killing over ten thousand Chicagoans in October of 1918 alone. People wore handkerchiefs and gauze masks over their faces, and the vaudeville and movie theaters were shut down. The war had also taken casualties from the neighborhood, sending home survivors crippled by mustard gas. There was death and mutilation of all varieties under the gaslights of Nelson’s childhood.
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