I folded a tennis net and covered it with a smooth piece of tarp, put it on top of a pile of old nets, and made a pillow out of an old tennis jacket that hung on a broom handle. I opened the window next to the pile of nets and let the moon shine through. I climbed up the mound of nets and found a good level spot to lie on. It wasn’t anything like my Murphy bed but it felt good to stretch out.
My mind got to thinking about my father and where he might be. Jail, no doubt, but what kind? All the movies I’d seen that had jails had cramped, dumpy upper-downers, where the good guys had to climb the uppers while mean-looking desperadoes were on the lowers. The jail food was fed to them like I’d seen animals fed at the Forest Park zoo, only the animal food looked a whole lot better than the jail crud.
My father, who I sometimes call Pop but mostly Father, was not your regular American dad. He was lots older than my mom who was eighteen and he was thirty-three when they got married. My mom told me she had gone to secretary school to learn typing and a funny kind of writing called shorthand so she could get a job and free herself from her terrible father, my grandfather (she didn’t call him “terrible,” that’s my word). She got a job at eighteen dollars a week, gave most of it to my grandma, but that wasn’t enough for my grandfather who was after her for all of it and threatened her with his awful black belt. She never gave in, not my mom. So I’m sure she was anxious to get out of that house and that was one of the reasons she said yes to my father. Another reason, I guess, was he lived a steady life and owned a fur store. My mother told me all this, not my father who almost never said anything much about his early life, not even about the place where he was born or where he went to school.
All I knew was that a relative who had come from Poland had started a fur shop in St. Louis and brought my father over as a young man to join his family and work in the store. After many years the relative said he had decided to go back to Poland with his family and he turned the business over to my father. So when he married my mother that was the fur shop that he owned. I was born two years later.
My earliest remembrance is living in a very nice apartment on Art Hill Place and that there was a nanny named Mildred who wore a white dress and always had a flower in her hair. She liked to sing and taught me songs that we often sang together. One Christmas we performed a dance she made up and we danced for my mother and father to the music on the Victrola and they clapped happily and Mildred took my hand and we made a nice little bow.
It was that Christmas that my father gave me my first suit and Mildred a beautiful hat with colored ribbons and tiny birds. After dinner, in front of the tree, he gave my mom a jewelry box tied with a gold ribbon that contained a ring that had a large shiny brown diamond with little white diamonds around it. My mother cried out a happy cry and put it on her finger and kissed my father on his lips which I had never seen her do before, only cheeks.
It was all right to have a new suit, but, honestly, I had hoped it would be a Lou Gehrig baseball mitt or a Bill Tilden tennis racket, but coming from Europe, the only sport my father could relate to was soccer, and there was not much of that. He was a proper man. He wore very nice suits made for him by what he called “Old World tailors” and he wore a proper tie with a fine stickpin every day, even at Sunday breakfast. The stickpin was the only thing that really impressed me. It was a solid-gold head and shoulders of an African prince with a high turban of pearls and beautiful diamonds for his eyes. Seeing that gold stickpin in the fold of one of his elegant silk ties made all the dark days to come a little bit better. And days it had to be put in the pawnshop made a dark day darker. That’s where it was now, in Nathan’s on DeBaliviere with its three gold balls hanging over the front door. And certainly you couldn’t have a day darker than this one.
* * *
—
I WOKE UP in the night from a horrible dream of lions attacking me, red lions dripping blood. I was throwing baseballs at them, pitching at their snarling mouths, but I was losing the fight when waking up saved me. It took a while to get myself together and recognize where I was and what was happening. There was a busy, scratchy sound in the pile of nets beneath me that I recognized because there had been mice in our room at the Westgate. One of them, I called it Mickey, often ran around the molding on the ceiling.
I sat up in front of the open window hoping for good air but the air coming in was just as hot and heavy. The moon had moved on. I climbed down from my sleep perch and went outside to pee on the grass. I didn’t have a wristwatch but there were smudges of light starting to appear in the black sky and I figured June daylight was not far off. I went to a nearby court and climbed up the referee’s stand and sat me down in the high chair.
Happening 7
In a couple of hours, I would be going from this clay court to the criminal court where they would bring my father, maybe in handcuffs; the thought of having to be on my own among all those court people with their uniforms and robes and badges and guns made my stomach flip-flop. What will I do when my father approaches? Go over to him? Wave to him? Send him a note? Pretend not to know him? Will he wave to me? Or will he look at me, pretending not to know me, letting me know I should do likewise?
About my father and me, it’s true we didn’t have many things we did together. Like going to ball games. He tried but he could not figure out the whole craziness (to him) of balls and strikes, hits, double plays, walks, steals, and all the rest. I tried to teach him how to throw and catch a baseball so we could have catches, but it didn’t work. No matter how much I tried he continued to throw like a girl, and he poked at the ball with his glove instead of letting it come to him and catching it in the pocket.
But even though we didn’t do many things together, my father was a big fan of mine. He carried my report cards around and proudly showed off the As and Bs and what the teachers wrote about my English, writing, and athletic leadership which I guess was being captain of the baseball team. He came to all my events with my mother and was a big clapper for me at oratorical contests and when I acted in plays. Over the top when I was a winner and mad at the judges and umpires when I wasn’t. Really proud of me.
A very good family life we had, until the doom of the Night and Day. That one thing, that one terrible thing and all we were, our whole life, fell apart without warning, out of the blue, the Night and Day Bank, one of the biggest banks in St. Louis, locked its doors, turned out the lights, and put up a sign:
CLOSED
My father had everything he had, every penny, in that one bank. So did I. Twenty-two dollars, saved up in my own savings account, little by little. My father had no backup. No company or person he could borrow from. His relations in Europe had hard times too. Everything all around him was caving in. The Night and Day sent a letter that said it would pay a penny for every dollar but they never even paid that. My father sold all his furs to other stores to pay off some of what he owed but it wasn’t enough to even get even. He had to let Mildred go (she and I had a good cry) and he told our landlord we were leaving the apartment. We sold all the good stuff and that kept us going for a while.
My father tried to get a job with one of the fur shops he knew but they were all firing employees or going out of business themselves. My father sold our Buick but not for very much because everyone was selling their cars and no one was buying. Some of the kids in my class whose pops had certain jobs like doctors and cops, politicians and conductors, still brought hefty lunches, but the really rich kids and the medium kids like me had lunches that got skinnier and skinnier and often no lunches at all. But the worst was when a couple of kids who had dads who were really rich big shots were absent because their dads, like mine, had lost everything, but not able to face it, like mine, had killed themselves. Jumped out of the high-up windows where the big companies were on Pine Street. One of the kids was my good pal Benjamin who was the catcher on our baseball team when I was the pitcher. With him gone, Billy Joe, our se
cond baseman, had to switch to catching but though he had a face mask and a chest protector he ducked every time the batter swung, so thanks to Billy Joe I lost my first game of the season. Didn’t really matter because the principal, Mr. Stellwagon, canceled baseball “for economic reasons,” he said in the notice he sent to every classroom.
* * *
—
IT WAS light enough now for a few of the earliest tennis birds to start arriving. A pair of ancient ones wearing sweat-stained sun visors, floppy shorts, T-shirts featuring Listerine, and clay-crusted tennis shoes came on my court and began volleying with an ancient tennis ball that was as gray and bald as they were.
I climbed down from the umpire’s chair and went over to the water fountain. The courts were filling up. That’s how it was now—play before eight and you don’t have to pay or have a permit, but I had worked out a deal with Buddy Silverstone, who was in charge, for sweeping the courts in exchange for free play time. He also saved cracked rackets for me that could be fixed good enough to play. As for balls, court fifteen had an outside drain that could swallow a ball hit over the fence and make it disappear, but not if you knew where the drain ended.
The snack place, the Drop Shot, was starting up and coffee was in the air reminding me that I was hungry. Not for coffee, I don’t drink coffee, but my mom always fixed me a pretty good breakfast, even if we were in the Westgate or one of those others that didn’t allow food in the rooms. But a glass of milk and a slice of bread with margarine or peanut butter was about the best I could do with her in the sanitarium. I still had the forty-seven cents in my pocket but I figured the day being what it would be I’d better hang on to it. Thinking about my mom and breakfast I could hear the arguments she had with my father those times we had nothing for breakfast.
“Fred,” she would say, “it’s not right we send Aaron to school on an empty stomach.”
“Maybe Piggly Wiggly will give us a little credit. I’ll have a talk with Dave.”
“You know what he said last week—absolutely positively not.”
“I know. I know. But what do you want me to do, Ina? There is nothing left to sell. I took the steamer trunk to three places.”
“What about the brown diamond?”
“You know it’s at Nathan’s.”
“Yes but it’s time to sell it. Nathan already told you.”
“Now, Ina, don’t start up!” My father thumped his hands on the table and raised his voice. He turned to me. “Aaron, why don’t you go out and play.”
Standing there outside the door I’d hear my mother say something about how the brown diamond would help us out for months to come.
My father would say not as much as you think since it has a flaw and wouldn’t get nearly as much as one that didn’t.
“But it would get enough so we could get by when we run out, wouldn’t it?”
They would argue back and forth, but the last time I heard this, my father suddenly stopped arguing and said for my mom to give him her hand and sit beside him. His voice got soft and he spoke in a teary way, saying that the brown diamond for him was the last thing that stayed in their lives. That it reminded him of the business that was such a success and reminded him of how much he loved her the Christmas Day he gave it to her and reminded him of how pretty she was with joy on her face standing there in front of the tree with the lights on her as she turned the brown diamond this way and that and kissed him with much love and happiness. “Someday, somehow, I’ll get it back from Nathan who said he’d hold it for me, and we will again be loving as we were.”
“Hey, Aaron,” Buddy called out, breaking in on my remembering. He was standing at the wide-open space on the side of his place where he delivered his orders. “How about a doughnut? You look like you need a sugar doughnut. My treat.” I guess I did look kind of poopy. I took a big delicious bite and it made me hope it was going to be a day as spiffy as the doughnut.
Happening 8
Courtroom four was on the second floor of the Criminal Courts Building and it was packed when I got there. Not only was I feeling panicked by all the people and activity but also by a sign outside the door of the courtroom: “Children under 16 not admitted unless accompanied by an adult.” I was big for my age but nowhere near looking sixteen. So the first thing I had to do was hook up with an adult. I watched everyone as they came up the stairs, feeling pretty hopeless, until an elderly gentleman who seemed alone came off the top step. His clothes were old but proper, his bow tie rather ragged but his beard and mustache nicely trimmed.
As he headed toward the courtroom I walked close beside him and the door cop let us pass.
“Sir,” I said, acting as needy as I could, “could I please sit beside you?” I blurted out why I was there and he seemed pleased to help me. He explained that he was retired and that these daily court sessions were his best way to pass time. He explained that everyone who had been arrested and put in an overnight holding cell, like my father, had families and friends and lawyers and people called bailsmen who I never heard of who were all there. The many policemen, he explained, were connected to the arrests of those jailed and would report to the judge. He offered me a box of mints that he opened and I gladly took one, in fact two.
Suddenly, in a loud voice, the uniform at the head of the courtroom said that everyone should rise and come to order and the room did. A judge came in, sat behind the desk, and there followed a parade of the locked-ups, arrested for all kinds of things: hitting a wife, not paying parking tickets, hit-and-run, alimony, peeing in the street, driving with no license, on and on, all wrapped up with lawyers and bailsmen and cops and suddenly there was my father, a cop taking him in front of the judge.
“Frederick Broom, Your Honor, material witness in FM23W5, the J & J Jewelry murder case.”
The judge was looking at the papers he’d been given. “Naturalized?”
“Foreign accent. Entered with the killer. Held jewelry bag for him. Prior arrest for jumping electricity.”
I gasped when I heard that about jumping the electricity. He’d take the electric line out of the meter box and twist it direct onto the other end of the line. Very dangerous because he could get electrocuted but he only had to go to jail once but not for very long, maybe a day or so because so many people were getting locked up for doing the same thing and the jails were spilling over. But now the judge was looking at him like he killed a dozen people.
My father started to say something but the judge stopped him, said he’d get his chance to talk at the trial. Meanwhile, he would be confined until trial. “Next.”
My father again tried to say something but the cop pushed him away. As my father turned, he looked straight at me, smiled, and slightly shook his head left-right meaning “no.” I started to get up to go down the aisle between the benches to try to talk to him but the cop had him gone before I could get out of my seat. I was close to tears and hurt and befuddled (which was a favorite word of mine) but I put my head down for a minute and remembered that I had a new friend next to me.
“He’s a handsome man, your father,” my new friend said. “As a material witness they can hold him without charges until the trial. You should try to get a lawyer.”
“Lawyers cost a lot, don’t they?” I said.
“Depends.”
“I don’t know anything about lawyers,” I said. “Can you help me?”
“Oh, I wish but I’m not allowed.”
I had no idea what he meant. “Not allowed?”
“Well, yes, I am not to have any contact with anyone who is, well, like you—a child.”
“But I’m not really—”
“It’s the numbers. Below twenty-one, and you’re twelve.”
It dawned on me. “And they busted you?”
“It hasn’t been pretty. Now, sorry I am, but I have to terminate your company even though you’re an a
dmirable young man who needs help.”
He got up, offered me another mint, and left. The locked-ups were still coming before the judge. I had no idea where to go, what to do, or how to go about it.
Happening 9
I left the courthouse and turned the corner onto Richmond, walking down the side of the street where the maple trees gave a little shade. My head was exploding with all kinds of things: finding a lawyer, somewhere to stay, somehow to eat, our apartment, the Bulova sample case, the Ford, my mother. The heat of the pavement was burning through the cracked soles of my busted Keds. The morning doughnut needed a refill.
At Fourth Street I came upon a church with open doors, Roman Catholic Church of the Immaculate Heart. The idea of sitting myself down in a quiet kind-of-cool church thinking things out was very appealing, but we were not church people although we own a Bible and I had studied the Bible, but we had no particular religion. We did Christmas, a tree and special eating when we could afford it, and sometimes I was invited to a church affair by one of my school friends, back in the days when things were okay and I had church-looking clothes, but I had never been in a Roman Catholic Church with priests waving incense and a choir singing or a synagogue where there was a special singer and chanting, all of which I had seen in the movies.
So it felt strange to go up the steps into the Immaculate Heart on my own. It was very nice and quiet and felt private. Only a few old people were in the pews praying. I sat myself down and looked around at the colored windows and saints and paintings of religious figures. I began to feel a little better, especially my feet.
Not far from me was a black standing box with a pointed roof and a black open curtain on one side of it that hung folded over a small window that was closed, with a chair up against the box under the window. There was a little red light shining on the pointed roof. The box had an open door that a heavy priest in his black robe was entering. He shut the door and the light on the roof turned from red to green. A woman who had been praying got up and went over to the box. She sat down on the chair, the little window opened, and she talked to the priest who had his ear at the window as she pulled across the black curtain in back of her, making her disappear. The green light now turned to red. I realized that I had seen these boxes in the movies and the priest was there to give advice to the people who told them about their problems and some bad things, sins they had committed. When the woman opened the curtain, she crossed herself and left the box. The red light turned green. I hadn’t planned on it but just like that I found myself going to the box, getting on the chair to reach the little door, and tapping on the window. The priest slid open the screen and was surprised to see me.
The Amazing Adventures of Aaron Broom Page 3