The Amazing Adventures of Aaron Broom

by A. E. Hotchner

  I thought I might stick around and detectify Sol Greenblatt when he left work but I decided it was more important to go back to the Tremont, check with Vernon on the Ford, and pick up letters from my mother who wrote me just about every day. She had a wonderful handwriting and just seeing it—the way she floated her ys and her gs—was a little like having her right there.

  I checked our door to see if the notice was still there—it was—and I went across the courtyard down to Vernon’s place in the basement. The door was open and I could smell his cooking. I went in calling out his name but he wasn’t alone. A large woman all in black holding a stuffed briefcase was talking to him. Soon as he saw me he called out, “Hello, Stanley, your toilet stuffed up again?”

  For about three seconds I thought Vernon had gone gaga but when the woman turned to look at me with her super-spooky face and a tag on her said “Freda Muller, Juvenile Welfare,” I caught on and said, “My father wants to borrow your plunger.”

  “Sure thing,” Vernon said, handing me a plunger.

  “You know Aaron Broom in 12B?” the woman said to me in a cannon of a voice that would make drill sergeants wet their pants.

  “No, ma’am,” I said creakily. “I mean, yes, I know him but—”

  Vernon cut in quick. “It’s okay, George, I already told Missus Muller that Aaron’s not—”

  “I thought this was Stanley!” she blasted with her cannon again.

  “Oh, yeah, get him mixed up with his twin brother,” Vernon said.

  “We’re identical,” I said. “I’m Stanley, all right.”

  She gave me a look that would kill a battalion of wild gorillas, turned back to Vernon. “Find him!” she commanded in a blast that could derail a train and left. Vernon reached inside an old teapot and took out a bottle of whiskey. “That woman prob’ly caused the De-pression,” he said and tilted the bottle into his mouth. “Damn woman drove me off the wagon.” He exhaled and plunged the cork back in the bottle with a thump.

  “Coupla letters from your mama,” he said, handing them to me, “and this package from the Windy City Hosiery but your pa’s not here to deliver it.”

  “I’ll tell her,” I said. “Meanwhile you hang on to it. How’s Bertha?”

  “All safe and sound. Sleepin’ like a baby behind them tires. How ’bout a dish a my turnip stew? Looks like you ain’t partakin’ much.”

  I wasn’t a big fan of turnips but my poor stomach had a welcome sign out for any contribution.

  He served it up with a slice of Wonder Bread and my stomach gave it a standing ovation.

  “Guess there’s no way for me to get those quarters out of the Fatima tin, is there?”

  “Nope. If I was you, I would try to keep my distance until they take down that sign from your front door. But I can lend you a little somethin’ if you like.”

  “No, thanks, Vernon, but in these times a delicious plate of turnip stew is better than a two-dollar bill popping up on a huckleberry bush.”

  Happening 13

  I sat on a bench in Forest Park and read my mother’s letters, one by one, slowly, taking my time to feel her being with me. Despite her being in a dismal world of coughers and die-ers, she tried to sound cheerful or at least hopeful that she would soon be well enough to come home but I could tell that she was covering up the pain of being away from us and that she really didn’t know when she would be able to leave the sanitarium. It’s like when you play hardball and the pitcher plunks you in the rump with a fastball and knocks you down and you get up hurting like all hell but you mustn’t rub the hit spot or make a hurt face and you jog to first base as if you were just fine even though you’re not.

  No two ways about it, I must go out to see her even though visitors are not allowed inside the sanitarium because consumption is very catchable, so I’ll just holler up to her from the lawn outside.

  * * *

  —

  THE WAY to get to the Fee-Fee Sanitarium, you take the Creve Coeur trolley to the end of the line. It was a really nice ride. Trees and country all the way through Creve Coeur and we even passed a lake where men with straw hats were fishing.

  It was quite a walk from the trolley stop to the sanitarium and I passed many nice houses with clothes drying in their backyards. Made me aware that I looked pretty rumpled and scruffy, not a pretty sight for my mom who always had something washed clean for me to put on. But I didn’t want her to know anything about our place being locked up or Pop in jail so I did what I had to do—I kept an eye on those backyards and found one that had kids’ clothes hanging that looked just about my size. Making sure no one was watching or a dog about to tear me apart, I plucked a pair of socks, underwear, a shirt, and pants from the clothesline and took them where I changed behind a tree for cover, leaving all my things on the ground. I really wasn’t stealing anything since my stuff would replace what I took once it was washed. Matter of fact my shirt was a lot nicer than the one I took. So I think it was okay for me to pick some of their flowers and I’d have a bouquet to give to my mother.

  Happening 14

  My mother was on the second floor of a white frame building that had a screen porch running all around it. There was bed after bed after bed all along this screen, and all you heard was coughing, the kind where something comes up at the end. My father had explained to me that the cure for my mother was lots of fresh air and sunshine and things like cream and eggs to eat.

  I finally located her by walking around the building and looking up at people in the beds. She was very glad to see me, and me to see her. I held up my flowers and showed her I’d send them up to her. It wasn’t very private talking to her with everybody in their beds from the first floor and second floor listening. They didn’t have anything else to do, so they just looked out at me and listened. I felt like I was on the stage. There were lots of other visitors standing on the lawn talking up to people in the beds but I swear everyone was listening to me.

  While we were talking I could see that some patients were walking along the aisles between the beds with tin cups in their hands. When they coughed and brought stuff up, they spit into the tin cups. The people in the beds had tin cups, too, that they spit into, but all the time I was there my mother never coughed once.

  I told her that Father was on the road somewhere but that I was making out just fine. I made up a lot of stuff like that. She complimented me on how neat and clean I looked. I stayed on the lawn trying to think of things to talk about until the bell rang that meant visitors had to leave. I had almost forgotten to tell her that a shipment from the Windy City Hosiery Company had arrived. This bothered her.

  “Oh, dear,” she said, “I’d forgotten. They have to be delivered.”

  “I’ll deliver them,” I said.

  “No, I don’t think you should.”

  “Why not? It’s in East St. Louis, isn’t it? Well I know where East St. Louis is.”

  My mother was suddenly upset which wasn’t good for her. I was sorry I told her about the Windy City package.

  “Well, I guess I have to send you, A,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  “You just go there and then right home, hear? Oh, if only your father were here to do it.” I couldn’t imagine why she was so upset. It wasn’t a big package and God knows it wasn’t heavy with all those silk things in it, and if I could get myself to Creve Coeur I could certainly get myself to East St. Louis.

  “Well I guess it will be all right, but be careful changing streetcars. When you collect the money, twenty dollars goes to the company. You just take it to the post office and get a money order. The two-seventy-five commission—you keep the seventy-five cents and mail me the two-dollar bill inside a folded paper so no one can see the money through the envelope.”

  We waved goodbyes and threw kisses. I went to the man at the door and he said he would send my flowers up to her.

&nb
sp; * * *

  —

  I STARTED on my way back to the trolley, full of the sadness of seeing her like that. Having to pretend that we were just fine when we weren’t. I felt heavy, like my legs couldn’t carry me. I was passing a bench and I collapsed on it. The tears flooded out of me. I am not a crier. I never cry. I can keep hurt inside. But I was crying and drawing in to breathe and saying things to myself I had never said before. It was like the time I had a boil and the nurse at school lanced it and all the bad stuff inside came running out.

  * * *

  —

  GOING BACK on the trolley was a very heavy ride. Leaving her alone with all those coughing people. What a wonderful woman she was, how in her quiet, firm, loving way she held us together and although we had nothing and nothing to look forward to, my mother convinced my father and me that we were going to survive the endless days without hope. Somehow she kept us from resenting the better life of some people, even making me feel in some ways superior to kids in school who were much better off. She could stitch up a worn-out patch in my pants in such a way made me feel that she was giving me a new pair of pants. I hope that’s what all good mothers do. I can only speak about mine. Why she’s being cruelly punished is something I can’t understand. Right now it does not seem, as my mom says, that someone is watching over us, but if there is, considering my father’s in jail, my mom’s locked away with consumption, and me hunted by freaky Freda Muller, I wish he would please watch over someone else for a while.

  Happening 15

  I went to Vernon’s place to pick up the Windy City Hosiery package, making sure Freda Muller wasn’t lurking around. The way she kept after me, you would think I was Jack the Ripper.

  I changed streetcars at the Eads Bridge, which crossed the Mississippi to the Illinois side where East St. Louis is located. As the streetcar headed toward the bridge we passed through a zillion shacks in a Hooverville that was packed into the approach area before the start of the bridge. There were all kinds of shelters—tents big and little; packing containers; shacks of tin, cardboard, wood; food stands; a church made of rocks and bricks; and so on, a little dilapidated city, a place, I decided, where I could set up for the night.

  * * *

  —

  I HAD never been in East St. Louis and one look at it made me wonder why anyone lived there when they could live across the Mississippi in St. Louis proper. It was dirty and ugly and all the men I passed in the street looked like they were packing guns or had a disease. Of course, St. Louis is dirty and some mornings the black coal smoke shuts out the sun and burns your eyes so bad it makes you cry, but East St. Louis made you feel dirty, if you know what I mean. And it was even hotter than St. Louis.

  This street Betty Haskins lived on was not paved and had holes and gullies in it. I couldn’t believe this is where the rich ladies lived who could afford to buy the Windy City silk things. I pushed the button over her name and waited in the East St. Louis sun with flies buzzing at me off the screen. Suddenly there was a click and a lady’s voice said, “Hello, who’s there?”

  “I’m here to see Betty Haskins,” I said.

  “Who are you?”

  “I have some things for her from the Windy City Hosiery Company. My mother is sick and I’m here to deliver them.”

  “Oh, sure, honey, whyn’t you say so? Come on up.” She buzzed me in.

  A long flight of narrow stairs went up to the second floor. A very peculiar smell was pouring down the stairs from above. By the time I got to the top, I remembered the smell. There was a Gypsy lady around on Enright who had this fortune-telling parlor in the basement and I had smelled it there. I used to give out circulars for her, ten cents from after school to six o’clock, and she always had a thick stump of incense smoking away. Nobody much went to see her and she finally disappeared. When people aren’t eating regularly, I guess they don’t believe much in fortune-tellers.

  When I got to the top of the stairs, I could scarcely see where I was. There were these dim orange lights with fringe shades over them and lots of beaded curtains. I was in a sort of corridor with several closed doors, and down at one end was a lighted room. I could hear voices and music coming from that room. One of the doors opened and a woman came out.

  “Why, aren’t you cute!” she said to me. “Are you Ina’s boy?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Too bad she’s sick. Just bring the package in here.”

  I carried the package into her room and she shut the door. There were more orange lights there but I could see better. The room was all full of silks and satins, and there was a big bed in the middle with a silk canopy over it and gold angels at the corners holding the silk.

  “Well, now, let’s see what you brought. Just open it up on this couch.”

  Betty Haskins was a movie star. She had red hair and super-white teeth and she was wearing a black silk kimono with red flowers on it. My opinion of East St. Louis suddenly improved, because if someone that gorgeous who was rich chose to live here, there must be something to say for it. I opened the box and she started to take out things and lay them on the bed. She picked up a silk sort of nightgown, I guess it was, with lacy junk in front, and held it up against her and looked at herself in the wall mirror. It was pretty embarrassing.

  “I can wait out in the corridor,” I said.

  “Oh you don’t have to do that, honey,” she said.

  She looked at the bill and took some money from the center of her bra. I counted it and it came to exactly the right amount. A bell tingled and she went over to the wall where there was an earpiece hanging on a hook. She put it against her ear and talked into a talk place in the wall. “Hello who’s there?…Oh, hello, honey, come right on up.” She thanked me for coming, hoped my mother would be better, and opened the door for me. She certainly had good manners.

  I put the money in my pocket, first checking around with my fingers to be sure there weren’t any holes in it, and I said goodbye and left. As I got to the stairs there was a fat man mopping his head with a handkerchief just coming up. He took a look at me and his eyes popped open. Going down those stairs it suddenly dawned on me where I was. I had read a book about a young woman named Nana by Émile Zola that was on the forbidden list at school, and also some absolutely forbidden stories by Guy de Maupassant, especially one about a woman who lived in a room with her little son, and when men would come up to visit her, she would hide her little son in the closet. She would put him on a chair and tell him to sit there and not make a sound. But one night he fell asleep and fell off the chair, and the man visiting his mother opened the door and saw him and was furious and stormed away without giving his mother any money. The little boy felt terrible and cried, but his mother was nice and loving and tried to make him feel better. I thought it was an absolutely wonderful story, but until that moment it was something that happened in faraway France and not in East St. Louis, Illinois.

  Happening 16

  There was a post office across the street from the Eads Bridge stop. I got a money order and two stamped envelopes, one that I addressed to the Windy City Hosiery Company, the other to my mom with a two-dollar bill I wrapped inside my post office receipt. I paid for the envelope and the money order fee from my seventy-five cents and that left me with two quarters that I hid in the lining of my felty that I always wore. It was really the crown of an old fedora hat someone had pitched as worthless. But I had scissored off the brim all around and cut a couple of air holes on the sides next to the big buttons with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s face on them, left over from the election. I also had one small button in the back with Herbert Hoover’s face that I had put a black X across.

  Herbert Hoover was my father’s worst enemy: “He’s a liar, a fraud, a two-faced fathead who promises anything and produces nothing! A chicken in every pot, hah! A car in every garage! Yeah, and a Hoover bank that gobbles up every cent you save!” During th
e election, Franklin Roosevelt said about Hoover, “There is nothing inside the man but jelly,” and after that Pop called him Jelly Hoover and I made up a jingle: “Hoover’s got a big fat belly, Inside the man is only jelly.” President Roosevelt said Mr. Hoover with his millions and all his millionaire friends blew up the government and buried all of us in the Depression and I believed him.

  * * *

  —

  STANDING THERE outside the post office, hearing Pop in my head, I really and truly missed him and thought about how it was for him in jail. I had no idea where the jail was but maybe I could find out and go visit him and tell him that everything was going to be all right, give him hope, like President Roosevelt says, but how could I find the jail and maybe if I did Freda Muller might get tipped off and nab me.

  An Olive streetcar came to a stop and I got on. Maybe if I had a talk with Augie, my new pal, I could get my detectifying back on track.

  He was there, all right, hawking the Post-Dispatch and we waved to each other. I saw that a sign had been posted on the J & J window:

  $500 Reward

  For Information Leading to the Arrest

  of

  the Killer of Ted Dempsey

  Reliable Insurance Company

  I managed to talk to Augie while he moved around his stand, selling his papers. He said he didn’t have a chance to tail Matt J. Pringle because when he left J & J a flashy Marmon convertible with a beauty at the wheel picked him up and they drove off.

  “How were they?” I asked. “Kissy-kissy or hand-shakey or what?”

  “How were they?” he repeated. “Well, he handed her something, she looked at it and laughed as they drove away.”