An Unfinished Season

by Ward Just

  My father was trained as a lawyer. He got to Dartmouth on a scholarship endowed by an industrialist from Lake Forest. He got to law school the same way, and returned naturally to Illinois to practice. His father-in-law was eager for him to join a New York firm and offered to open the usual doors but my father turned him down without a thought; yet whenever he was irritated by some aspect of his business life he always said, I should have gone the hell to New York when I had the chance. “New York” in our family was code for the greener grass, the pot at the end of the rainbow, or the successful inside straight, though as a concept it brought only sarcasm from my disappointed mother. There was no chance in this world that your father would have gone to live in New York or any other foreign city; he’s Illinois bred, and born, and does not feel safe anywhere elsess. Illinois is his native soil, the prairie and the cornfields and the waving fields of grain and the wolves and so forth and so on, and Chicago. So it was inevitable, my mother said, that he would join a small Chicago firm, not one of the established La Salle Street concerns, but a grittier firm on the Far North Side whose founding partners were a retired circuit-court judge and his nephew, a former assistant state’s attorney. Uncle and nephew practiced political law and hired my father to do other work, outside work that did not involve representations to City Hall, the City Council, the county Board of Supervisors, and the tax assessor’s office. My father claimed that the Hollywood Avenue offices of Greenslat & Greenslat were a microclimate of Chicago justice, and in them he learned how the weather worked, how the rain was made, and how the rain was paid for, and which crops flourished and which didn’t and why. Chicago was a lawyer’s paradise.

  Not a wife’s paradise, my mother said.

  The city was dirty. Not a tree. We lived a mile from the lake. I had time on my hands. God, I was lonely. Your father told me to be patient, that when we had a stake we would move to Quarterday, renovate his family’s house, begin a family of our own. My father offered to help but Teddy didn’t want his help. So we remained in Chicago for five years, saving what we could, your father dreaming of Quarterday. And then Andy came riding to our rescue.

  Early in his practice, my father was retained by the owner of a suburban printing business, routine corporate work that included union negotiations. Andres Carillo had a knack for infuriating labor unions, and there were three of them at his plant in the western lakes region. My father excelled at labor law and eventually Andy Carillo asked him to join his board of directors, and then to give up private practice altogether and work full-time as general manager and counsel to the corporation. These discussions took place on Friday afternoons at the Arlington Park racetrack, where Andy had a box. My father was also a dedicated horseplayer, so he was happy to meet his client each Friday at noon, a fine lunch at the Post and Paddock and then the races, all the while talking business and horses. He always had a tip on a horse from Judge Greenslat; and later in his life my father loved to reminisce about his afternoons at the track, the smell of the turf, the excitement when the horses broke from the gate, everyone rising, fists in the air, an animal roar from the grandstand. Andy Carillo was a widower and childless and gave my father to understand that he would inherit the business “in due course,” meaning upon Andy’s death or retirement.

  You’re like a son to me, Andy told my father.

  You’re the reason this business is as successful as it is. You’ve kept the taxes low and the unions down.

  And I like the way you bet, Andy went on. Study the field, study the odds, study the track, and go with your findings. Screw the hunches.

  My father knew he was not a natural lawyer. He was ton impatient, often tactless, and perhaps not clever enough. A sly business, he called the law, a business without product. The lawyer gave the client advice and the client made money on the advice while the lawyer received a retainer. He hated the expression “on retainer,” as if he were someone’s manservant. Of course the Greenslats always seemed to be part of whatever legal hocus-pocus they were engaged in, part of the deal, part of the profits—“the whole shoeshine,” as Judge Greenslat said. But the judge’s sort of law was not my father’s sort of law, so he would always be “on retainer” and driving Chevrolets while the judge and his nephew drove Cadillacs.

  I’ve been expecting this, can’t say I haven’t, the judge said when my father told him of Andy Carillo’s offer. I suppose it wouldn’t do any good if I offered you a piece of our action. Small piece, but still a piece.

  My father shook his head, smiling because he liked the judge, whom everyone called Butch. They were sitting in a tavern around the corner from the office.

  I want to run my own show, my father said.

  I’ll help you with the contract, if you like.

  We have a handshake, my father said.

  Teddy, Teddy, Teddy—a handshake isn’t worth batshit.

  I know more about his business than he does, my father said.

  You want money, don’t you, Teddy?

  I didn’t think I did but it turns out that I do.

  I like money, too. But I’ve always known that. How come you just figured it out?

  My father remembered Butch Greenslat’s eyes sliding away to watch the waitress bend at the waist to say something to one of the customers, her skirt riding above her knees, and her giving a little backward glance to their table, and Butch smiling, entirely engrossed. Butch had forgotten his own question, but my father answered it anyway. Because the way the world’s going, you’re not going to be able to do without it. If you don’t have it, they’ll walk all over you.

  But always, Butch said, still watching the waitress, someone has more.

  Oh, sure, my father said. But there are fewer of them.

  So my father was quick to agree to Andy Carillo’s proposal and Carillo Printing became Carillo & Ravan Printing, and when the old man had a stroke at the outbreak of the war, he was as good as his word, retiring to an apartment in Fort Lauderdale, returning only for the quarterly meetings of the board of directors. My father became chairman and president. He said he liked the noise of the presses and the smell of the ink and paper, the heavy stock he used for his stationery line. This was hard, dirty, and dangerous work. My father had dozens of small scars on his hands from splashes of hot lead and two broken toes when one of the heavy iron turtles ran over his foot. He had no use for white-collar chairmen who did not know the details of the business they were in. Clean-desk chairmen who sat in suites of offices guarded by secretaries. Chairmen who didn’t like to get their hands dirty—and in fact he was delighted when he returned to his third-floor office with his white shirt streaked black with ink, evidence of a day’s work. My father thought of his men as collateral members of his family and each Christmas everyone got a bonus, the sum calculated by a mysterious formula known only to him. Not every bonus was the same and so there was resentment, and when one day the foreman asked him about it, my father whirled and snarled, None of your business.

  It’s my money, my father said. I’ll decide the bonus.

  The foreman did not flinch. Clyde said, If that’s the way you want it, Ted. But the men—

  That’s the way I want it, my father said. It’s my business. Not their business.

  I’ll tell them that, Clyde said.

  Tell them any god damned thing you want, my father said.

  They won’t like it, the foreman said. And bonuses aren’t the only grievance. There’s overtime and vacation time and the pension. We’re not making progress at the table. And the contract expires end of the month. You’re not around as much as you used to be. We were more comfortable when you were at the table in person, he said with an attempt at a smile.

  I’m around as much as I need to be. My offer’s fair and the men know it.

  The men don’t see it that way, Clyde said. They see themselves falling behind. And the national, they don’t see it that way either.

  Your national’s in Philadelphia. What the fuck does Philadelphia know about condit
ions in Illinois? What does Philadelphia know about my business?

  More than you think, Ted.

  Your national wants a strike. Doesn’t want a settlement, fair to both sides. Your national likes unrest, the more unrest the better. Put it to an honest vote, secret ballot. And when the ballots are counted, let’s be certain neutral parties are present to verify the tally. I don’t trust your bosses in Philadelphia. I don’t like their politics. I don’t like their threats.

  I’ll see they get the message, the foreman said.

  That was the conversation as my father replayed it to my mother that night, my mother sitting on the davenport, her legs curled up beside her, reaching for the cigarette box and running her fingernail across the chased silver before lighting a Pall Mall and blowing a perfect smoke ring, her eyes focused on a Havana of the middle distance. My father, pacing in front of the fireplace, continued to complain about outsiders interfering with his business.

  What’s gotten into my men?

  Teddy, my mother said. Tranquilo. You’ll have a heart attack.

  Bastards, he said. He thought he had gotten too close to them, too familiar, remembering the names of their wives and Children, caring for them like members of his own family. And then he said something about making changes on the floor, and if it was outsiders they wanted, he had some outsiders of his own.

  What outsiders, Teddy?

  Strikebreakers, he said.

  Scabs, I said.

  We call them strikebreakers, my father said evenly.

  Please, my mother said wearily. Enough. Stop it.

  Strikebreakers, my father said again.

  My mother threw down her cigarette and left the room, rushing upstairs, an act that surprised my father and me. The dishes were left undone.

  When the weather turned at last, each evening around ten I put aside my schoolbooks, threw on a sweater, and slipped out of the house. I made my way in the darkness to the pond, sat in one of the swaybacked chairs, and smoked one cigarette after another, thinking of the life I would lead once I was free of Quarterday and my father, and when a girl would figure in this new life. September seemed years off and I did not know what to expect at the University of Chicago, except girls were present and they were said to be uninhibited. The older brother of a friend of mine was actually living with a girl in an apartment near the Midway, an unheard-of arrangement. They shared the rent along with the double bed in the center of the living room. They entertained guests from the bed. They spent whole weekends in the bed, eating Chinese takeout between bouts of love making. She was a political science major from Milwaukee, dark-eyed, long-legged, a devout socialist and admitted existentialist. Of course they were headed for trouble with that sort of behavior, the parents understandably furious—why couldn’t Walter have gone to Yale like everyone else? But before I could muse on the possibilities of long-legged existentialists I had to get through graduation, the party season on the North Shore, and a summer job that began in June. I rocked in the chair and looked at the sky, thinking about the long-legged girl as I identified the Dippers, Orion’s belt, the five stars of Cassiopeia, and the two Bears. One thing I would do when I was away for good, out of college and into a man’s life, was to see the Southern Cross from shipboard; and just then the Southern Cross was as remote as the unknown girl, though I was still wondering what it would be like to have a double bed in the living room and entertain from it, everyone loose and good-humored, not giving a damn about anything. Probably that was the secret, a casualness of approach. It had worked so well for me in the past, an attitude about as casual as the organization of the heavens, except who was to say that the heavens weren’t casual, the consequence of a cosmic roll of the dice. Einstein didn’t think so, but what did Einstein know? Einstein was an optimist. So you were attracted to a girl and set about coordinating an approach and halfway into the waltz you watched her eyes glaze and commence to peek over your shoulder, searching for a way out. You were false to the ground, about as persuasive as a clamorous radio jingle. It was not possible for one second to forget yourself and step into the life of another. It had never worked, not with the girl in the ninth grade, not with the girl in the tenth, nor the trampoline star later on. Naturalness was as elusive as smoke—so vivid one moment, vanished the next—and so you remained in your own bed alone, waiting for something magical to happen, as surely it would, tomorrow or the next day. The Midwest was so fertile, so enormous, the horizon line stretched to the limits of the known world. But there was no space to breathe.

  Away in the southern sky I could see the reflection of the lights of Chicago, a pulsing orangy glow, the throb of the future. On brilliant nights the Milky Way seemed almost close enough to touch, spread out like a great glittering banquet, though never pristine owing to the lights of the metropolis that nibbled the rim of the heavens. You had to turn your back to the city to get a chaste view of the stars—my father’s thought on those occasions when he felt crowded by Chicago’s muscle. He believed Chicago was a separate and hostile nation. Chicago was where you went for a loan when times were hard, and Chicago in turn looked east, where the muscle was bought and paid for. My father grew up believing that Illinois was a colony of some greater, more prodigious society to which he did not have access. This feared society was controlled by secretive personalities in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and London. They owned the banks, the railways, the steelworks, and the oil. They owned the electricity you needed to turn on a radio; and they owned the radio. These were the people who had nominated Eisenhower at the criminal convention in Chicago, summer of ’fifty-two, stealing delegates from poor Bob Taft, Mr. Republican, who had earned the nomination fair and square but refused to wheel and deal. No honor among them, the moneymen from the East, malefactors of great wealth. Who said that? Theodore Roosevelt, the good Roosevelt, the rough-riding Republican Roosevelt said it; and his appalling cousin, the bad Roosevelt, the socialist Roosevelt, expanded the definition to include any hard-working businessman trying to make ends meet in a tough economy. Some poor bastard owns a gas station or a shoe store, he’s a malefactor of great wealth. Meanwhile, the millionaires got away with murder.

  Well, I had said, now you’ve got Eisenhower.

  We’ll see about Eisenhower, my father said. Good man, I guess, but I don’t trust generals. He’s an improvement over Truman. And a damn sight better than Adlai.

  I would have voted for Adlai, I raid.

  Of course you would, my father said, barking a laugh. When was the last time you filed an income tax return?

  That was the world I sought to escape, for a double bed in the living room of an apartment off the Midway on the South Side of Chicago, and if I could find a dark-eyed, long-legged girl to share it with me, I would not care if she was a Republican, a Teen for Taft, even. I shivered in the chill, looking at the constellations and Chicago’s sulfurous glow on the southern horizon, wishing to God I was five years older and out of Quarterday, out of college and out of the Midwest, freely sailing the oceans under the Southern Cross. I stood and walked to the edge of the fairway and flipped my cigarette in the direction of the green on Six—and out of the evening mist came a herd of deer, a buck and three does and their fawns, gliding lightly up the rise of the fairway, the does leading the way, moving their heads like turtles. They made no sound as they glided along, high-haunched, the fawns pausing to graze a little. The buck turned his heavy head to look directly at me and then back again; and in a heartbeat they were gone, vaulting into the mist where they vanished for good. I stared at the place where they had been, shaking a cigarette from the pack and trying to light it. But my fingers would not work properly. I waited a minute or more for the herd to reappear but they were gone.

  We lived in a political house that se`son, nightly communicants at the evening news. The mess in Springfield, the mess in Washington, subversion in Hollywood, corruption in Chicago, stalemate in Korea, unrest generally. My mother was a ghost at the table, patiently knitting while the news was
read by a sad-eyed middle-aged man with a baritone voice and a reassuring manner. Once, when he devoted a sentence to a strike at my father’s plant, my father looked up, startled; but the sentence came and went in an instant.

  Did you hear that?

  No, Teddy. What was it?

  He mentioned the strike.

  Your strike?

  My strike, my father said.

  What did he say?

  That there was trouble at Carillo & Ravan.

  I’ll be damned, my father went on, pleased but trying not to show it.

  My mother rarely spoke during the news, though often she would look questioningly at my father, who offered his own commentary on the events of the day. He believed things were out of control, by which he meant directed by unseen hands. He knew that something had changed with the winning of the war and the unquiet peace that followed. He knew this from conversations with his friends at the club, and listening to the men on the floor talking about their new Ford coupe or the Johnson outboard they had their eye on, and the washing machine their wives were after them to buy. Commotion was in the air, both grievance and a new sense of destination. The whole nation had won the war and the whole nation was entitled to share in the victory. My father looked into the eyes of this new face and saw something of himself; but still he would not yield.