by Ward Just
You’re wrong, you know, about the colored woman. And wrong about my father.
But the city editor had already turned away to say something to one of the reporters standing patiently at his elbow, feigning indifference to the tirade just concluded—and I noticed now for the first time that Tilleman’s desk gave no hint of his private life. Instead, it was an inventory of the tools of his trade, a Royal typewriter with copy paper next to it, a paste pot, a box of paper clips, a Swingline stapler, number one pencils points-up in a plain white coffee mug, Scotch tape, a gum eraser, a Webster’s dictionary, Fowler’s Modern English Usage, Lennart’s street guide to Chicago, a railroad schedule, and a telephone directory. There was nothing personal on the surface of his desk, no mementos, no pictures of the family or of himself with local celebrities, a saloonkeeper, alderman, or sports hero, unless you counted the ashtray with a faded logo of the Chicago White Sox. The same was true of the reporters’ desks, strictly anonymous, some desks messier than others but otherwise interchangeable. It was as if the occupants of the newsroom had no life beyond it, certainly no life worth being reminded of, and nothing therefore to compromise their professional objectivity. A photograph of a wife or sweetheart or parents or children would be considered unforgivably sentimental—and then I wondered if the reverse was also true, that their homes would contain no hint of their daytime life, and somehow I doubted that. The pull of the newsroom was a twenty-four-hour affair.
I left at once for the state’s attorney’s office, thinking all the while of Tilleman’s animus and wondering how much of it was personal and how much related to my father’s business and deciding to have a final word with him; but when I returned to the newsroom, Tilleman was nowhere in sight. I put copies of the indictment on his desk and headed to the cashier’s office to collect my last week’s wages, thirty-five dollars and seventy cents. Along the way I stopped to say goodbye to the reporters I’d come to know, Henry Laschbrook and Ed Hoskins. I knew in my bones that we would never meet again, and so did they. For me, it was the last day of summer camp. I was leaving but the counselors were staying on, and as we talked I got the idea that this newsroom world would soon expire like a dying star. The rattle of the wire service machines in the corner, the pop of the pneumatic tubes that rushed copy to the composing room, the eyeshades and Tilleman’s paste pot and gum eraser, had the antique look of a silent movie. Windows were thrown open to the heavy August air, and you could hear horns and sirens and the clank of the El and all the notes of Chicago’s industrial hum.
Henry and Ed had heard the exchange between Tilleman and me—in the newsroom, no conversation was ever private, except telephone conversations—and said I shouldn’t worry about it. Not everyone was cut out to be a newspaper reporter, a specific craft requiring a specific outlook on life, low pay, long hours, deadlines, anxiety, with nothing to show for it at the end nf the day but a piece in the paper, edited by cranks, read by straphangers, here today, gone tomorrow. Most reporters were burned out at fifty, no good for anything but the obit desk, and the only thing to be said for the job was that it was—just a hell of a lot of fun, being in the know. In any case, the city editor’s bite was worse than his bark, ha-ha, but he wasn’t such a bad guy really, underneath. He was worried about his job, same as they all were. Ozias Tilleman had a reputation to maintain, “that of prick.”
But we were all a little surprised, Henry said.
He was rougher than he needed to be, Ed put in. What the hell, you were here as a copy boy, special circumstances.
Aren’t you the publisher’s nephew? Henry said.
No, I said. The publisher is a friend of my father’s.
Not the nephew?
No, not the nephew.
We heard you were the nephew, Ed said, eyes narrowing, suspicious of my story. Naturally he suspected a cover-up. The rumor was widespread and too plausible to dismiss because of a dubious denial by an interested party. Surely there was something more to it, something left unsaid. In every story there was something concealed, the inconvenient or incriminating fact.
So your father and the publisher aren’t related in any way, Henry said, nailing it down. That’s a shame because we were hoping you’d know something about where we stand. If the paper’s going to fold, or what.
No, I said. They’re just friends. They talk about golf.
And I assume your mother’s not related—
No, I said.
Golfing, is it? Ed said.
And Republican politics, I said.
It figures, Ed said. This publisher is a union buster, too. But he can’t get away with that here. Chicago’s a union town. We wouldn’t stand for it. We wouldn’t stand for scabs in the plant. We’d close him down, Ed said evenly, looking at me as if he expected an argument.
My father didn’t try to bust the union, I said. The union tried to bust him.
Ed Hoskins laughed sourly, turning to Henry Laschbrook. That’s a new one, he said. That’s not the way we heard it. But things probably look different out there on the nineteenth hole of the country club.
Take it easy, Ed, Henry said.
Plenty of kids I know, love to be making thirty-five a week hustling copy. Fetching Tilleman his coffee and Danish. But these are kids who don’t play golf, and their fathers don’t play golf either.
Ed, Henry said.
Shit, Ed said, and walked back to his desk.
Henry Laschbrook and I avoided each other’s eyes in the awkward silence. He said finally, This is a hard time for Ed, the uncertainty. There’s more bullshit thrown around this city room than in the stockyards. He has a family, one of his kids is sick. One of Ed’s kids is always sick.
My father doesn’t have anything to do with it, I said.
They’re going to fold this paper and then Ed’s out of work. No food on the table. Baby needs shoes.
All the papers in this town, he’ll find another job.
He’s fifty, kid. Fifty years old, a journeyman. The other papers don’t want him. And now he thinks he’ll have to go into public relations, flacking for one of the department stores or the railroad, maybe even the city. Shit, Ed doesn’t even own a decent suit. This paper’s been his whole life, started like you, a copy boy. Wrote sports for a while, then police. There wasn’t any college in Ed’s future. He was the breadwinner in his family. He still is. Maybe that’s hard for you to understand from where you sit, a college boy without a care in the world except deciding which dance to go to on Saturday night.
I have no idea what’s going to happen to the paper, I said.
If you hear anything, let us know.
I didn’t understand about Ed, I said.
No reason why you should, Henry said, turning to his desk.
And then the phones began to ring and one by one the reporters picked up, said Yeah, and began to listen hard, receiver tucked between jaw and collarbone, already inserting a sheet of copy paper into the typewriter and beginning to strike the keys, tap tap-tap tap-tap-tap tappatappatappatappa—can you spell that name again, sugar? How many injured? What’s the address? Typing with one finger while lighting a cigarette and dropping the match to the floor. Smoking and typing, typing and talking, talking and smoking, weighing and measuring the information on Tilleman’s Richter scale of reader satisfaction. Hard to miss the bitten fingernails, the frayed shirt cuffs, the canny insinuating tone of their questions, and the tremendous affection the reporters had for their typewriters, personal as pocket watches. While they talked they moved their fingers from the keys to the space bar and back again, whether they were typing or not; and when they finished, the telephone in its cradle, they reviewed their notes, all the while caressing the carapace of the machine as if it were a small animal or the skin of a woman. I watched them a moment, absorbed in their utter concentration, birds building nests one twig at a time.
Then I was standing on the sidewalk in a light rain, my pay packet heavy in my jacket pocket, no assignment, no place I had to be, no specific quitting time, a free Frid
ay afternoon at the paper’s expense. I turned to look at the newspaper office one last time—gray-faced, I thought, exhausted, rain darkening the stone façade, the newspaper’s logo in heavy gothic script over the entrance, upper windows thrown open to the Loop’s sooty air. I stood still and listened for the rattle of the newsroom typewriters but the noise of the street swallowed it up. My summer at the paper had been a summer at the circus, acrobats, clowns, lion tamers, aerialists, magicians, and Jo-Jo the dog-faced boy, Ringmaster Tilleman supervising all of it. Who wouldn’t envy such a summer, at the center of events in Chicago? And I was delighted to be finished with it. Not everyone was cut out to be a newspaper reporter. I turned my back and felt a sudden shudder, the sidewalk trembling from the huge Goss presses beginning to turn with the early afternoon edition, MOBSTER INDICTED! would be the page one headline over an unflattering photograph and a few paragraphs of essential details, hard facts to whet the reader’s appetite for the second edition and the edition after that, and tomorrow’s lurid follow-up already in the works. My contribution to the flow of the day’s news, Tilleman’s gold. But as I walked away, I was thinking of my father and his red duffel, my father the union buster, the publisher’s golfing partner and confidant. I was astonished his shadow had followed me all this way. I was marked as surely as if I had a clubfoot or was carrying a white stick or wearing white tie and tails or Lieutenant Sassoon’s bloody infantry uniform, and yet I had been absolutely certain that I was as anonymous as one of the newsroom’s gunmetal desks, the kid who brought Tilleman his morning coffee and hustled copy from here to there, handy in the morgue, what was his name again?
You know the one. The publisher’s nephew.
The college boy from the North Shore.
Bill? Will?
Of course Tilleman knew the score, thanks to my dancing shoes; and probably the dancing shoes were only confirmation of what he already suspected, having received a note from the publisher. Hire this kid, minimum wage. I pulled the problem this way and that, gathering twigs in my own way. But the nest would not build. I wondered if you went through life as a reflection in the mirrors of other people, and these mirrors were distorted, shaded by rumor and supposition, the way you spoke and the clothes you wore, your haircut and how you carried yourself, and you had to live with it. And I knew I was guilty of the same thing, observing frayed shirt cuffs and bitten fingernails and assembling from them a personality. What did I know of Ozias Tilleman’s life really, or the lives of Ed Hoskins or Henry Laschbrook away from the newsroom—Hoskins and his chronically sick children, Laschbrook and his moments of tranquillity at the pool hall on Wabash—other than their lives were different from mine. Observing the rollers gave only a superficial understanding of the ocean beneath. Probably Aurora had all this in mind when she talked of moving to Greenwich Village, where no one knew who you were or cared, where badges of caste and class would fall away in the balmy atmosphere of—no doubt it would be artistic freedom, and a closetful of hats for every occasion, depending on the personality you chose that day.
Something missing there, I thought.
What if Bleecker Street was only Astor Street in sandals and a black beret?
All this time I had thought I was one of them, a kind of junior partner, product of anonymous Quarterday, familiar with life’s hard knocks because my father had carried a gun for his own protection. But I was mistaken. I had acquired an identity that was not false, but one I had not sought, either, at least not consciously. North Shore kid, college boy, slumming for the summer. I was the enemy. But they knew no more of me than I knew of Jack Brule’s skull in the glassed-in bookcase.
I walked in drizzle through the Loop to the Art Institute, intending to surprise Aurora when her class ended at noon. The Loop was as well-known to me now as Quarterday and I knew in some specific way that I would always be drawn to it, the wide-windowed department stores with plump women in gloves and high heels scrutinizing the goods on offer, the movie marquees ablaze with garish lights, the restaurants, bars, pool halls and tobacco shops, the sidewalks crowded with shoppers and drifters, the streets damp and filthy with bits of paper that looked like the litter scattered around betting cages at the racetrack. There were fast-eyed characters waiting for buses, checking their wristwatches, expecting a score. The buildings surrounding them were low and crabbed, many dating from the previous century, sullen in the summer rain. Chicago itself had a nineteenth-century identity, a noisy, unlovely city of iron and concrete, a city on the grab, fundamentally lawless, its days spent chasing money and its nights spending it; loveliness was always just beside the point. The city had elbow room but God help you if you fell behind because there was always a more muscular elbow. The city was ruled by a half-dozen old white men to suit themselves. You were permitted to go about your business so long as your business didn’t interfere with their business. If it did, they invited themselves in. In its cosmic indifference, the city of Chicago resembled a mighty turbine, three and a half million souls oiling the gears and tending the works while the supervisors stood around reading the racing form. I was nineteen years old and that was my view of things after my circus summer at the newspaper—an unlovely city, not unloved. I knew that wherever I would go in the world, Chicago was the place I would return to and recognize at once, its fedora pulled down over one eye, a wisecrack already forming in its mouth full of nickels.
A clang announced the El overhead. I thought of walking down State Street to look at the crowded racks of jazz records at Seymour’s and, if I was lucky, strike up a conversation with one of the musicians who were always present. Hey-Hey Humphrey was a regular, and Jack Teagarden when he was in town, nighttime men whose days were free. The place always had a suspicious atmosphere, under-the-table business, men in porkpie hats cracking jokes you didn’t understand, jiving at the punch line. I thought I would buy a record for Aurora, something advanced, Dave Brubeck or Stan Getz playing in the cool style. It was not a style I understood but I knew it was the coming thing. I thought better of the idea when a gust of wind blew rain in my face. The time was just before noon. I entered Michigan Avenue from Randolph, the great expanse of Grant Park before me, the grass bare in patches, the trees stunted and lifeless. The park was empty of people, as if it were a quarantined zone. Rain collected in puddles; and under one of the trees I saw three men in raincoats and fedoras gesturing expansively, their heavy arms moving every which way. They all seemed to be talking at once. I thought I knew what it was about, thanks to a tip from Henry Laschbrook. A State Street merchant had the idea of appropriating four or five acres of Grant Park into a parking lot for the convenience of all Chicagoans as they went about their important business in the Loop, a parking lot of the finest asphalt and ringed by stately white oaks, the Illinois State Tree. Opposition could be expected. These three were discussing how to go about things with the least fuss, meaning the most privacy. Whom to talk to. Where to talk to them. What to say. And how much the conversation would cost.
The Art Institute, spacious and softly lit, quiet as a church, was a relief; but Aurora was not there. The instructor said she had missed class. Are you the newspaperman? I said I was and gave him my name. I called the apartment but there was no answer so I decided to spend an hour looking at pictures, an exhibition of canvases on loan from European museums along with those of the permanent collection. The rooms were not crowded at midday and I was able to stroll as if I were visiting my own private gallery. I was still bemused by my unwanted identity, and I saw soon enough that there were identities aplenty in the rooms of the Art Institute, ballet dancers, cancan dancers, farmers scything fields in Provence, a dark-eyed barmaid behind a forest of bottles, her thousand-yard stare as blank as a playing card laid face-down. I thought the room represented a civilization of its own, the barmaid next to a boulevardier in a top hat, boaters beside athletes, two old women struggling up a steep sidewalk in Montmartre, the angle of their heads suggesting an exchange of scandalous intimacies. They were in no hurry to c
omplete their climb, and then I saw that it was not the angle of their heads that suggested scandal but their locked arms and the ample curves of their backsides. A sad-faced clown, a postman, and a group of friends on promenade completed the ensemble.
I sat on one of the low benches and watched the dark-eyed barmaid look through the clown without recognition, one more guest at the costume party. Then I discovered a canvas I had somehow missed, two drinkers side by side at a plain wooden table, a bottle and a guttering candle before them. Was it the middle of the afternoon? They had been at the table a while and would remain a while longer. The woman’s hat was awry but her companion didn’t notice. Noticing was not what he was good at just then, and I wondered if he had a father like mine and had heard the same lecture—drinking well and not showing it because that was how you gained respect in the world and women would be drawn to you, feeling at once safe and in danger—but had decided to ignore the advice. I imagined the time as 1914, the world lit off-color, the landscape so muted that the colors could not be identified precisely, gray-green, off-red, sand-yellow, yellow-white. I had the newspaper office in mind and regretted that Manet or Degas was not familiar with the métier, tobacco smoke in the air, phones ringing, the floor trembling when the presses began to turn, the reporter with his long fingers resting on the keys, the letters of the alphabet motionless as corpses on slabs until the reporter’s fingers began their tango. From the look in the writer’s eyes, an artist might suggest the life behind the métier and from the frayed shirt cuffs something else and from the shapeliness of his wrists something more still, and at once a world was illuminated. I thought of Degas at the cotton exchange in New Orleans, brokers in their best clothes standing at high-topped desks. These artists were interested in labor, the workaday life and the tools of the trade. The dancers, the barmaid, and the farmer were all working people, although the dancers seemed to enjoy it less than the others. The postman looked comfortable in his official hat. I looked at the faces and tried to find a newspaper reporter, but the only face that fit was the barmaid’s. She had seen much of life and that included her own life, and what she had seen was not encouraging. I had noticed the thousand-yard stare on the faces of reporters trying to compose the first sentence of their “piece,” the “lede” that would bring a look of sour satisfaction to Ozias Tilleman’s face; and then the editor would correct a word and add a comma, brushstrokes from a master of the number one pencil.