by D. J. Taylor
‘Why don’t you come in and have some breakfast?’ she said. ‘You must be hungry if you got up at six.’ ‘Don’t let me put you to any trouble,’ he said. He had taken off his straw boater and was twirling the brim anxiously around his forefinger, and his Adam’s Apple stuck out of his throat like a tomahawk. He lived way over on the East Side in one of the new projects and she had met him at a dance given by the Young Women’s League of St Francis. ‘Oh, it’s no trouble,’ she said, smiling suddenly at the promise of the day before them, the thought of Wabash Avenue and its summer crowds, girls and their dates flocking into the streetcars, and he caught something of the excitement in her voice and came almost blithely through the apartment door to stand in the vestibule shaking imaginary specks of dirt off his shoes and look benevolently at the clutch of umbrellas and her father’s ulster and the piled-up boots that her brothers had left there, as if this profusion of objects accorded with every idea he had ever possessed of domestic comfort. She could not take him into the parlour, for it was full of dressmakers’ samples, laid out anyhow over the sofa and the chairs, and so she led him into the kitchen, which was full of steam and heat and the smell of baking soda, where her mother looked up from the stove and said, ‘Is that you Huey? Gracious but it’s early.’ Mrs Christie did not like Huey. She had tried to, but she could not manage it. She said there were too many Catholics and the APA had the right idea. And Huey, knowing this, was frightened of her.
It was going to be a hot day, for the Fourth of July flags, not yet taken down from the drug store that ran along the front of Mr O’Hagan’s building, drooped listlessly towards the street, and the air coming from off the lake through the open window was warm and full of grit. ‘Huey, how are your folks?’ her mother asked as she handed out the cups of coffee, and, looking round the tiny kitchen, with its faded poster advertising the Chicago Grand Exposition, the grocery list pinned up on the cupboard door, the cat gone to ground in its basket, she saw that it was exactly the same as it had always been and that not even the introduction of Huey could lend it novelty. Huey was nervous with his coffee. He blew on its surface to cool it, spilled some of it onto his saucer and then poured the liquid that had spilled back into his cup, and all the while Mrs Christie watched and judged him. Later, when he was gone, she would say: ‘He’s a nice young fellow, I dare say, but he can’t manage himself.’ ‘They’re all pretty well, I guess,’ he said, when he had dealt with the spilled coffee. ‘Although my mother’s not so good.’ Huey’s mother was never very well. She had a goitre in her throat and an abscess on her leg that needed to be dressed twice a week at the doctor’s surgery. This was another thing Mrs Christie had against Huey: bad health was a moral failing. The coffee was nearly all drunk up now, and in the silence that followed she could hear the creak of his shoes as he rocked back and forth on his feet. She wondered if her mother had finished with Huey yet, but Mrs Christie had her trump card still to play. She waited until Huey had set down his coffee cup in such a way as to send another little rivulet of liquid over the saucer’s edge and onto the kitchen table and said in what was meant to be a conversational tone: ‘Of course, Ruthie got her letter just the other day.’ ‘Why, that’s great,’ Huey said, with the same air of pious absorption he brought to a baseball game on the radio or a cinema newsreel. ‘I’m certainly pleased to hear that.’ She stood there by the kitchen table as the cat looked up enquiringly from its refuge, her mother canny and belligerent, Huey pained and conciliatory, and wished that all this could stop. ‘That’s right,’ Mrs Christie said proudly. ‘Some girls, they just got standard letters. But Ruthie, she had the principal write to her personally. Now I call that well-mannered.’ ‘Oh mother,’ she protested, ‘there’s no reason to make such a thing about Mrs O’Riordan writing to me. It’s only because there was a doubt about me going.’ ‘Nonsense,’ Mrs Christie said triumphantly. ‘She wrote because you scored so high in the test and she wanted to tell you so. Isn’t that right, don’t you think, Huey?’ ‘Yes, I’m sure that’s so,’ Huey said anxiously, knowing that some game was being played with him but not yet able to see what it was.
Having watched Huey spill his tea, satisfied herself that his mother was still ill and wrought upon him the triumph of the letter, the fight went out of Mrs Christie. She had carried her point, established her moral superiority: the young people could make of this what they chose. ‘Ruthie,’ she said, deciding to leave abstract questions of etiquette for practical necessity, ‘if you are going out in this heat, I absolutely insist that you wear a hat. Think what Mrs O’Riordan would say if you turned up on the first day looking like a field hand.’ Mrs Christie had been raised in rural Illinois: ‘field hand’ was about the worst insult she could think of. And so she went back to her bedroom and fetched the straw bonnet she had bought for her holiday the previous year and wove a piece of ribbon around it, which the Ladies’ Home Journal had said was a sure-fire remedy against dullness. When she came back to the kitchen her mother was gone and there was only Huey twirling his boater in his hand and staring seriously at the picture of Herbert Hoover, gleaned from the Sun-Tribune, that had been stuck to the larder door. ‘Your mother’s in the parlour,’ he said. In the early days he had called her ‘your ma’. This had got back to Mrs Christie and been appropriately ridiculed. ‘She said not to say goodbye. Maybe we ought to go.’ ‘Yes, maybe we should,’ she said. She was annoyed about the spilled coffee and the letter. The ribbon had come adrift from the back of her hat and she wound it carefully up again, round and round her finger, and then pushed the knot into a little crevice in the brim, all the while following him down the staircase and out onto the sidewalk.
It was still not much more than 8am, but already the street was showing signs of life. The Italian family who owned the drug store were out taking down the shutters, and there were old men with elaborately oiled hair in summer jackets labouring past with newspapers under their arms. ‘Those eye-ties sure get everywhere,’ Huey said, as if to suggest that such work, though not for him personally, would do very well for inferior races, and, wanting to conciliate him, to recompense him for the quarter-hour spent with her mother, she said: ‘Yes, they surely do.’ The streetcar stop was a block away and they went on rapidly, past the advertisement hoardings and big, high buildings out of whose upper windows men in shirt-sleeves leaned at forty-five degree angles with their elbows on the sills, with the heat growing stronger at every step, and she thought of the other girls at Lonigan’s, heads down over the green baize work-table, with Mary Daley, to whose care these commissions usually fell, collecting up two cent pieces to buy a pitcher of lemonade, and realised that in four weeks time, or maybe only three, she would not be there any more and Mr Lonigan would have to get by without her. The awareness of this impending revolution in her life scared her, and she said: ‘How are you getting on with your job, Huey? Is it going any better?’ And Huey, who worked for a man who had invented a patented sanitary drinking cup, frowned and said seriously: ‘I should say it is. That Mr Banahan is a live-wire. Do you know what he did the other day? He took a crate of cups down to the Loop, stood on a trestle table and shouted at people about how great they were. Sold the whole crate, too. Yes, he’s a real live-wire, and I’m proud to be working for him even if it is only a commission job.’ The position with Mr Banahan was Huey’s third commission job. Previously he had sold brushes and a curious kind of vacuum cleaner that did not need plugging into an electrical circuit.
When they reached the streetcar stop there was already a crowd of people waiting: a priest in a cassock with a grocery sack, labouring men with bags of tools slung over their shoulders, a tall fellow with an unnaturally pale face in a suit of overalls whom the other passengers studiously avoided. ‘Jeez,’ Huey said, wrinkling his nose and divining the cause of this ostracism, ‘will you smell that guy? It’s no wonder nobody wants to stand next to him.’ ‘I expect he works at the meatpacking plant,’ she said, having caught the scent of fertiliser. ‘I don’t suppose it�
�s anything he can help.’ Nevertheless, it was a very powerful smell and she found herself edging further down the line. The streetcar came clattering up with the sun gleaming off its iron fender and the light blazing into its deep green windows and carried them away, and she sat looking out at the familiar streets and the dusty store-fronts and the street corners, where fat cops stood sunning themselves before the pink-and-white striped awnings and there were vendors out with milk-cans and packets of candy, thinking that the college at Wheaton would be very different to this, and wondering how she would find it, and what the other girls would be like. Huey, with his mouth half open, sat watching the traffic, and counting the Cadillacs, which was the automobile he favoured, or would have favoured, had the privilege of driving one ever been allowed him. It was hotter than ever, and the people in the street – the groups of girls talking to each other, and the negro women weighed down under grocery sacks with bored children toiling in their wake – seemed far away, as if the windows of the streetcar were made not of glass but of some dense, viscous membrane cutting her off from the teeming world around her and turning her in on herself. Back home her mother would be brewing herself a pot of green tea, reading the newspaper and going in every so often to ask her father if he intended to get out of bed. Mr Christie worked on the night-shift at the telephone exchange and was not always amenable to these enquiries.
‘Jeez,’ Huey said again, ‘but I could use a soda.’ Beneath his striped jacket there was already sweat welling up in the arm-pits of his shirt. The shirt was too small for him and there was a red crease showing where it dug into his neck. If he took his shirt off when they got to the beach it would look as if he had tried to hang himself. ‘Did you ask Mr Banahan about the secretary’s job?’ she asked, and Huey frowned again, not liking – for all the pride he took in working for Mr Banahan – to be reminded of these things on a day given over to pleasure. ‘Sure I did,’ he said. ‘You don’t think I’m the type of guy to let a chance like that slip, do you? You bet I asked him. And he was nice as pie. Told me what a fine young man I was and how he appreciated my efforts, but that everything was pretty tough right now and they needed a qualified man. So I guess it’ll go to some cake eater who’s done his time at night school, yes sir, and not to yours truly.’ It was a long speech for Huey and the tomahawk of his Adam’s Apple went working up and down again as he said it. She had only once been to the apartment on the East Side, where his mother lay in bed all afternoon eating candy out of a paper bag and his father sat listening to the boxing matches on the radio. Mostly they sat in cafés together, or prowled around the early evening streets.
The number of people in the streetcar had thinned out by now. The priest had gone, and the man in the blue overalls who smelled of fertiliser. There was a black puddle on the floor that looked like spilled ink. The advertisements that ran along the car at the level of her head were for carbolic soap and pocket zip-fasteners and a magazine called Modern Pictorial which promised to ‘lift the lid on Hollywood’. The remaining passengers were all destined for the lakeside, too. They had bundled up towels under their arms, and some of them carried little wicker baskets and flasks. She wished she had had a wicker basket to bring, but Mrs Christie had said they were unnecessarily expensive. There were six or seven couples in the same degree of proximity as Huey and herself, and she examined them surreptitiously, one by one, and decided that three of the men were better-looking than Huey and three worse, and one of them – a bald man with almost no eyebrows and variegated teeth – so ugly that it was a wonder he was allowed out. The streetcar was slowing down in sight of its final stop, and she found herself lapsing into her favourite day-dream, which was of being married to a grey-haired but still youthful man in a dark suit, who called her ‘Ruth’ and ‘my dear’ instead of ‘Ruthie’ and established her in a neat plasterboard house with a white picket fence somewhere in the Sixties, where the coloured maid sometimes brought her drinks on a silver tray and Mrs Christie occasionally, but only occasionally, came to supper on Sunday evenings, when there would, additionally, be ‘company’. She knew that it was foolish to chase these phantoms, but she could not help it. They had sustained her through her time at Lonigan’s and she suspected they would see her through her time at the college at Wheaton as well.
There was a pain in her right hand where she had been clutching the arm-rest of her seat, and she massaged it with the fingers of her left. The streetcar had slowed practically to a halt and the people around her were stirring, rather as if they had been woken from sleep. A girl a yard or so away from her with a pair of zealously plucked eyebrows that made her look like Betty Boop said: ‘Gee, Stan, will you look at the way the sun shines off the water?’ and the boy she was with grinned and said: ‘Fritzy, you’re a poet and you just don’t know it.’ The girl’s dress was made of cheap, plain cotton, and she wondered how she had come by Stan, who had a shock of dark, unruly hair and was wearing a college football sweater. They stepped cautiously from the streetcar at a point where the sand had come nearly up to the sidewalk and there was a man with a peaked visor and arm-bands on his shirt selling ice-cream out of a portable refrigerator. In the distance there were white birds criss-crossing the blue sky and beyond that long ships apparently motionless on the horizon, so slow-moving that they were almost inert, like pieces of balsa wood laid out on an azure blanket. ‘This is the life,’ Huey said vaguely. He was a tall boy, taller than the man in the college sweater, but his weight was not adequate for his height and made him look spindly. ‘You must be careful,’ she said, ‘not to sit in the sun with that pale skin of yours.’ There had been an occasion when Huey had come back lobster-coloured.
‘Oh, I’ll be careful,’ he said. He had the remote, far-away look that he sometimes wore on these excursions to public places. ‘It’s awfully hot,’ she said, aware of the sun on her bare arms, the warm sand spilling over the tops of her shoes, the draw-string of her bag digging into her shoulder. ‘That’s right,’ he said. Something was concerning him beyond the sheen of the water, the long, low ships and the crowds at the beach, and he said, not curiously but as if courtesy impelled him to ask: ‘How long is it till you stop off working for Mr Lonigan?’ She had an answer to this which had already been doled out to several other enquirers. ‘On next Friday fortnight,’ she said. ‘I can’t stay a moment longer. I don’t know why but I just can’t. I guess the other girls will buy me a cake. They usually do. When Susie Montgomery left to get married they bought her ever such a nice one. But she was there five years and I’ve only been there two.’ She thought about Lonigan’s, with its crackling fan sending the stale air around the green baize table, and the odds and ends of cloth lying around in heaps, and the trimming scissors as big as shears, and realised that the only thing that made it tolerable was the fact that she was leaving it. ‘Two years,’ Huey said, who had never been in a job longer than six months. The sunlight was shining off the buttons of his jacket and he stepped gingerly over the sand, fearful of bumping into people or putting his feet into the picnic baskets.
They found a spot near the shoreline, where some young kids were ducking each other in the shallows while a lifeguard looked benevolently on and a mustachioed old man in a one-piece bathing costume swam backwards and forwards against the tide, labouring like a grampus, and established themselves on the sand, and she clasped her hands over her knees and looked out into the far corners of the lake, beyond the line of ships, where the water was greyer and less tractable. Huey took off his shoes and socks and sat with his feet stretched out in front of him. They were enormous feet – size twelve, at least – and her mother had once said that if Mrs Niedermeyer ran short of a clothes line then all she had to do was to hang a string from one of his big toes to the other. Sometimes he picked up pebbles and threw them into the water, and at other times he squeezed the parcel that contained his bathing clothes into a pillow and lay flat on his back staring up at the sky. To right and left the crowds of people extended as far as the eye could see:
couples running in and out of the water; families grouped around their rugs and baskets; men in straw hats with their pants furled to knee level walking up and down. ‘Don’t you want to bathe?’ she asked. Huey threw a little stone, so weakly that it barely made the water-line. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I guess I don’t feel like it. Maybe I will later.’ The young kids had stopped ducking each other and were staring hopefully out over the water, as if they expected a frogman to emerge from the depths, but the old man in the one-piece bathing costume was still labouring strenuously up and down, ever more pious and determined, as if only a sense of responsibility, some weighty obligation to wife, children and dependants, was stopping him from heading north to Canada, thrashing his way along the rivers that flowed out of the Great Lakes and swimming up the Yukon like a salmon. She had seen all this before, a hundred times at least, but now she realised that the prospect of going to Wheaton was making her see it anew, but to Huey it was just the beach crowd and the splashing children and the doughty old men. There were some words in her head that had not been there when she sat on the streetcar or asked Huey whether he intended to bathe, and suddenly, without her being conscious of the effort, they assembled themselves into something coherent and she said: