by Colin Asher
Gerson settled into the long middle of life when he reached Detroit. His talents developed, and over time he became a great craftsman—a master of the caliper and the lathe—but he remained the quiet, humble man he had always been. He rarely spoke about himself and never complained, and eventually he was rewarded for his skill and his stoicism. Packard gave him a promotion and a raise, and he and Goldie took advantage of their rising fortunes. They had another daughter, and named her Bernice. They bought a house at 867 Mack Avenue, and they opened a candy store that Goldie operated. Then they had a third child.
Goldie brought a son into the world seven years after she gave birth to her second daughter, and when it was time to name him, she and Gerson did so in honor of his deceased grandfather Nils Ahlgren—the man who had transformed himself into Isaac Ben Abraham, the rambler, zealot, and teller of wild tales who died a pauper. It was a prophetic choice.
That child was born on March 28, 1909, and his birth certificate reads: Nelson Algren Abraham—third legitimate child of Gerson Abraham, Jewish, age 41, born in California, occupation: machinist. And Golda Abraham, Jewish, age 31, born in Chicago.
* Readers should begin inserting adverbs such as maybe and possibly and likely into everything they read about Isaac. He left many stories behind when he died, but few documents. The shipping manifest of a boat called the White Falcon recorded the immigration of a Swede who called himself Abraham Abraham in 1854—this is probably Isaac. Rabbi Felsenthal of Chicago’s Sinai congregation made a note about marrying Isaac to Jette Scheuer on March 29, 1863, and a census taker found him on a farm in Indiana in 1880. The Chicago voter registration rolls from 1890 mention a Swedish Isaac Ben Abraham—but aside from that, there’s nothing. The version of events presented here represents the most believable story I could piece together from those documents, several contradictory and embellished interviews, and a handful of Nelson’s contradictory, and often fictionalized, memoirs.
† It’s unclear what happened to these children.
‡ Nelson sometimes claimed his father went to Chicago in 1886 to work as a scab during the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company strike. I doubt this. More often, Nelson said his father left the farm to work at the World’s Fair, and that lines up with other statements from family and friends.
§ This chronology of Isaac’s life contradicts other published chronologies. You’ll find an explanation for the discrepancy when you reach chapter 27.
Between St. Columbanus and the Wrought-Iron Gate of Oak Woods Cemetery
(1912–August 1920)
Nelson Algren Abraham mugging for the camera, July 1920.
Gerson Abraham lost faith in the automobile industry in 1912 and resolved to get his family out of Detroit. Horses were faster and more reliable than cars at the time, dray wagons could haul heavier loads than trucks, and trains moved people with unrivaled efficiency. There is “no future” in cars, Gerson believed. They “are not going to go.” Soon, he reasoned, everyone would come to their senses and stop driving, and when they did, Motor City would collapse. He didn’t want to be around when that happened, so he left the Packard Motor Car Company and moved his family back to Chicago. It seemed like a provident move.
The Abrahams decided to settle on the South Side when they returned, and they began searching for somewhere to live. Before long, they found an inexpensive two-family home in a quiet residential neighborhood, and took out a mortgage and purchased it. The house they left behind in Detroit had faced a busy street and a high school, the view through its windows was marred by smokestacks, and soot clung to its walls like black mold. But their new home at 7139 South Park Avenue was near Chicago’s quiet southern border, and downtown was a jagged line on the horizon.
The Abrahams’ new neighborhood was called Park Manor, and it was working-class, Catholic, and had the feel of a small town. One- and two-family homes lined its side streets, and the main drag boasted a movie theater with a white tile facade and a soda shop with a player piano. A teenager delivered milk from a local dairy to people’s doorsteps every morning, and the iceman guided his horse-drawn cart through the area in the afternoons. On occasion, an organ grinder meandered through the streets in search of an audience with money to spend. When he found one, he turned the crank of his music box and his capuchin monkey—in bespoke vest and cap—danced for the spectators surrounding him, and then extended a paw and collected their pennies.
Sixty years earlier, Park Manor had been swamp, prairie, and freight tracks. Then a developer named Cornell recognized its potential and began buying up large swaths of land. He divided the tracts he purchased into small plots, and then he sold them to immigrants from Europe who built themselves homes and businesses.
Almost every inch of the area had been leveled and developed since, but somehow, amid all that industry and ambition, a swatch of grassland had been overlooked, allowed to grow wild, and then ceded to the neighborhood’s children. It was their exclusive domain by the time the Abrahams arrived, and on warm afternoons they stalked each other across its expanse, or flew kites, while tall grasses swayed drunkenly around them. After sunset, they lit bonfires to guard against the night and gathered around the flames they conjured. Then they rested potatoes on the ruby and alabaster coals that formed on the ground, and waited for them to blacken and char while soot swirled into the air, cooled, and fell like gray snow.
A church called St. Columbanus dominated the western edge of the field, and loomed above the children while they cavorted. It was an intimidating building that was at once a house of worship, a school, and the cultural center of the neighborhood. A large, unadorned cross pierced the sky at the peak of its roof, and there was a rabbit hutch at the base of its front steps that the Right Reverend Monsignor Dennis P. O’Brien tended to. The doors of the church school were heavy and double-wide, and when they opened on weekday mornings, nuns emerged wearing dark habits. They lingered in the entryway’s shadow while their charges filed past, and then they stepped back inside and sealed the building tightly.
The Abraham family home faced the field and the church beyond it, and contrasted each sharply. It was as tame as the first was wild, and as unobtrusive as the second was regal—nothing but red bricks, a flat roof, a narrow backyard, a patch of grass out front the size of a postage stamp, and a set of steps that ended at the sidewalk. The walls inside were bare, and the furniture was mismatched. There was a couch in the living room, and a piano, and when the family gathered there and looked through their front windows, they saw a big Midwestern sky, Ford Model Ts with wooden wheels, gas-burning street lamps, and, if they timed it just right, the cross on the church’s roof ringed by crimson light as the sun, descending toward the horizon, slipped behind it and set it ablaze.
Gerson transitioned into his new life in Park Manor smoothly, and soon he had distinguished himself with his capacity for industry and labor. He built a garage in his backyard, filled it with tools, and began fixing his neighbors’ cars, furniture, and appliances for nominal fees. He planted a vegetable garden across the street from his house at the edge of the field the neighborhood’s children had claimed, and began tending it on Sunday mornings, when most other husbands were in church. He rented out the second floor of the family home to a widow with a young daughter, and then he hired on as a mechanic for the Yellow Cab Company.
Gerson worked “bell to bell” from that point forward—dawn to dusk, six days out of every week. He left the house carrying a metal lunch pail each morning, and walked a few blocks to the last stop on the streetcar line that ran along Cottage Grove Avenue. He waited there for his train, and when it arrived, he rode ten miles north to the Loop. He retraced his steps at the end of his shift, carrying an empty lunch pail, each evening, and then opened the front door of his house and greeted his wife and children.
The family assembled for dinner when Gerson returned home, and took their places around the dining room table. They spent little time together most days, so their nightly meal should have been
a joyful occasion, but it rarely was. As a rule, the atmosphere in the house was tense and dolorous—mostly as a result of Goldie’s presence.
Unlike her husband, Goldie felt diminished by the family’s relocation. Her mind took a dark turn when she left Detroit, and afterward she was a disconsolate and heedless character. She dropped things, walked into walls, and burned meals. She mixed up her Ms and Ns when she spoke so that moon sounded like noon, and soon was soom—and she compensated for her lack of grace and eloquence with volume, and violence.
Dissatisfaction was Goldie’s favorite topic of conversation, and she never lacked material. The way she explained it each evening, everything about life in Chicago was disappointing—her house, her Irish neighbors, her children, and, most especially, her husband.
Gerson was a tall, taciturn man. His hands were thick with calluses that had been packed with grease, and he had broad, powerful shoulders. Men deferred to him in the street or on the job because of his size, but he was timid and hapless at home—tender, adoring, and quiet in a manner that projected weakness rather than strength. He never understood jokes the first time he heard them—or the second, or the third. Movies were just light and sound for him, and he relied on his children to explain their plots. Sometimes their father’s simplicity embarrassed them, but mostly they found it endearing.
Goldie did not. She blamed Gerson’s mild nature for her discontent, and shortly after moving to Park Manor, she launched a campaign designed to transform him into the sort of man who gave orders instead of following them. Her methods were not benign. She called him a failure in front of their children; she called him stupid; she yelled.
Gerson adopted a defensive stance when Goldie confronted him. He fanned a newspaper out in front of his face when she became upset in the evenings, or retreated to his garage, and sometimes he left the house in the morning even earlier than necessary in order to avoid her. He rarely responded directly to her provocations, and it was always a mistake when he did.
You need to let me rest if you want me to succeed, he’d say. And Goldie would reply with curses, smashed dishes, and slammed doors.
Irene and Bernice were also targets for Goldie, but neither suffered the way their father did. Irene turned twelve the year the family returned to Chicago, and Bernice turned ten—they were close in age, but very different temperamentally. Irene was rigid and uncompromising. She looked and argued like her mother, but she had more talent and bigger dreams. She was an accomplished piano player, and she planned to leave her family behind and travel east when she was old enough. Bernice was athletic and buoyant—a movie buff, a devoted reader, and an aspiring actress who survived her mother by avoiding the house. She was a member of the theater club, and she swam. When World War I casualties began arriving in Chicago hospitals, she visited them as a Red Cross volunteer.
Nelson, however, was a nuisance of a higher order in his mother’s eyes. Goldie could tolerate her daughters because each had qualities she admired. When Irene played the piano in the living room, she was a perfect manifestation of her mother’s middle-class aspirations. Bernice brightened the house with her movie-star smile and sang while she washed the dishes. But there was nothing about Nelson that Goldie enjoyed. His list of sins was simply too long to be ignored, or forgiven. He was born when she was thirty-one years old and ready to be finished with motherhood, and he had too much energy. Worse yet, he looked like his father—tall and thin, angular features, fair hair.
The most generous thing that can be said about Goldie’s relationship to Nelson is this: She tolerated him. She expected him to abide by her rules and occupy himself, and when he did those things, she left him alone. When he did not, she beat him. At an early age, he learned that giving his mother a wide berth was the safest course of action.
Nelson began attending the Park Manor School at Seventy-first Street and Rhodes Avenue in the fall of 1915, and afterward he spent very little time at home.
When the last bell of the school day rang each afternoon, Nelson and his classmates met outside and began making their rounds through the neighborhood. They visited their homes to steal potatoes and root beer from their parents’ basements, or stalked the iceman’s cart so they could attack his cargo when he stopped to make deliveries. They played cops and robbers in the field by St. Columbanus until World War I broke out—and afterward they played Allies and Huns. They sorted themselves into teams when the game began, and then dispersed across their battlefield and fought using bombs made from garbage wrapped in the pages of tabloid newspapers, and guns fashioned from sunflower stalks. They were the children of Irish, German, English, and Scottish immigrants, and they were keen to display their patriotism, so the brave Allies charged forward confidently each afternoon while the Huns skulked and schemed. They clashed violently when they met, and the Huns, who always lost, died with theatrical flourish—with a leap to imitate the blast of a grenade, or writhing in agony after catching a bullet.
On weekend days, Nelson explored Park Manor alone. He left home early and walked toward Grand Crossing, the freight junction that ran along the neighborhood’s eastern border. When he reached the berm its tracks rested on, he began moving north in a snaking line—up the embankment, down to the street, up again. Older boys haunted the tracks as well. They collected coal and grain that had fallen to the ground, and sold their spoils to a hermit who lived in a shack built from discarded wood. But Nelson spent his time hunting empty cigarette packs and beer corks. He removed the foil linings from the packs when he found them, pressed them between his palms, and molded them into balls. The beer corks were as good as cash at school. The most prized were dyed bright colors and emblazoned with intricate designs, and they could be traded for dozens of less desirable Schlitz corks, or candy.
Nelson turned west when he reached Sixty-third Street, and walked toward White City—one of the largest amusement parks in the country, and Park Manor’s northern border. It was a mass of white buildings encircled by a white fence, and it was visible from any direction for blocks and blocks. Roller coaster tracks peeked above the roofline of the surrounding buildings, a large American flag fluttered in the wind, and a three-hundred-foot monolith called White Tower pricked the sky and blazed like a sun when the half million lights encircling it flickered to life at night. At its base, a sprawling saturnalia unfurled—there was a restaurant that sat twenty-five hundred, a ballroom where a thousand people could dance at once, a miniature railroad, and a carousel. At an exhibit called Midget City, people could pay to jeer at dwarves who had been hired to act out the functions of family and government. And any white person with change to spare could visit African Dip, and pay to dunk a black man into a tank of water.
When Nelson reached the fence surrounding White City, he headed for the trash heap behind the park’s casino. Bags of refuse were often piled so high in the bins there that they towered above his head, and he spent hours digging through them—searching for a “lucky cork or two” the way “country boys might seek four leaf clovers.”
Nelson knew Goldie would send him back outside if he returned before she was ready to see him, so he rarely began walking home before dusk. Sometimes he miscalculated, though, and arrived early.
You need air, Goldie said on those occasions. Go back outside. It was not a suggestion.
Nelson went to his backyard when that happened. There was a wooden piano crate on the porch, and if he had nowhere else to go, he hid inside it until he thought it was safe to reenter the house. Occasionally, on winter days, he spent hours huddled there—watching snow fall, or feeling his body grow stiff while vapor from his breath billowed around him, and then condensed and froze.
Nelson and Gerson discovered each other in 1918, when Nelson was nine years old. Their relationship had been loving before then, but distant. Gerson had no idea what a father should do with a son until Nelson became interested in the adult world, but afterward they became close.
Gerson spent Sunday mornings tending his garden that spring
and summer, and when he finished, he and Nelson headed toward the Warshawsky Company—a junkyard on South State Street. They visited with a purpose in mind each time, and then forgot it. They went looking for a furnace, or gears for a cuckoo clock Gerson was trying to fix, but after perusing Warshawsky’s maze of tires, metal dashboards, pipes, and piles of bolts, they would leave with something else entirely.
One afternoon, Nelson spotted the top of a wagon in a pile of trash. It had no wheels and no handle, but he had to have it anyway, so Gerson bought it. They lugged it back to Park Manor, and when they reached their home they dug through the junk in their basement until they found Nelson’s baby carriage. They removed its wheels and bolted them onto the wagon. Nelson found a post and a handlebar next, and attached them as well. Then he found an empty can of tomatoes, removed its label, perforated its sides, placed a candle inside, and hung it from the handlebar he had just installed. Gerson gave him a bell.
For the remainder of the summer, Nelson rode his pushcart to the streetcar stop on Seventy-first Street each day and met Gerson at the end of his commute. He was a whippet-thin child with tousled hair that stopped just above his jug ears, and he peered out at the world through big, watchful eyes as he rolled through the streets—the ding, ding of his bell announcing him, and the lantern’s crenulated light showing him the way.
Gerson handed his empty lunch pail to Nelson when he stepped off the trolley, and then they headed home—eight blocks west, one block south. Gerson took long, weary strides. Nelson coasted beside him, eager and attentive.
Gerson rarely talked about himself, but when he and Nelson were alone, he sometimes did. He spoke in a bemused, confessional tone, and the stories he selected suggest he was so guileless, he had never learned that he should, at the least, pretend to understand the world.