Hard City

by Clark Howard

  Sitting on the curb thinking about Helen, Richie looked back at the man in the doorway. He lighted a cigarette, glanced at Richie, then stepped out of the doorway and walked away. Richie watched him all the way to the corner, then turned his attention back to the apartment building and his memories.

  Richie had always been able to tell when his mother and Estelle were going out. They would be in their housecoats, sharing a vanity bench in front of the mirror as they applied makeup. Richie made a habit of wandering in and pretending to build something with his Tinkertoys on the bed so he could eavesdrop on them. Usually he found out where they were going.

  “Did Jack say where they were taking us tonight?” Estelle would ask.

  “The Aragon Ballroom, I think,” Chloe might reply.

  “Oh, good. That one-armed trumpet player is there. You know, the one who got run over by a streetcar in New Orleans when he was a kid, and lost his right arm. Then learned to play trumpet left-handed—”

  “Wingy Manone,” said Chloe. “Yes, he’s there.”

  “We going to Jack’s after?” Estelle wanted to know. Chloe would throw Estelle a cautionary look, glance at Richie, and not answer. Lowering her voice, Estelle would say, “I declare, sometimes he’s so quiet I forget he’s around.”

  By then Richie would have heard enough to know how his evening would be spent: with Helen and Dorothy at the Kedzie Annex, then with Helen alone in the apartment. His mother always came home late when she went out with the man she insisted he call “Uncle” Jack. He would begin to wonder what excuse Helen would find for slapping his face tonight. He wished he could keep from crying when she did it, but he never could.

  Presently, Chloe would say, “Run on into the other room, sugar. Aunt Estelle and I have to dress.”

  Aunt Estelle. Uncle Jack. Richie did not feel comfortable calling either one of them that, although he was not certain just why. His mother constantly had to remind him to do it, saying. “You want them to like you, don’t you, sugar?” Richie always lied and said he did, but he did not really care.

  “Pull the door closed on your way out, sugar,” his mother would tell him as he took his Tinkertoys and left the bedroom.

  On the living room side of the door, Richie would immediately look through the keyhole. Invariably he would see either Estelle or his mother remove her housecoat and put on step-ins and a brassiere. He liked it better when it was Estelle whom he saw; she had bigger titties and lots more hair between her legs, and for some reason that excited him more. Besides which, he was not altogether certain that he should be spying on his own mother like that. It didn’t matter, he was sure, if he saw Aunt Estelle undressed. Whichever one it was, however, Richie was fascinated by the sight of them naked.

  If only it had not meant he would have to be slapped in the face by Helen.

  After looking at the building on Walnut Street and remembering the life he had there, Richie fished the piece of napkin from his Buck Jones billfold and looked at the address Estelle had given him. It was about two miles away—sixteen city blocks. He decided to see if she was home.

  Walking along Kedzie Avenue, he was thinking again of Estelle’s nice, big tits, when a hand reached out of a doorway and grabbed him by the arm.

  “Truant officer, boy,” a gruff male voice said. It was the same man Richie had seen earlier on Walnut Street. “What’s your name and what school do you go to?”

  “Lemme go,” Richie said, resisting. “I ain’t done nothing!” He struggled, but the truant officer’s grip was too strong to pull out of.

  “Why aren’t you in school?” the man demanded.

  “My mother took me to the doctor. I’ve got a cough.” Richie coughed several times to prove it. The truant officer looked skeptical.

  “You better come along with me, boy.”

  “Wait, there’s my mother now,” Richie said urgently. “Ma! Hey, Ma!”

  The truant officer turned to look, relaxing his grip, and Richie wrenched free and bolted. In an instant he ran across the sidewalk, between two parked cars, and dodged traffic to cross the street.

  “I’ll get you, punk!” he heard the truant officer yell behind him.

  When he looked back, he saw that the man was not even chasing him.

  An hour later, scurrying mostly through alleys, Richie reached Estelle’s address. It was a run-down three-flat converted into housekeeping rooms: bedrooms with a small sink and a hotplate to cook on, with the bathroom down the hall.

  “Why, hello, sugar,” Estelle said when she opened the door. She was wearing only a slip and her hair looked as if a cat had been trapped in it and fought its way out. The room itself was in total disarray; it reminded Richie of some of the places he had lived with his mother. “Come on in, sugar,” Estelle said. “’Scuse the mess; I slept late today.”

  Richie started to ask if she had gotten the job the man in the bar was supposed to have for her, but thought better of it. Instead he said, “I went over to the Walnut Street place. After I saw it, I remembered lots of things.”

  “Oh?” Estelle eyed him warily. “What sort of things?”

  Richie shrugged. “Just things. Like those two sisters that lived upstairs—Helen and Dorothy. And how I used to fall off the couch at night ’cause the cushions wouldn’t stay in place. You know, just different things like that.”

  “Oh.” Estelle sat down at a card table covered with a piece of checkerboard oilcloth. Lighting a cigarette, she put the match in an already nearly full ashtray, and picked up a cup half full of black coffee. Richie sat across the little table from her. He wished she would put on a robe or something; her breasts were very distracting. The slip Estelle wore was pink, not sheer at all, but her breasts, much larger than they had been when Richie used to see them through the keyhole, were clearly outlined under the bodice of the garment. Every time Estelle moved to raise her cigarette or coffee cup, they shifted enticingly.

  “What else did you remember about Walnut Street?” she asked.

  “I remembered when that guy Jack started coming around; ‘member, I had to call him ‘Uncle’ Jack? Do you think my dad went away ’cause he found out about Jack?”

  “Why, no, ’course not, sugar,” Estelle assured. Seeing the concern in his young face, Estelle’s own expression, as it had when she talked with him in the bar, softened noticeably. “Your mother seeing Jack Smart had nothing in the world to do with your daddy going off. That’s the God’s truth, Richie.”

  “Why’d she ever start going with him in the first place?” Richie asked. “Why didn’t she wait for my dad to come home from prison, like she was supposed to?” His last words had become a troubling, bitter thought, seeded by the image created by Mack: of Richie’s father returning home from prison and finding his wife and little boy gone.

  “Richie, honey, listen to me,” Estelle said, reaching over to clutch one of his hands, “your mother did wait. She did. For a long time she waited. Why, even for a long time after we moved up here, she waited. Don’t you remember how she’d sit at home with you night after night, reading magazines, listening to the radio, doing her fingernails over and over?

  “She was thinking about your daddy all the time,” Estelle insisted. “I know, because she used to spend hours on end composing letters to him, trying to explain where she was, and why she had moved away from Lamont. She showed me some of the letters and, I swear, honey, they like to broke my heart. She was suffering, Richie; she was hurting inside, she was so lonely. She had been without your daddy for three long years, and she couldn’t help but blame him for not being with her. She had begged that man to get out of the bootlegging business; she had warned him that his luck was running thin, that the Federal agents were going to catch up with him. But your daddy was a hardhead if ever there was one. He never learned an easy lesson in his life. He didn’t believe he’d ever get taken.” Estelle let go of Richie’s hand and patted it. “But he did. He got hisself sent to the penitentiary and left your mother all alone with a little
baby to take care of.”

  Estelle sighed a weary sigh. “Your mother was resentful, sugar. She had a right to be. But she was faithful to your daddy for a long, long time. She’d sit at home night after night and write those long, heartbreaking letters to him and then she’d show them to me and I’d say, ‘Why, Chloe, honey, this is a wonderful letter, you go right ahead and mail it,’ and then first thing I knew I’d see it all tore up and thrown in the wastebasket. She never mailed one letter to your daddy after we came to Chicago—not a single one.”

  Staring sadly at the checkered table cover, Estelle blinked. Then she tamped out her cigarette in the nearly full ashtray, drank the last swallow of coffee, and got up to pour another cup. She felt the coffeepot and turned on the hotplate under it. Daylight from the room’s single window made her slip diaphanous, outlining her fleshy thighs. Richie noticed but now was not preoccupied by them; his mind was still struggling with past inequities that he was trying to understand.

  “But why did she start going out with Jack?” he insisted.

  Estelle turned around and studied him for a long moment, her lips pursed in troubled thought. “How old are you now, sugar?” she asked.

  “Going on fifteen.” He lied so often about his age that the answer came out automatically before he realized that Estelle would probably know better. But to his surprise, Estelle did not challenge him; she merely frowned briefly, then nodded her head in acceptance.

  “Do you remember—or did you even know—what happened to your mother just before she started seeing Jack Smart?”

  Richie shrugged. “I guess I don’t know.”

  “Well, I’m going to tell you,” Estelle said, returning to the table with her empty cup. “Going on fifteen is old enough for you to know. Do you remember when your mother was working for the Grubb brothers, Ed and Lew? They were the plumbers; I used to date Ed and he came over to the apartment sometimes. Matter of fact, I was the one that got your mother the job—”

  “Was that the place where she used to take me to work with her and let me play in the back room?”

  “That’s the one,” Estelle confirmed. “That’s where your mother first met Jack Smart . . .”

  It was a little storefront office back then in 1937, on Van Buren Street, with GRUBB PLUMBING lettered on the window. In front of a partition was just enough room for two old wooden desks and a three-drawer filing cabinet. Behind the partition was a large supply room where Ed and Lew kept piles of various size pipe, elbows, catch-basins, toilet fixtures, and other accoutrements of their trade.

  Chloe’s job was to answer the telephone, quote the hourly rate the brothers charged, take orders for service, and take care of the billing and the daily mail. It was an easy job, the pay was fair, and the brothers had no objection to Chloe’s bringing Richie to work with her and letting him play in the storeroom. The brothers came in first thing in the morning to pick up their work orders and supplies, then were gone most of the day. One of them usually came back by late in the afternoon to look over the day’s messages. The rest of the time, Chloe was on her own. The only unusual part of her job was the man named Jack, who stopped in every morning around ten to either drop off or pick up an envelope.

  “He’s a runner for our bookie,” Ed Grubb explained. “Lew and me, we play the ponies every day. We usually call our bets in when we’re having lunch. If Jack drops off an envelope, it means we won the day before; if he picks one up, it means we lost. When we have to pay him, we’ll leave the envelope in your top desk drawer.”

  Estelle, who clerked at a Walgreen’s in the next block, had taken a few minutes off and walked down to see how Chloe was doing her first morning on the job. She was there when Jack Smart came in. A dapper, handsome man, he had an incongruous stutter that invariably surprised people.

  “Hi, Est-st-stelle,” he said, recognizing her from the drugstore. “Changing j-j-jobs?”

  “No, but this is my friend Chloe,” Estelle said. “She’s working for Ed and Lew now.”

  “Pleased to m-m-meet you, Chloe,” he said, holding out his hand. “I’m Jack Sm-mart.” After they exchanged a few pleasantries and Chloe gave him the envelope that had been left for him, he said, “Maybe you’ll l-l-let me take you out to d-d-dinner some night. We can d-d-double date with Estelle and Ed.”

  Chloe had politely turned him down, after which Estelle had chastised her. “For God’s sake, girl, go out and have a little fun once in a while. You don’t have to sleep with him, you know.” But Chloe had declined to reconsider. Richie, listening to everything from the back room, was glad his mother was not going out with the man. He was still uneasy about this new place called Chicago, and he didn’t want his mother going anywhere without him.

  For Richie, the city was a strange, sometimes exciting, but more often frightening place, far different from the small Southern town where he spent his first four years. Streetcars and elevated trains were new sights for his young eyes, and made noises new to his ears. On the streets he saw black people dressed like white people, something he had never seen in Lamont. Instead of the yard of his grandmother’s house, he played on the floor of the storeroom where his mother worked. The only thing that was the same was that his father still was not with them.

  Playing in the storeroom of the plumbing office became, after a while, interminably boring for Richie. Chloe did what she could to keep him occupied; she bought him sets of toy soldiers, windup cars and trains, all manner of picture books, coloring books, cut-out books; she even tried to make up games that he could play by himself. But Richie could amuse himself just so long; then he wanted Chloe’s attention. Sometimes he drove her to distraction, particularly when she was having a busy day. Even though it was a small, two-man business, there were invoices to prepare, account ledgers to keep up, telephone calls to answer, supplies to order. Sometimes she did not even have time to chat with Jack Smart when he made his daily stop to drop off or pick up the betting envelope. Jack continued to try and get her to go out with him, but was always polite and good-natured about it.

  “How a-b-b-bout that dinner?” he would ask with his handsome smile, hurrying the words past the speech impediment that, as Chloe had discovered, was relegated to the ordinary by the rest of the man’s personality and charm.

  “Jack, how many times do I have to tell you no?” Chloe would reply patiently.

  “T-t-two or three thousand more t-t-times ought to do it,” Jack usually said, or “Not too m-m-many more. I think you’re w-w-wearing down.”

  Sometimes he would bring her a bunch of posies that he bought on the street corner, and Chloe would put them in a glass of water, saying, “Jack, save your money.” Other times it might be a bag of jelly beans for Richie, and she’d tell him wryly, “Won’t work, Jack.” But he always smiled, winked, and kept trying. Secretly, Chloe seemed pleased by the attention.

  One afternoon, Estelle got off work early at the drugstore and stopped by the plumbers’ office to take Richie off Chloe’s hands for a couple of hours. “I’ll take him for some ice cream and then over to Humboldt Park for a little while. There’re some swings and a slickey-slide he can play on. It’ll get him out of that back room for a little bit. I swear, I’ll bet that child feels like he’s in jail sometimes. Just like—oops, never mind.”

  Chloe was grateful for the break. She straightened Richie’s clothes, combed his hair, admonished him to “be good for Aunt Estelle,” and kissed him goodbye.

  In the two free hours that she did not have Richie there, Chloe was able to accomplish as much as it usually took her a full day to do. Even when he was not bothering her directly, Chloe was always aware of her son’s presence; if he was playing, she heard his little boy make-believe noises; if he was quiet, she knew he was bored and would be sitting against the wall staring at nothing, brooding, reminding her of Richmond when he had been in the Memphis jail awaiting trial. Although it was a great relief for Chloe to be away from Lamont, with its many real and imagined gossips, she nevertheless was
acutely aware that in escaping she had also moved her son to a less desirable environment. Many times when she paused in her attempts to write a letter to her husband, it would be to consider ways in which she might somehow improve life for Richie. But without the money to enroll him in a private nursery, and disinclined to even consider sending him away to live with her mother, she was no more able to alter Richie’s existence than she was to complete a satisfactory letter to his father.

  One day Richie heard Estelle quietly broach the subject of sending Richie to live in Tennessee. “You know your mamma would take good care of him,” she had said. “And, God knows, it’d make your life a lot easier.”

  “No, it wouldn’t,” Chloe disagreed. “You don’t have children, so you don’t know how it feels. I love Richie and I need him with me. He’s my little boy. I wouldn’t think of sending him to live with Mamma or anybody else.”

  Richie had felt good when he heard his mother say that.

  On the day that Estelle took Richie to the park, Chloe was getting ready to close the office when Lew Grubb stopped in to look at the day’s mail. Coming in the back door, noticing Richie’s absence, he asked, “Where’s your kid?”

  “Estelle took him earlier,” Chloe said. Of the two brothers, she, like most people, cared the least for Lew. Big and beefy, he often went unshaved, did not wear clean work clothes every day, and was less communicative, almost to the point of surliness, than his younger brother Ed. Today, Chloe noted as he passed her desk, was one of those days when Lew left a distinct body odor in his wake. “Here’s the envelope from Jack,” she said. “Do you need me for anything else before I go?”