Hard City

by Clark Howard

  “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm,” Linda said. She gave him a wry look. “Since you didn’t bother to remember the title, I don’t guess you plan to read it.”

  Richie shrugged. “Prob’ly not. I’m reading Moby Dick right now.”

  “What’s that?” she asked, recoiling slightly as if it might not be wholly acceptable. Seeing her reaction, Richie shrugged again.

  “It’s about sailors,” he said vaguely, deciding against trying to explain Captain Ahab to her.

  Gradually, although their reading tastes differed widely, they seemed to sense that they were kindred spirits because they liked to read—and in that sense, in their classroom anyway, they were unique.

  “Has Miss White ever talked to you about why you like to read?” Linda asked him one afternoon. Richie shook his head. “She has to me,” Linda continued. “She says she thinks it’s because I have a creative mind. She says I should think about becoming a writer myself.” Turning a penetrating gaze on him, she asked solemnly, “Have you ever thought about becoming a writer?”

  “I got enough to do thinking about my paper routes,” Richie replied. “Anyway, I don’t read for no reason like that.”

  “Then why do you read?”

  “To get away,” Richie said quietly.

  “What do you mean? To get away from what?”

  “From me,” Richie told her, looking away, feeling embarrassed. “To get away from what I am, who I am, mostly where I am. When I’m reading, I forget those things for a little while.” They stopped at the corner where they customarily separated. Habitually, self-consciously, he shrugged. “Kind of a dumb reason, huh?”

  “It is not,” Linda assured him passionately. She put a hand on his arm. “Know something?”

  “What?”

  “I really like you, Richie.” Quickly kissing him on the cheek, Linda hurried on her way.

  Blushing deeply, Richie hustled off in the other direction, hoping nobody had seen that.

  Chloe tried at the shoe store just as earnestly as she had tried at the lunch counter, but she did not find herself suited to clerking any more than she had found herself suited to waitressing. She tried other occupations as well, failing at all of them. Her reasons were many: customers didn’t treat her right; the work was too hard on her feet; co-workers didn’t treat her right; the work was too hard on her back; managers didn’t treat her right; the work was too hard on something. In lieu of any specific reason, she utilized her old standby: “I can’t stand this job another day; it is driving me crazy!”

  For a time she did fairly well as a hotel maid, but after several instances of small items reported missing by guests—earrings, a change purse left in a drawer, a pre-war silk scarf—she was let go. Coming home in a paroxysm of indignation, she vehemently denied to Miss Menefee that she had committed the thefts.

  “The nerve!” she ranted. “I mean, the nerve! Why, that housekeeping manager didn’t even question the Negro maids. They’re the ones who probably did it! Of course, why should I expect him to question them; he’s nothing but a Filipino himself. Birds of a feather, you know how that is.”

  “Chloe,” Miss Menefee finally told her unequivocally, “you are going to have to settle down and keep a job. The department has a limit as to how long it will continue to supplement your income. This business of working a week or two, then spending the next week or two looking for a new job does not look good in your file. If you were unable to work, it would be different—”

  “Did I tell you I hurt my back?” Chloe seized on the possibility. “It was at the hotel—”

  “Chloe, please,” Miss Menefee shook her head emphatically. “I haven’t the time for this. “You can work—and we both know it.”

  Before Miss Menefee could locate another job for her, Chloe found one on her own. “I am now an outside saleslady,” she announced loftily to Richie one night.

  “Selling what?” he asked.

  “Greeting cards. Boxed and assorted.”

  “Door to door?”

  “Yes, certainly. I’m not going to stand on the street corner to sell them. There should be a good market for greeting cards now that the war restrictions on the paper have been lifted and they can be made again.”

  Richie doubted it, but he said nothing. He was not surprised that the job lasted only a week. Chloe’s idea of it was that at each house or apartment she visited, she would be asked inside, invited to sit down, allowed to show her samples, and be given an order. The reality of it was that she was rarely asked to come in, that a vast proportion of the job was walking, walking, walking, knocking on endless doors, ringing endless doorbells, constantly being refused and rejected, most times rudely turned away before she could even complete the introductory presentation she had been taught when she was hired.

  “God, people are lowdown mean sometimes,” she lamented to Richie after she quit.

  Richie only grunted softly. I could tell her a few things about lowdown mean, he thought.

  When she was between jobs, Chloe waxed melancholy about the infant she had given up. “You should have seen her, Richie. She was the prettiest little thing—great big eyes and a mop of black hair. I named her Betty, did I tell you that? Oh, yes, I had a right to name her, even if I was giving her up.” Biting her lip, Chloe often had to hold back tears. “Gee, Richie, it would have been nice if we could have kept her. You would have been crazy about your little sister . . . .”

  Sure, Richie thought, that’s just what I need: a little halfbreed kid to have to worry about. He had learned the word “halfbreed” from reading Zane Grey and other Western writers. Whenever Miss Menefee visited and Chloe asked about the baby, Richie was always enormously relieved to hear the caseworker say, “Now, you know I can’t discuss the baby with you, Chloe. She has a good home, that’s all I can say.” Even with that continuous reassurance, Richie nevertheless lived with the nagging suspicion that somehow the baby would come back, replace him, and he would have to go back to foster homes.

  It was a long time before he stopped worrying about it.

  Richie began to pay attention to his mother’s physical appearance. In the past he had noticed not so much how she looked but how she acted. Depending on whether she was using paregoric or not, she had been either alert and active, or lazy and lethargic; depending on whether there was a man in her life, she had been content and cheerful, outwardly at least, or anxious and afraid. But her personal appearance, insofar as Richie saw, seemed always the same. Now, with Frances Rozinski, the woman on his paper route, as a comparison, Richie became aware that his mother had changed.

  From the beginning, Richie had thought Frances and his mother were approximately the same age. For some reason they seemed the same age. His mother, he knew, was several years past thirty; he vaguely recalled a birthday some time earlier when Estelle had made a crack about something being “all downhill” after thirty. Frances, he was sure, was probably also past thirty. And while Frances was not as pretty as his mother had been, she was prettier now simply because she seemed so healthy and fresh, while his mother seemed to be . . . withering.

  Richie did not attempt to figure out why his mother’s looks were fading. His mind was too immature to reconcile two long periods of addiction, the emotional stress of her relationships with Richmond, Jack Smart, Johnny, and George, and the more recent trauma of having to give up her baby, with the fact that she was becoming gaunt and old looking beyond her years. More significantly, it did not occur to Richie that there might be a new reason for her deterioration—or at least a new aspect to an old reason. Richie was not around Chloe a great deal of the time; on school days he was up and gone very early to work his morning route, did not return for breakfast because of the time-consuming streetcar rides, after school went directly to his afternoon route, then usually to the library, where he sometimes met Linda. He came home for supper but did not stay long, returning to the streets as quickly as possible. So it took him a while to realize that something was again wrong w
ith his mother. When he began to suspect something, he rummaged around the apartment for paregoric bottles, drugstore bags, marijuana shreds, cigarette paper, and sniffed the air for traces of either smell, for paregoric was almost as detectable as the other, though for not as long. But Richie found no evidence with which he was familiar. There was something amiss, something awry. He could feel it, yet he could not define either what it was, or his reason for believing it.

  Chloe finally ended the mystery late one Saturday afternoon when he returned home from his paper route.

  “I want you to go someplace for me, Richie,” she said. Richie saw that her expression was grim, her dark, once-pretty eyes hard and fixed. Her hand shook slightly as she wrote out an address on Lake Street and handed it to him with some money. “The man there will give you something for me.”

  “What is it?”

  “Just something I need, Richie, for my headaches,” she replied. “Go on now, get it for me.”

  “This address is in the colored neighborhood—”

  “I know where it is!” Chloe snapped impatiently. “Will you just go!”

  “It’s getting dark out—”

  “I don’t care! Go! Right now!”

  “Okay!” He stormed out of the apartment, muttering curses.

  “You hurry back too!” she shouted after him, her words a threat.

  When Richie emerged from the closed stairway of the building on Lake Street, which stood between a liquor store and a commercial laundry, he heard somebody say, “Where you been so long, you little shit?”

  Head snapping around, he saw Vernie standing in a nearby doorway with three other black girls. Sixteen now, she was voluptuous and earthy-looking in a skintight, revealing dress. As Richie grinned widely at the sight of her, she came over to him in the superb, superior strut she had long since developed and mastered.

  “Hey, Vernie,” Richie said, delighted.

  “What you doing in that building, boy?” she asked without preliminaries.

  “My mother sent me there,” Richie replied, glancing down.

  Nodding knowingly, Vernie fished two fingers into his shirt pocket and pulled out a small cellophane envelope that had BC HEADACHE POWDER printed on it. Sighing quietly, she said, “Well, I see yo’ mamma done changed her prescription.”

  “I guess it’s not BC Headache Powder,” Richie said, his voice almost timid.

  Vernie shook her head. “They buys BC Headache Powders just to get the envelopes. This here be heroin, Richie. It’s bad shit.”

  Turning his head, Richie stared off at the deepening shadows under the el track. In the yellow of the streetlight, Vernie could see his eyes become misty. She put an arm around his shoulders.

  “It be okay, Richie,” she assured. “Don’ nothing last forever.” Giving him a squeeze and a little shake, she added, “One good thing—you don’t have to worry ’bout being chased on Lake Street no more. Long as you going to that address, ain’t nobody gonna mess wif’ you. Them mens in there don’t allow no interference wif’ their trade. Look like you don’ need Vernie to take care of you no more.”

  From the nearby doorway, one of the other girls yelled, “Vernie, you better get back over here, girl. You know you up next.”

  “Who are they?” Richie asked.

  “Jus’ some girls,” Vernie replied. After a beat, she added softly, “Girls trying to get by, like me.” Giving him another squeeze, she said, “I gots to go. I be seeing you, hon.”

  “Sure.”

  Richie watched her strut back to the doorway, flaunting every part of her femaleness with each exaggerated step.

  Walking to the corner, Richie crossed the street. Instead of leaving the block, on a sudden urge he stepped into the shadow of a storefront and stood there, concealed, watching Vernie and the other girls. The four of them laughed and cut up among themselves for several minutes, smoking cigarettes, patting their hair, smoothing their skirts. Only when a car approached and slowed down did they quickly become quiet. Richie saw Vernie go over to the curb and lean down to speak to the driver, a white man, through the passenger door window. Presently, she got into the car and it slowly pulled up to a point between two streetlights where the shadows of the el tracks were darkest. Parking there, its headlights went off.

  33

  On the last week of their welfare entitlement, Miss Menefee came to see them with their final check.

  “I wish there was some way we could continue to help you, Chloe,” she apologized, “but the department has to have established limits of aid or some people would stay on the charity rolls forever.”

  “You’ve been very good to us,” Chloe replied. “I’m sure Richie and I can get along just fine now.”

  Richie said nothing. He knew that as soon as Miss Menefee left, he and his mother would be moving. She had already rented a cheaper place, back on the old Adams Street block, and just that morning had applied for welfare at a different field office under the name of Chloe Clark. Miss Menefee knew her only as Chloe Eaton.

  When Miss Menefee finished talking to Chloe, she said, “Come on out to the car with me, Richie; I have something for you.”

  Richie went outside with her and Miss Menefee unlocked her car and handed him a bag off the front seat. In it was a book: Nevada by Zane Grey.

  “Paula Hovey told me that you were going to pick a Zane Grey book as your next prize. I hope you haven’t read this one.”

  “No,” Richie said, blushing. “Thank you.” It was a lie; he had already made a book report on it in Miss White’s class.

  “Listen, Richie,” Grace Menefee said, combing his hair a little with her fingers, “I want you to promise me something. I want you to promise me that if things start to get bad for you again, you’ll call me. I’ve written my telephone number on this piece of paper and I want you to keep it somewhere safe in case you ever need it. Will you do that for me?”

  “Sure,” Richie said. Was it his imagination or did Miss Menefee look like she was going to cry? He glanced around, hoping nobody he knew was watching.

  When the caseworker finally drove off, Richie breathed a sigh of relief and hurried back upstairs.

  “What’s that?” Chloe asked, seeing the bag.

  “She gave me a book.”

  “A book?” Chloe made a sour face. “See if the sales slip is still in the bag; maybe we can take it back and get the money.”

  “I already looked,” Richie lied. “It ain’t there.”

  “Isn’t there,” Chloe corrected.

  At first Richie had resisted moving again. “You know how many schools I been to since first grade?” he complained. “Eleven. Eleven schools!”

  “Changing schools never killed anyone,” Chloe scoffed as she went about packing their things. “Making new friends is good for you. Besides, living on Adams Street will make it that much closer for you to go get my headache powder when I need it.”

  Richie stared irritably at his mother. “I know that stuff’s not headache powder.”

  “You don’t know what you know,” Chloe said peremptorily. Whenever possible lately, she avoided confrontations with him. “Here”—she handed him a cardboard box—“carry this over to the Hamlin streetcar stop and wait for me there. If Mr. Niemera sees you and asks what you’re doing, tell him you’re taking things to the dry cleaners.” Mr. Niemera was the landlord; Chloe was skipping out on their rent again. She would, Richie thought, probably sneak out the rear with her suitcase.

  Walking toward the streetcar stop, Richie reflected on how it might not be too bad moving back to Adams Street, after all. He would be able to pal around with Stan Klein again, and it would be a shorter streetcar ride twice a day to and from his paper route. He knew he would miss Tilton Elementary, but at least being back at Brown with Stan would relieve him of the periodic bullying he was still subject to at Tilton. But the main thing he was going to miss, he realized, was Linda. She was the one spot of brightness in his life that he could depend upon not to fade.


  Maybe, Richie thought tentatively, he could still meet Linda at the Pulaski Road branch library. He would have to take a streetcar there also, he realized; the goddamned streetcar fares were going to break him.

  When Richie and his mother got back to Adams Street that day, Richie found that the two-and-a-half room apartment was not markedly different from the one they used to live in when George Zangara was coming to visit. As soon as he got his things unpacked into a box under his rollaway bed, he asked Chloe for a dime to go buy a candle for killing bedbugs. She gave him half that much, saying, “Candles are only a nickel.” As he went out the door, she added, “You’ll probably swipe it anyhow.”

  “I don’t swipe things,” Richie said over his shoulder. Hearing his mother laugh softly, he could not suppress a half smile.

  Down the block, Richie climbed the stairs of his old building and knocked at the Klein door. Stan’s sister Janet opened it. She was wearing a tight, low-scooped sweater and it looked to Richie like her breasts had tripled in size. “Is Stan home?” Richie asked.

  “Stanley ain’t living with us right now,” Janet said. “He was getting in a lot of trouble, so Ma sent him to Ohio to live with the old man for a while. She wants the old man to straighten him out.”

  A sinking feeling came over Richie. “Oh,” was all he could manage to say. Without even a parting glance at her breasts, he shuffled listlessly down to the street.

  There were some days, he decided, when nothing in the whole goddamned world went right. As he sat on the curb brooding, he felt a cool wind whip down the dreary little street. Richie grunted resignedly.

  On top of everything else, winter was coming.

  Chloe eventually found a job that suited her: folding circulars and stuffing them into envelopes. She liked it so well because it was “home work” that she could do in the apartment, and the only person she ever had to deal with was a tough-looking woman with orangish hair who delivered the work to be done and picked it up when it was finished. It was also piece work, for which Chloe earned only insubstantial wages. But with the new welfare stipend she was receiving in the name of Chloe Clark, and with Richie’s earnings on his two paper routes, they got along adequately if not comfortably. But only for a time.