Hard City

by Clark Howard

  Richie’s errands to Lake Street were only twice a week in the beginning, and he was able to work them in following his afternoon route and before hurrying off to the library where he still met Linda. After his discovery that Stan Klein was gone, Richie had opted to stay at Tilton Elementary, taking a streetcar to school every day. It was not allowed—living in one district and going to school in another—but as long as none of the teachers saw him getting off a streetcar, he would be able to do it. And if he did get caught, he planned to say he was coming back from working his paper route, which was half true anyway.

  Although Richie tried not to think about it, he knew somewhere deep in his mind that the semi-weekly trips to Lake Street would eventually increase, and that when they did there would be a corresponding drop in their standard of living, which was already meager. For that reason, he helped his mother with her envelope stuffing and other piece work so that she could earn more money, in the belief that the more she made the longer it would be until they encountered money problems. To his dismay, it did not work that way at all. The more money Chloe made, the more her addiction increased, because she was able to buy more of the drug that she loved so irresistibly. Richie had no idea how she had started on this new “medicine” or even how she used it. He assumed she swallowed it, as she had the paregoric.

  Winter stalked in with a vengeance. Bone-chilling cold numbed Richie on his morning paper route, and icy winds whipped him mercilessly in the afternoons. Nearly every afternoon, Frances Rozinski opened her back door and pulled him into her kitchen for hot chocolate or a bowl of steaming soup. One day she touched her fingertips lightly to his cheeks and said, “God, Richie, you’re chapped almost raw. Don’t your mother have no lotion at home?” She got out a large bottle of Jergens and rubbed it gently into his reddened face. It burned like fire for several minutes, but soon felt much better. Frances put some lotion in a small empty witch-hazel bottle she had and gave it to him. “Use this at night and in the morning,” she instructed. “Put it on your hands too. Let me know when it’s used up and I’ll give you some more.”

  Richie still saw Frances watching him from her window sometimes when he worked his dark morning route, but she never opened the door or spoke to him in the mornings. Probably, Richie thought sagely, because her husband was at home. Richie never saw him, but occasionally he would hear Walter Rozinski’s voice behind the drawn kitchen shades when he left their Tribune on the back porch.

  At night, back in the run-down little apartment on Adams Street, the place cluttered with boxes of Chloe’s work, when a very tired and cold Richie crawled under his threadbare blanket, he frequently took the little bottle of Jergens from beneath his pillow, opened it, smelled its sweet fragrance a few times, and went to sleep with thoughts of Frances Rozinski in his head.

  As he had known they would, Richie’s trips to Lake Street gradually increased to three times a week, four, then five. Just as the heroin began to tell on Chloe—she lost weight, gray began to show in her hair, her breath became putrid—so too did the strain of his expanding schedule start wearing on Richie. It seemed that he was constantly on the move: up before dawn to ride the streetcar to his morning route; riding a streetcar to school; a streetcar back to do his afternoon route; a streetcar home and then the walk over to Lake Street and back; a streetcar up to Pulaski Road to spend a few minutes with Linda in the library; a streetcar home.

  “Can’t you go over to Lake Street yourself some of the time?” he challenged Chloe. “I’m working two paper routes out in the cold and you stay inside all the time where it’s warm.”

  “Warm!” Chloe belittled his complaint. “You call this place warm? Sometimes my hands are so cold, I have to hold them in the oven before I can stuff my first envelope.”

  “You’re breaking my heart,” Richie scorned. Chloe took a swing at him but missed when he ducked.

  “Goddamn it, don’t you talk to me like that!” Taking off a shoe, she flung it at him, but he was out the door and gone before it landed.

  Usually he ate on the go. There was no such thing as a meal at home anymore; Chloe’s own appetite became negligible, and she conveniently assumed that Richie would find some way to feed himself. He did. A lot of what he ate, he stole: milk from delivery trucks, doughnuts from bakery trucks; he got hot cereal in a greasy spoon if he had money; at noon he left school as if he were one of the kids who went home for lunch, but instead he would go to one of the larger grocery stores, an A & P or a Royal Blue, and walk through the place eating whatever he could get: apples, oranges, uncooked frankfurters, a big dill pickle from a barrel, anything. Occasionally a store manager would catch him, slap him around a little, and throw him out on the sidewalk or into the alley, but most of the time he got away with it. He bought, stole if he could, a lot of candy bars, which kept his energy level up but provided him little nourishment. At night he usually had White Castle hamburgers or chili before he went home to sleep; he always tried to save enough money each day to do that.

  Eventually, Richie and Chloe were hardly talking to each other. An unspoken agreement evolved between them that Chloe would, with her paltry earnings and the welfare checks—she was managing to receive several, under various modifications of her name—pay the rent and buy her dope, and Richie would see to his own needs: food, clothes, haircuts when they became imperative. As the winter became daily more bitterly cold, the welfare clothes from the previous year proved too small for him, so he began to steal others from secondhand stores run by the Salvation Army, where the volunteer clerks smiled and trusted everyone in the name of the Lord. Richie learned to wait outside and walk in with other people so that it looked like he was with them; then he stole what he could put on while crouching under a table or behind a rack. Shoes were the biggest problem; with wartime restrictions still in effect, there were no secondhand shoes, and new ones were too expensive to buy and impossible to steal, and Chloe had long since sold their ration books. Richie cut cardboard inserts to cover the holes in his soles, and wore three pairs of socks, which could be stolen. Nevertheless, his feet were always cold, frequently wet.

  As winter deepened, Richie’s paper routes became brutal trials of endurance. The shorter, darker days were somehow more threatening. When the constant wind drove snow and sleet along the ice-covered sidewalks in a curtain of frigid cold, Richie moved along with his head bent, rarely looking up, working his deliveries from memory. The dark mornings were the worst, when his pushcart with its iron wheels on the ice required several times as much energy just to control, much less push. Afternoons were better because there was usually a break to look forward to when he reached the Skinner Park area where Frances more often than not pulled him into her kitchen to give him something hot to drink or eat, and sometimes do other things for him.

  “My God, Richie, you’ve got holes in your gloves. Your fingers will freeze like that. Wait a sec.” She hurried from the room, hurried back, and made him try on, over his own worn gloves, an old pair of men’s gloves. “They’re Walter’s from last year. I had them in a bag for the Goodwill. Are they okay?”

  “They’re swell,” Richie said. “Thanks a lot.”

  Sometimes she fed him thick, meaty stew she had been cooking all day for that night’s supper. “I made extra so you could have some.” Other times it was a quick grilled cheese sandwich or a can of soup. While she fixed something for him, she made him put his shoes on the radiator to dry, and brought him a bottle of Jergens Lotion to use. “Your mother should take better care of you,” she criticized.

  “She’s sick,” Richie excused. “It’s all she can do to take care of herself.”

  Before he left one day, Frances put a new woolen muffler around his neck. “I saved up out of my grocery money and bought it for you,” she said proudly, her dark, dark eyes dancing with delight. As she bent to adjust it around his neck, her face was very close to his.

  “How come you’re so nice to me?” Richie asked. It was a question he could not resist, somethin
g that had begun to bother him.

  “Because I like you,” Frances replied. She gave him a brief, dry kiss on the lips. “That’s all right, isn’t it? For me to like you?”

  “Sure,” Richie said, with his usual shrug.

  Frances led him into her hall and stood him in front of a mirror on the wall. “See how nice it looks,” she said, adjusting the muffler still more. “If Walter found out I bought it for you, he’d beat me up.”

  “Maybe you should take it back,” Richie offered.

  “No, he won’t find out.” She stepped over to stand behind him so they could both see themselves in the mirror. “Look how tall you are,” she said. “You’ve grown a couple of inches since the morning I caught you looking in the old woman’s window next door. That’s what you were doing, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” Richie admitted for the first time. He turned a little red. Smiling, Frances put her arms around him from behind and gave him a little hug. “Will you do something for me?” she asked, fixing her eyes on his. “Sure, what?”

  “Change your route around tomorrow so that you deliver my afternoon paper last. Can you do that?”

  “Sure. But why?”

  “You’ll see. It’s a surprise.”

  Richie smiled. “Okay.”

  For the rest of that afternoon, trudging the remainder of his route in a heavy snowfall, Richie tried not to imagine why Frances had made the request.

  It was easy enough to alter his delivery sequence; he simply skipped the block where Frances lived and made the rest of his deliveries in a circle back to it. When he got to her door with the last Herald-American, leaving his empty cart parked in the alley below, Frances was waiting for him and quickly let him in. She was wearing a chenille bathrobe and had a towel tied around her dishwater hair. The kitchen was close with heat, its windows steamily opaque. Smiling, Frances led him into a warm, misty bathroom.

  “Would you like to take a nice hot bubble bath?” she asked, helping him out of his coat and cap. “Of course you would,” she answered for him. “Take off the rest of your clothes while I get you some hot chocolate.”

  When Frances left the bathroom, Richie stood there in uncertainty for a moment. One part of him was queasily fearful about what was happening, while another instinct lured him tantalizingly onward. He had been so cold for so long; even his baths in the bathroom down the hall where he lived were taken in an unheated room, in an old, chipped tub, sometimes with water that was barely warm, often rusty. This bathtub was glistening white, filled to the rim with foamy, sweet-smelling bubbles floating on water he knew was hot and clean.

  Hearing the rattle of cup and saucer from the kitchen, Richie quickly began undressing. He hurried so that he could get out of his threadbare underwear to keep Frances from seeing that the knees and elbows were worn all the way through. By the time she returned, he was in the tub, hugging his knees, letting the hot water turn his flesh red.

  “There, isn’t that nice?” Frances said. “Here, drink some cocoa to warm up inside.”

  As he rested and sipped the hot, sweet chocolate, Frances soaped a thick cloth and gently washed him. Watching her, he concluded again that she was probably the same age as his mother. Maybe, he thought, she was pretending that she was his mother, giving her little boy a bath when he came home from his long, cold paper route. Except that, after turning up the sleeves of her robe, Frances had put her hands under the water and was washing him the way Dorothy had once done, on those nights when she had him bite her nipples.

  “Well, what have we here?” Frances asked when her slippery hands came upon his erection. Richie felt himself turn red. “Don’t be ashamed,” she said in a softer voice. “It’s really a compliment to a woman when you get like that.”

  When she finished washing him, Frances rinsed him off and stood him on a fluffy rug as she knelt and dried him with a soft towel. He had never felt so clean in his life; it was such a marvelous feeling, that he was able to ignore his stubborn erection. When he was dry, Frances led him into the living room to a large easy chair. “This is Walter’s chair, but we can use it anyway. He’ll never know.” Sitting far down in the cushion, she drew Richie to his knees in front of her and opened her robe partway. Her breasts fell apart from each other, their large, dark nipples pointing off in opposite directions. Richie stared at them in turn, fascinated.

  “Would you like to touch them?” Frances asked. Taking one of his hands, she guided his fingertips first to one nipple, then the other. “Would you like to kiss them?” Gently she drew his head forward. “Would you like to suck on them? Suck on them, Richie.”

  As he drew her nipples into his mouth, each in turn, wetting them with his tongue, licking, trying to suckle something out of them, Frances poured Jergens Lotion on her hands from a bottle on the end table and began to rub it over his genitals, careful not to bring him to a climax when she felt his young erection begin to throb at her touch.

  When she had enough of what he was doing, Frances gently moved his head back and opened her robe the rest of the way. From the pocket she took a small brush and, saying “Let me show you something,” slowly stroked and parted the growth of dark pubic hair she had exposed. When she had it combed just the way she wanted it, parted neatly and brushed to each side, she said, “Would you like to kiss me there, Richie? I want you to kiss me there. Please, do it for me . . .” She drew his face down. “There, right there where my finger is, kiss it there . . . aaah . . . yes, yes, yes—”

  A shudder seized her and she threw her head back, Richie stopped, looking up, not knowing whether to continue or not. She was holding both his hands flat against her fleshy, widespread thighs.

  “Did you like that?” she asked after a moment. Without waiting for him to answer, asked, “Would you like to lick me there, Richie? Yes, you would, I know you would. Lick me, my darling, lick me there . . . yes, right there . . . oh, Christ in heaven—”

  After another shuddering seizure, during which her naked body quivered all over the chair, Frances finally dropped back to a slack position, breathing heavily, her expression rapt, lips parted with a trace of saliva in their corners. Richie remained kneeling before her, looking at her spread legs, parted breasts, dark, hard, lumpy nipples. Remembering the window of Cook County Hospital that looked into the nurses’ locker room, he curled his fingers around his lotioned erection and began to masturbate. Frances smiled lazily at him.

  “Oh, so my little boy already knows a few things, I see,” she said in mock surprise. “Well, come here, my darling, let Frances do it for you . . . .”

  Drawing him up until he was straddling her, one knee on each side as she remained lying back in the chair, she pushed her breasts together with her upper arms and with one hand cupped his scrotum, with the other began to masturbate him.

  “You are going to be mine, Richie,” she purred softly, “the only gentle thing in my life, the only tenderness I will have, the only thing that is not rough and brutal. You and me, Richie, we will have romance . . . .”

  Listening to her hushed voice, feeling her lotioned, slippery hand sliding up and down, Richie closed his eyes and let her take him euphorically to his climax.

  Not once did he think about Chloe, waiting in the shabby apartment to send him to Lake Street, or that he would have to face her later.

  But when he opened his eyes when it was over, he looked at Frances and saw his mother.

  34

  When Richie finally got home, much later than usual, as soon as he walked in the door Chloe, who was waiting against the wall, hit him in the side of the face with a shoe.

  “Where the hell have you been?” she shrieked. Before he could answer or recover from the first blow, she landed another which sent him reeling back, off-balance.

  “Cut it out, goddamn it!” he yelled. When she moved forward to batter him further, he grabbed her frail wrist and twisted the shoe away from her. Seizing his coat so that he could not get away she sniffed him, frowning.

  “Wh
y do you smell so funny? Where the hell have you been?”

  “A wheel came off my pushcart,” he lied. “A lady let me come in her house to use her phone. The place smelled real funny, flowery like.”

  Chloe began to shake him. “You knew I was waiting for you! You knew I needed you to go someplace for me!” She pointed a finger in his face. “I want you to quit that paper route, you hear me? Quit it and come right home after school—”

  “Oh sure!” Richie snapped back. “Then who’s gonna feed me? You sure as hell won’t!”

  Face up close to his, Chloe’s expression slowly changed from rage to wretchedness. Her entire face seemed to sag, becoming pendulously pitiful: the circles under her eyes seemed to sag; her cheeks, what little pliancy they had left, sagged; her mouth drooped miserably. Sinking to her knees, she began to sob woefully.

  “You know I need you, Richie,” she choked out words. “You know you’re all I’ve got. There’s no one else to help me, no one else to go get my headache powders for me. I’m all alone without you, Richie. If you don’t help me, I’ll die, that’s all there is to it, I’ll just die!”

  Looking down at her, Richie’s own face reflected guilt and anguish and a wild rampage of doubts. He was still cushy and cozy somewhere deep inside himself from his experience with Frances, and on the way home he had once again instinctively thought of his mother not as she was now, not haggard and sick, but vibrant, pretty, alive, the way Frances was. It was as if Frances calling him “her little boy, her little Richie,” and doing to him the glorious, delightful things she did, made Richie wish that Chloe had felt that way about him, that when Chloe was pretty and healthy like Frances was, she would have done those things with him instead of doing them with Jack Smart and George Zangara. All the way home Richie had pictured a voluptuous naked woman who had the body of Frances and the face of Chloe as she once was.