Algren (2 page)

On the steamer back to the States, the blue-eyed prophet struck again. He looked at the American Consulate's money and decided that here was a sin—thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, sayeth the Lord, but lo, were not these graven images of George Washington on the bills? So Isaac threw the money into the Atlantic. He did this publicly, for the edification of the horrified passengers, as Nelson told the story. Someone took up a collection for Jettie, and she kept the money hidden, to spare everyone another commentary on the first commandment.

In Indiana Isaac stayed on the farm with his family at least until 1880, when Gerson was thirteen, fathering two more children—Rosa and Adolph. Then Isaac abandoned his family and Judaism, first for socialism, then for Methodism, then for whatever would pay, going around the world as a mercenary missionary, as Nelson recalled. His sister Irene described the old man in softer terms, as a “writer and a lecturer and a champion of the underdog,” like her brother. The Abraham family went to Chicago, to the colonies of Jews on the West and North Sides. But when Gerson was about twenty, the old man returned, small and poor, with a long white beard and a new humility, ashamed that he had abandoned his family. “There is no truth, there is no religion, no truth,” he told them. “It is all nothing.”

His family pressed him to stay, and he did for a little while, at least long enough to be on the 1890 voter registration records in Chicago. Then Gerson remembered giving Isaac a half dollar and watching the little, hunched old man go down the aisle on the
Madison streetcar, never to be seen again. He eventually died a pauper in Florida. In 1900 Jettie was living in Chicago with her oldest son, Moses, and daughter Rosa, at the same address as the newly married Gerson and Goldie. By 1921 Jettie was living alone as a widow, in the rear of a building in Hammond, Indiana. There was a long connection between Nelson's family and northwestern Indiana, from the 1860s, with the farm, into the 1930s, when his sister Bernice and her friends bought a cottage there, through the 1950s, when Algren bought his own home in Gary, in the Miller Beach area. Northwestern Indiana was Algren's alternate home, outside of Chicago, his version of the country and a green place of escape. He always longed to be able to look out on a big body of water.

It is a sign of Algren's eccentricity that he later sees Isaac Abraham as his true spiritual father. But the homage started at Algren's birth. Despite memories of the lonely road with camels, Gerson named his only son for the prophet wanderer: Nelson Ahlgren Abraham. Maybe this was a measure of Gerson's own search for a hero, and hopes for something that only occasionally materialized.

Gerson got little schooling and was a working man from early adolescence, from a time when men worked from first light to 6:00 pm. He had seen the belly dancer Little Egypt at the 1893 World's Fair, and a band called McGuire's Ice-Cream Kings at the Columbia Dance Hall on North Clark Street, but these were short breaks in a life of constant effort. The great machinery of industrial-age Chicago wanted workers who weren't throwing bombs and would endure a sixty-hour, six-day week. Gerson worked for McCormick Reaper Works, Otis Elevator, and Yellow Cab, fixing what was broken. He is described as a “screw maker” in the 1890 census. He was, Nelson remembered, “a fixer of machinery in basements and garages,” working hard and trying to avoid trouble at a time when trouble was everywhere, in greedy owners or threatening union agitators. Nelson suggested that his father was a scab, a strikebreaker,
who would earn two times what others were getting for doing the same work until “some picket would take him aside and ask him how he would like to have his head blown off his shoulders.” Simple Black Oak Gerson replied he would like to wait until after lunch. Gerson saw the police clash with union activists advocating for an eight-hour day near the McCormick works in May of 1886, perhaps ducking his head as he crossed the picket lines. Two workers were killed when police fired into the crowd. This incident was followed the next day by the notorious riot at Haymarket Square, in which a homemade bomb led to the deaths of seven policemen and four civilians, and later to the hangings of four anarchists on dubious evidence. Gerson also recalled seeing the fierce, bearded preacher-anarchist Samuel Fielden, who was later convicted of inciting the crowd to violence, speaking at the lakefront, which suggests that Gerson was willing to see all sides of the matter. But Nelson said with a note of scorn that Gerson did not remember these epic events as well as he remembered popular songs from the past—Gerson was not trying to be anybody's hero; he was just trying to fix things.

In 1899, at age thirty-two, Gerson married twenty-two-year-old Goldie Kalisher and lived for a time with Jettie on Chicago's North Side. Then they moved with baby Irene to Detroit, a growing city where the auto industry was just starting to take off and jobs were thick on the ground. Goldie worked as a candy maker. Nelson's adored older sister Bernice was born there in 1902, followed by Nelson seven years later. His sisters helped care for him, pushing him around the neighborhood in a baby carriage to give Goldie a break. They moved back to Chicago in 1913. Gerson and Goldie must have saved some money from Packard, since they came back not to the bustling Near Northwest Side, under the eye of Goldie's family, but to the pleasant, almost rural Park Manor neighborhood, to buy a two-story house at 7139 South Park, now Martin Luther King Drive, when Nelson had just turned four.

Then as now, Chicago's neighborhoods were defined by Catholic parishes, and Park Manor was under St. Columbanus, the patron saint of motorcyclists, the cross of its combination church-and-school building standing sentinel over all the little one- and two-story brick and frame homes. Park Manor had yards and open prairies for playing Run, Sheepy, Run, cowboys and Indians, or baseball, with boys discussing the heroic White Sox—Shoeless Joe, Eddie Cicotte, and Nelson's favorite, Swede Risberg. In the war years, it was the Huns versus the brave Americans and English, with boys taking turns as enemies and allies. They used sunflower stalks as bayonets, and garbage slop tied up in scraps of burlap as grenades. They talked over tin-can field telephones, connected by wires through wooden fences, and feigned dramatic deaths in trampled prairie grasses. Trenches could have been reinforced with stolen red bricks from the St. Columbanus construction projects—ambitious pastor Dennis O'Brien finished a convent in 1917 and later started building a big, double-steepled church, which was completed in 1923. Nelson grew up with this example of constant progress outside his window, of the city around him constantly expanding, with scaffolding and walls rising and the clanking noises of machinery.

The kids made bonfires in the vacant prairie lots on the chilly autumn evenings, and roasted potatoes, making them black on the outside, and soft and white within. In winter they skated on a pond by the church. For the hot summer days, Goldie made homemade root beer. People kept ducks and geese, and grew big vegetable gardens, following the motto “Garden Plots to Kaiser Blot.” Gerson himself had a half acre of tomatoes and onions planted across the street—which he worked joyfully, missing the farm, though Goldie did not want him working there on Sundays. Even if they did not go to church, she did not want others to see him working like a farmer with everyone else in their Sunday clothes. Horse-drawn wagons brought blocks of ice from Wisconsin for wooden
iceboxes, and neighbors like Mrs. Sheeley kept cows, employing her oversized, feeble-minded son Johnny to carry bottles of milk to customers, and whacking him across the head when he got distracted. Father O'Brien bred Belgian hares on the church grounds. There was a country smell, of manure and cut hay, mixed with coal smoke from the Illinois Central Railroad, which gave the sunset sky a reddish glow.

The neighborhood was mostly Irish, which must have pleased Goldie, since it gave her something to complain about. “It's those Irish bums again,” she'd mutter when there was trouble anywhere in the neighborhood. She even worked for the Republican presidential candidate Charles Evans Hughes in 1916 because Woodrow Wilson was another “Irish bum.” Wilson's ancestors were English and Ulstermen, and had as much to do with the Sheeleys and O'Connors of Park Manor as the man on the Moon, but that did not concern Goldie, who could not be moved from an opinion. In boxing during the 1920s, she picked handsome Gene Tunney over Jack Dempsey because Tunney was a gentleman and Dempsey was an “Irish bum.” No, Gerson would argue, Tunney was a sissy—Dempsey was the real fighter. In reality, Tunney's parents were from County Mayo, while Dempsey was part Jewish and Cherokee. But Goldie had her convictions, and always won by the long count.

Nelson's unorthodox religious education began in Park Manor. Despite being ostensibly Jewish, the family kept a Bible with both testaments, in which the dates and addresses of the children's births were recorded. Though Nelson was attracted by St. Columbanus and wanted desperately to attend, Nelson's mother sent him to the public Park Manor school and the nearby Congregationalist Church Sunday school, to counter the Irish Catholics and because he “ought to go and learn something.” Gerson disagreed—why should his son learn about Jesus Christ? “He gave us nothing but trouble,” Gerson scowled. But Nelson liked Sunday school—especially after he
found a five dollar bill at the annual picnic. He also got his first exposure to the impractical philosophy that blessed are the poor in spirit, and that it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. It was a curious lesson in a material age, in a material city, about which Rudyard Kipling complained that people “talked money through their noses.”

Nelson's other early religious instruction came from his little girlfriend Ethel, whose mother rented the upstairs flat. Ethel had lost her father, and she filled her imagination with a highly colored, pierced-bleeding-Sacred-Heart-and-holy-card style of Catholic faith, infecting Nelson with its violent poetry. Older by one year, Ethel would command little Nelson to watch the sunset behind the St. Columbanus cross to see God's face. She would baptize him repeatedly—even if it was just with the ice water from the candy store on Seventy-First Street. When Nelson flew an orange kite on a spring day near the church, Ethel sent up a message of love to her savior. “It became a Jesuit kite scouring Heaven for proselytes,” Nelson remembered. Nelson was not allowed to go into the church itself, but Ethel introduced him to the symbols he later gave to his characters—the crosses for suffering, the nails for punishment, God's sudden abandonments. As Ethel marked crosses on store windows on Halloween, the children Sophie and Frankie in
The Man with the Golden Arm
marked them on doors on the Feast of the Epiphany.

Over supper one evening, after Ethel had instructed Nelson to imagine God's blood burning in the sooty sunset sky, Nelson told the family that he had become a Catholic. No, his mother told him, you need a priest for that, Nelson recalled in his memoirs. Then Ethel came down into their kitchen, in tears. Her father had died without last rites, and her mother had paid a priest $100 to save him from purgatory. The priest felt another $100 was needed for full salvation, but Ethel's mother thought he could make it the rest
of the way himself. Ethel had fled from the blasphemy, weeping that her father would never see God's face.

“Then let him look at His ass,” retorted Gerson.

On another occasion, Nelson remembered how he and Ethel had lured poor backward Johnny Sheeley from his milk rounds to give a little white terrier, struck by a car, a Christian burial. Johnny got in trouble from his harridan mother, and Gerson told Nelson he was excommunicated.

Nelson mimicked his father's skepticism. When Ethel warned him against stepping on sidewalk cracks, for fear God would strike him dead, Nelson stepped on them all. He triple dared God, and nothing happened. Ethel warned that trouble would get him yet. He still planned to marry her. Using the dime allowance he got on weekends, he squired her to his own church, the candy store church of John the Greek, who was “a dirty old man,” another neighbor girl remembered. But for Nelson, here was an ice-cream paradise, with whipped cream and butterscotch, pecans and cherries, ginger ale and root beer and strawberry syrup. John the Greek would sit at the player piano and sing a warning for immigrants who did not love their new country enough:

Go back from whence you came

Whatever land its name

Nelson started selling newspapers by a corner tavern—the two-cent, red, white, and blue
Saturday Evening Blade
and the
Abend-post
—for Mr. Kooglin. To carry them, Nelson, likely with his father's help, made a pushcart out of an upright wooden orange crate and a single roller skate. Nelson sometimes enjoyed the punk thrill of skimming off a customer's change—returning two cents for the nickel instead of three, or giving no change at all. He fixed a mount for a candle at the top of his pushcart, and a bell to ring.
The little candle flickered and glowed far below the gaslights, as he went to meet his father in the evening, getting off the Seventy-First Street trolley with its green window shades after a long day's work. Father and son would walk home, holding hands. The neighborhood bully, Baldy Costello, once stole Nelson's cart, sending copies of the
Abendpost
flying. Baldy put it on the trolley tracks, and Bernice rescued it before it was run over. But it was Gerson who fixed everything with Mr. Kooglin over the missing papers. Nelson made another cart out of a wagon top he found in a weekly excursion with Gerson to the junkyard and wheels from his old baby carriage. Gerson was happy to have a son to provide for because his own father hadn't done so for him.

But for all his heavy sense of responsibility, Gerson had a temper problem. After a few years of holding some machinist job, he would hit a foreman for some mysterious reason. “When he walked into the kitchen at noon with his tool chest under his arm, my mother knew it had happened again,” Nelson remembered. Typically, there was raging by hot-tempered Goldie, who never let Gerson forget that
he
never made foreman. For days the family “lived under an oppression of which none but the tool chest spoke.” Then Gerson would find work again.