Algren (3 page)

Despite these lapses, the family managed to stay middle class, in the go-go days of Chicago's teens and twenties, when the city surged and sprawled into the prairie, pushing up skyscrapers, and there was work for the skilled, even if they were occasional brawlers. They never had a car, but Gerson was enterprising enough to build a one-car garage in the back of their two-flat to rent. They did not go hungry. Besides his Sunday nickels, Nelson got pennies on week-days, to spend on licorice whips or yellow jawbreakers or strips of ten White Sox player cards, dipped in wax to keep them sturdy for use as currency in junior dice games, or to trade for marbles. The Abrahams kept a cat, which Goldie believed would not hunt mice
because Nelson had snipped its whiskers short with nail scissors in a moment of childish sadism or curiosity. There was a piano and an Edison Victrola with a trumpet in the front room. Irene might have played the piano—she later worked for music publishers. Nelson liked to play the Victrola, especially the record “America, I Love You,” which had a crack in it and got stuck at the line “A nation's devotion-devotion-devotion,” which drove his sister crazy.

A portrait of heroic Uncle Harry was framed above the piano, and Harry's woolen coat of faded blue with its brass buttons hung in a closet. Goldie offered, or threatened, to cut it down for Nelson to wear to school on the anniversary of the sinking of the USS
Maine
. Nelson begged off that one, but he could not get out of other embarrassing Goldie notions, like her insistence that he had to wear long woolen underwear under his bathing suit on a trip to the Jackson Park lagoon. The saintly Ethel laughed at him.

Goldie used to do more than nag Nelson into compliance—she had a furious temper and would hit him, sometimes with a broom. He remembered how she once knocked him halfway across the kitchen, though it is hard to say if she was unusually brutal or just typical of her time, when most children were hit regularly. Gerson hit him, too—Nelson remembered how his father knocked him over when he tried to imitate a tightrope walker by standing on his head. This was a little too much eccentricity for Gerson, too much art. “Why can't you be a good boy like I was when I was a boy?” he wondered.

Nelson came to regard Goldie as clumsy, always cleaning like a servant, singing to herself as she worked:

I'm as reckless as I can be

I don't care what becomes of me.

But she did care—she was relentlessly middle class, and Nelson's friend Dave Peltz thought this was part of Nelson's problem with
her. Goldie was a “loving, concerned mother,” but “straight as an arrow,” and Nelson did not have much patience with that, Peltz recalled. “If his mother had been a whore he would have loved and adored her.” Nelson also disliked her cooking—Art Shay joked that Algren's warning “Never eat at a place called Mom's” came not from bad diner experiences but from his mother's kitchen. She would say “pregrant” for “pregnant” and “anulimum” for “aluminum”—perhaps because of her lack of education, or her own stubbornness. In 1921 crazy Baldy Costello was convicted of murder and “elexecuted.” “Elec
tro
cuted, Mother,” Nelson would correct, exasperated. He paid attention to the sounds of words—his sensitivity to the way they could be bent and spindled was fed by one of his favorite books,
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
.

Algren biographer Bettina Drew recounted a story Nelson told his first wife about how his mother ordered him outside to go ice skating, but he did not want to, and rather than openly defy her, he sat shivering in a box for hours. The story may demonstrate Goldie's fierceness, but it also says something of Nelson's own perverse stubbornness—he would have been warmer skating, but he would rather suffer than do something he had not chosen to do.

Despite her own deficiencies, Goldie was literate and wanted her children to better themselves. The first book he remembered—which he thought his mother may have read to him—was Robert Louis Stevenson's
A Child's Garden of Verses
:

In the darkness shapes of things;

Houses, trees and hedges,

Clearer grow; and sparrow's wings

Beat on window ledges.

Bernice also joined in this campaign of education, reading Nelson George Eliot's
Silas Marner
when he was ten. Nelson later said
he did not remember much about this story of disgrace, false accusation, and redemption by love, but he loved having it read to him. Lying on his bed, he studied the book's cover and title while watching Bernice, slim and fair, silhouetted by the lamplight. Bernice loved books and disdained convention, declaring herself an atheist as a teenager. She was also a theater buff, and regularly brought home the glamour of the motion pictures from the Park Manor Theater. Nelson ate Goldie's chicken soup and bread pudding out of free dishes decorated with the faces of silent-screen stars—Blanche Sweet, Wallace Reid, and Viola Dana.

Goldie was interested in disasters, like the “fatal accidence” collected by Sophie in
The Man with the Golden Arm
. When Nelson was six, she took him all the way downtown to see the SS
Eastland
turned on its side in the Chicago River, where 844 men, women, and children had died. They had been working families, about to go on a summer picnic sponsored by the Western Electric Company on July 24, 1915, and the misbalanced tub with a concrete floor had tipped over as they waved good-bye to their friends on shore. It was a popular spectacle—on the day of the tragedy, a janitor from a nearby building charged a dime each to let the curious see the bodies laid out in a makeshift morgue. Nelson stared into the sulky brown water, imagining the little boys and girls in their summer best, sailor suits and pale lawn dresses, hopelessly sucked below the steel hulk. All the way home, Goldie spoke of the
Chicora
as the great maritime tragedy of the age.

Goldie could also be ahead of her time, too far ahead for Nelson's childish inclinations. The South Side in the teens was still mostly dominated by the Irish and Poles, Lithuanians and Slovaks, working for McCormick and the stockyards. But black people were also coming in from the South for the plentiful factory jobs, escaping lynchings and near-slavery as sharecroppers to find a better life of hostile white immigrants, brutal cops, and restrictive housing
covenants in the North. Chicago's black population more than doubled during World War I to 125,000 people. Most lived in the Bronzeville area, around Thirty-First Street and Michigan Avenue, but at least one family had settled in Park Manor, for in Nelson's enormous class of forty-eight children, there was one black girl, Mildred Ford, her pigtails tied in blue bows. Nelson remembered addressing valentines to forty-six children, but not Mildred. Goldie wondered where Mildred's card was. When Nelson protested that nobody sent valentines to blacks, Goldie scooped up his bundle of penny greetings and said if he did not send a valentine to Mildred, he could not send one to anyone. So he had to comply. The card showed a tearful puppy with the plea “Don't Treat Me Like a Dog, Be My Valentine,” Nelson recalled. Mildred looked at the card but would not speak to him. On the way out of the classroom at Park Manor School, she gave him a look that said clearly that there were two sides, and he was on the other one. Later, Ethel, snickering at the wool underwear beneath Nelson's bathing suit, mocked him for it: “You send valentines to niggers.” Nelson, already a Swedish-German-Jewish alien among Irish Catholics, had somehow ended up with Mildred, whether she wanted him there or not, among the most outside of outsiders.

That next summer, he learned just how apart the sides were. A seventeen-year-old black youth named Eugene Williams swimming at the Twenty-Seventh Street beach drifted across an imaginary segregation line to Twenty-Ninth Street. He did not know about a confrontation earlier in the day when some African Americans had walked into what was considered a white space. White men threw rocks at him, and he drowned. Black onlookers asked a policeman to arrest the man who had thrown the stones, but the policeman refused. Fights broke out and more rocks were thrown, leading to Chicago's biggest race riot. After four days, 23 blacks and 15 whites were dead, 342 blacks and 178 whites were injured,
and 1,000 homes had burned. Black commuters going home from work were dragged from streetcars, beaten, and killed. Most of the fighting took place a couple of miles north of Park Manor, but Nelson would have seen the smoke that summer floating beyond the White City amusement park at Sixty-Ninth Street, and Goldie would have been eager to explain what it all meant.

Park Manor held its own horrors. On Halloween Nelson and Ethel put on false faces and went up and down Seventy-First Street chalking store windows. Nelson wrote “Everything inside is a penny!” on John the Greek's candy store, and the kids ran off screaming. The next day, all the windows were washed clean but John's. The police broke the lock and found the amiable priest of Nelson's ice-cream cathedral hanging by his belt. Perhaps whatever the neighborhood suspected him of doing had caught up with him, and he wanted to avoid shame and the Cook County Jail. Terrified, Nelson now avoided the sidewalk cracks in front of the candy store. That winter, he rubbed the frost off the window of the abandoned shop and saw how the chocolate and pineapple syrup had burst from their jars, flowed over the counter, and stiffened in the cold. He remembered how the long drip of strawberry hung frozen from the counter “like a strip of raw meat.”

There were other sorrows—at school, he fell in love with a girl named Geraldine Crow, who played Snow White in the school play. Nelson was the magic mirror, telling the wicked queen with earnest passion that while she was fair indeed, “Snow White is fairer far.” Geraldine died during an epidemic of black diphtheria that winter, along with two other children from Park Manor School. When Nelson was nine, the Spanish flu swept the city, killing over ten thousand Chicagoans in October of 1918 alone. People wore handkerchiefs and gauze masks over their faces, and the vaudeville and movie theaters were shut down. The war had also taken casualties from the neighborhood, sending home survivors crippled by
mustard gas. There was death and mutilation of all varieties under the gaslights of Nelson's childhood.

As a South Side kid, Nelson developed his lifelong obsession with baseball, and its ensuing disappointments. One summer day in 1920 when he was eleven, Nelson set out with a fellow newspaper seller nicknamed Nephew to see the “Miracle Sox” play against the New York Yankees. In one version of this story, Nelson was part of a gate-crashing riot that got him a seat behind left fielder “Shoeless” Joe Jackson; in another, he and Nephew hid out under the bleachers before the game, to emerge when play began. He remembered seeing the French Canadian pitcher Cicotte strike out Babe Ruth, and he somehow acquired a Louisville Slugger wooden bat autographed by Swede Risberg, whose nickname Nelson adopted for the next ten years. He even tried walking pigeon-toed because the Swede did it.

In 1920 Gerson bought a brick two-flat at 4834 North Troy Street and the family moved to the North Side, to Albany Park. It was a busy, prosperous, mostly Jewish neighborhood, at the end of the Ravenswood elevated line—businesses along Lawrence Avenue included a bookstore, the Kosher Purity Restaurant, a Spiegel's department store, and in 1926 a palatial 2,500-seat Balaban & Katz Terminal movie theater, which had a make-out corner for hot dates and had replaced a smaller venue. As in Park Manor, the family rented one floor, and Gerson had a tire and battery shop on nearby Kedzie Avenue. Bernice, the family's strongest character, was studying to be a teacher at Chicago Normal College. Nelson needed some time to adjust—the North Side culture was different: no one would be nicknamed Nephew or Cousin up here, and no one liked the Sox. The North Side was the home of the National League Cubs, who in 1920 had shamefully gone a whole twelve years without winning the World Series. For a South Sider to come into a Cubs neighborhood was like a Muslim moving into a Jewish neighborhood, Nelson recalled. “Baseball was the most important
thing in everybody's life.” Asked for his favorite player, Nelson named Swede Risberg. They grudgingly accepted his choice when he was able to produce a program showing he had actually been to a Sox game.

But something terrible happened that fall: eight talented but underpaid heroes of Nelson's childhood—including Cicotte, Risberg, and “Shoeless” Joe Jackson—were indicted for taking money to throw the 1919 World Series. They were acquitted the next year, but commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis banned then from ever playing baseball again. The Troy Street boys made it clear that Nelson could no longer keep faith with the Swede, heavy with the shame of the South Side. “We all make mistakes, fellas,” Nelson told them, oily and cowering, eager for acceptance. He even traded off his Risberg bat. For the rest of his life, he saw the indictment as a great symbol of institutional injustice. He acted like a clown on the field—when he missed an easy fly ball, he'd follow through by falling on his face in the alien North Side grass—anything for a laugh.

Nelson went to Hibbard Grammar School, and then Hibbard High, later renamed for Theodore Roosevelt. Here again, he wanted to be accepted. He kept a clothbound autograph book, into which he had pasted fingernail-sized pictures of his classmates and teachers. It was filled with what passed as wit among thirteen-year-olds in 1923: “Dearest, sweetest, funniest Nelson—Don't be
Don't be
Just be