Going Down Fast (14 page)

“Get off my back. I guess you'll marry someday, but there's no damn hurry. Those couples tied around each other's necks before they're out of school. Wife knocked up, barrack existence—”

“Stop being superstitious. Getting married only changes my name and his draft card.”

“Then why bother?”

“Because if you feel around long enough we'll get into a fight and break up. Like you and Anna. That's not my idea of what I want to happen.”

“If something busts you up, then you better not get stuck so tight you need a lawyer to untie you.”

“Oh Rowley, everybody fights. If we weren't related how many times we'd have written each other off! You're being trivial!”

“Sam, the way people act in school has zero correlation with what they're going to sound like later. Everybody's an intellectual, everybody's a rebel. Everybody's set to lead a life honest to their values—whatever those turn out to be, when things start costing.”

“Everybody doesn't sell out, Rowley! You don't believe that either. Don't you have faith enough in me to think I won't, and that I wouldn't pick somebody who will?”

A look of intense irritation had been growing on Gino. Now he hauled himself up off the floor and stood head forward like a stork with rundown heels. “She means this whole scene to be pablum, but it's not working. It's only making it worse on you, thinking you can change things. Don't choke on it, but we are married.”

The kid dared to pity him. “Shit!” Rowley found himself crossing as if the floor tilted, walking into his desk. He stood observing that he had not paid his telephone bill.

“I'd never act this way if you did something you really meant!”

“Like shoot the mayor? Well, now.”

“Look at me.”

He swung around. She flushed. “When? How? You notice I don't ask any more, why.”

“The weekend after I called you.” She went to stand beside Gino, who rested an elbow on her shoulder, and looked at him directly now. His eyes were a slatey dark blue. She asked, “Want us to leave?”

To smash Gino's flimsy long head against the basement wall. He drew a deep abrasive breath. “I don't want to quarrel with you.”

“No annulment threats?” Gino drawled.

“She did what she wanted. You don't have to worry about our folks. They're scared of courts. The old man served a term for a sitdown strike, in the sweet past.”

“My family can't do anything they haven't already, for other reasons. It's what you might call a very loose connection.”

“Gino organized a demonstration at Dow. About eighty of us went down there and leafleted and did guerrilla theater in front of the gates. When he got busted, his father wouldn't bail him out.”

“He was scared.” Gino shrugged. “I wasn't. I can't bail him out of where he is, either. And he's in for life.”

Cheap imitation of me. She was too young to have developed a taste in men. “Notice I don't ask how she'll be supported either. I know.”

“Rowley! Help me only if you mean it. Don't beat him over the head. You're acting just like they want you to, putting him down on sight, ready to think you must know better. Big brother, you're acting like a trained seal, and it brings me down.”

“Look,” Gino said in his flat drawl. “I'm used to making it on twenty bucks a week, and she'll learn. And no apologies from me. She's got a brain and muscles, and she won't starve unless she wants to. She's tougher and smarter than you think—and less than she thinks.” He gave her a little more of the elbow.

He could not realize it. Harry he'd never been close to. But she had been his person since she was a baby. He had first been pleased with her when she was six months born, with moist black curls and enormous eyes. He considered he had had a lot to do with bringing her up and setting her straight. His parents named her Sandra, but he had called her Sam, and his name had stuck. Now this skinny cretin from a company town, this gangling, sourmouthed lichen-chinned heir of a chemical engineer had the right to call her anything from Sandy to Tootsy, haul her around, give her orders, read her mail, pump her full of limp fuzzy babies, and decide when and if he saw her. He could not believe it. He picked up a glass ashtray and smashed it on the desk. Broken shards exploded. He had to pick splinters off his shirt, out of his moustache, out of his palms. Her face was drawn tight with strain. Another girl would be crying, but he had raised her tough.

He marched up to Gino. “Look you aren't exactly prepossessing …” which made the boy laugh before he brought back the high horse expression, all nose and goatee. “Sam isn't stupid, so you must be good for something. I guess you're both pleased with each other …”

“There, see! I told you.” She threw her arms around Rowley in a quick strong hug. He could not respond.

Gino shrugged. “You aren't so pretty either. She thinks a lot of you.”

He found he could plod along if he thought of her marriage as a temporary state, like the spring she decided she too would sing. Not that she had ever been as lusterless as poor Caroline. He must see that she stayed in school.

He took them for chicken and ribs at the place on 47th. Gino liked it because it was soulfood. Oh well. The kids did act pretty, obviously in love and giddy with joy at being somewhere together. Gino seemed frozen in his affection: he called her Sam or Smartass, and when he touched her, it was with a roughness that apologized, that claimed it was not sentimental. Yet Sam beamed.

“Promise me you'll tell them. I just can't,” she said. “I just can't go through that scene with Dad.”

He showed them around the studio and took them to a coffeehouse with good rock. Then he drove them through the greenlit tunnel roads under the Loop and parked near the river. Lights from
the Sun-Times
presses. The wind sawed into the back of his neck as they walked through a light dusting of snow on the bank. The cold entered him like steel as he followed them joined and embracing, and bits of their laughter struck his set face.

That night he slept on the couch and they shared his bed. He lay awake, pitching. He tried not to listen, he put his head under the pillow until he felt smothered, but their whispers and rustlings and jinglings and mumbles worked like hot sand into the inner part of his ears.

Tuesday–Wednesday, November 11–12

They were sitting around the diningroom table with the remains of mincepie and icecream and the second round of coffee. “Not bad pie,” Harlan conceded, who thought Shirley cooked too bland. What they used to call the General Foods syndrome when they were always on the lookout for a free meal. After Shirley dragged the kids off to bed, Harlan held out a cigar, gesturing for Rowley to sniff it appreciatively while he lit up one for himself.

“Hey!” Long time. His nose tickled.

“No, tobacco, man. Hot red tobacco—no cooler smoke.”

“Who brought these in?”

“We'll never know.” Harlan puffed, wrinkling his forehead. “Had a call from Sheldon Lederman, renewal's iron man. Invited me in for a chat before the public hearings. First I heard of them. Turns out the University has their consents already—”

“He was bluffing. There aren't that many defeatists here.”

“First, the University owns more real estate than we ever suspected. They been buying under dummy corporations. The old hospital signed—there are connections.”

“All right, that's maybe forty percent. They need sixty.”

“Remember our surprise they included some of their own lily blocks? Our neighbors over there signed in droves their approval for having neighbors no more. Lafleur down the block who's taking his family to L.A. That amazing ofay bitch on the corner who recalls sunflowers nine feet tall and figures this was a lovely village before all the riffraff from Chicago took it over.”

“A city board has to pass on it. That's our real battle.”

“And we are going to make it a loud one. I want every person in these blocks at the hearings. But we have to submit names ahead of time, and time's running short.”

“I'll testify. I'm willing.”

Harlan tapped ash gently. “You look bohemian.”

Rowley drawled, “You calling me a Polack?”

“Second, you're only a tenant.” Harlan held up his palm. “God will record your willingness. In the meantime, raise money, cause we're going to need it. And get us publicity! I can't see why we can't get anything in the papers. I keep calling up and getting the royal runaround.”

“You wait till I do a program on it. I'm seeing Cal tomorrow. I've got the script blocked out already and I figure we'll use some of the tapes we've made at meetings.”

“I'm seeing UNA tomorrow night—meeting with their steering committee. I figure they've got to support us. I'm taking Blanche and J.J. and maybe Short—I think he's come around. Those UNA types are all liberals and interracial. I figure if they send some of their University types to the hearings to testify against the administration experts, it'll look pretty good. They claimed these blocks weren't organizable, but I'm taking our membership lists, and they'll have to eat crow … This is some cigar.”

“So Lederman gave you a couple of cigars imported I imagine through Canada, and told you to reflect upon the moral of luxury?”

“He said as how he was sad to see me wasting my considerable energies obstructing the public good, and he was sorry I was going to lose this house. It had been brought to his attention that I had tried to buy a house nearer the University. A very attractive one is just coming on the market, right near a good school for my children, and if I thought financing would be a problem—”

“They tried to bribe you?”

“Don't be crude.” Harlan sucked, sucked on the cigar. “We're discussing a great institution—one founded on oil needs a little grease to keep it running.”

Rowley leaned back in the chair till it creaked, bracing his nape on joined hands. “I can't help but have the feeling something is missing. All this fuss for a couple of dormitories.”

“He said something about a research park too. I don't quite get it. Some sort of institute that does defense contracting? Besides, they're putting up townhouses too, at thirty-eight thou.”

“Some of the financial goodies are plain enough to me now. In urban renewal, the city uses eminent domain to clear land and sells it off to the developer dirt cheap—often less than half of what the city has spent in tax money to buy and clear it. Then the FHA insures a bargain-type mortgage for almost the whole damn cost of the development. Add tax concessions, and the redeveloper doesn't even need to lay out much hard cash to clean up. All this is to build places that will rent or sell for the upper third economically. So you end up subsidizing the redeveloper and the upper middle class.”

“Racism for fun isn't good enough any more, now they got to make a profit.” Harlan snorted. “Lederman told me to stop acting as a race man and act more as a member of the middle class. This only two years after one of their agencies kept me out of a co-op that voted us in. All day long I fight a nasty colonial war against the down and out. Society rates my job with trash collector. Human garbage disposal. I punish my clients for being black and poor and female.”

Tommy appeared in the doorway in striped pajamas. “Daddy! Read me about Pollywinkle. Daddy?”

“Tomorrow, Tommy. Daddy's talking.”

“You never do. You never do any more! Daddy?”

“Shirley!” Harlan bellowed and Shirley led her son away, consoling him in a high voice meant to be overheard. Harlan shook his head. “Don't know what I expected. A crude man who was going to try to put me down. But Lederman was urbane, genial. He really did think he was talking to me for my own good. Like he was admiring the fuss we've created, and warning me it's time to cash in or back off.”

“He has a mind like a hungry pike and the ruthlessness of the just. The joy of the real operator. When you walk into his office, you know you're in the presence of a man who is happy in his work.”

Harlan gave him a puzzled stare. “When did you meet him?”

“Remember when I roomed with Joe and that kid Leon? That was his son.”

“The circles you moved in. Now look at you.”

“Leon's a jagoff. He got into trouble at the University. The dean contacted Sheldon—big alumnus, committeeman. How would he like them to handle it? Treat him like the hooligan he is, says Lederman: kick him out.”

Harlan raised his brows. “Sounds like facesaving. What had the kid done?”

“Boosted some books from the University store.”

Harlan made a face of disgust. “That's sick. His father could have bought him every book there.”

“Lederman believed in making the kids struggle. Don't give them anything they really want. Know what you get? One kid who can't put a dime in a parkingmeter, and the other who can't admit to wanting anything.”

“His son.” Harlan winced with incredulity. “Of course I see what Lederman's up to. It's the Jews' interest to keep us in the ghetto because they own the business there—”

“Man, if you think Lederman cares for some palsied refugee with a candystore in the Black Belt!”

“How's your kosher girl? Haven't seen her lately, worst luck.”

“You ought to work for the CIA. Haven't seen her myself since last summer.” Corpses of the cigars lay in the ashtray. “I looked into that housing authority study on relocation, and there's meat for us. Proof people displaced have to pay lots more rent. I've located a batch of similar studies, some with racial breakdown. When you figure the statistics are collected by agencies who benefit from more of same, the odds loom even higher.”

Harlan was not listening. Dipping his finger in ash he wrote on the oiled walnut veneer.
FUCK
he wrote and wiped it out with the side of his hand. “Did you know that joining the middle-class is like ordering one of those pink light-up phones from the telephone company?”