Some Luck (27 page)

“She’s seen plenty of snowdrifts,” said Frank. And then he said, “Call me Frank.”

And Eloise said, “Oh, you are so funny. Are you sure we’re related?”

“Only Mama would know,” said Frank, and they both laughed. Eloise reached up and ruffled his hair. But Frank was surprised, and maybe a little taken aback, by how happy she was. Maybe those people in New York really had frozen to death.

THE DRIFTS IN CHICAGO
were still nearly as tall as the streetlights, but it was the end of March, and you could get around. Which was good for Frank and bad for Eloise, since he was gone most of the time and she had just about no control over him. The thing was, he was
so charming. When he came in, he would say, “Oh, I was down at the Y, and they said to say hello to you,” and she knew he was at the pool hall or down by the stockyards or the train yards. But she had walked over to the school and talked to the principal about him, and the principal said that he was a very quick student and was making straight A’s. And, said the principal, “There is a sweetness about him. A bit of the country boy.” Right, thought Eloise.

She had her hands full with Rosa, who was three now, and with her job, writing articles for both the paper and the
Daily Worker
, and, of course, with Julius, who was turning into a Trotskyite, and so was she. But she kept her mouth shut about it and he didn’t, and if they expelled him from the Party, she would have to go, too, and then what? Half of her income came from the
Daily Worker
, and all of his came from the Party, since he was in charge of education.

Her worries about Frank only bothered her when she got a letter from Rosanna; she had one in her hand now and wasn’t all that eager to read it, but she put Rosa in her high chair, set her scrambled eggs before her, and ripped open the envelope.

Dear Eloise,

Thanks for your reassurances about Frankie. There is no out of sight out of mind with him, at least not for me. I wish he would write more often, and at greater length, but if, as you say, he has lots of studying to do, I understand that. Every word he reads and every math problem he solves is another step away from farming, and that is good, as you know.

Usually, Rosanna was not quite as open about these sorts of opinions. Eloise read on:

If there is more snow in Chicago, even in Chicago, than here, then the end really is at hand, because although now we haven’t had a new blizzard in a couple of weeks, we are still digging out. Walter has a tunnel between the house and the barn. You would think that he would be happy, but he says that if the ground stays frozen while the snow melts, it will just run off, and then the floods—I don’t like to think.

However, we are all fed, and the snow has insulated us from
the winds, and so the rooms we are heating have been warm enough. I am in a mood to be thankful, because a terrible thing happened to Mrs. Morris, and Lillian and I have been over there twice.

Eloise didn’t want to read on, but she did. Mrs. Morris, she remembered, was Lillian’s best friend’s mother.

Last week, she had a baby, a boy. Her Jane is ten, Lucy is five, and Gloria is two, I think. I guess she’s had trouble before. They wanted a boy, but this one, Ralph, they named him, seems to have been very premature. He is tiny. He cries day and night—he even pulls away from nursing to cry. Of course he has to be swaddled because of the cold, and he can’t stand that. Mama says that in her day he would have been quietly passed on to the Lord, and maybe he would have been, I don’t know, but Mrs. Morris would never do such a thing. I help her a bit with the baby, and Jane stays here for the most part, with Lillian, which is fine, because there is still almost no school. Jane and Lillian read books to Lucy and Henry, and the two little ones don’t seem to care that they are hearing about the French and Indian War or the last of the Mohicans. Every time they stop reading, Lucy asks, “How’s Ralphie?” My goodness, so sad!

Eloise wished she didn’t know how this was going to end. The one thing she and Julius had formerly disagreed upon was procreation—Julius thought they should produce as many New Men and New Women as they could, whereas Eloise shrank from subjecting more children than necessary to the cruelties of life. Now, of course, they disagreed about lots of things, and if Julius were to come back to the apartment this very minute, no matter how many resolutions she made, they would resume their argument about Stalin, the trials, the vilification of Trotsky, solidarity versus truth. He was always manipulating her into the righteous but powerless corner—what was she willing to give up just to hold her own opinions? She was reacting, he was sure, to having grown up Catholic rather than to the needs of the working class. Obviously, it was a bigger leap for her
from the Opiate of the Masses to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, especially since she came from long lines of landed peasants on both sides, but eggs had to be broken, omelettes had to be made.

Her own analysis was that Julius, as the nephew and grandson and great-grandson, etc., of English rabbis, had a love of and talent for rhetoric, and no one else argued with the fine-hewn eloquence of communists. He wanted to stay in the Party in order to disagree with them. And the revolution in Chicago, the founding spot of the Communist Party in the United States, was burbling along just fine. They could afford a little thesis and antithesis. She picked up the letter again, but then put it down and looked at her watch. She said, “Rosa, Nancy is coming over with her mommy, and they are going to watch you while I do some writing, okay?” Rosa shook her head, but she didn’t cry. She said, “Nancy pulls my hair.”

“Doesn’t Mary stop her?” Mary was about Eloise’s age, in charge of writing up minutes from meetings.

Rosa shook her head. “She’s busy.”

Eloise picked Rosa up and set her on the floor, then said, “Okay, honey, listen to me. When Nancy pulls your hair, you take her by the shoulders and look her right in the eyes and say, ‘Stop that. Right now.’ No yelling, but very firm.” She knelt down and took Rosa by the shoulders and demonstrated. Then she said, “Understand? Speak up, but don’t retaliate, okay?”

Rosa nodded.

“Now go watch out the window until they come.” Rosa walked away, and Eloise picked up the letter again. It was strange to Eloise that Rosanna never complained, no matter how Job-like her life became. But, then, perhaps she didn’t know what had happened to her. Eloise was amazed every time she went back for a holiday. Rosanna, who had been so beautiful fifteen years ago, with blond hair so thick that it burst out of her hairpins, brilliant blue eyes, and a sudden, dazzling smile, now looked cadaverous, with hollow cheeks and a flat, controlled bun. She was thirty-six and looked fifty. The turning point had been the birth of Lillian—everything Rosanna had seemed to flow out of her and into the little girl, and no one noticed except Eloise, who had grown up thinking Rosanna was the most beautiful person in the world, and the luckiest, and the brightest. Eloise looked
around, and then crossed herself for luck and in thanks for having escaped the farm. Life in Chicago was full of vociferous “struggle,” but Julius was right, wasn’t he? He had saved her.

FRANK
’
S NEW SCHOOL
was actually new—it was called the Franklin Branch, and it had only been open for two years. It was much bigger than North Usherton, and there wasn’t a single farm kid enrolled, unless you counted Frank, which Frank did not. It had a big library, a gymnasium, and a meeting hall where the student body gathered to be told things, and where performances and shows were put on—Frank was pretty impressed when, two weeks after his arrival, the students themselves did some singing, tap dancing, piano playing, and violin playing. The first half was for classical music, and the second half was for popular music, and the last act was eight girls who kicked up their legs and threw their arms around, and eight guys who tossed them in the air. There would be another show at the end of the year, and Frank planned to be in it, but he wasn’t going to sing “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain.” “Ain’t Misbehavin’ ” was more like it, but in the larger scheme of things, he was misbehaving, and it was wonderful fun.

He had fallen in with a gang of boys who ranged all over Lincoln Park and the North Side of Chicago, Terry, Mort, Lew, and Bob. Bob was the most accomplished thief—he walked into Woolworth’s and even into Marshall Field’s in one pair of shoes and came out in another. For his mother’s birthday, he had stolen a five-pound roast, walking out with it under his coat. He had also stolen her birthday present, which was a silk blouse. The other boys, and Frank himself, stuck to packs of cigarettes and bars of chocolate, but Bob would try anything. Terry and Mort were the brawlers. When they happened to run into the gang from St. Michael’s, who were good fighters because they were Micks, Terry and Mort could do damage if they had to. Lew, Bob, and Frank did some punching, but only for the fun of it. Terry broke one kid’s nose—really broke it—and Mort had another kid down and was kicking him as hard as he could, until the kid could hardly walk. Lew was the best talker—he talked a mile a minute, and just like Jimmy Cagney. Lew knew all the stories about the twenties in Chicago, and swore up and down that his dad and his uncle
had been bootleggers, but Mort said that Lew’s dad and uncle were plumbers and always had been, and so what? Lew had perfected a type of swagger and knew how to get into Cubs games for free, so Frank was looking forward to Opening Day. The boys were going to skip school, as was everyone else. Wrigley Field was about a half an hour from Eloise’s place, less on the L. There was a catcher everybody was wild about named Gabby Hartnett. He was called Gabby because he had a big mouth and was funny. His batting average in the last season was .344, and Lew was sure he would end up in the Hall of Fame. Frank didn’t tell them he had never been to a baseball game. Even Julius liked baseball games, and they took Rosa.

It was Frank who was good with the girls. The others stood back and gawked at him—he could talk to any girl, and he would talk to any girl. He didn’t care whether she was nice or had a bad reputation or was pretty or not. He started by giving the girl a smile—not a dumb smirk or a sideways thing, but a good smile. He made sure she saw it, but he didn’t say anything right away. When the girl was used to smiling back, then he would start chatting like they’d been talking all along. It was easy. And, as he tried to explain to the others, though to little effect, it didn’t matter if some of them walked away—girls were all the same; you couldn’t tell by looking which one you wanted. The other thing was that if you had the girls on your side, then the teachers liked you. Frank didn’t know why that was, but maybe that, too, was the smile. One teacher, Mr. McCarron, he thought might see through him—he was a little impatient, and he taught French. But Frank liked French. He was in there with freshmen, since there hadn’t been French at North Usherton, but he did his work and practiced his pronunciation and raised his hand and asked Mr. McCarron about all the Louises and the Charleses, and the
ponts
and the
gares
. He imagined Paris to be a kind of better Chicago. He said that his father had spent a lot of time in Paris during the Great War, but of course he hadn’t. Yes, Frank had a contribution to make to the gang that was certainly on a par with Lew’s, Bob’s, Terry’s, and Mort’s—he was the best liar. He didn’t tell stories and he didn’t put on any performances, but he got them out of trouble two or three times. Frank liked to think of himself as the brains of the operation.

It was in this spirit that he made himself available to Julius, who was willing to pay him for writing up leaflets focused on Youth. It
didn’t take long, and by doing it, he learned to type.
Who Is Our Real Enemy?
was the name of one—about Hitler.
What Is Really Going On in Spain?
was another.
Who’s the Boss?
was about whether members of the petite bourgeoisie were really free or actually slaves of the system without knowing it. After listening to Julius go on and on around the apartment, Frank could blab away in these leaflets without a hitch. Julius would read them over and correct him, and then when the leaflets were printed up, Frank saw them as a sort of publication, even though his name wasn’t on them. Julius paid him five dollars a leaflet, including typing.

But the thing Frank really loved had nothing to do with the gang or school or girls, even; he loved the L. It was Bob who showed him, since Bob had to range fairly widely in his avocation of stealing, so Bob took him south, down to the Loop, all the way to the University of Chicago, and north to Evanston and Wilmette, and west to the cattleyards. The L ran fairly steadily in spite of the snow, and it gave Frank a sense of dazzling speed and mobility, especially when he caught a glimpse of the still, flat, frozen white in the distance. At those moments, even though the L was big and noisy and made of metal, it felt cloudlike, as if he were sailing in a thunderhead over the still plains. The L made him want to fly in an airplane, as Julius had, as Eloise had, as even Bob had, though only to Minneapolis. When he was on the L, it convinced him that he would never return to the farm, never see the farm again, maybe only ever see Mama and Papa and Joey and Lillian and Henry from a great distance, from high in the air or way down the street. He imagined himself waving and them not seeing him, and himself walking on and turning the corner.

SCHOOL GOT OUT
later in the summer in Chicago than it did in Usherton, and even the corn was already planted by the time Frank was finished for the year, so Mama said that he could stay with Eloise if he found work of some sort. He didn’t, at first, and then he did. A fellow at Party headquarters got him a job at Marshall Field’s, working in the stockroom. But three weeks into that, just before the Fourth of July, Eloise received a letter, and that night there was crying, and then, the next morning, Eloise got up at six, when Frank woke up,
and she came into his room and sat on the bed, pinning Frank under the sheet. Her eyes were red, and she said, “Frank, something happened.”