The Street Sweeper (37 page)

‘E
LISE
 … E
LISE!’

Henry Border stood at the bottom of the staircase and called up to her but there was no answer. The once-grand house had been built at the turn of the century when the land around there could be snatched up for a song. A number of similar places had been built just in time for the rumour to calcify into the incontrovertible fact that the Northwestern Elevated Railroad was coming to Uptown. It was a large house with more rooms than they needed just for themselves. There had been a number of reasons Henry Border had chosen it at the time he and his daughter had moved in but a major attraction had been the extra rooms that he had planned to sublet to help with the rent and perhaps even to help with their other living expenses. There had been a shifting cast of subtenants for a time but the war had eventually taken them all away and by the summer of 1946 when he and Elise were living there alone the house had almost none of the grandeur it had once had.

For such a reserved and, by nature, private man, subletting had been a necessary accommodation to the uncomfortable economic realities from which he tried to shelter his daughter as he sought to make his way in America. By both his instruction and example his daughter
had learned to find a self-contained richness within the walls of the room she had been allocated when they had moved in years earlier. She could lose herself in her books – her own or from libraries – or even in her school homework. It was perhaps in one of those books that her mind sojourned that summer’s day when the sound of her father’s voice eventually reached her through her closed bedroom door. Her father, who could appear formal to the point of being curt to strangers, was not usually this way with her. If anything, even his brusquest admonishments were almost always delivered as appeals to reason and had, if not a sugar coating, then at least the flavour of cinnamon. But the tenor of the voice that found her through her now-opened bedroom door, and which had grown ever more urgent with the mounting evidence of its impotence, suggested to her that her father was calling out to her in the presence of another person. When she got from her bedroom to the top of the stairs and looked down she saw that she was right. Standing beside him at the bottom of the stairs was a black woman she had never seen before.

‘Elise, I want you to meet Miss Ford.’

‘How do you do, Miss Ford?’ she said, shaking the black woman’s hand. The woman glanced down at the twelve-and-a-half-year-old girl’s hand clasping hers and said with a tentative smile, ‘Please, miss, call me Callie, miss.’

‘Callie?’

‘Yes, miss.’

‘Please call me Elise, Callie … or Elly, if you like, or Lissenka, my father sometimes calls me that … Sort of foreign, Polish, I think,’ Elise said shyly, briefly lowering her head while she tried to work out who this woman was and what she was doing there.

Henry Border ushered his daughter and Callie Ford further into the living room and bade them sit down.

‘Miss Ford is going to be staying with you.’

‘With
me?’
Elise said, surprised that his sentence permitted the possibility of a separation from her father.

‘Yes, when I go to Europe. Why don’t I make us all a cup of tea while you two get to know one another? You drink tea, Miss Ford?’

‘Yes. Thank you, Dr Border.’

He left the room for the kitchen and Elise smiled nervously as her feet moved back and forth slightly in what was the most immediate and obvious sign of her rising nervousness. Her father had mentioned a trip to Europe for his work. In fact, he had mentioned it many times but it had seemed like it was never really ever going to happen.

‘You at school, miss?’

‘Yes,’ Elise said, continuing to smile. ‘I mean not at the moment though … summer and all.’ She noticed what her feet were doing and the movement gave way to embarrassment for having been caught out being a nervous twelve-and-a-half-year-old girl. Adults didn’t move their feet that way in company and she was grown-up enough to know that.

Callie Ford had worked as a housekeeper before, originally in the south where she’d been born and raised and then for a time in Detroit before moving to Chicago. The work had involved her taking care of other people’s children even when she had still been a child herself. So it wasn’t the child-minding that made her every bit as anxious as the fidgeting girl on the couch with the jet-black, wavy, shoulder-length hair and huge black eyes trying to smile her way through this situation, a girl with skin the colour of alabaster, white as if it had never been outside, had never seen a minute of this or any other summer. Callie Ford had thought the position was for a visiting housekeeper. She hadn’t known how many days a week she was going to be required and, depending on the pay, she would have been prepared to come every day. But she hadn’t realised the doctor wanted her to stay there overnight too. Was that really what he had in mind, just her and the girl in that otherwise empty house?

‘Here we are … tea for everyone!’ Henry Border said with a hurried and forced bonhomie as he placed a tray down on the table in front of Callie Ford’s chair and the couch.

‘Do you take milk, Miss Ford? Or perhaps sugar? I’m afraid we have no cake.’

They were treating her like she was a guest, not someone they were interviewing to be the help, but still she couldn’t stay there.

‘Perhaps she takes both, Daddy.’

‘Both what?’ Henry Border asked his daughter.

‘Both milk
and
sugar. Do you, Callie?’

Callie Ford looked at her, the girl with her jet-black wavy hair and eyes ever wider, the same colour as her hair, almost a woman but not quite yet. What could she say to this girl?

‘Milk
and
sugar, please,’ Callie replied hesitantly.

She was twenty-nine years old. Since moving from Detroit three years earlier she had lived in a series of wooden tenements on the south side of Chicago until moving into one of the rooms in one of the 176 apartments that housed more than two thousand black men, women and children inside the grey brick monolith that took up half the block between State and Dearborn streets just north of 34th Street known as the Mecca Flats. She needed money as badly as anyone she knew there and she knew a lot of people, or at least had met some and had seen the rest living out their lives, many in public, right there in front of her; a mass of people herded together by their circumstances. She saw them, some in families of varying and changing sizes, some of them alone, some old, some young and some of an indeterminate age that kept increasing as you looked, their youth draining from their bodies. She saw them trying to help one another, giving to each other, saw them coming home from work or going out to look for it, saw them in various states of undress, some hollering, laughing, spitting, drinking, fighting, cursing, loving, smoking, dancing, singing, starving, bleeding, stealing, begging, washing up and sweating; all of it on top of her. But Callie Ford didn’t know anyone who lived in the part of town this old foreign white man and his daughter with her various names did. And she certainly had never before been there herself.

She had worked for women before but never for a man. Women could grind you down mercilessly with the hours they would make you work. From her own experience and from the stories of other black women who worked as domestics she knew that sometimes the ladies of the house didn’t care how young or old you were or what shape you were in. They could work you worse than a mule. Even a mule got to sleep but in some houses you might be expected to be on call twenty-four hours a day.

Men, however, harboured their own dangers. Callie had once been chased by a boss’s drunken husband. She had been asleep at the time and so half undressed. The first she knew of it she was feeling warm licks of this strange man’s flammable breath on her face and woke to a nightmare feeling his drunken hand inside her nightgown fumbling for her breast. She had got out from under him, out of bed still half asleep, and had run out of the room and down the hall. Was it better to keep quiet about it in the morning? Would it happen again? Would the woman blame her, disbelieve her or would she recognise the husband from the details of the assault but make Callie pack her few belongings and leave anyway? On another occasion back when she was barely out of childhood and still in the south, a woman’s son had come back from boarding school for the weekend only to make rough advances when the rest of the house was asleep. The son, who was growing stronger with each visit home, thought of only one thing. Fortunately he wasn’t there that much.

But this man here didn’t seem that kind of man. It wasn’t so much that he was foreign, old or educated, although perhaps that helped. Not that she could know. She’d never met anyone like this. He wore a three-piece suit though it was the beginning of summer. She knew he was a doctor of some kind but, as he hastily showed her around the house, he appeared to need a doctor himself. In his hurry to show her each room he quickly became out of breath. In the kitchen pantry, and again in his bedroom, he didn’t take the opportunity to see how close she would let him get. It looked as if the thought had never occurred to him. He was exceedingly polite but he seemed like he wanted to get the tour of the house over and done. His explanation of the workings of the house didn’t extend beyond pointing out what she could already see just standing there. What could she see? It was a big house with many rooms that would take a long time to dust but it was almost empty. There was no one living there but the old man and the girl, whom at first she had mistaken for the doctor’s granddaughter. He was offering her a wage that exceeded the market rate. Why? Was he too old or too foreign to know the going rate? Well, she thought, it was a rate set unofficially by a marketplace of white women and perhaps the only woman in his life was the little black-haired dolly sitting there lonely on the couch.

Henry Border and his daughter Elise waited for her to say something. She had survived on her instincts and in the faded glory of that living room her instincts were telling her that this was possibly the best or at least the easiest job she would ever be offered. Unless she was missing something, it was the kind of job no one in her position, no one in their right mind, would turn down. But she was going to have to turn it down much as it would hurt her, and it would hurt her a lot. It would hurt her for days and even weeks back in the foyer, on the stairs and in her room back in the Mecca as she remembered the chance she’d had. But there was no way around it. She couldn’t possibly stay there as the Borders’ live-in housekeeper. They looked at her expectantly. No, it was out of the question, just not possible. Who would take care of her son?

*

‘I knew Callie. We all did,’ Arch Sanasarian explained to Adam Zignelik over sixty years later as he took a sip of iced water in the lounge beside the Chi bar in the Chicago Sheraton. Adam couldn’t afford to stay there but he decided it was better to meet people there than in the hotel in which he could afford to stay, especially since it looked like he was going to need to travel to Chicago quite a few more times even after this visit. Arch Sanasarian was the first of Border’s graduate students still alive when Adam had been able to track down. A list of the graduate students who had written their dissertations on Border’s ‘Adjective–Verb Quotient’ had not been too hard to come by, not with Eileen Miller’s assistance. But in addition to this, Adam had managed to find contact details for three of the survivors Border had interviewed in DP camps in the summer of 1946. He didn’t know if the contact details were still current, if the interviewees were still mentally coherent or even if they were still alive, but just finding them gave Adam the feeling that it might be possible to come to know something more about the man who had pioneered oral history, this man who seemed to need to record these people’s stories at great cost to himself at a time when barely anyone else wanted to know.

Adam caught himself feeling a certain excitement about his work that only a short time earlier he had relinquished hope of ever recapturing.
He couldn’t remember how long it had been since he had experienced any emotion that was remotely positive. The best he had been able to achieve since Diana had moved out was numbness, usually alcohol induced. In the weeks, even months, leading up to her leaving, it seemed to him impossible that he would ever again feel any pleasure from anything short of the temporary absence of pain. But more recently it had dawned on him that it was possible, from time to time, to feel some stirrings of hope but only as long as he thought solely of pursuing his interest both in the possible role of black troops in the liberation of Dachau and in Border and those whom the Chicago psychologist had known or interviewed. His own personal life remained the disaster he’d engineered.

Arch Sanasarian was the first person Adam had met face-to-face who had known Henry Border. Border was now very slowly coming back to life and this encouraged Adam even more. A gentle, thoughtful man, a distinguished psychologist himself, now in his eighties, Arch Sanasarian’s long fingers moved slowly when carefully attaching the tiny microphone that went from the lapel of his shirt to Adam’s digital audio recorder.

‘We didn’t know Callie at that time because
none
of us knew Dr Border then, not in 1946. Not even Wayne knew him then. He went to Europe in 1946 to conduct the interviews but we didn’t meet him till about 1950 or perhaps late ‘49. Elly was sixteen or seventeen by the time we met her and
I Did Not Interview the Dead
had already been published. As I understand it, Callie started working for him when he went to Europe back in ‘46. That’s how she became involved with the Borders. Do you want to make sure you’re picking me up on this thing?’

‘Thank you, no, we’re good. Who was Wayne?’

‘Wayne Rosenthal, he was one of the other graduate students. Didn’t they give you his name too?’

‘Yes, but I wanted to make sure I knew which Wayne you were referring to. You seemed to single him out.’

‘I think Dr Border singled him out.’