No Promises in the Wind, Page 2

  Howie was a boy of many sorrows, but he was one that sorrow couldn’t quite pin down. He was only a few months younger than I was, but not much taller than Joey. He was a thin-faced, sallow boy with great dark eyes that could look mournful one minute and full of laughter the next as if they mocked mournfulness and refused to accept it. I guess he had never known his father; he’d had a line of stepfathers, none of whom cared much about him. His mother was drunk when she could find money to buy whiskey; when she wasn’t drunk, she was mean. Howie didn’t talk about her much. He liked to talk of things that made for laughter, and the most striking feature about him was his mouth, a mouth that seemed always eager to laugh. Maybe I noticed that especially because my own mouth was characteristically unsmiling, even a little sullen. He was a wonderful guy, that Howie, the only real friend I had in high school.

  That afternoon we were practicing something I had composed. It was a fluid, changing tone-story, a theme that I improvised upon according to my mood, an outpouring of feelings that were inside me and changed with the quality of sunlight or the lack of it, with the dreams that sometimes seemed to be possible, with the despair that was a part of the times. It was something Howie and I had worked on for months, and lately when we’d played it, Miss Crowne’s face glowed. We didn’t have to ask her if we were good. We knew we were when she asked us to play for the school assembly.

  The October afternoon outside the windows was as gentle and drowsy as if there weren’t a trouble in the world. For all old Nature knew or cared, every able-bodied man the length and width of the country had a good-paying job; every supper table in the country had enough on it to satisfy the hunger of the children gathered around it. Nature might even have carelessly supposed that the hunger of the children was an indifferent kind of hunger, sharp enough from work or play, but nothing to be scared about. The jab of hunger pangs was nothing to panic over when the smell of a good supper at twilight was as much expected and as little considered as twilight itself, or the light of morning. That is the way it had been with me once—wonderful, ravenous, indifferent hunger. It was no longer like that for a great many of us.

  I was suddenly angered that Nature could be so carefree, so oblivious to the dreariness that my music only brightened for minutes. I struck a few chords on the yellow keys, full of a helpless kind of resentment, but Howie brought me out of my mood in seconds.

  “What’s itchin’ at you, Joshaway?” he asked, laughing at me. “Come on, let’s get goin’. This banjo’s got a deep, low yearnin’ for something with a Dixieland beat.” His fingers skittered over the strings as he spoke.

  I grinned at him and brought my hands down on the keyboard, ready for the opening bars of our number. All the months of playing together had made Howie and me like one boy when we swung into our music. He could sense the moment when I’d go into a change of tempo; he knew when my mood called for laughter and clowning, or when it began to sink low, low down into the blues of men who cowered around the wire trash baskets on street corners and warmed themselves with burning newspapers. Howie and I vibrated with music that neither of us could have talked about in musical terms.

  Miss Crowne must have been bone-tired that afternoon. Her face looked faintly gray and drawn, but she came into the room and stood there watching us, swaying a little with our rhythm, smiling and brushing tears out of her eyes at the same time. When we were through, she walked over and stood beside the piano.

  Howie was a ham—there was no doubt about that. He laid his head against the back of his chair and closed his eyes. “Lord, wasn’t that sweet! Josh, you’re terrific, and I’m mighty near as good as you.”

  Miss Crowne laughed then; she often laughed at Howie. “You two all but make me forget the bread lines for a few minutes.” She nodded at me. “It’s good, Josh, real good. You’re making it come alive, and Howie is giving it a beat that’s going to make the assembly sit up and listen next week.”

  When Miss Crowne praised us, we felt clouds under our feet. Although she made a gesture of brushing us outside the door when we lingered over our thanks for the use of her room, we were confident that she liked us, that she was proud of what we were doing.

  “Get on home now, you two,” she told us. “You have home-work, and I have an hour’s ride on the streetcar. Get going, gentlemen.”

  We had to go, although we hated leaving her. We wanted to stay and hear again how much she liked our music. Mostly, I guess, we wanted to put off the hour when we had to go back to our families.

  Outside I said good-bye to Howie and told him that maybe I could get out that evening in which case I’d meet him at the usual place by the corner drugstore. I didn’t say that I’d get out if Dad was in a mood to ignore me. I didn’t have to explain; Howie knew how things were.

  He said, “Bring Joey along. I snitched a jigsaw puzzle the other day from someone who’ll never miss it. I want to give it to Joey.”

  I shrugged. “He has to go to bed early,” I said. I didn’t care to have a younger brother tagging after me. Howie didn’t mind. He had no brothers of his own, and he had a special kind of affection for Joey.

  Joey was, of course, the protected and best-loved one of us at home. He had grown stronger with the years, but he was still fragile, a little too slender and delicate for the lean times. He was also beautiful, a golden child with a mouth that looked as if it had been sculpted, and great gray eyes under his shock of bright hair. I loved Joey’s beauty, but I wasn’t cured of the old resentment toward Joey himself. His birth had meant the end of happiness between Dad and me. I suppose I should have been a little wiser, but as the years went by, it didn’t occur to me to bring reason to my feelings. I just went on thoughtlessly, not exactly disliking my brother, but not liking him much either.

  I took Joey’s hero-worship for me with indifference just as for years I had taken such things as food and shelter and security for granted. It was obvious that Joey thought of me as a great guy. I was strong and husky; I knew things that made him feel I was pretty brilliant. I could do things he thought it would be great to do, and he didn’t seem to mind that I was often brusque with him, that I lorded it over him with an authority I had no right to claim. Maybe Joey accepted these things as the way of all big brothers. I don’t know. But I do know that a thrust of guilt sometimes hit me where I lived when I looked at his face and saw the eager friendliness there which I knew I didn’t always deserve.

  It was like that when I came upon him after my practice session at school. He was sitting in the alley back of our house, bending over something in the darkness. I couldn’t see what he was up to until I was almost on top of him. There he sat in the midst of dirt and trash, and directly in front of him was a lean alley cat which he stroked as it lapped milk from a rusty pan. A five-cent milk bottle was in Joey’s hand.

  “She was just about starved, Josh,” he said quickly as if realizing that he must come up with an explanation. Joey knew well enough that milk was not for alley cats that fall. “She’s got babies, and she needs milk awful bad. You’re not mad at me, are you?”

  “Where did you get a nickel for milk?” I asked sternly.

  “Kitty gave it to me. She walked home from the elevated yesterday to save streetcar fare, and she gave me the nickel because she couldn’t buy me a present for my birthday last week. It was my nickel, Josh, honest. And the mother cat was so hungry.”

  “Kitty’s in big business giving you a nickel when she’s just been laid off her job,” I answered. “And you listen to me, Joey—when you get hold of a nickel, you give it to Mom to help with groceries. I don’t know what Dad would do to you if he knew you’d bought milk for a mangy alley cat.”

  Joey looked scared. Petted as he’d always been, he still hadn’t wholly escaped Dad’s mean moods that year. “Are you going to tell on me, Josh?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “There’s enough trouble in our house without adding to it. Just don’t do it again. Just don’t ever do a thing like this again.”


  Even in what I felt was justifiable anger, my words struck something inside me. “A thing like this” meant feeding a starving animal, and I was making Joey feel that he had committed a crime in being compassionate. Once I had been as eager as he was to feed every stray animal that came near us. It was strange what poverty and fear of hunger could do to a sense of decency.

  I guess my voice softened a little. “Come on, Joey, let’s go inside. I won’t say anything about this.”

  We went inside to desolation. Mom was lifting boiled potatoes from the pan to a serving dish which she placed upon the table. Nothing else was there except glasses of milk at Kitty’s place and at Joey’s and mine. There was a cup of coffee at Dad’s place, nothing at Mom’s. Dad stood in front of the chair where Kitty was sitting, his face dark and forbidding. Kitty was crying.

  “I tried, Daddy,” she was saying. “I tried so hard. I wanted that job more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life. I was so scared that I just went to pieces. I couldn’t remember my shorthand, and my hands shook so that I couldn’t do the typing test. You’ve got to believe me, Daddy, I tried—”

  “Well, you didn’t try hard enough, my girl, and get that into your head right now. Your mother and I have spent good money putting you through high school, giving you a chance to learn this stuff so you could make a living. You’ll go down to the Loop tomorrow and you’ll try about a hundred times harder than you tried today or you needn’t—”

  He stopped himself suddenly and sat down at the table, looking as desperate as I’d ever seen him. Kitty sobbed. It was awful.

  I had never known Dad to be mean to Kitty. She was the child of his Elzbieta, the young wife who had died in Poland when Kitty was born. Mom had told me many times about the frightened little girl Kitty had been when Dad sent for her to come to this country and to a new mother. I guess Dad and Mom had worked hard in those days to bolster Kitty’s confidence with love and understanding.

  “You must understand, Josh,” Mom had told me once when I thought Kitty had been treated with more consideration than I had. “You must understand that Dad is terribly proud of you. You’re a son, and Dad is a man who wants sons. But sometimes he’s afraid of showing all he feels for you—he’ll lean over backward to show his girl-child that he’s just as proud of her. He’ll even go so far that it seems he’s setting her up above you, but it’s not so. You’ll have to understand this thing in Dad’s nature.”

  That night as Kitty cried I wondered if Dad was capable of loving anyone.

  It was only a few minutes until he turned on me. “And where have you been until nearly dark?” he demanded. “Why is it you don’t get home after school to help your mother?”

  “I was practicing,” I answered shortly, expecting this admission to bring more wrath down on me, but Mom quickly interrupted. “I gave him permission to stay after school, Stefan; he needed to practice for the assembly program next week.”

  He didn’t say anything after that; he just sat huddled in his chair, staring at the plate in front of him.

  We were all silent for a long time. Joey kept his eyes lowered and ate very slowly. I felt pretty sure that he understood why I had chosen to say nothing to Dad about the nickel’s worth of milk that had gone to a hungry cat.

  Then I did something that called forth more wrath than Joey’s gift to the cat would have done. It was thoughtless, of course, but I was always hungry, and many times at the supper table I had asked the same question: “Are there any more potatoes, Mom?”

  Dad turned on me as if I had struck him. “No, there aren’t any more potatoes, and if you haven’t had enough, that is just too damned bad. Do you think your paltry little job gives you special privileges to eat when everyone else at the table is hungry, too? Do you realize that your mother ironed all day to buy the food set before us, that she never asks for second helpings?”

  Mom tried to stop him. She said, “Stefan, Stefan, has it come to this? Are we watching what one another swallows?”

  He got up then and stalked outside. Kitty ran up to her room, and Joey went outside to sit on the steps. Mom and I sat alone at the table. She didn’t cry—I guess she was long past crying. She just sat there without speaking, and I sat looking at her and wondering.

  She had always been so pretty, so young, until the past two years. Now she looked old, although actually she was only thirty-six. I wondered how she could stand up in the face of all these troubles. I had my life at school, my music. Mom no longer had the music she loved—just an ironing board all day and a husband who made life miserable for his family when he came home at night.

  “A great guy, Mom, a real great guy. Someone I must always look up to—is that what you’re going to tell me?”

  “Do you know what he’s been through today, Josh? He’s stood in line from seven-thirty this morning until five tonight to get into a factory over on Western Avenue. He didn’t have a bite to eat at noon, and only coffee and bread this morning—”

  “That’s all you’ve had too, isn’t it?”

  She ignored that. “He was fourth in line when they closed the window at the employment office. Can’t you understand what that does to a man, Josh? Dad has always been able to feed us well, to clothe us and give us a good home. Now he’s at bay. He’s cornered and desperate.”

  “All of which gives him a right to hate Kitty and me.”

  “Josh, he doesn’t hate either of you. He’s always been tender with Kitty, and underneath his rough ways, he’s so proud of you. If only you could understand how proud he’s been ...”

  I was almost as angry with her as I was with him. “Do you know any more nice little stories, Mom? Do you know any more pretty speeches to make me love my dear old dad?” I got up and walked around the table to stand directly in front of her. “Listen to me, Mom. You heard the way he talked to us. You know that I can’t make a move without having him bellow at me. And yet, in your book, he’s still someone I must be patient with, someone I must love and honor—is that right?”

  She looked at me steadily as I glared down at her. “When a woman sides with her children against her husband, a marriage and a family are all in ruins, Josh. Your father is crazed with fear and terror. I’ll stand by him no matter what his son says about him.”

  “Then I don’t think there’s any place here for me. I’d better get out on my own. Isn’t that right, Mom?”

  I had never seen such suffering in her face as I saw then, but there was a hardness inside me that made me callous to that suffering. I repeated my question: “It’s time I got out, isn’t it, Mom?”

  She nodded; at least it seemed she did. It was an almost imperceptible movement. “You’re forcing me, Josh; you’re driving me to say a thing that kills me. But I guess you’re right. There’s nothing here for you, no food, no jobs. And you and your father—it’s better that you be apart before there’s a sharper tragedy than we’ve yet known. I guess you’re right. You’re a strong boy; you’re bright. Maybe you can find something better than what we have here.”

  She had said it. If I wanted to wallow in self-pity, I could say that both my father and mother had rejected me, had turned me out on my own. The world of that depression year lay ahead of me. If I licked it, fine; if I didn’t, there wouldn’t be anyone who cared.

  But I wasn’t nearly so desolate as I tried to convince myself that I should be. Actually I was suddenly filled with excitement, with an eagerness to get away, to break all the ties of home and to leave Chicago behind me forever. Plans began growing in my mind as I ran down the front steps past Joey and into the street. I could hardly wait. I was breathless when I reached the drugstore and sat down on the curb in front to wait for Howie.

  2

  Howie was a little late in joining me. He’d spent a half hour rummaging through a pile of crates which some grocery company had dumped on a vacant lot; it had been a half hour well spent, though, for he’d beaten the rats to an orange, only half decayed. He cut out the bad part with his pocketknife an
d divided what was left between us, smiling his big smile, full of pleasure that he was able to give me a treat. I wondered if Joey’s cat had been as grateful for her pan of milk as I was for that bite of orange.

  After a minute I told Howie of my plans. “I can’t take it any longer,” I told him. “I’m hittin’ the roads, and I hope I never see Chicago again. Or my dad. Or”—bitterness rolled up like a fist and pounded inside me—“or my mother either,” I added. “She’s all for the old man. Well, I’ll clear out. They can’t be any happier to get rid of me than I am to be through with them.”

  Howie shrugged. I suppose my family difficulties seemed rather bland to him. Then he answered as casually as if I’d suggested walking around the block. “Well, I guess I’ll be goin’ with you, Josh.”

  “But what about your mother?”

  Howie’s eyes could get icy. “Are you tryin’ to be funny?” he asked.

  “No. I just want to be sure that someone isn’t going to set the cops on the trail of two runaways.”

  “Well, be at ease.”

  We were silent for a minute. Then I said, “We can make it, can’t we, Howie?”

  He came out of his icy mood into a gay enthusiasm as if he’d done a mental handspring. “Of course we can make it. You know, in a way we’re a couple of the luckiest guys around here because we’ve got something that people want. No matter how hard times are, people still want music. And we’ve got it, Josh. We’re a notch or two above just ‘pretty good,’ and you know it. Well find some place—a speakeasy, a restaurant, a dance hall—some place where people will pay to hear the kind of music we make.”

  I felt excitement growing in me. “We’ll head for the smaller towns, Howie. Chicago’s too big and ugly—Chi—cago’s too close to my old man. We’ll head for the smaller towns that maybe aren’t hit so hard.”