No Promises in the Wind (2 page)

And then suddenly, his bootstraps, his industry, his shrewdness and thriftiness, were worth nothing. He was as powerless to save his home, to feed his family properly, to feel an ounce of pride or confidence in himself as any man he had scorned in former years.

It was hard for Dad, I knew, but his unreasonable rages in which I was usually the whipping boy bewildered me at first and then angered me deeply. Mom had talked with me many times about him.

“We must be patient with him, Josh. He's a good man—just wrong in letting his desperation get the better of his reason. We mustn't forget the goodness in him just because we can't go along with some of the things—we are sorry about.” She never would actually come out and agree with me that Dad had done anything wrong. It was always, “I know, Josh. I know, dear. Let's just be a little patient.”

That morning as we stood in the dark kitchen together I made a vow that I'd try to be patient with Dad if only for her sake. She was so little, so bent with weariness and worry that I felt a great tenderness for her. I patted her shoulder as I placed my empty cup on the table. “Get another hour of rest, Mom. You don't have to be up before six.” She nodded, but I knew she wouldn't go back to bed. She'd be afraid of oversleeping, of failing to have breakfast ready as each of her family made an appearance in the kitchen. She worked too hard, cared too much about the rest of us. It worried me. And to give Dad credit, I must admit it worried him too.

They were sitting together, Mom and Dad, at the kitchen table when I got back. He looked beaten and disheveled, but not angry as he so often did. He was holding Mom's hand, and they were talking quietly when I came into the room.

Mom got up to fix the breakfast she had promised three hours before. “We have a few eggs this morning,” she said. Then she noticed that I shivered as I drew close to the stove. “Oh, Josh, you didn't wear your sweater. Didn't you see that I had it laid out on the chair for you? These mornings are too chilly for—”

Her words touched off Dad's ready anger. He turned toward me furiously. “Must your mother dress you like you are three years old again? Must she be worried with all her other worries because you show no responsiblity—even for wearing the right clothes? It will be fine, won't it, when you catch a cold and we have doctor's bills on top of everything else?”

I started to say something that blazed up inside me, something about the fact that I was at least earning a little to buy food for us, but I caught the pleading in Mom's face and I kept quiet. Dad sat for a moment, looking from one of us to the other. Then he got up and put his arms around Mom.

“Forgive, Mary. Please forgive. Why do I say things to the boy that hurt you? I think there is a meanness in me—”

“No, Stefan, there's a tiredness in you—and hunger. Won't you eat one of the eggs, please? I'll scramble the other two for the children to divide amongst themselves.”

“No, I don't want anything more. I'll go now and meet the other men. We're going to try a place out on Western Avenue.” He looked at me. I had a feeling that he wanted to say “Forgive” to me as he had to Mom, but for the life of me I couldn't have accepted an apology at that moment. I turned away from him abruptly. He had lashed out at me too many times, too unreasonably. I didn't feel the love for him that Mom did.

When he was gone, I turned to her. “Don't fix any breakfast for me, Mom. It would choke me.”

She didn't answer. She just walked to the window and stared outside. I went up to my room, finished some home-work, and got ready for school.

When I came down, she had a sandwich of bread and oleomargarine for me. “Buy a cup of hot cocoa and have this for lunch, Josh. You can't play very well for Miss Crowne if you're starved.”

She turned away quickly after she had spoken and hurried out of the kitchen as if she feared I might mention what had happened earlier. I stood at the kitchen table, looking at the sandwich she had made for me. I wanted to ask her if
she
had money for a cup of hot cocoa after a morning of ironing. But I heard the door of her room close sharply, and I knew the meaning of that sound. I'd heard it often at times when I was younger and she was fed up with my childish demands for attention. It meant, “Keep your distance. I am not available for further conversation.”

I didn't think she was angry with me this time, but I had an idea she didn't want to hear me say anything against Dad. Slowly I put the sandwich into the pocket of my jacket and started out for school.

Penn High School had become a refuge for me. I was a good student, and that helped to make school attractive. I wasn't one of the popular set, but that didn't bother me because when classes were over, the piano up in Miss Crowne's music room was mine, and Howie was with me.

I played better than most kids of my age, I guess. That was partly because I loved music better than anything on earth. I played by the hour, improvising upon the snatches of melody that ran through my mind, fumbling sometimes, faking at others, but finally finding something that sounded beautiful and right to me. When that happened, I rearranged and polished and worked at it until the notes went slipping under my fingers like water.

Howie shared my love of music, and he was one of those rare musicians. He seemed to have been born with an instinct for understanding music, for hearing it precisely and then reproducing it with a little something extra, all his own. Without being able to read a note, he could coax music out of a piano, a guitar, a mouth organ, a pocket comb. His favorite instrument, though, was the banjo. He had an old one which he once told me he had stolen, and that was very likely true. However he came by it, that banjo meant more to Howie than anything on earth. He knew how to make those strings sing, and we hadn't practiced together very long until we were making music that sent splinters of delight all through me. With music like that I could forget the anxieties at home; I could forget Dad's moods and the cheerless faces everywhere on Chicago's grim west side. Day after day Howie and I closed the door of the music room and shut out the troubled times.

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.”