However, he did like his grandmother’s cooking, which was a vast improvement on his father’s tasteless meat and potatoes, which he cooked on Sunday and reheated the rest of the week. In the hope of stimulating his growth, Ida fed him copious amounts of rich foods: breakfasts of eggs and bacon or sausage, oatmeal with sugar, cinnamon, raisins and cream; farmer’s cheese, macaroni and cheese and fat sandwiches and cookies for lunch; and dinners of pork chops with gravy, meatloaf and mashed potatoes with butter and buttered beans, creamed vegetables, chicken and dumplings, liver and onions, all served with glasses of buttermilk or chocolate milk. And for dessert, pies with ice cream, chocolate fudge cake, and more sugar cookies. Alex devoured everything, in portions astonishingly large relative to his size, all to no avail. Ida wondered where it all
went—until
it was time to empty his chamber pot.
Having his own bedroom was another issue. It was too big, too quiet, too clean. He much preferred to be stuffed in with Arthur and Benjamin, fighting and giggling and pinching each other, than be left alone at night in his mother’s childhood bedroom, with its frilly curtains and flowered wallpaper. On those nights, when he felt particularly lonely, Alex would drag his blue blanket into Ida’s bedroom and curl up at her feet, next to the orange Maine Coon cat Jack.
He spent a lot of time reading. He’d tired of his
A Child’s Life of Christ
and started on Ida’s encyclopedia, beginning with
Volume A-Ar
. Straddling the open book, he often reading out loud to Jack, who seemed to regard Alex with a mixture of reverence and horror, alternately nuzzling his legs and hiding from him under a large horsehair chair.
On a sunny Tuesday morning, two weeks after Ida’s lightning conversion to Sunday-ism, she burst into the living room carrying a large tin bucket. She tore open the tall cabinet where she kept her liquor. She grabbed a nearly full fifth of Irish whiskey and proclaimed in a strident voice, as if she were the keynote speaker at a Women’s Christian Temperance Union meeting, “Whiskey has its place. Its place is in Hell,” which was one of Reverend Sunday’s most quotable lines regarding proper location of alcoholic beverages.
Alex looked up from the encyclopedia. “Grandma, see the picture. The giant anteater.”
Ida paused, but not with wonder at
Mymecophaga Tridactyla
. She stared long and hard at the bottle in her hand. “I must be strong. I must be strong for the Lord, and for you, dear Alex.”
“Anteaters, they eat ants. It says an anteater has no teeth but its tongue is two feet long.” Alex stuck his tongue out as far as he could. “How long is my tongue, Grandma? I ate an ant once in the backyard. It was brown but it tasted bad.”
“You ate what?”
“My tongue. Look. How long is it?”
Ida pulled off a bottle cap. She poured the liquor into the bucket “I’m sending you to Hell.”
“Benjamin says ‘Hell’ is a dirty word.”
In five minutes, Ida emptied the entire contents of her liquor cabinet: two quarts of Irish whiskey, a fifth of sloe gin, a pint of rye, a bottle of sherry and a bottle of apricot brandy. She poured the bucket down the drain in the kitchen. The liquor fumes hovering over the sink drifted to her face and made her feel light-headed, either with exhilaration or remorse, she wasn’t sure, but now that she had started down the path of righteousness there was no turning back.
She went back to the living room. Alex was still in his pajamas. “Alex, time to get dressed.”
“Why?”
“Come on.”
Upstairs, as Alex played with toy soldiers, Ida went through his wardrobe. Most of his clothes were hand-me-downs from his brothers’ toddler outfits, which Irene had had the foresight to save and which Ida had to tailor to accommodate Alex’s unique physique. She pursed her lips. If she were going to take him to a Billy Sunday service, he needed to be dressed properly. It wasn’t that the crowds that came to the prayer meetings were particularly well clad. In fact, Ida had been appalled at the slovenliness of the mill workers, coal miners, day laborers and city workers, and especially their children, who looked like so many refugee ragamuffins. She was determined that her grandson needed to be dressed like a little gentleman when he met up with Reverend Sunday, even if it meant taking an advance on her next month’s budget.
“Alex, let’s get you washed up. It’s time to go shopping.”
Alex jumped up and down. “Woolworth’s, Woolworth’s.”
Ida picked him up and hugged him tightly. “Not today, my handsome boy. We’re going to Kauffman’s.”
Ida took close to an hour to get ready, for one didn’t go downtown to Kaufmann’s, Pittsburgh’s premiere department store, looking like a housewife in the midst of cleaning the toilet. She tried on three outfits before she decided on a light blue wool suit and white blouse, her Easter outfit, the one she’d decided on for Billy’s service that evening. She even powdered her face and put on lipstick for the first time since her daughter’s funeral.
With Alex by her side, they barely made it past Kauffmann’s cosmetics counter when women shoppers began to glom onto them. At first Ida felt important, as if she were the grandmother of a child movie star, but after a few moments of tolerating the clutches and grabs at her grandson, she reverted to her safer, surlier self and robustly pushed away the curiosity seekers.
They boarded the elevator and rose toward the fifth floor, Children’s Wear. As the elevator began to climb, Alex said, “Grandma, the room is moving. Where are we going? Up to the sky? It’s too dark.”
Elmer Setich, the normally stoic operator, laughed out loud. “Ain’t he a cute pup. First time on an elevator, sonny? Say, how old is he, lady?”
Alex said, “I’m almost six.”
“Go on with you. You are?”
“But, Grandma, where does this go?”
“Up to our floor. You’ll see.” She laughed. “Full of questions, night and day.”
As the other passengers stared straight ahead, Alex lifted the billfold of Walter Blaney, a saturnine man who was assistant manager, Men’s Furnishings. Blaney half turned, as if he noticed a slight movement in his back pocket, but, elevator etiquette being what it was, he remained silent, his eyes tightly focused straight ahead, until he got off on Four.
Two stops later, Alex dropped the emptied billfold on the elevator floor as he and Ida got off. Later that day, Setich turned the wallet into Kaufmann’s Lost & Found department, but not before he pocketed thirty-two cents from the change compartment.
Ida and Alex strolled through the toddler’s section. Alex ran his fingers over everything he could reach. Two saleswomen tripped over each other trying to wait on them. They showed Ida a variety of shorts, shirts, coats, a checked suit and a tiny sailor’s suit, all in two sizes—one for his arms, one for the rest of him—per Ida’s instructions. “Oh,” said Louise Beverson, the senior sales clerk, “he’ll look like a handsome little doll. Blue is his color.”
Ida was pleased with the attention. “Alex,” she said, “what do you think?”
“I want that.” He pointed to an orange cap with a wide brim on top of a manikin.
With three duplicate outfits over her arm, Miss Beverson said, “Will you be taking them with you today?”
“Just the new suit.
“The cap, Grandma.”
“And the cap. You can send the others. All right, Alex?”
“Okey dokey.” Alex put the cap on his head and turned the narrow brim sideways, so he’d look like a boy he’d seen illustrated in a magazine.
“Isn’t he the cutest little monkey? Where did you get those arms, dear?”
Alex looked at his grandmother. “Jesus.”
It was two o’clock by the time they left Kaufmann’s and three by the time they arrived home. Alex had fallen asleep on the trolley. Ida carried him upstairs and placed him down on her bed. She lay down beside him, pulled up the quilt and reached her forearm around his shoulder. She closed her eyes and dreamed of Billy.
*
Even in the early months of 1914 the threat of world war loomed on Europe’s doorstep, and Arthur, who’d barely opened a book in four years—he’d repeated seventh grade twice—couldn’t get enough of news from “across the pond.” He read every article in the daily paper he took home from his after-school job at Plotkin’s Grocery Store. Europe’s impending conflict had become an obsession with him, and he began to get to school early so he could get to the school library and study the towns and landscapes of France, Germany, Belgium, Bulgaria and Turkey on the world atlas. He knew the locations of the local U.S. army, navy and marine recruiting stations and went by them on Sundays to stare at the recruitment posters in the windows.
Your Country Needs You. Now’s the Time to Enlist!
The drumbeat was calling.
Benjamin was interested in the war, too, but had become far more passionate about baseball. Never much of an athlete, he began to blossom physically as he entered his early teens; his limbs lengthened, his foot speed increased dramatically, as did his hand-eye coordination, and he showed a natural propensity for hitting a baseball, no matter how fast the ball was pitched, perhaps due to his keen eyesight, which, had Dr. Malkin the instruments or knowledge to measure properly, would have registered 20/15.
Everything Abe knew about the impending war he got from Arthur’s daily updates. Even though Ida took Alex during the week, riding herd on his older sons, working overtime and keeping the house at least semi-habitable meant he barely had time to read the newspaper before he fell asleep at night in his easy chair, a half-smoked cigar resting in the ashtray. Household obligations had cut deeply into his time with Delia Novak, too. Consequently, their relationship, which Delia referred to as “this thing we do,” was as stagnant as the air above an open hearth on a humid summer night. As the months went on, Abe realized it had been far easier to have a mistress when he had a wife.
It was close to six o’clock on the Friday before Ida was to take Alex to see Reverend Billy. Abe had gotten home late from work. He carried a large paper sack with four fish and fried potato dinners he’d picked up from The Olde Oyster House in Market Square, in deference to Ida and her Friday preference. Even though he’d “paid through the nose,” as he told his boys, he was fairly flush, with steady work and plenty of overtime to be had at Shields Metal now that the steel industry was ramping up production for the inevitable wartime shortfalls of its allies, whomever they would turn out to be.
Arthur stood at the kitchen sink, rinsing breakfast dishes. He was as tall as his father, and almost as broad, with Irene’s red hair and light complexion. Benjamin was halfway out the side door, holding an industrial-sized trash barrel with a week’s worth of garbage. Will you look at these two, Abe thought, doing what I told them this morning before I left, without me yelling at them, will wonders never cease. He set the sack of food on the counter.
Arthur looked up. “Smells good, Dad.”
Abe’s stomach gurgled at the aroma of fried potatoes. He took one of the dinners wrapped in newspaper from the sack. “Don’t suppose it would hurt to have a little taste before your grandmother and Alex get here, huh? Arthur, get your old man a beer, would you?”
“Yes, sir.” Arthur opened the icebox. “Dad, did you hear, the Gerrys might push into France any day now.”
“Ain’t that jumping the gun a little bit there?”
“Well, I read it just today. They’re tight with the Turks and the Austrians. There was a map. We’ve got to get ready for this thing.”
Benjamin closed the door behind him. “He wants to enlist, Dad.”
“I would in a minute if I could. I don’t see why a 16-year-old can’t serve.”
Abe fingered a potato. “War is a terrible thing, boys, a terrible thing.”
“But you never fought in a war, and now you’re too old.”
“Yeah, well ask your grandmother sometime about what happened to your grandfather in the Spanish-American War. Poor guy got blown to smithereens when they sunk the
Maine
.”
The front door creaked open. “Daddy!” Alex rushed into the kitchen and threw his arms around Abe’s legs.
“Wow, look at Alex,” Benjamin said. “Where’d you get that hat?”
Ida had dressed him in his new checked suit. “Don’t let him get dirty now.”
“Come on, Alex.” His brothers hoisted him by the arms and headed upstairs.
Abe finished his beer and thought about opening another, but it was Friday, which called for something a little stiffer. He took his bottle of rye from the cupboard above the sink and checked the level to determine if his boys had nipped any. He poured two fingers for Ida and two for himself. “Here’s to your health, Ida.”
She put her hand over her glass. “None for me, thank you. I’ve sworn off the stuff.”
“You? You’re pulling my leg.”
“Oh, it’s no joke, Abe. Liquor is the Devil’s tool.”
Abe scratched his head, as if considering that it might be so. “Maybe so. But hell, Ida, that never seemed to bother you before.”
“And I’ll thank you to want to watch that mouth of yours around me, too. I don’t take to cursing now, either.”
Maybe the woman is already drunk, he thought. She did seem to have some kind of glow about her, but her smile was too broad, her eyes were too wide open. Something had its hooks into her.
Upstairs, Arthur did twenty-five push-ups with Alex sitting on his back. His side of the room was a neat as a Marine’s barracks awaiting inspection.
Alex slid off his back. “Look what I have.” He took three one-dollar bills and a faux diamond hatpin from his pockets, the swag from his Kaufmann’s heist. He smiled up at Arthur. “See?”
Arthur closed the door. He whispered, “Put that stuff away.” He explained to Alex that he didn’t want him to steal anymore, he was through with selling stolen stuff at school. He’d been thinking it over, that he couldn’t afford to get caught, since he was going to enlist as soon as he could and that he couldn’t have a criminal record because the army didn’t want criminals. Besides, it wasn’t honorable to do what he’d been doing, no soldier would ever do that, it was against the soldier’s code of conduct to commit any sort of crime.