by Wally Lamb
So what happened?
What happened was, I had a real dilemma on my hands, see? I mean, I liked Jinx—I really did. Lot of the models back then come from money, see? Kinda snooty, some of them. But not Jinx. She’d gotten where she was on moxie and the good looks God give her. But Winchell, Earl Wilson, Hedda Hopper: they had snoops all over the city digging around for shmutz. One of those gossip columnists gets wind that Miss Rheingold’s seeing a colored ballplayer and it shows up in the Daily Mirror or the Daily News? Rheingold’s million-dollar promotion’d go down the toilet and maybe take the brewery with it. And like I told you, the Weismanns had always been good to me. They and I had a history, see?
What did you do?
I go to Gus. And he’s mad as hell. Says he’ll be goddamned if he’ll stick his dick into anyone’s sloppy seconds, let alone some schvartze. Says there’s no way in hell Jinx is gonna be Miss Rheingold, popular vote or not. It’s partly a business decision and partly a get-even thing—at least that’s how I see it. What he does is, he goes to his aunt Sadie. Drags me into her office with him, as a matter of fact. Gus doesn’t say word one about his own little fling with the girl, but he tells Sadie they got a crisis: their new Miss Rheingold’s sleeping with a Negro. Next morning, there’s this top-secret meeting in Sadie’s office. The lawyers are there, Hazelton, the top marketing guys. I’m pulled into it, too, because, for one, they know I can keep my mouth shut and for two, I’ve been driving Jinx around all summer, so I’m the guy who can best predict how she’s going to react when they give her the heave-ho. At least everyone thinks I’m the guy who knows her the best, except I don’t know her the way Gus White does. But I’m not saying anything about that, and neither is Gus!
So they decide they’ve got to get rid of Jinx—get Estelle Olsen in on the next plane from Los Angeles and make her Miss Rheingold. Hazelton balks at first because he’s got some beautyful pictures of Jinx—says he doesn’t care if the guy she’s screwing is black, white, or purple with yellow polka dots. But he finally comes on board, because that contest is his bread and butter, too. Now the good thing is, the announcement ad hasn’t run yet, so the public won’t need any explanations. The bad thing is, the accounting firm that oversees the contest has already registered the election results. In pounds of paper, right? Remember the barrels? It’s on the books that Jinx has won by about x number of pounds, I can’t remember how many.
So here’s what they do. Everyone at that meeting, myself included, goes down to the warehouse and into the government cellar. It’s all hush-hush, top secret. They bring in all the unused ballot pads—boxes and boxes of ’em, maybe two, three hundred pads of ballots in each box. They have a couple of the warehouse guys roll in four or five empty barrels. Then all of us—Gus, me, the lawyers—we spend the better part of the day checking off ballots for Estelle. Next morning, they make up this cockamamie story about how someone’s discovered these barrels of ballots in the warehouse that accidentally never got counted. So now they have to do a recount, see? A re-weigh. They get the accounting guys back in, and the loading dock guys roll both Jinx’s and Estelle’s barrels out to the weigh station. And whataya know? Estelle’s got Jinx beat by eighty, ninety pounds. So they reregister the election results and Estelle Olson becomes Miss Rheingold for 1950.
What happened to Jinx?
She took it bad. Trashed that fancy apartment the day they evicted her. Broke all the mirrors, slashed the upholstery. At first, she swore up and down she was gonna fight them—go to the papers, go to Gus’s wife, sue the company. But she backed down. The company’s lawyers put a pretty good scare in her, I guess. In the meantime, they put a team of private investigators on her, and these guys dug up something really screwy: turns out, the kid wasn’t really Jinx Dixon. I forget what her real name was, but the real Jinx had been a roommate of hers who’d gotten fed up with modeling and left the city. So this one “borrowed” her name—to get past the background check, see? But once they found out who she really was, they had the goods on her. She’d had a couple scrapes with the law, see, and she’d signed a contract that said she was clean as a whistle. So there was no way she could’ve sued. By contest rules, she was ineligible. We coulda saved ourselves all that writer’s cramp, checking off all those ballots…. The sad thing was, after Rheingold fired her, Sparks dropped her like a hot potato and so did her modeling agency. Word got out, so no other agency would touch her either. She hung around for a while—kind of stalked Gus, I guess. It got pretty ugly. One afternoon, she showed up at the Brooklyn plant where Gus’s office was and they called the cops—had her removed from the premises by armed guards. They hushed it up, though. I heard she made some trouble for Sparks out at the Polo Grounds, too. I guess she went a little off the deep end. I felt kinda lousy about my part in it, but the girl dug her own grave. Schtupping two men at the same time, one of ’em a black guy? Bad mistake. Miss Rheingold had to be pure as the driven snow…. Funny thing was, the white-black thing was what finally killed off Miss Rheingold anyway. About fourteen, fifteen years later—the summer when all the race riots were breaking out—Rheingold pulled the plug on the contest. They claimed the public had lost interest, so it was no longer cost-effective. But the real reason was, the company was between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, they were getting pressure from the blacks to run a colored contestant. You remember Adam Clayton Powell? Congressman from Harlem? He kept calling, giving Gus White the needles about it. Sadie had passed on by then and Gus was president of Rheingold, and I was his driver. So one afternoon, I got the boss and Powell in the backseat and Powell says, “Now Gus, the good people in my district buy a lot of your beer. Lot of folks wondering when you’re going to give us a beautiful Negress to vote for in that little contest of yours.” But back then, if they’da run a black girl, there woulda been a backlash from the whites. Maybe old Otto Weismann would have done the right thing, but Gus wouldn’t risk it. The Rheingold girls were about fun, see, not politics. So rather than run a colored girl, they killed the contest.
Okay, but back up a minute. You ever hear anything more about Jinx?
Heard from her. Got a call one Sunday morning, out of the blue. At first, I thought she was calling to give me guff for blowing the whistle on her. It had to have dawned on her that I was the one. But no, that wasn’t it. She says, “Peppy, can you do me a favor?” What she wanted was for me to drive her back home to Connecticut. She wanted to get the hell out of New York, she said, because there was nothing left for her here, and because that’s what the head shrinkers at Bellevue said would be best for her. To pull up stakes and go home. She’d landed in the nuthouse, see? Admitted as much. So I said, “Sure, okay, Jinx.” I was still calling her Jinx, see? Playing as dumb as possible, for her sake as well as mine. I didn’t want to drive her up there, but what was I going to do? Say no? I made sure Cookie rode up with us, though. We got a babysitter for Rochelle, and me, Cookie, and Jinx drove up to Connecticut. I mean, I liked the kid, I really did, but she was bad news. I didn’t want any trouble. You get what I’m saying?
Yes.
We picked her up outside this little coffee shop way downtown on Delancey. You should’ve seen her. She was wearing bobby sox, rolled-up dungarees, kerchief on her head. No makeup. No trace of Miss Rheingold. She looked like some sweet, innocent high school kid. On the drive up there, we stopped at a diner for pie and coffee, and when I went off to the men’s room, she told Cookie she was pregnant. Didn’t say who the father was, so I don’t know if it was Gus or Sparks or maybe even someone else. She said there was a boy back home—a guy who loved her, would take her back. We dropped her off at some little town called…geez, I can’t remember the name. When she said Connecticut, I was thinking Danbury or Bridgeport, maybe. But it was way the hell over on the other side of the state. Little town in the boondocks.
Three Rivers.
Yeah, that might’ve been it. We had a hell of a time getting back to the city, I remember. It had started snowing, see? One o
f those crazy March blizzards and I didn’t have any chains on my tires. So all the way back to…Hey, you all right? You look a little…emotional. Did you know Jinx?
No.
Here. Now you need a napkin.
I’m okay. It’s…. I’m fine.
This isn’t really a business book you’re writing. Is it, Jake?
No.
Well, whatever it is, I better go home now. You okay to drive? Because if you need to take another minute, maybe have a cup of coffee—
I’m okay.
And I have your word, right? I’m not gonna see any of this Jinx stuff in some book down the line?
No. It’s all off the record.
Okay, then. Good. Well, I guess I talked your head off, eh? About King Ludwig, and the Weismanns and all that. Now you just give me a call when you’re ready to have me fill you in about the other stuff. Because remember what I said: history is all cause and effect. Connecting the dots.
Yeah, speaking of that, did you ever wonder about what became of her after you dropped her off?
Jinx? I did, as a matter of fact. From time to time, I’d—
She killed herself. They found her floating facedown at the edge of a lake, same as your buddy, King Ludwig. Suicide, the paper said.
No kidding. Gee, that’s a shame. How do you—
Bride Lake, it’s called. It’s on the grounds of the prison where she ended up. So there’s your cause and effect. You fed my mother to the fat cats, and she ended up dead.
Your mother? Jinx was your…Look, she had problems. You can’t say—
Here’s your coat. Let’s get out of here. Because to tell you the truth, I’m sick of listening to you.
I stood, flung Peppy’s coat at him, and threw a bunch of bills on the table. Grabbing my tape recorder in one hand and his forearm with the other, I hustled him out the door of the Inn Between a little faster than his feet wanted to move. Damned if, at that moment, I could remember a single one of those anger management strategies I’d learned. Damned if I wanted to.
In the parking lot, Peppy lost his balance and stumbled forward, and I broke his fall at the expense of my tape recorder. It hit the asphalt and cracked, sending double-A batteries rolling. I got him off his knees and into the car, then walked back to the broken recorder. Picked it up and hurled it, hard as I could. It rattled a chain-link fence and ricocheted into a patch of dead weeds.
I got in the car and started the engine. “Look, you don’t understand,” he said. “If it got out what she was doing, it would’ve cost the company—”
I shouted it without looking at him. “Don’t talk!”
On the drive back to his daughter’s, he sat ramrod straight, staring ahead. His hands, illuminated at the traffic lights, danced with tremors. One of his pant legs gaped open, exposing a bloody knee. It wasn’t until he was safely out of the crackpot’s car that he issued his two-sentence defense. “The Weismanns were like family to me! There was something wrong with her!”
I stomped on the accelerator.
Trying to escape Queens, I got good and goddamned lost, and none of the bodega cashiers or glassed-in gas station attendants I stopped to ask seemed to have heard of the fucking Whitestone Bridge…. She was already pregnant when she went back? With me? Had they lied about who my father was, too? Did I have a half-sibling somewhere?…Lost in a maze of unfamiliar streets, I somehow passed the Inn Between again. Braked, backed up. I found my tape recorder. Popped the cassette and slipped it into my coat pocket.
I never did find the Whitestone. Instead, I followed signs to the Throgs Neck, which got me to the Bruckner Expressway, which became the New England Expressway. Somewhere along dreary I–95, my shame kicked in. Yes, he’d taken the scenic route through Bavaria on his way to coughing up what I needed to know. But on the subject of my birth mother, Peppy Schissel had been far more forthright than my own family.
Then why did you get so angry with him?
Because he ratted her out. And because I saw the outcome: her out there at the corn maze, at Daddy’s wake. Dirty, seedy looking…. Eight years old and I had to steal them food, for Christ’s sake—my mother and father. If he even was my father….
So which do you prefer? The lies or the truth?
The truth! I just want the truth!
You sure about that, Quirk? The Minotaur took victims before he was slain.
Yeah? What’s that supposed to mean?
The truth might eat you alive.
In Branford, I pulled off the highway and into a McDonald’s rest stop. I parked at the outer edge of the lot and cut the motor. Picked up the cassette I’d salvaged from that busted recorder and shoved it into the tape player of my car.
“It was a sight to make you cry: this fine and fancy lady, watering plants, pulling weeds. Trying to make something beautyful out of—”
I hit fast-forward. Stop. Play.
“—that the question you gotta ask isn’t Why? or If? The question is How?”
I slammed the dashboard so hard and so many times that I sprained my fucking wrist.
I GOT BACK TO THREE Rivers a little after midnight. Drove past the glow from the casino, onto Ice House and then onto Bride Lake Road. Drove past the jail. A “circumstantial separation,” I’d told him—a bullshit euphemism for “my wife’s in prison.”
I drove up the driveway and around to the back. The lights were on in the barn; Moze’s Web site business had taken off, and he and Velvet were hustling to keep up. The upstairs was dark. Janis had left for San Francisco that morning to deliver her paper at that conference.
I entered through the kitchen door and fumbled for the light switch. I saw it first thing: the slim, spring-bound book with its burgundy leather covers.
I approached it tentatively. When I opened it, a card dropped out—a note.
Dear Caelum,
I hope you enjoy the finished product. Thanks so much for your encouragement. You come from an amazing family.
Love,
Janis
chapter twenty-seven
ELIZABETH HUTCHINSON POPPER (1804–1892):
An Epistolary Self-Portrait of a Remarkable
Nineteenth-Century Woman
By Janis S. Mick,
Ph.D. Candidate in Women’s Studies,
Tulane University
Social activist Elizabeth Hutchinson Popper’s extraordinary life spanned the presidencies of Thomas Jefferson and Grover Cleveland. Her acquaintances included such nineteenth-century notables as writers Louisa May Alcott and Mark Twain, reformers Dorothea Dix and Lucretia Mott, and the many politicians and captains of industry whom she lobbied for support of a variety of social justice causes. A staunch abolitionist, “Lizzy” Popper was an agent of the Underground Railroad and, later, a Civil War nurse. A lifelong crusader for the betterment of the downtrodden, she worked tirelessly on behalf of orphans and poor women, slaves and free blacks, and female prisoners. Popper left behind a treasure trove of documents, diary entries, and saved letters. Because it was her long-standing practice to slip a sheet of “carbonated paper” beneath the letters she wrote to others, what survives is a rarity: a record of both sides of written exchanges between Popper and her correspondents. From these it has been possible to reconstruct the details of a life fully lived and to gain intimate access to the psyche of the remarkable nineteenth-century woman who lived it.
Elizabeth Hutchinson Popper was born in 1804, the eldest child of William and Freelove (Ashbey) Hutchinson, devout Hicksite Quakers of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The eldest of four children, Elizabeth assumed the role of surrogate mother to her siblings after her own mother died, probably of cerebral hemorrhage, while birthing her youngest child, Roswell (1817). In addition to her domestic responsibilities, “Lizzy” Hutchinson, during her teens and twenties, ran a small private Quaker school for girls. At the urging of family friend Lucretia Coffin Mott, she also wrote abolitionist pamphlets and articles for the Society of Friends. Following the death of her father in 1834, Liz
zy Hutchinson closed her school and traveled to Connecticut to visit her sister Martha, the wife of New Haven harbormaster Nathanael Weeks. For the remainder of her life, Elizabeth Hutchinson Popper called Connecticut home.
Lizzy Hutchinson was a founding member of the Ladies’ Division of the New Haven Abolitionist Society and a delegate to the New York Antislavery Convention of 1838. It was at this gathering that she met her future husband, fellow abolitionist Charles Phineas Popper. Seven years Lizzy’s junior, Popper was a traveling subscription bookseller and a member of the American Bible Society, a Congregationalist organization whose goal was to place Bibles “without note or comment” in homes where there were none. As a young man, Popper had toured the country with his brothers and sisters in a popular abolitionist singing act. The Popper Family Singers were headliners at antislavery fundraisers, spreading the abolitionist message to the settlers of westward territories preparing to vote on the issues of statehood and slavery. Two of Charles Popper’s songs, the rousing “Swing Open, Freedom’s Door!” and the sentimental “Mother’s Tear-Stained Bible,” were widely published in songsters and as sheet music—the nineteenth century equivalent of hit records. Although Popper had made no money from these compositions, they lent him celebrity at the contentious 1838 New York Anti-Slavery Convention, at which factions argued bitterly about whether or not female and male delegates should conduct business separately or “intermingle promiscuously,” and whether or not “our sable brothers and sisters”—free blacks from New York and New England—should be allowed to fraternize with white delegates. Lizzy Hutchinson and Charles Popper both spoke out in favor of the intermingling of all, and it was this shared stance that first united them. In a letter to her fiancé dated May 6, 1839, Lizzy would later write:
I confess that I first assumed thee a popinjay, more in love with the looking glass than with the idea of freedom for all, but later I saw that thy heart and thy intentions are true. I am often too quick to judge, dear Charlie, and this thee should know about the woman to whom thy troth will be pledged.
