Minnie asked me what my birthday was, and when it rolled around— I was turning twenty-one—she gave me a tube of dark red lipstick. It was all she could afford, she said, but we could make ourselves up to look like real ladies and go to one of the big department stores, where we’d have fun trying on all the things we’d be able to buy one of these days. I’d never been one for makeup—few women were in ranch country—but Minnie applied it for me, rubbing a dab into my cheeks as well, and darned if I didn’t look a bit like a stockbroker’s wife.
Minnie led me through the department store. It was as big as a cathedral, with vaulted ceilings, stained glass windows, pneumatic tubes that whooshed the customers’ money from floor to floor, and aisle after aisle after aisle of gloves, furs, shoes, and anything else you could possibly imagine buying. We stopped at the hat department, and Minnie had me try on one after another—little hats, big hats, hats with feathers, hats with veils or bows, hats with artificial flowers arranged along the wide brims. As she sat each one on my head, she’d evaluate it—too old-fashioned, too much brim, hides your eyes, this one belongs in your closet—and as the hats piled up on the counter, a salesclerk came over.
“Are you girls able to find anything in your price range?” she asked with a cold smile.
I felt a little flustered. “Not really,” I said.
“Then maybe you’re in the wrong store,” she said.
Minnie stared at the woman square on. “Price isn’t the problem,” she said. “The problem is finding something up-to-date in this dowdy stock. Lily, let’s try Carson Pirie Scott.”
Minnie turned on her heel, and as we walked off, she told me, “When they get high-handed, all you have to do is remind yourself that they’re just hired help.”
AFTER I’D BEEN IN Chicago for almost two years, I came home from work on a July evening to find one of my other roommates laying out Minnie’s only good dress on her bed.
Minnie, she said, had been at the bottling plant where she worked when her long black hair got caught in the machinery. She was pulled into these massive grinding gears. It was over before anyone nearby even had time to think.
Minnie was supposed to wear her hair up in a kerchief, but she was so proud of those thick, shiny Irish tresses—they made every man in Chicago want to flirt with her—that she couldn’t resist the temptation to let them down. Her body was so badly mangled that they had to have a closed-coffin funeral.
I loved that girl, and as I sat through the service, all I could think was that if I’d been there, maybe I could have rescued her. I kept imagining myself chopping her hair off, pulling her back, and hugging her as we sobbed happily, realizing how close she’d come to a gruesome death.
But I also knew that even if I’d been right there—and somehow happened to have had a pair of scissors in my hands—I wouldn’t have had time to save her once her hair got tangled up in the machine. When something like that happens, one moment you’re talking to the person, and then you blink and the next moment she’s dead.
Minnie had spent a lot of time planning her future. She had been saving her money and was confident she’d marry a good man, buy a little house in Oak Park, and raise a boisterous brood of green-eyed kids. But no matter how much planning you do, one tiny miscalculation, one moment of distraction, can end it all in an instant.
There was a lot of danger in this world, and you had to be smart about it. You had to do what you could to prevent disaster. That night at the boardinghouse, I got out a pair of scissors and a mirror, and although Mom always called my long brown hair my crowning glory, I cut it all off just below my ears.
* * *
I didn’t expect to like my new short hair, but I did. It took almost no time to wash and dry, and I didn’t have to fuss with curling irons, hairpins, and bows. I went around the boardinghouse with the scissors, trying to talk the other girls into cutting their hair, pointing out that even if they didn’t work in a factory, the world today was filled with all manner of machinery—with wheels and cogs and turbines—that their hair could get caught up in. Long curls were a thing of the past. For us modern women, short-cropped hair was the way to go.
Indeed, with my new haircut, I felt I looked the model of the Chicago flapper. Men took more notice of me, and one Sunday while I was walking along the lakefront, a broad-shouldered fellow in a seersucker suit and a straw boater struck up a conversation. His name was Ted Conover, and he’d been a boxer but now worked as a vacuum-cleaner salesman for the Electric Suction Sweeper Company. “Get a foot in the door, toss in some dirt, and they gotta let you demonstrate your product,” he said with a chuckle.
I knew from the start that Ted was a bit of a huckster. Even so, I liked his moxie. He had quick gray eyes and a lumpy nose—a souvenir from his boxing days. He also had a ruddy-faced vitality and, as Minnie would have put it, the gift of gab. He bought me a snow cone from a street vendor, and we sat on a bench by a pink marble fountain with frolicking copper sea horses. He told me about growing up in South Boston, catching rides on the backs of trolley cars, stealing pickles from the pickle man’s wagon, and learning to throw a knockdown punch in street fights with the dagos. He loved his own jokes so much that he’d start laughing halfway through them, and you’d start laughing, too, even though you hadn’t heard the punch line yet.
Maybe it was because I was missing Minnie and I needed someone in my life, but I fell hard for that fellow.
THE FOLLOWING WEEK, TED took me to dinner at the Palmer House hotel, and after that we started seeing each other regularly, though he was often out of the city for days at a time because his sales territory stretched all the way to Springfield. Ted always liked to be in a crowd, and we went to ball games at Wrigley Field, movies at the Folly Theater, and prizefights at the Chicago Arena. I smoked my first cigarette, drank my first glass of champagne, and played my first game of dice. Ted loved dice.
Late in the summer, he showed up at the boardinghouse with a bathing suit he’d bought for me at Marshall Field’s, and we took the train down to Gary, where we spent the afternoon swimming in the lake and sunbathing in front of these big sand dunes. I didn’t know how to swim, since I’d never been in anything much deeper than the puddles left by the flash floods, but Ted taught me how.
“You’ll have to trust me,” he said. “Just relax.”
And he held me in his arms as I floated on my back. It was true, I could do it. When I relaxed my body, I stopped sinking and rose up toward the surface until my face broke through and the water actually supported me. Floating. I’d never known what it was like.
About six weeks after I met Ted, he took me back to the fountain with the sea horses, bought me another snow cone, and, as he gave it to me, planted a diamond ring on top. “A piece of ice that I’m hoping will make you melt,” he said.
We got married in the Catholic church I’d visited when I first came to Chicago. I wore a blue linen dress I borrowed from one of the girls at the boardinghouse. Neither of us could take time off for a honeymoon, but Ted promised me that one day we’d go to the Grand Hotel, this spectacular resort on Mackinac Island at the top of Lake Huron.
That afternoon we moved into a boardinghouse that took in married couples, and we celebrated in our room with a bottle of bathtub gin. The next day I went back to my job as a maid, and Ted hit the road.
I didn’t wear my diamond ring to work, keeping it instead in a little silk pouch under our mattress, but I worried about it being stolen. I also worried that Ted had paid more for it than he could afford.
“Relax and learn to enjoy life a little for a change,” he said.
“But it’s such an extravagance,” I said.
“It would have been if I’d paid retail,” he said. “Truth is, it’s got a little heat on it.”
Ted assured me he hadn’t actually stolen the ring, he just had connections who had connections who knew how to get things through the right channels. In this world, he liked to say, connections were all that mattered.
I HAD NEVER WANTED someone to take care of me, but I found that I liked being married. After so many years on my own, I was sharing my life for the first time, and it made the hard moments easier and the good moments better.
Ted always encouraged people to think big, to dream big, and when he found out that my great ambition had always been not just to finish high school but to go on to college, he told me I might even want to think of getting a Ph.D. When I told him of my dream to fly a plane, he said he could see me becoming a barnstorming stunt pilot. Ted was full of plenty of schemes for himself, too—how he was going to manufacture his own line of vacuum cleaners, build radio antennas out in the prairie, start a telephone company.
We decided we’d put off having kids and squirrel away money while I finished night school. When the future came into better focus, we’d be ready for it.
Ted was away a lot, but that was fine with me because I was busy with work and night school. To save money, we ate a lot of saltines and pickles, and reused tea bags four times. Busy as we were, the years passed quickly. When I was twenty-six, I finally got my high school diploma. I began looking for a better job but was still working as a maid when, one summer morning, crossing the street while carrying an armload of groceries for the family whose house I kept, a white roadster with wirespoked wheels came tearing around the corner. The driver slammed on the brakes when he saw me, but it was too late. The grille upended me, and I went rolling across the hood, scattering the apples, buns, and tins that I’d been carrying.
I instinctively went soft as I tumbled off the hood and onto the street. I lay there for a moment, stunned, as people rushed over. The driver jumped out. He was a young man with slicked-back hair and two-tone shoes.
Slick started insisting to everyone that I had stepped out into traffic without looking, which was a darned lie. Then he knelt down and asked if I was okay. The accident looked worse than it was, and lying there, I could tell I had no serious injuries, only bruised bones and some nasty scrapes on my arms and knees.
“I’m fine,” I said.
But Slick was a city boy, not used to seeing women take hard spills, then get up and walk away. He kept asking me how many fingers he was holding up and what day of the week it was.
“I’m okay,” I said. “I used to break horses. One thing I know how to do is take a fall.”
Slick insisted on taking me to the hospital and paying for the examination. I told the nurse at the emergency room I was fine, but she told me I was a little more banged up than I seemed to believe. While filling out her forms, the nurse asked if I was married, and when I said yes, Slick told me I should call my husband.
“He’s a traveling salesman,” I said. “He’s on the road.”
“Then call his office. They’ll know how to get in touch with him.”
While the nurse put mercurochrome on my scrapes and bandaged me up, Slick found the number and gave me a nickel for the pay phone. As much to put his mind at rest as anything else, I made the call.
A man answered. “Sales. This is Charlie.”
“I’m wondering if there’s any way you can help me track down Ted Conover on the road. This is his wife, Lily.”
“Ted ain’t on the road. He just left for lunch. And his wife’s name’s Margaret. Is this some kind of prank?”
I felt like the floor was tilting underneath me. I didn’t know what to say, so I hung up.
SLICK WAS BAFFLED BY the way I rushed out of the phone booth past him, but I had to get away from him and out of the hospital to clear my head and try to think. I kept fighting panic as I made my way to the lake, where I walked for miles, hoping the still blue water would calm me. It was a sunny summer day, and lake water lapped at the promenade’s stone wall. Had I misheard Charlie or imagined what he’d said? Was there an explanation? Or had I been two-timed? There was only one way to find out.
The Electric Suction sales office was in a five-story cast-iron building near the Loop. When I got to the block, I fished a newspaper from a trash can and took up a position in a lobby across the street. As five o’clock approached, people began pouring out onto the sidewalks, and sure enough, my husband, Ted Conover, joined them, walking out the door of that cast-iron building wearing his favorite hat—the one with the jaunty little feather—tilted at a rakish angle. He’d clearly fibbed about being out of town, but I still didn’t have the full story.
I followed Ted at a safe distance as he made his way through the crowded streets over to the El. He climbed the stairs and so did I. I stood at the far end of the platform with my nose in the newspaper and boarded the train one car behind him. At every stop, I stuck my head out to watch and saw that he got out at Hyde Park. I followed him a few blocks east to a shabby neighborhood with walk-up apartment buildings that had sagging wooden staircases in the back.
Ted went into one of them. I stood outside for a few minutes, but he didn’t appear at any of the windows, so I went into the vestibule. None of the mailboxes had names on them. I waited until some kids came out, then slipped through the open door into the hallway. It was dark and narrow and reeked of boiling cabbage and corned beef.
There were four apartments on each floor, and I stopped at every door, pressing my ear against it, listening for the sound of Ted’s South Boston accent. Finally, on the third floor, I heard it booming out over a couple of other voices.
Without knowing exactly what I was going to do, I knocked. After a couple of seconds, the door opened, and standing in front of me was a woman with a toddler on her hip.
“Are you Ted Conover’s wife, Margaret?” I asked.
“Yes. Who are you?”
I looked at this woman Margaret for a moment. I figured that she was about my age, but she seemed tired, and her hair was going gray before its time. Still, she had a wan, careworn smile, as if life was a struggle but she managed from time to time to find something to laugh about.
Behind her I could hear a couple of boys arguing, then Ted’s voice saying, “Who is it, honey?”
I had an almost overwhelming temptation to push past Margaret and gouge out that lying cheater’s eyes, but something held me back— what it would do to this woman and her kids.
“I’m with the census,” I said. “We just wanted to confirm that a family of four is living here.”
“Five,” she said, “though sometimes it feels more like fifteen.”
I forced myself to smile and said, “That’s all I need to know.”
I WAS ON THE El going back to the boardinghouse, trying to figure out what in the blue blazes to do now, when I suddenly thought about our joint bank account. I stayed up all night, sick with worry about it, and was waiting in front of the bank when the doors opened. Ted and I had salted away almost two hundred dollars in an interest-bearing savings account, but when I got to the teller, he told me there were only ten dollars left.
I got back to the boardinghouse and sat down on the bed. I was surprised by how calm I felt. But as I packed my pearl-handled revolver in my purse, I noticed my hands were trembling.
I took a bus to the Loop and walked up the stairs of the cast-iron building to Ted’s office. I pushed open the frosted glass door. Inside was a small, dusty room with several old wooden desks. Ted and another man sat at two of them, their feet up, reading newspapers and smoking.
As soon as I saw Ted, I lost every bit of ladylike decorum my mother had tried to instill in me. I became a wild woman, lighting into that two-timing thief, cursing and screaming—”You no-good low-down dirty lying scum-sucking son of a bitch!”—and whaling him with my purse, which, since I had my six-shooter in it, meant I was giving him a pretty good pistol whipping.
Ted had his arms up, trying to defend himself, but I got in some solid blows, and his face was bleeding by the time the other guy pulled me off. I then turned on him with my purse and whacked him good once before Ted grabbed me. “Calm down or I’ll drop you with a roundhouse punch,” he said, “and you know I can.”
“You go ahead, bus
ter, you hit me and I’ll charge you with assault as well as robbery and bigamy.” But I stopped struggling.
The other fellow grabbed his hat. “I see you two have a few things to discuss,” he said, and slipped out the door.
Everything came exploding out of me then: why had he lied to me, why had he married me when he already had a wife and three children, why had he taken the money that we were supposedly saving for our future together, were there any other lies I hadn’t discovered, why hadn’t he just left me alone that day he first saw me beside the lake?
As Ted listened, his expression went from defiant to hangdog to downright mournful, and finally, his eyes welled up with tears. He’d taken the money because he’d run up some gambling debts and the dagos were after him, he said. He’d hoped to be able to pay it back before I even noticed. Margaret, he said, was the mother of his children, but he loved me. “Lily,” he said, “lying was the only way I could have you.”
The louse was acting as if he expected me to feel sorry for him.
“It’s my fault,” he said. Then he reached out and actually touched my hand, adding, “By loving you, I’ve destroyed you.”
The bum sounded like he was about to blubber up. I pulled my hand away.
“You have a mighty high opinion of yourself,” I told him. “The fact is, you don’t love me, and you haven’t destroyed me. You don’t have what it takes to do that.”
I shoved past him, slamming the door on my way out, then turned and swung my purse against the frosted glass pane, shattering it, and all the broken little pieces fell in a shower to the floor.
I TOOK ANOTHER WALK along the lake. Sometimes I felt I could see into the future, but I sure as shoot hadn’t seen this coming. Things looked pretty bleak right then, but I’d survived a lot worse than a brief marriage to a crumb bum, and I’d survive this, too.
A wind was up, and as I watched it lash the water, I got to thinking how sometimes, as had happened with Minnie, something catastrophic can occur in a split second that changes a person’s life forever; other times one minor incident can lead to another and then another and another, eventually setting off just as big a change in a body’s life. If that car hadn’t hit me and that driver hadn’t insisted on taking me to the hospital and hadn’t found out I was married and hadn’t insisted on my calling Ted, I’d still be happily and obliviously going about my life. But now that life was dead.
Half broke horses: a true-life novel Page 7
