White Collar Girl

by Renée Rosen

  “CeeCee? What the hell was burning in here?” my father asked, lifting a lid, inspecting what was in the pot.

  “What do you think was burning?” My mother drew a final puff from her cigarette before extinguishing it beneath the dripping faucet. “C’mon now, before it gets cold.”

  We took our seats as my mother placed the smoking pot roast on the table. It was charred and looked like someone had dropped a bomb on it. Any part that wasn’t burned was full of gristle. She’d overcooked the green beans, too. Boiled the life out of them so that the color had faded to the shade of lima beans.

  “What’s that on your jacket?” my father asked, pointing at me with his fork.

  “Oh—” I twisted about in my chair, looking at the ink on the fabric, feeling ridiculously pleased that he noticed something about me, even if it was a flaw. “That’s just newsprint ink. Think it’ll come out?” He tended to respond well to questions. But this time he only mumbled in response, so I tried a different approach. “Guess what happened today.”

  “What happened?”

  “I watched Marty Sinclair have a nervous breakdown.”

  “Sinclair?” My father hiked up his eyebrows. “No fooling? Really? That’s surprising.”

  “It was awful. You should have seen it.”

  “But he’s such a gifted reporter,” said my mother.

  “What the hell happened to him?”

  “They wanted him to—”

  “Jesus Christ, CeeCee”—my father was staring at his pot roast—“is there a piece in there that doesn’t look like the bottom of a shoe?”

  “Here”—my mother took a slice off her plate—“try this one. It’s not as well-done.” My mother turned to me. “Go on, now. About Marty Sinclair.”

  “So anyway, the editors wanted him to reveal his source. But he refused because his source is in the Mob. They said he might get subpoenaed and then he—”

  “Aw, Christ.” My father pushed his plate away. “How do you expect me to eat this? I can’t eat this.”

  “Fine. Then don’t eat it. You know, you were right there in your office, Hank. You smelled it burning. Would it have killed you to get up, walk two feet and check the stove?”

  My parents glowered at each other. There was a time when their behavior would have upset me, but sadly, I was used to this sort of thing now. They were sparring partners and seemed to take comfort in sniping at each other. It was familiar, and they never held on to the jabs. An insult here and there was a flesh wound compared to everything else they’d been through.

  “Like I was saying,” I continued in an effort to defuse their tussle, which was my job. The peacekeeper. I often worried about how they’d resolve their tiffs after I moved out. “So he had a nervous breakdown. Right in the city room. He started eating his notes. I mean he literally put wads of paper in his mouth and started chewing them.”

  “Probably tasted a hell of a lot better than this.” My father dropped his fork and knife to the plate with a loud clank.

  That’s when my mother got up and pulled his plate away from him.

  “Hey—what are you doing? CeeCee—”

  “You don’t want to eat it, then fine. Don’t eat it.” She stepped on the foot pedal of the wastebasket, and when the mouth flipped open, she dumped the whole thing. She came back to her seat, picked up her knife and fork and proceeded to saw through her pot roast.

  “Did you ever give up a source, Dad?” I asked, hoping to distract him.

  “Who, me? Never. You never want to burn a source,” my father said, reaching for a dinner roll. “Your mother here—now, she’d burn just about everything else, but never a source,” he teased. This was his way of saying he forgave her for throwing out his burned dinner. “What the hell else is there to eat around here?”

  My mother just shrugged and continued chewing, letting him know that he was on his own. She was going to eat every bite of meat on her plate even if it killed her. I labored through mine as well. I didn’t have much of an appetite but felt I owed it to my mother to suffer the roast along with her.

  My father got up to fix himself another drink. “How’s Ellsworth and Copeland?” he asked.

  “I guess okay. I didn’t really talk to them.”

  “Ellsworth was a hell of a reporter. Christ, I remember when we started out together at the City News Bureau. A couple of punks was what we were. I covered my first story with him.” My father laughed.

  “You did?”

  “Sure, sure.” He laughed some more, enjoying his reverie. The scotch must have kicked in.

  “What was the story, Dad? What were you two covering?”

  He took a sip and studied the melting ice in his glass. “Ah, that was a long time ago.” He sat back down at the table. “Any of that tuna casserole left?”

  “Help yourself.” My mother’s jaw was working back and forth on the meat.

  My father wiped his mouth, tossed his napkin aside, and when my mother refused to look at him, he pushed back from the table. Without another word, he went into his study, shut the door and started clacking away on his typewriter.

  My mother reached for her napkin and spit out whatever she was chewing on.

  Chapter 3

  • • •

  I couldn’t sleep that night. My mind was still back in the city room, my head full of typewriters plinking, telephones and news chatter. After an hour of staring at the ceiling and watching the headlights that shone through the parting of the drapes each time a car passed by, I got up for a glass of water.

  There was a light on downstairs in the living room, casting a shadow that crept up the stairs and reached the tips of my toes. From the landing I saw my father in a chair, his chin resting on his chest, eyes closed, an empty glass in his hand. The radio was on low, tuned to Man on the Go. I recognized the murmuring voice of Alex Dreier.

  I was reminded of all the nights, especially those first few months after Eliot was killed, when I helped my father to bed, all his weight leaning on me as we tackled the stairs. The next morning, miraculously, he’d be dressed, shaved and showered, without the slightest hint of a hangover. There seemed to be no consequence to his drinking and, therefore, no reason not to get drunk again that night and every night thereafter.

  I knew I should have left him in his chair, left his neck to kink up, his shoulders to stiffen, his lower back to lock up, but I couldn’t have done that to him then any more than I could now. And silly me, somehow I thought he’d appreciate it.

  I went over to his chair and jiggled his shoulder. “Dad? Dad—time to go to bed.”

  He shifted with a start. “Jesus Christ, you scared the hell out of me.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

  “What are you doing sneaking around the house at this hour anyway? Christ, if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s someone sneaking up on you. . . .”

  The booze made him angry, made him ready for a fight. “C’mon, Dad,” I said, tugging at his arm. “Time to go to bed.”

  He pulled away from me. “Let me be, dammit.” There was such finality to his voice. I knew better than to challenge him then. I’d give him another twenty minutes or so and try again.

  In the meantime I went back upstairs, and as I passed by the bedroom that had once belonged to Eliot, I had a strong urge to go inside. I wanted to plunk myself down on the foot of his bed and talk to him like I used to do.

  Eliot was five years older and many, many years wiser than me. Sure, the two of us had our times, like any siblings, when we’d fought over silly things like hogging the bathroom or the telephone line. But at the end of the day, we were friends, confidants. I wanted to share my first day of work with him.

  I was still standing in the hallway, remembering Eliot’s first day at the Sun-Times. It was 1948 and the Chicago Sun had recently acquired the Chicago Daily Times. When Eliot landed that job, you’d think he’d landed on the moon. My parents were that proud. I went with my mother to Dinkel’s Bakery
up on Lincoln Avenue that day and picked out an enormous devil’s food cake for him. My father gave him a bottle of Cutty Sark with a red bow taped to the label, drooping like a wilted rose. We sat around the table that night listening to Eliot impersonating his city desk editor. My brother was a natural-born mimic, able to imitate just about anyone. I used to get so mad when he’d do me, slapping at his arms and begging him to stop exaggerating my laugh or the way I used to reach up and pat down my bangs. That night he was impersonating his boss, who apparently had a propensity for trying to stifle yawns and belches in mid-sentence. He had us laughing until tears oozed from our eyes. We always said if he hadn’t been a journalist, my brother would have made a great stand-up comic.

  After his first day my parents started keeping a scrapbook, cutting out and pasting every one of Eliot’s stories that ran, no matter how small or insignificant. But Eliot’s pieces didn’t stay small for long. The Sun-Times recognized what they had in him and the promotions quickly followed. Eliot had started as a general assignment reporter, and by 1953 he was being groomed for the position of city desk editor.

  At the time of his death Eliot was working on a big story, an exposé, and I always wondered if one had something to do with the other. He was hit near the subway station about nine o’clock on a Tuesday night—June 9, 1953. We got the call sometime after eleven. The police couldn’t tell us much. There were no eyewitnesses, only a man saying he heard tires squealing moments before he turned around and saw my brother down on the sidewalk. Eliot died less than an hour later, while in surgery.

  After the shock wore off, I found myself questioning the police investigation, which seemed cursory at best. Why weren’t they looking for more witnesses? It was right by a subway stop—someone had to have seen something. Why hadn’t the police combed the area again, looking for evidence, maybe a stray hubcap or a piece of the grille? As far as I could see, the police weren’t doing anything to try to catch the guy.

  I went from being numb to being outraged, thinking that my brother’s killer was going to get away with it. I wanted answers and justice. I wanted the police to delve deeper. I mentioned this to my father, thinking that a seasoned newspaperman, not to mention the victim’s father, would challenge the investigation. Instead he grew livid with me for even suggesting we raise concerns over how the police had handled it.

  “Haven’t we been through enough? Leave it be, dammit.”

  I could only suppose that the thought of investigating his son’s death was too much for him to deal with at that point. And ever since then I hadn’t been able to question the circumstances of Eliot’s death without starting a battle, especially with my father. But I knew I wouldn’t find any peace until the person who killed my brother was caught and prosecuted. I grew silent, as did my parents. We didn’t talk about Eliot’s death. We didn’t talk about Eliot. Hell, my father and I hardly talked about anything at all.

  God, how I missed my brother.

  Everything was so different now with him gone. It was as if everything we knew and trusted had been stripped away and we were starting from scratch. I felt lost. We all did as we struggled to reinvent our family, still trying to figure out how we were supposed to do something as simple as set the damn kitchen table. And what about holidays and birthdays? Who was going to go in on gifts with me now and help me pick out the perfect cards? It was the little things that left the biggest holes in my heart.

  And it wasn’t that I’d lost just Eliot. I’d lost my parents, too. They were never the same afterward. Day by day I watched them withdrawing, and I felt abandoned, orphaned and lonely. Maybe I was jealous that no one had rallied around me for my first day at the Tribune—no cake, no bottle of scotch. No nothing. I shouldn’t have been surprised, though. My father told me a newspaper was no place for a woman to work. And that incensed me, which led to a host of other arguments. He did his best to discourage me from getting a job with the press, but at the end of the day, I was my father’s daughter, just as stubborn as he was.

  Now that I’d been hired as a journalist, I felt compelled to finish what Eliot no longer could. I wanted to become the reporter that he was meant to be. I also wanted to be both daughter and son for my parents, convinced that if I could fill the void my brother left behind, I could bring my parents back. Back to me. Truly, in the end, it was a selfish endeavor. But that’s why I had my eye on the city desk.

  I placed my hand on the glass doorknob and gave it a minute, drew a deep breath before stepping inside. Eliot had still been living at home when he died, saving his money for a trip to Europe that summer. Besides, he liked being here—it was a different home back then and my parents were the modern type. He could do anything in their house that he’d do on his own. He could smoke, drink, bring girls around—as long as they weren’t prostitutes. That was where my mother drew the line.

  His room was just as he’d left it when he’d left this world, preserved like a shrine. It had been two years, and still my parents—especially my father—couldn’t bring themselves to clear out his things. The hint of a gray sweater still stuck out of the chest of drawers where he’d stuffed it inside. His shirts, trousers and suits hung like ghosts in the closet above the mass of shoes, a loafer with its heel smashed down in back, probably kicked off in a hurry. There were books and record albums that I would have loved to read and listen to that sat idle now, collecting dust. And then there was his typewriter, a brand-new IBM electric resting on the desk. It was green, the color of plastic toy soldiers, and I coveted it. I’d never seen anything like it, and when he turned it on it hummed as it rat-a-tat-tatted while he typed. He’d promised to give it to me when he got a new model. I never had the courage to ask my parents for it, but I wanted it. Oh, how I wanted it.

  Chapter 4

  • • •

  It was the end of June. Six weeks had passed since I’d started at the Tribune. I was eager and always among the first to arrive at the paper. I’d get to the city room before seven, just as the night men were finishing up their shift. Everything was different in those early hours—the air was clear of cigarette smoke, the typewriter racket was minimal and there were fewer telephone lines ringing, fewer voices to be heard. The sunlight seemed more translucent then than at any other time of the day.

  I was told that Marty used to be one of the first ones in, too. Last I heard he was still in the hospital. No one knew when or if he was coming back to the paper. His wife had stopped by a few weeks earlier to get a sweater left behind, an extra pair of reading glasses and a book from his bottom drawer.

  I was at my desk that morning in June, reading the day’s headlines with a cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. Benny came in and slapped his cap onto his desk and moaned as if in agony.

  “Can you believe this?” he said, holding out the morning edition.

  “Believe what?”

  “Walter’s piece on the mayor’s latest appointee. Daley made an ex-con the head of one of his departments. And Walter says right here that the guy has no qualifications, no relevant training for this job whatsoever.”

  “That guy doesn’t need to have qualifications,” I said. “He’s from Bridgeport. That’s all the credentials he needs.” I turned back to the front page and scanned Walter’s article: “Daley Appoints Ex-Convict.”

  “But Jesus,” said Benny, clearly outraged. “The guy’s been in prison.”

  “Oh, but only for two years,” I said mockingly as I continued to read. “And according to what Walter says here, the ex-con’s father went to high school with Daley.”

  “That makes it even worse.”

  I let my paper dip so I could get a good look at Benny to make sure he wasn’t joking. He wasn’t. “Oh, Benny, Benny, Benny,” I said, setting my newspaper aside. I knew he was young and that his cousin in sales had gotten him the job, but plenty of reporters got their start right out of high school. Not everyone went to journalism school like me. But still, the things Benny was questioning wouldn’t have
been taught in a classroom anyway. If the others suspected how green he really was, they’d never let him live it down. “Let me explain this to you. Don’t you know that everyone on the city’s payroll under Daley is there by design?”

  “Well, yeah, sure,” he said with a shrug, as if to suggest he knew more than he did. “But still—”

  “But nothing. Almost everyone in City Hall is either Irish or from Bridgeport or both,” I said. “They’re all old pals from the neighborhood, and they’ve all got cushy patronage jobs now that their buddy is the mayor. They’re all part of the machine.”

  “I know all that, but . . .” He didn’t finish his thought because he couldn’t. He didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “Think of it like this: there are thousands of people working for the city of Chicago—from the street cleaners to the city councilmen—and that means there’s plenty of jobs for Daley to give his friends. He’s got his people sprinkled all throughout the system and some are in key places. Each one is a cog, or a lever, or a gear that’s connected to Daley. All those gears and levers and cogs turn according to what Daley and the Democratic Party say. That’s how Chicago works. That’s the machine. It’s how this city has always operated, going as far back as Mayor Cermak and Big Bill Thompson and even before that. And don’t forget about the Mob. The mayor’s office has been in bed with them since the days of Capone. You got it?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know all that stuff. Of course I know that stuff. I was just saying that, cripes, the guy’s an ex-con. . . .” He muttered and went into the kitchen for coffee.

  One by one the other reporters began trickling in for work. I watched M touch up her lipstick at her desk while Henry opened a fresh box of Sugar Smacks and Peter adjusted his eyeshade. Walter came in with Randy, who was already whistling. Slowly the din of phones ringing and typewriter keys striking copy paper picked up steam, while the cigarette and pipe smoke rose toward the ceiling. By a quarter past eight, the floor began to rumble from the presses. The start of a new day.