A Woman of Uncertain Character: The Amorous and Radical Adventures of My Mother Jennie (Who Always Wanted to Be a Respectable Jewish Mom) by Her Bastard Son

by Clancy Sigal

  Chatter in the back room stopped briefly, then a guy at the kitchen table broke the silence. “Sure, kid. Why not? It’s a free country.” One of the others chimed in, “Hell it is—” and they were off again.

  The guy who told me it was a free country was a square-built, hard-muscled traveling fruit picker named Swede Hammeros, who looked a little like “fighting Marine” Gene Tunney—Jack Dempsey’s ring nemesis—only blond. Hard jaw, intelligent eyes, thick but carefully combed hair, the sleeves of his blue work shirt rolled high up, knotted arms, a certain look in his eye. Dad had that same look. Except that the Swede didn’t seem as consumed by his own hot-wired anger, maybe because he was so big and imposing and didn’t have to go around proving himself as did “the little Jew,” Leo Sigal.

  The change in Jennie was startling when Swede was around. After Dad took off, a victim of his restlessness and her disappointment in him, her freckles had faded into deep worry lines, she smoked more if that was possible, and she spent whole days without bothering to get out of her housecoat. Most alarming, weeks would go by without her visiting Betty the manicurist at Riskin’s barbershop next door. But when Swede showed up, all he had to do was walk in, toss his leather billed cap on the counter, and give my mother a certain look, and she lit up like a Christmas tree. Soon she was back in a proper dress all the time, with makeup, nails polished with fifty-cent-a-bottle Revlon enamel “Chinese red” (none of your ten-cent transparent Cutex crud), hair set, permed and hennaed—on show. Unlike most other guys who came around during Dad’s absences, the Swede didn’t court me, too, none of this mussing my hair or giving my hand a manly shake. Swede was like Jennie that way. He kept his distance without actually pushing me away; I had to come to him.

  His visits became routine. In the mornings she put out a breakfast plate of Heinz baked beans and fried sunnyside eggs the way he liked them; and he’d drop by after I left for school and he was there when I came back.

  Around this time, the laundry business got so bad that on afternoons and weekends I developed a stage act—by climbing inside the store’s front window to tennis-bang a Hi-Li paddle—designed to attract the business of potential customers, a kind of freak show that bankrupt businesses indulged in then, like flagpole sitting, dance-athons, six-day bicycle races, Cannonball Kelly with ten guys standing on his stomach, etc. A Hi-Li was a small wooden paddle with a rubber ball attached by a long elastic string that let you keep hitting it over and over again without missing a beat. I had won a set of roller skates (which we pawned) on the stage of the Central Park Theatre by whacking the ball with my paddle over a thousand times while blowing huge bubbles from wads of pink powdery Fleers bubble-gum in my chipmunk cheeks, beating the competition into the ground.

  Inside the store window I quite enjoyed posing as a laundry-store mannequin and showing off in front of passing non-customers even if my tired arm felt like falling off.

  When my Hi-Li vaudeville flopped as a crowd pleaser, Jennie asked me if I’d parade up and down Kedzie Avenue with a homemade sandwich board proclaiming the lower prices of Family Hand Laundry (a lie, the local Chinese did shirts cheaper). On vanity grounds I refused, so Jennie and I negotiated a compromise where I’d write and hand-distribute all over Lawndale an advertising flier which Harry the Printer over by Thirteenth Street would cyclostyle for us in return for laundering his ink-stained aprons. Here is my very first real writing effort.

  FAMILY HAND LAUNDRY

  We Do It All!

  Wet or dry, shirt iron, collar turn, Grade A finish

  Your Wash Is Our Command

  Prop. J. Sigal 1404 S. Kedzie

  No phone listed because it had been cut off long ago.

  Nothing doing. The 1937–38 “depression-within-a-depression” kicked hell out of the laundry business. For us, as for millions of others, FDR’s New Deal was No Deal.

  About Swede. I didn’t know if I wanted him to stick around or not, but impromptu he began taking me places just as Dad had. “Let’s head into town and stir things up,” he’d say, and together we’d ride a Roosevelt Road streetcar into the Loop and stroll under the Wabash Avenue L tracks, winter sunlight shafting through the struts, until he ran into one of his friends panhandling or mooching outside a bar. “That your kid?” they’d ask. “For now,” Swede replied. He said it so casually that I began to think Hey, maybe there’s a future for me there, and immediately felt disloyal about Dad.

  Sometimes we’d wander up to the offices of The People, an old-time radical weekly newspaper, where Swede would pick up a bundle to distribute in coin-operated metal boxes along State Street. Gradually, he let me take over his newspaper route while he stayed in the office gabbing with the editor, then we’d ride home, side by side on the streetcar’s reversible wicker seat, not speaking much and not having to. He had such a lazy offhand style, the very opposite of my intense Dad, or so it seemed. Back in the store, I went around idly crooning into a broomstick end, “You’re getting to be a habit with me….”

  All that spring of ’38 we were a threesome. Swede would take Ma and me rowing in Douglas Park lagoon, or down to the Grant Park bandstand for a concert, and a couple of times to the Oak Street beach, just like any other family. I’d catch him looking at Jennie in this appraising, lazy way—later I’d learn to call it sensuous—and stop thinking about it.

  What happened then was this: I’d just come out of the gym of St. Agatha’s church across the tracks from the store—this was before Father Lenihan threw me out, his one and only Jewish catch—when a larger boy, probably an Irisher from up by Twenty-second Street, walked past the church across from the store and, for no reason except that I was there, slammed a fist into my stomach while observing, “Your mother’s a hoor.” Ooof! I crumpled over and exhaled, “So what if she is.” Now why did I say that? Astounded that this strange Irish kid knew so much about us, I fled across the streetcar tracks into the store, where both Swede and Jennie had witnessed the episode. My father would have poured silent scorn on me for running away from an insult. How would Swede vote?

  He took me by the hand and walked me out of the store north on Kedzie Avenue past the Midwest headquarters of the Jewish Forward on Thirteenth Street, with its white plaster Moroccan turret, until we caught up with the ambling Irish kid. “Hold up there, boy!” Swede said. The kid kept walking, strolling really, insolent. “Stay here,” Swede ordered me and caught up with the kid and spoke in a low tone to him. The kid shook his head, but Swede kept right on talking, soft, unthreatening, until the kid made as if to walk away. Swede touched him. It didn’t look like much of a punch, but the kid hurled himself backward against the brick wall between two stores and fell down. Unhurried, Swede dragged him by his torn sweater into an alley and I trailed after them. All the time, Swede kept chatting, like he was discussing philosophy. In the alley the kid got up and then his head snapped back. I hadn’t even seen Swede hit him. The kid collapsed again and Swede stood over him for a moment, thoughtfully gave him a single hard kick, then came back to me and Ma (her fist in her mouth) standing in the alley. She looked at him with new eyes. Swede said, “Hey, Jennie, no sweat.”

  All my life I’d been waiting for somebody to take my part, but, now that Swede had done it, it felt as if something had been taken away from me.

  Soon afterward, Jennie stopped leaving a breakfast plate out for Swede, and now when he came calling and sailed his leather cap onto the counter she politely picked it up and handed it back to him.

  I didn’t know how to ask Ma what was going wrong between them so I just said, “You know, Swede is a really nice guy.” All she said was, “On Sundays when it isn’t raining.” What did that mean?

  Then, like Dad, he simply wasn’t there anymore.

  I didn’t realize until Swede left that the other hoboes hadn’t come around as often when he was with us, but as soon as he was gone they flocked back like birds on a tree branch after the hawk has flown. Same as before, Jennie fed them and presided over their quarrels, but
it wasn’t the same at all; something was gone. Jennie never said she missed Swede. He’d made her laugh, she came alive around him, and he hadn’t exactly been the daddy I longed for, he was no Judge Hardy dishing out “life guidance,” (maybe it was against Swede’s syndicalist principles).

  But he’d been good enough.

  So there we were, Jennie and me together again, running a customerless store, me in the front window again banging my Hi-Li paddle and chewing Fleers like a madman, Ma slumped in her frayed old housecoat at the sewing machine fiddling with pieces of fabric, both of us waiting for somebody to walk back through the front door, setting off the tinkle bell above it and ripping open our lives and making us better for it.

  Only the hoboglyphics changed. One morning soon after Swede disappeared, Jennie went outside with a piece of sandpaper. She stared hard at the symbols carved on the lintel, then forcefully sanded out

  Stepping back inside the store, she had a second thought, reached for a pair of scissors by the sewing machine, came out again, and stabbed the door wood with

  Translated: “Hit the road.”

  Swede Hammeros was not coming back, I guessed.

  Several years later, while a part-time baker’s assistant at the National Biscuit Company over by Racine, I bumped into Swede as he was piling boxes in the Nabisco loading yard. We had a friendly chat without mentioning Jennie. And even later, in crossing the country by car on my way overseas, I tracked him down running a farm with a widow woman in Ohio. More mellow and self-protective of his new contentment, he didn’t seem the same man. Is this what happens to aging rebels, I wondered? He didn’t ask me to stick around, but when I was about to drive off he leaned in through the car window and asked, “Did your pa ever come back?” I said no, and he said, “Well, life makes fools of us all,” and bade me good-bye.

  Men such as Swede and my father are like human magnets drawing me to them. Ever after, I’ve searched for a father in men as close to the original as possible, guys on a volcano’s edge of violence, fighters against themselves or the world or both at the same time.

  Why couldn’t Jennie hold her men?

  And why couldn’t I?

  8 Jennie and the Women

  On June 22, 1938, sixty-eight million people—the highest number ever for a radio broadcast—tuned in to the second heavyweight fight between Hitler’s champion, the “Teutonic Titan,” Max Schmeling, and African-American “Joltin’ Joe” Louis. Joe whips Max in two amazing minutes and four seconds of the first round, his fists the opening salvo of the American counteroffensive against fascism in our imaginations. The night of the fight in Yankee Stadium, the hearts of American Jewry seem to stop until Schmeling crashes to the canvas a beaten pulp. Then you can hear it all over Chicago, deafening on the west side, a tidal wave of emotion exploding in every household that had a radio. Jennie, who hates boxing, has tears of joy in her eyes as she listens to the referee Arthur Donovan count Schmeling out, and the ringside announcer almost bursts an artery screaming, “Schmeling is DOWN! He’s OUT!”

  Joe Louis’s crushing right hook to the kishkes is an omen.

  We can win.

  Later that year, 100,000 Jews march in an anti-Nazi rally in New York in response to the mass arrest of German Jewry and their banishment to concentration camps.

  After Swede and Leo Sigal delivered a one-two punch to her heart, Ma shut down on men. Even now, it’s hard for me to know if she sent them away or they took off on their own, but they seemed to confirm in her a deepening disgust with the species, who spelt more trouble than they were worth. Right now, she needed another kind of love.

  My Mom the Dealer

  “Two pair showing, Surkah. Keep an eye on Sadie’s possible flush.”

  “Minnie, you’re folding with three of a kind? Go ahead, be brave, raise Bea a nickel.”

  “Nothing, nothing, nothing, ace high bets. Tuva, you can check, Nonie has a pair on the table.”

  “Leah, you got eye trouble? Look at Essie’s hand. Essie, touch your nose to warn Leah.”

  My mother The Dealer.

  A lone woman on Chicago’s west side was a life at risk. The neighborhood social structure held little status for a widow, divorcee or, most culpably, a spinster. Without men in their lives, and soon to lose sons to war, such women constituted a potentially subversive sexual subculture in the heart of one of the most conservative neighborhoods in America.

  The umbrella under which my mother and her friends chose to come together, or camouflage themselves, was the Riga-Baltic Progressive Ladies Society, a gentle fiction since none of the ladies hailed from the Baltic nations; most, like Jennie, were Great Russian emigrants, but they needed a respectable cover to fit snugly within the community’s cat’s cradle of benevolent organizations. I was cover, too; after all, how dangerous could a coven of single not so young women be if they dragged along a bored twelve-year-old?

  The Riga-Baltic met four times a month, with a ceremonial poker game on alternate weekends. Ma and I would go, say, to Surkah Ginsberg’s place, where a blazing white lace tablecloth on a large dark mahogany dining table, brought over from the Old Country as part of Surkah’s dowry, awaited players. The table smelled of furniture polish, and on the tablecloth sat a nearly full cut-glass decanter and six or seven empty clear shot glasses with thick bottoms. The hostess, Surkah, waited for everyone to show up and then ceremonially filled the glasses with Four Roses or Old Grandad from the decanter. The women would raise their glasses—L’chaim!—and battle commenced.

  “A pair of queens bets. Sadie, I can see your cards, hold them closer. Essie, put money in the pot, don’t be a four-flusher.”

  The poker games Jennie ran usually were on Friday nights when more Orthodox, and orthodox, women were at home preparing a Sabbath meal for their menfolk. But the Riga-Baltic ladies were manless, either through death, departure, or the disappearance-in-place Essie described as “He’s not there even when he’s there.” These were women on their own leaning on each other. Every player came out even at the end of Ma’s poker games. If anything later ruined me as a poker player it was being taught how to “read” the table by a bunch of lonely working-class women for whom the loss of even fifty cents at the end of a social evening was a financial and moral disaster. The game was always seven-card stud, nothing wild. If someone was dealt an indisputably winning hand—say, two face-down aces and a third showing—it was mandatory for her to loudly clear her throat or wink to signal her luck so the other players could fold with honor. And if, say, Essie Rabinowitz rashly bet against the aces with only a low pair, Ma wildly grimaced or whistled in an attempt to persuade her to fold. The Mosaic sin was sandbagging or raising after checking.

  Surkah, as tonight’s hostess, would hover obligingly from a wheeled gurney which she maneuvered with her toes or hands, pushing herself this way or that against a solid object like a wall or table. She suffered from a crippling form of arthritis that made her spend most of her time lying on her back or side, and from this awkward position she was capable of remarkable feats of housewifery. If she had to leave the game, she’d roll around the flat, dusting and cleaning and loudly humming “Little Sir Echo,” and the Baltic Ladies made sure to include her in as many activities as possible.

  Warmed by the Four Roses, the women gossiped while Jennie shuffled and dealt. “Did you hear Chava Roth changed her name to Eve?” “Pearl Berkowitz’s daughter, the cockeyed one, is seeing a guy who works in a Sheridan Drive butcher shop. Social climber.” As the night wore on, the ladies, infused by gambling fever, played faster and looser, racy even, raising bets, going for it, and if, by some mishap, Tuva (now Toni) or Polly Nudleman or Aviva Zaretsky came out winners by as much as a dollar, there would be a fast and furious last round in which Jennie dealt intentionally winning hands to losing players to keep things healthy. Afterwards, at home, I’d protest that playing to lose was idiot’s poker. “We’re gentlemen,” Jennie said firmly, “and we play like gentlemen. You want to be a killer at the t
able like your father—little good it does him—I’ll show you how,” and she’d sit me down at the kitchen table with a clean uncut pack of Bicycle playing cards to teach me with a swift and merciless eye the permutations and odds. I swear she’d give Texas Dolly Doyle Brunson a run for his money.

  Some men have Oedipal trauma; I have a seven-card stud complex.

  P.S. Jennie’s poker playing genes skipped a generation and landed squarely on Joe Franklin. Five card draw is his game, and Cincinnati Kid is his name. He could be the next Texas hold ’em champ like Amarillo Slim. Joe bluffs like a demon and has no “tells” as far I can see. He keeps this same diabolical grin on his face if he’s holding a straight flush or zip. “Who else do you play cards with?” I ask. “Oh,” he replies casually, “a few kids at school.” Any moment I expect a police raid.

  The other preferred Riga-Baltic venue was a center table at Carl’s Restaurant, a popular deli on the main drag, Roosevelt Road. Again I was a largely silent partner, a “beard,” for these widowed or otherwise unaccompanied ladies who had largely given up on the possibility of another man to replace the dead, “divorced,” or deserting one. Something about Carl’s busy festive air gave gossip a harder, wilder edge when the ladies’ ribald laughter drew disapproving stares from other customers who included, I now realize, the men—tonight dining with their families—whom the ladies knew on the side and who were the subject of some of their coded jokes. Unlike the poker chitchat, the tittle-tattle at Carl’s had a defiantly sexual tinge. For example, Rosalie Levin’s visit to a back-alley doctor, Sol Schecter’s marital unhappiness, Dorothy’s non-appearance at Riga-Baltic gatherings due to facial disfigurement from her husband Max’s beating, Manny Solow’s vacations in the Wisconsin Dells without his wife—