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

  War began to seem as natural as breathing. You could almost hear a huge sigh of relief go up from the neighborhood as jobs seemed to sprout on trees and the old rules relaxed.

  The Rockets now had a proper basement clubhouse, and I was so glad to be in the club again that I threw myself at them with a manic, almost erotic, ferocity. Although the youngest by a few months, I was the nuttiest: from now on, there was no dare I refused. One blizzardy winter day, on a bet, I balanced myself on the ice-glazed, ruler-thin stone parapet outside the Adler Planetarium, leaning way over roiling Lake Michigan holding onto nothing and letting the blasting wind keep me upright at a wobbly angle as I inched all the way around the observatory to safety. Hey Dad, top of the world! I was no feigelah!

  This issue of homosexuality had lain between Jennie and me ever since she walked in on me, at perhaps six or seven, scissoring “Wee Winnie Winkle” paper cut-out dresses from the Sunday cartoon section of the Chicago Herald-Examiner and arranging the panelled skirts and blouses on Winnie’s softly modelled shoulders and hips. I loved nothing better than playing with the splendid full-color, full-page dolls of working girls like Winnie, “Tillie the Toile,” and “Ella Cinders”; they might not be Charlie’s Angels but they still had a lot of spit and fire. The miniature dresses had paper flanges that you hooked onto the chemise-draped ladies and let you experiment with fashion. I felt absolutely safe and free to do this until the Sunday morning, when I was about twelve, that Jennie came through the beaded curtain separating the Family Hand Laundry business from our one-room home in back and stopped dead when she found me happily fitting patterns to a whole show of newspaper cartoon women. To my astonishment, she grabbed the fabric shears out of my hand and demanded, “Why aren’t you playing with Tarzan?” to which I replied that the Sunday dress-up section had only girls. “You can’t put a skirt on the Ape Man,” I said reasonably.

  “I don’t care.” She stormed back into the store. “From now on, no more dressing up your sweeties. Put clothes on Smiling Jack!” I was amazed she even knew the name of the daredevil cartoon-strip pilot. Did she know any of my other secrets?

  Out front, she banged down hard on the keys of the old and black National cash register, making an exclamation point of sorts. If Ma was such an ace labor negotiator, how come she wasn’t negotiating this?

  Okay, I was a fat kid, growing breasts like a girl, maybe caused by twice-a-week hormone injections (for an undescended testicle) in my ass from the visiting county nurse, and, yes, I swanned about crooning “Music, Maestro, Please” at the top of my breaking tenor and was addicted to daytime radio soap operas like Our Gal Sunday. (“Can a simple mining girl from the West find happiness with a British aristocrat?”) Jennie suffered me through it all, but now that I was approaching puberty her antennae convulsed over my infatuation with fashion accessories. Indeed, she seemed more comfortable with my bloody noses given and taken in alley fights and my position as South Kedzie Avenue’s chief armorer and supplier of handcrafted (for five cents) rubber guns, than with my “feminine” hobby. In her eyes, pure male was an absolute good. For all her troubles with Dad, she’d never lost her admiration for his macho swagger, and though she often disapproved of my behavior, she also signaled that she was proud of the cocky style I’d inherited and copied from him.

  Statistically there must have been queers in my neighborhood, but it wasn’t an option for boys then. Our idea of gay was a kid who practiced piano or was named Sherwin … or Clarence, which probably is why I got into so many fights about it. To be overweight with a name as easy to ridicule with “Clare” or “Clarice” was an intolerable insult to the part of me that wanted to be most manly, like Leo Sigal.

  Some time in early 1942, after Pearl Harbor, with the laundry sold before Jennie could torch it, and when we Rockets got into the habit of thinking of ourselves as dead men, our school principal at Marshall High called a special assembly, not to hear the usual retired ROTC officer prattling a patriotic pep talk but to welcome the school’s most famous alumnus. As was our custom, my thugs monopolized the entire back row in the auditorium balcony, feet hanging over the backs of the seats, elbowing, and kicking, normal behavior. The girls in the balcony front row shot us dirty looks, but the Rockets were so totally outside the student pecking order that we were non-insultable. Somewhere, perhaps, boys in checkerboard-pattern Hart, Schaffner & Marx sports jackets jitterbugged on a polished gym floor with scrubbed-clean girls in pressed dirndle skirts who were the yearbook editor and got A’s in civics class; somewhere brawny young Jews—Marines in the making—took Marshall High to yet another All-City basketball championship. Not us. We weren’t even tough guys. Just young petty criminals without any sense at all except of ourselves, our basement clubhouse, and the certainty that Hitler meant it when he promised to kill all the Chicago Jews. In today’s jargon, we were latchkey children who rode free on the iron-grated cowcatchers of the huge roaring red and green electric streetcars, snored in class or pretended to, and dreamed of absolutely nothing.

  The featured speaker down on the stage turned out to be a tubby, neatly dressed little man in a white shantung silk Palm Beach double-breasted suit and two-tone wingtip shoes. What had we done to deserve him?

  “And now,” announced Mr. Beer, the principal, “Mister Mainbocher …”

  Who?

  Mainbocher—one name only please—was, it turned out, a couturier, the world-famous dressmaker who had designed the wedding gown of King Edward’s bride, the Duchess of Windsor. I cannot remember a thing he said, partly because we were all in shock. This was the best Marshall High was capable of—a fag dressmaker? The other Rockets may have felt something like it, too, because an incoherent sense of disbelief swept over the back row. This went way beyond deadly insult to our brittle identities. Hell of a way to prepare us for war.

  After the assembly, we went a little mad, viciously shoving people around, loudly banging lockers to make our presences felt, snapping the bras of girls whom we hadn’t dared approach before, and tripping each other down the school stairs. In some unspeakable way, we had been dissed and needed to strike back.

  Outside the school we got into a terrific fight, only in this case we put up our local champion, Abe Goldman, to challenge slim and smooth Davie Dolin, who always wore a sports jacket and knife-creased trousers to school, danced like a dream, attracted girls without even trying, and was in every known school activity. Our exact opposite. Big Abe was a monster, with naturally buffed biceps and a giant’s gentle disposition. Reluctantly, he let us push him forward into the fighting circle formed by a crowd of students. That was our second big shock. Davie Dolin broke his nose with one punch. Life was so unfair.

  It also turned out that Mainbocher—the name transliterates from the Jewish—had escaped from Paris only one step ahead of the Nazis. He wasn’t just a feigelah but a kind of war hero. Too damn much.

  Between my mother denying me Wee Winnie Winkle’s off-the-shoulder blouse and Mainbocher speaking at our school, and Big Abe’s failure to deck Davie Dolin, I suddenly felt a little shaky about what a man was, anyway. My moral failures mounted. I failed to confront Jennie about my comic-strip dresses, I didn’t step in to help Abe knock Davie Dolin on his ass, and I didn’t become homosexual. Fortunately, my masculine future was soon to be written in military jargon—“Asgd/MOS 745/inf rflmn.”

  Fish on a Bicycle

  A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle, feminists used to say. They’d have a hard time convincing Jennie. Her attitude to men, though laced with equal parts admiration and contempt, had a strong measure of pure biological desire.

  As time went on and my father’s absences grew into total separation, Jennie’s attitude to herself and to men, including me, changed. At first, she suffered a kind of shock of abandonment, anxious depression, a collapse of the sexual ego for which there appeared to be no remedy, not even the sacred company of women friends. But gradually, her sexual clock reset as she gave up her dream of an enduri
ng love in favor of a more hedonistic, cheerful, selfish, and personal satisfaction. That’s about when she gave me up as a lost cause and began dialing—we had a phone now—for “professional help” for me.

  What she gained in sensual pleasure in making a new life she lost in sexual idealism, emerging as a harder, shrewder, wilder, and more devil-may-care person, somebody I hardly recognized. From her old mantra, “There’s nobody for us but your father,” it became, about any new guy “Oh, I suppose he’s all right. Treat him nice. Do I want him to stick around? Check with me tomorrow after I sleep on it.”

  The most startling change was that she no longer bothered to be secretive around me, almost as if she wanted me to know. Psychoanalyzing your own mother is a mug’s game, but let’s guess that we were back to our old game of multiple identities and I had become my father, on whom she was taking a kind of revenge by exposing him (me) to her intimacies. So there, Leo Kalman!

  Masquerading as my father, in her eyes, was easier now that adolescent hormones had seized my body to lengthen and strengthen it. Jennie’s eyes shone with admiration at the sheer manliness of what was happening to me. She was proud of, not to say relieved about, my descending ball, my flattening tummy, widening shoulders, and, for the first time, the muscle to back up my swagger. I might be an ill-mannered, self-centered, disrespectful, zoot-suited ruffian—but I carried the Sigal seed.

  She worried a great deal that I was like my father in treating women badly. “I hear what you’re up to on Roosevelt Road. Don’t you dare use women,” she implored. Like a lawyer, I laid out the defense case: girls weren’t women; they liked being “hondled”; they gave as good as they got; the existence of their older brothers set limits on the Rockets’ misbehavior; and who got hurt? “You’re exactly like him,” she said in an observational rather than accusatory tone. “Him” was in the air all around us. I wished he’d come back, drop dead, or take one of Angie Lombardo’s knives and decisively cut the knot that bound us all even in his absence.

  What Lies Beneath

  Ma was right to be anxious about me since I exhibited “symptoms” that today you find listed in the P.D.D., Pervasive Developmental Disorders, a.k.a. the psychologists’ bible. Aside from almost every conceivable alimentary, bowel, and intestinal complaint—cramps, constipation, vomiting, nausea—I had an early speech defect that embraced both stutter and stammer, a lisp (later noted in my FBI file as “probably homosexual”) and a failure to pronounce “sh,” “ch,” “j,” “z,” “zh” or much of anything else without stumbling. (“Bullsit maketh the grath grow greener, thmuck”). Then there was always that “low normal IQ” taint that caused Jennie to demand a second intelligence test which came back exactly like the first.

  I was slow. Slow-thinking. The other Rockets thought I was with malice aforethought slacking off my school lessons, hence the poor grades, which was fine by them, but the truth was I worked hard to learn almost nothing. Algebra, science (all that chlorophyll!), penmanship—even trying with all my might, they came very s.l.o.w.l.y. For a while Jennie thought I was doing marvelously at Howland Elementary because my report card had so many “A’s”; I lied that “A” was the highest grade. Actually, “A” stood for Average, the dummies’ mark.

  As any secret illiterate knows, it’s amazing how much you can get away with if you have balls to bluff. What helped me cover up my s.l.o.w.n.e.s.s. was hiding out in the local Douglas Park (now Stephen Douglass) public library. Ma had taught me how to read, working with me on wooden ABC blocks practically from infancy. So, in the ordinary give and take of street life, I’d randomly throw in sentence structures and unrelated facts acquired on my precious library card—from “The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come,” “Three Musketeers,” “Stover at Yale,” Paul de Kruif medical biographies, Flying Aces tales and John Gunther’s “Inside Europe”—and slot it into our gang repartee with lots of big words, and then walk away a smart guy. To this day my school chums remember me as a top scholar. See how easy it is when you have no options?

  After a neighbor woman told Ma what an “A” grade really stood for, she became less enchanted with my throwing around random facts and figures. She threatened to go down to talk to my teacher, Mrs. Johnson, a fearsome disciplinarian, about why I couldn’t use my big brain to get higher grades.

  “What big brain?” I said proudly, citing my IQ test results.

  “You faked the tests so you wouldn’t have to work hard,” she insisted.

  I hadn’t faked them, but it gave me a warm feeling to know that Ma believed I had.

  “I’ll do better,” I promised. “Just don’t talk to the teacher.”

  She looked at me almost pleadingly. “Be normal. Not low normal or high just normal, all right?”

  It would have been easier if she had asked me to strap on Buck Rogers’s rocket belt and fly solo to the moon.

  Stu

  I had a dozen nicknames, but the one that most painfully stuck was “Stu” for stupid, which Oscar Gutierrez translated into Mexican-Spanish as “estupido” which evolved into Dodo and occasionally Doodoo.

  Although the other guys knew I had periods of seclusion in the public library, they also knew I was, with the possible exception of Deaf Augie, mentally and intellectually, the s.l.o.w.e.s.t. Their general assessment, made without rancor, was that I was estupido.

  “You are not stupid,” Ma angrily claimed. “They’re just paskudnyaks, small-time Charlies pretending they’re big men. What do kids know?”

  They know me, I thought. They’d pinned the tail on my donkey and, since there was nothing to be done about it, I’d wear it with pride. You say I’m a stupe, I will be one. So I went around the neighborhood posing as a dybbuk, a dislocated ghost, more accurately a golem, an ignorant mud person, acting out the part as a juvenile Frankenstein-monster, dragging my feet and pushing my hands in front of me as joke claws. “Arrggghhh.” Some joke. Ma hated my spaz act. She complained that her friends were reporting to her that I was on the verge of seizures on the sidewalk.

  “Are you sick, Kalman?” she demanded. “Or just plain stupid?”

  I smiled. “There … you see,” I said triumphantly.

  Child Abuse

  Remedial teaching, of a certain sort, may have saved my life. When the s.l.o.w.n.e.s.s. and stammering and tongue tics became flagrant, I was removed from my home room and placed in what was called the subnormal class along with a couple of half blind albino twins, a few deafies, undiagnosed mental cases and bone lazies. Once a week a special teacher, Mrs. O’Brien, came to Howland Elementary to help me with my speech disability. Her method was clear and simple. In an empty room she sat across a small table from me and every time I mispronounced a word or stuttered she slugged me sharply on the wrist with a twelve inch wooden ruler. In any given session she might strike me a dozen or two dozen times. It did not occur to me to protest because, at some level, I felt that she was a kindly person doing her best to cure me. She was giving me the attention I needed. I looked forward to her visits if not necessarily to the stinging blows.

  Nearly a year in subnormal class (which vastly improved my status among the Rockets), and many visits by Mrs. O’Brien, significantly improved my speech habits. Ma, who saw the progress, didn’t object to the corporal discipline, either. We felt gratitude more than bitterness. “It’s child abuse!” friends tell me today. “You should have sued.” I’m aware of how much damage was done in the past to patients, for example, by “kindly” administration of electro-shock therapy or surgical lobotomy. I was lucky. The worst injury I received from Mrs. O’Brien was a skinned knuckle when her swinging ruler missed my wrist. But I felt then, and feel now, that this big steadfast patient woman and I were working together to help me.

  “Say “sh,”” urged Mrs. O’Brien.

  “Th …”

  Whack!

  “Sh …”

  “Tsh …”

  Whack!

  “S … h … h …”

  Just a great big Irish smile.r />
  “Now let’s move on to “J” …”

  Ma and I were like two erotic locomotives heading toward each other on a collision course. I was sixteen and inventing myself as a man, she was forty-seven and struggling to liberate herself from the trauma, just setting in, of Dad’s exit. Sparks flew whenever we were in the same room. Our passions ignited in quarrels over food, politics, and my “delinquent” behavior. Whatever was going on, neither of us had a vocabulary for. I recoiled when we brushed past each other in the small apartment; she sternly abstained from touching me. Yet, my pubescent body, with a will of its own, seemed to involuntarily lean into hers at the slightest opportunity. Something had to give.

  11 Among the Amazons

  1942–43—Warsaw ghetto uprising. “Bataan death march” in Philippines kills many GIs, some from Chicago. Nazis plot “Final Solution” (mass murder) of Jews at Wansee Conference. Stalingrad epic battle. Bogart in Casablanca.

  THEY COULDN’T BREAK A hard case like Bugsy Sigal.

  An assault-and-battery of Jewish Social Service Bureau caseworkers (Mrs. Adler, Mrs. Strauss, and Miss Loeb), a probation officer (Mr. Watkins of the juvenile court system), and Jennie faced me across a bare wooden table on which lay a Devil’s bargain.

  Due to “behavioral problems,” I would be sent for my junior high school year to incarceration at the inner-city reformatory, Montefiore Special School for Boys, with its high yellow-brick walls and prison population of Jew-hating polacks, micks, hunkies, and cabbage heads—or I could choose to enroll at a trade tech like Crane, Lane, or Flower High where, if I applied myself diligently (their words), I might learn wood shop along with polacks, micks, hunkies, and cabbage heads who hadn’t yet ended up in Montefiore.