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

  I turned off the light and climbed back onto my couch. I felt so tired. That last word hung in the air: afterwards? It was out in the open. Leo Sigal would forever and always be her “afterwards.” Nobody else would ever take his place in her life. Not even me.

  Venus (Assisted by Cupid) at Her Dressing Table

  Friday, a warm spring night in wartime Chicago. Hip to hip, Jennie and I are crammed into her “beauty alcove” improvised around a half-length mirror screwed to the bottom of the retracted Murphy bed in our one-room-plus-kitchenette apartment at Douglas Boulevard. We’re in the money, jobs are plentiful, and so are paychecks. A low-key madness enters our souls: people are dying overseas; in Chicago they’re living for the first time. Separately, Ma and I are preparing to go out for the night. She claims to a meeting of the Riga-Baltic Progressive Ladies Society; I to the movies. We are both lying.

  Even after we moved into our very own place we continued to dress and undress in front of each other. But now when I lean in to study Jennie she stiffens uncomfortably under my stare, even turns her back when putting on her Van Raalte chantilly lace slip and waits for me to turn away before she tries on her panties, girdle, and almost-impossible-to-obtain, full-fashioned stockings. Vaguely, I feel cheated.

  I weave and bob in front of the mirror to get its full attention, and Jennie’s. She carefully assembles herself for the evening. Not bad. Open-throat rayon blouse showing more bosom than usual, elbow-length Belgian velvet gloves, red-banded straw hat set at a flirty angle, pleated skirt with medium-high hemline, a dab of Jergens Lotion for a set of the front bob in her “casually yours” hair style. She’s on her way to the Riga-Baltic Ladies, oh yeah I’ll bet. Automatically she turns for my approval, catches herself, realizes it isn’t appropriate anymore. But I give her my Robert Mitchum slit-eyed sultry look. Jennie doesn’t like where this is going so she narrows her blue-shadowed eyes on me, but she’s blushing.

  It’s my turn.

  Now check me out. I mean, cool. Pork pie extra-wide brim fedora with a rainbow-colored feather stuck in the hat band, orange fluorescent fake-satin shirt with wide lay-down collar, double-knotted fifty-two-inch shiny burgundy wool-cable tie with cream and navy abstract pattern and tied in a Windsor knot, one-inch-wide green corduroy suspenders holding up “reet” cuffless chest-high trousers with baggy thighs and strangled ankles, a Texas cowboy-style belt with a silver-plated buckle engraved CS, pale mauve imitation angora single-breasted cardigan-type blazer jacket, checkerboard-crocheted argyle socks and oxblood high-shine shoes with metal taps heel and toe so they can hear me coming a mile away on Roosevelt Road, and, of course, a double spiral “gold-plated” key chain clipped to my belt and plummeting to the sidewalk and halfway back up, a small-arms weapon as well as an ornament.

  Venus, the observed, observes with sinking heart. We stare at each other in the mirror.

  Her look says, where did I go wrong?

  Joe Franklin, ten as of this writing, has begun spreading smelly guck on his hair to make it look spikey. He spends incredible amounts of time in front of the bathroom mirror microscopically examining his blonde mane while snapping his fingers and wiggling to gangsta rap lyrics,

  I’m a little boy but live a big man’s life/

  I got grown women wanna be in my life …”

  Exhales. Blah Blah Blah … gotta split heads tonight …

  Where did I go wrong?

  14 Reds

  MAYBE IN TOPEKA OR Laramie you don’t find many “ists,” but they were everywhere in Chicago, agitating on street corners and in taverns, helping to drag furniture back for evicted tenants, turning out at dawn at factory gates to hand out leaflets exactly like Barbra Streisand’s Katie Morowsky in The Way We Were. They were your neighbors. Signing up was as easy as shouting across a clothesline.

  If I wanted to get Jennie’s goat, why didn’t I go all the way and become a Republican? Quite simply, I never met any Republicans in Lawndale because they were an endangered species. Our local Twenty-fourth ward habitually turned in 95 percent Democratic votes, and, in one election, more than 100 percent (Chicago mantra: “Vote early, vote often”). The president, FDR himself, hailed the Twenty-fourth as the most Democratic district in the nation. I’ve met South Wales miners who have gone through life without ever meeting a Tory; they would have felt at home on Kedzie Avenue.

  It starts this way. “Some performance you put on there.” This tall, awkward, intense kid put his hand on my arm outside Miss Saunders’s class at Marshall High. Max Weinstock said, “If you’re interested, I can show you some real Communists.” I said, “My old lady had her ass kicked by you Communists. Screw off.” But since I’d tried every other group, grouplet, faction, and Young-This-Or-That on the west side, I figured What do I have to lose? And went along for kicks.

  The Young Communist League meeting in somebody’s front room was not exactly a hoot. There were dusty pictures of Karl Marx, Lenin, and Joe Stalin on the wall, and the YCL girls looked as if they all got all As in class and not a neighborhood slut among them. An older woman with a pronounced lurch-limp paced up and down expounding on “wage, labor, and capital” and recommended a pamphlet from the Little Lenin Library; my head fell on my chest with boredom and I soon slipped away. Max followed me out into the street, where I told him, “Next time, warn me so I can blow my brains out first. See you around,” and went off into the night.

  Six months later I saw Max Weinstock again when he was standing on a wooden orange crate punching his fist up to the sky on the corner of Roosevelt and Turner calling for “Guns for Russia!” A fight started, he was grabbed off his soap box, and a couple of other guys, I assumed Young Communists, hurtled to his rescue, fists flying. Ah, unlike “wage, labor, and capital,” this was a language any Rocket could speak.

  On his way out of the crowd with a bleeding lip, Max spotted me. “Still on the sidelines, Sigal? We’ll never win the war that way.”

  Something about the brawl intrigued me. The inefficient way Max fought back, all awkward arms and flailing legs and no rabbit punch, and how those two other kids dived in to save him. Curiosity pulled me in.

  What a difference six months makes. This time, the YCL met under a new “front” name, American Youth for Democracy, in a big room at a local People’s Institute, where pinned on the wall was a large American flag and portraits of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, not Lenin and Marx. Same girls, same boys, same older limping woman, different lecture, “Communism is Twentieth-century Americanism.” It was like attending an American Legion convention.

  My big mistake was dragging some of the Rockets along—Deaf Augie, Stash, Albie, and Ike, all army bound—to the AYD meeting, which ended badly when they made boors of themselves by yawning like hippos and pawing the “broads,” and I was asked—no, told—never to bring them around again. But I still dressed like a Rocket, so this, too, became an issue. Or, as the limping woman, my section leader, a veteran Communist organizer, warned, “Bohemian is so bourgeois. The norms of comradeship require an appropriate response to the culture without surrendering to it.” I had no idea what she was talking about except that it sounded like a Jones Commercial sermon.

  A culture clash was inevitable. While I was keen on necking, petting, cussing, and chasing girls, AYD was dedicated to clean living, healthy exercise, and fresh air, like the Boy Scouts except without the hi-top boots. Whoever circulated the rumor that Bolsheviks were into free love was a liar or way out of date. I’d conned myself into the west side’s most conservative organization outside the synagogues.

  Again I tiptoed out of the meeting, meaning never to return, when from an adjoining room came the squalling sound of a guitar followed by young voices belting out a Sigmund Romberg showstopper with weird new lyrics. I paused in the hallway to listen.

  The sky was blue and high above

  The moon was new, so was love

  This eager heart of mine was singing

  Krupskaya,* where can you be?

  Ah
a, finally somebody with half a sense of humor. I opened the door into a whole new life.

  The voices belonged to Max Weinstock and two of the guys who had hustled him away from the street corner scuffle. Max and his friends, Arthur and Ginger, called themselves the “Corpuscle Trio” for no known reason except that they liked to get together in close part harmony, a sort of curbstone doowop version of the Mills Brothers adapted to Woody Guthrie lyrics with send-ups of Tin Pan Alley standards. Cool. When I asked to sit in, the Trio put it to a vote—everything was voted on—and that afternoon the group became the “Corpuscle Quartet.” For the rest of the war and beyond, until Senator Joe McCarthy and amnesia set in, that’s the way it would be, the four of us, just like the MGM film Three Comrades, plus one.

  Intensely competitive, dying of hormonal glut, fighters more than rebels, noisy and bad mannered, the Corpusclers were not anything like the lovable sleazeballs I was used to. Max and his friends had their eyes set on something we Rockets simply never thought about, the future. The future—hope—promise—a better day—singing tomorrows were written into the Communist songs and pamphlets and their perspective on life.

  If I had gone into a conventional Red branch I would have marched out again in ten seconds. I called it the “comrade kids” syndrome, patronizing and cynical at the same time. But the Corpusclers occupied a fringe of their own: quick to shoot down authority, they liked “doing the dozens” and making fun of their own party leadership, Marxist dogma and “marching into the dawn” type songs. Although loyal Communists—as I would become—they gave themselves plenty of room for satire and put-downs, erupting in their—our—versions of the Old Anthems (“I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night / In bed with Emma G / Says I to Joe you’re ten years dead / It never died says he”) or scatological jokes or defying the ever-changing party line with gags. Call it style. It angered the ancient members and the bureaucrats, who tried to shout us down, split us up, promote us, educate us out of our “absence of proletarian discipline,” a phrase we loved to roll about our tongues to see what new puns we could make of it. (Not very good ones, admittedly: “Absinthe makes the proles grow fonder.” Ugh.) Premature punks, we rampaged through the Chicago progressive movement drawing large audiences of wildly appreciative young fans and disapproving frowns from the party mandarins and Old Believers. Of course, it never occurred to me to bring Art, Max, and Ginger to my Flukey’s hangout joint. Innocenza Dominici would eat them up alive.

  Because the Corpusclers were smart and lively, the “downtown leadership” (party hacks) chose to honor, and cage, us with scholarships to a sort of West Point called the Abraham Lincoln School for budding “cadre,” or potential leaders. Our most charismatic teacher, Socrates to us disciples, was a musician and artist named Arthur Stern, a singer with Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger in the Almanacs, radical folkies who were the spiritual godfathers of Bob Dylan and Springsteen. Arthur Stern was pugnacious, irreverent, brilliant, analytical, scathing, generous, dogmatic, and loved young men. He put his stamp on us for years to come, tugging us out of childhood into a world of massive abstractions against which our main shield was sheer adolescent fuck-you. In time, each of us in turn was sent to the Lincoln School principal, an African-American super-Stalinist, for correctional lectures which only furnished more material for our improvised satires. We were not about to let ossified minds throttle back our idealism or our instinctive faith that by ourselves alone as Corpusclers we could remake the world, even if we had to do it as Communists.

  An American Comedy

  Normally, being radical is a good way to stay poor. That was certainly true of my mother and father. But, as I was to learn, if your timing and connections are right it can boost you right up the status ladder.

  Aside from teachers and probation officers, I had no personal contact with the middle class, the so-called “bourgeoisie.” Even at sixteen I had no higher ambition than to connect with the neighborhood lawyer Mr. Freyer and his daughter Annette, who clearly found me a social disaster. Without resentment, I had accepted their judgment; indeed, their silent censure released me from any obligation to aim above my station.

  But then one night the Corpuscle Quartet was asked to perform at a benefit at a south side Hyde Park venue, one of many we accepted because it was fun to sing our hearts out for an audience. But this was different from the workingclass picnics and halls we normally appeared at. The home belonged to a Chicago businessman whose daughter, let’s call her Antonia, was a young radical.

  I’d never in my life been in such a palatial palace, a three-storey Frank Lloyd Wright-style house with porches and eaves and low-slung wooden beams and a fabulous dance-hall-size living room with two grand pianos, a kitchen as big as our whole living quarters at the back of the Family Hand Laundry … and a separate bedroom for the parents, a walk-in closet and a whole room to herself for fifteen-year-old Antonia.

  I was impressed … and how! And so were Max and the homeless Ginger though Art, whose father was in work and therefore socially a micromillimetre above us, affected a gentle superiority to his surroundings. But not me. “Shut your mouth—you’re gawping like an ape waiting for his banana,” Max said.

  After we performed successfully to a room packed with middle class sympathizers, we sat cross-legged among them to listen to the next act, Big Joe Turner belting out the blues accompanied by the boogie-woogie Kansas stride artists Al Ammons and Pete Johnson. Two things immediately struck me staring up at them in astonishment. I had never before heard anything like this—Turner snapping his fingers and shouting “Roll ’em Pete” while Ammons and Johnson ran their fingers up and down the piano keys in a thundering locomotive of sound—until then my idea of music was Kay Kyser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge’s “Three Little Fishies”—hit me like a religious thunderbolt, and my life changed on the spot. And, gazing around at the guests, my eyes picked out the women all of whom seemed elegant beyond compare. They dressed and even stood still differently. Had I seen them in Lawndale I might not have given them a second glance. But they were here amidst all this glamor … and money. (Over a thousand dollars was raised: Orphan Annie’s Daddy Warbucks was here in spirit.)

  They may not have been wearing perfume but I smelled the difference.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald, in the persona of his fictional hero Amory in “This Side of Paradise,” famously envied the inherited arrogance of his Princeton classmates and their wealthy friends. But I did not want what these people had. For one thing, it was unimaginable. But, (almost) virgin as I was, I wanted every single woman there, to possess them. For me to rise into their comfortable middle class—those silk cut-on-the-bias dresses, that streamline moderne furniture!—was clearly an impossibility, and a betrayal of my convictions. But taking “their” women … that I could imagine.

  Thus, rock ’n roll—for that’s what Ammons, Johnson and Turner played—and a determination to have what the men in this room had—their women—entered my life at the same time.

  Even then I had read Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and identified strongly with its pathetic hero Clyde Griffiths, son of wandering preachers. He, too, had tried “getting up” through sex and ended up in the electric chair. Poor fool, he’d never heard of condoms.

  Jennie had taken care of that.

  Jennie now faced a Hobson’s choice. Her son—forget getting kicked out of high school, the neighbors’ gossip about his behavior, or the next-door rabbi’s outrage at atheistic slogans in Crayola crayon on his temple’s front steps—had strayed into her personal Land of Horrors by linking up with the despised Reds. She could expel me from her bosom as Leo Sigal had—or deal with me as she treated hecklers in the hall, kill them with kindness.

  Guess which.

  She kept her composure and armed herself accordingly. Whatever it took, she was determined to keep me as her son.

  Hospitality was her weapon of choice. Somehow she maneuvered me into inviting the Quartet up to our place for cookies and milk. (“What, I can’t ha
ndle young criminals? May I remind you, sir comrade, that when you were little we once had Homer Van Meter to breakfast.” Hey, yes. Van Meter, John Dillinger’s right hand man, blazed it out with cops in St. Paul and fell dead with a smoking .45 still in his hand. He’d been a distant pal of Dad’s.)

  I dreaded a confrontation between the Corpuscle Quartet and my Communist-hating mother. Grudgingly and ill-temperedly the Corpusclers swaggered up to the house on their worst behavior. Ginger, thin and wiry and salty-tongued, sauntered in as if he owned the place, kicked off his sneakers, and stretched out his smelly bare feet on the kitchen table and left them there as an insult to Jennie despite her unblinking stare at his filthy toes. Art loudly noted the absence of bookshelves. “Your mother doesn’t read? How interesting.” And Max, practically before he was across the threshold, baited and taunted Jennie as a “social fascist” while I kept a miserable cowardly silence.

  All the while, Jennie just kept smiling her all-American Mom smile in the face of their really mean blistering attacks, offering “More cookies?” instead of venom, slowly grinding them down with her civility. It drove the Corpusclers crazy.

  “What’s wrong with your mother?” Ginger demanded in her hearing. “Isn’t she a serious person?”

  She was infinitely more devious than anything they had ever met before.

  Soon the Corpusclers got into the habit of dropping by Jennie’s place any old time, to see, and provoke, and be comforted by her. She always kept fresh cholla and jam or Nabisco wafers and milk on hand for them, and I hung around just to watch Ma do her magic act, except that her hand was quicker than my eye and I never did catch her at it. Some kind of internal guidance system, a talent for enchantment, told her to use a different approach, even a different tone of voice, for each of the Corpusclers, around whom she slowly and protectively wove a net of maternal charm. Counterintuitively, she freely laid her hands on tall gawky Max, the group’s unofficial commissar, who hated being physically touched; gave a duplicate of our apartment key to Ginger, who was basically a homeless street orphan sometimes beaten by his half-insane stepmother; and sat with Art for hours teaching him Russian folk songs until he got the chords and intonation right. Ma’s intuition told her what each of them needed emotionally, what they lacked at home or, in Ginger’s case, no-home, and she gave of herself warmly, generously.