by Clancy Sigal
He’d read it!
I said I’d made up that part about him out of literary license and my worst fears about his fate. He said, “You better get that license renewed. I’m doing pretty well on Social Security.”
All the time I was there, Dad examined me closely as if not quite believing I existed. He was making up his mind about something and waiting for Sarah to disappear again.
Then: “Confidentially,” leaning in to speak out of the side of his mouth, getting right down to it, “your mother and I were crazy for each other. Couldn’t keep our hands off. But it was hell when we were together. She had a mouth on her like a river of fire.” He sat back with folded arms. Before I could react, he threw in, “Children bore me. But I’m a great-grandfather. Ask Percy.”
He paused, looked to the ceiling, clasped and unclasped his fingers, stared me into the carpet, set his jaw, and decided with a long sigh. “Okay kid, it’s time.”
And came clean about the whole thing.
“Her name was Lena,” he said.
Lena was his first wife, Dad revealed, by whom he had a son and a daughter, whom he abandoned for Jennie and to whom, “after some adventures we don’t want to get into right now,” he had returned after leaving Jennie and me. Boom, that was it.
So I had a new half brother and half sister out there somewhere. Dad had kept putting off our meeting to give himself time to prepare his “real children” (his phrase) for the shock of a surprise brother. “Your sister is all right with it, she can’t wait to see you, but your brother, he’s having a problem.”
I waited. More, surely. Just this?
With many detours the rest of the story came out.
They—Jennie and Leo—had met in New York in 1919 on the crest of a national general strike wave and had fallen hard for each other. Leo believed he saw in Jennie the sexier, laughing, militant, experience-hungry rebel girl that his legal wife may once have been but wasn’t anymore. And Jennie saw in him exactly what? Dad flashed a grin. “You kidding? I was an eagle, flying, up way up, nobody could touch me, she thought I’d snatch her with my claws and swoop her to the top of the mountain. That was the plan. God thought otherwise.”
He’d been a married man with two young children, my mother a twenty-four-year-old bohemian virgin with four pissed-off brothers who had sworn a virtual blood oath on Leo Sigal after the sudden collapse in anguish of their widowed mother on hearing my father spring his brazen proposal—“a negotiating point,” he called it to me—to split his domestic life equally between his legitimate family in the Bronx and Jennie at the Persily house on Manhattan’s Twelfth Street. Uproar, bellows of outrage, threats, shouts. Pursued by the Persily wrath and the puritan furies of the socialist movement, Jennie and Leo fled west into the American industrial heartland to make a new life. “Your mother’s family made it tough for us to earn a living in New York so we kept moving around, pulling up stakes, even after you came along. We’d make out somehow. We had each other, the movement and, what the hell, we were young.”
“That,” concluded Dad, “was when my bad luck started.”
“When was that?”
“The day you were born.”
It stung like he had torn open my eyelid.
Until now, I’d kept my feelings in check. Why is he speaking to me like this? I couldn’t reach down deep enough to find my rage and sadness. It may have showed on my face.
“You came here today for a reason, right? Don’t be yellow. It’s just you and me. Don’t go soft on me.”
I asked who Percy was.
“My son Phil. A pet name.”
Except that Dad kept calling me Percy all afternoon.
I took out my notebook again.
By now, the living ghost of Jennie had taken her usual place at my right hand, invisible except to me. Her large open freckled face was rapt and profoundly unconvinced by Dad’s tale. But I bought it.
Nothing would stop him now from telling it his way in a stream of consciousness, Jackson Pollack dripping on the canvas, carelessly rattling off like a memory machine gun.
“The General Strike … cigarette girls wanted a nickel an hour more … William Z. Foster … Red bastard … the Amalgamated … Executive Board … per capita … Teamster goons … Ralph Capone that momser … the shooting in Gary—no wait, it was Whiting, Indiana—”
“The what where?” I asked.
“—Carmichael tossed you over the counter and you bumped your head and Jennie went crazy when we got home, your skull is fractured, you’re going to die, the sky is falling … she always wanted you a sissy, succeeded, too, by the look.”
Tell me about Gary or Whiting, Dad. It really happened?
But when he saw how curious I was about the shooting episode, he clammed up and then changed the subject. He was on a roll, conjuring up fairy tales about our “many” idyllic times together as father and son fishing in the lake.
What lake? What fish?
“Our luck held till she got pregnant, and I put my foot down and said one more is too much for me to handle, but she wanted you and I gave in, your mother was too strong for me, what could I do? Teamster hoodlums chased us out of Chicago that time. I wanted to buy another gun, like in Flint. Your mother said no more guns, said we had to protect you. You, you, always you. So we sold the store and ran.” Spitting out the word ran. “You made me run. Always you.”
Dad looked over his shoulder to locate Sarah, still in the kitchen boiling and reboiling the same kettle. His knee touched mine. “Your mother,” he spoke low, “a wonderful woman, wonderful mother. Her luck, too, changed for the worse when she met me, I’m sorry to say.” Then leaned in to whisper.
“And just between you and me,” he repeated, “when you came along, no offense, everything went …” his hand dived and fluttered to mimic an airplane spiralling out of control. “Get my meaning?”
He sat back to assess the damage. “Your mother and I, crazy for each other.” Another look into the kitchen. “Crazy.”
He yawned. “Percy, what kind of name is Clarence? I begged her to nix it. Such a cross to bear. Clarence.”
“Does Percy know about me, Dad?”
“Don’t try to see him.”
“If you say so,” I said.
He sized me up again. “Not much of a scrapper, are you, kid? Living in England all this time make you a gentleman? You haven’t changed. That time in Chicago. I made you fight them. You’ve forgotten. I thought writers had good memories.”
Christ. He remembered how I’d fled from a bunch of boys and he’d shoved me back at them. He despised cowards, whom he called “yellowbellies.”
I felt the same way. What kind of son runs away from fights, or when trapped screams like a girl and pulls hair and scratches with his nails and flinches away from a kishke jab? I carried Dad’s genes but not his nerve.
Jennie leaned over from her perch on the arm of my chair and reminded me of something she’d said on one of those nights we’d lain together in the big four-poster in the back of the Family Hand Laundry waiting for Dad and his fury to come home. In the darkness, she’d given a little laugh. “He tries, your father. He didn’t bargain for all this. He’s a fighting man, not a married man.”
I put my notebook away again and Dad nodded triumphantly at my gesture of resignation. His look was almost tender. “Percy,” he said softly, “we did not intend a rough deal for you. I read your book. You are a troubled person. Don’t be a sorehead. It won’t get you anywhere. Be a man. What choice do you have?”
He stood up and said, “Sarah! Clarence is going!”
Clarence. That was something.
Sarah parted the fringed curtain that separated kitchen from living room, nervously wiping her hands on her apron. I embraced her and she hugged me back, tears in her eyes. Dad stuck his skinny paw out a mile to block me from wrapping him in my arms, and I brushed it aside to try to crush him to death, inhaling that familiar aroma of cigars and shirt starch. He almost fell over from surprise.
“Walk him downstairs,” Sarah suggested. Dad threw her a dirty look but got me to the door. We went out to the hall and down the narrow, dark-carpeted stairs without talking. Outside on Nelson Avenue he gestured at passersby and said loud enough for them to hear: “Puerto Ricans. Negroes. I don’t mind, but Sarah’s scared of the colored. We’re moving to a new housing development in Long Island.” I mumbled something. “If there’s nothing there, if it’s like the English new towns, don’t worry, I’ll organize something.”
He was, he said, active in the Bronx section of the Social-Democratic Federation, a collection of old-time socialists, tough little Jews with long memories. Then, “You still a big time red?” My name he forgets, but not that. I wondered if he even remembered his letter disowning me? I wanted to say something that didn’t sound contrite or weak. He’d hate that. “Dad,” I said mimicking Popeye the Sailor Man, “I yam what I yam and that’s what I yam.”
That got him. He shrugged, “You’re a funny kid, you know.” For the first and only time I felt that, father and son, we both got it at the same time.
He walked me to the IRT subway stop a block away, boldly staring down the lounging teenagers we passed on front stoops who gave us the city scowl. The set of Dad’s body, his vigilant eyes, dared them to take New York, his city, away from him. My old man. What balls.
We stopped for a traffic light on the corner. Nothing more to say.
At the IRT station he stopped and cocked his head at me. “Physically,” he announced, “I’m a champ in my weight class. Emotionally, I’m yellow. Maybe that’s where you get it from, Percy.”
What a parting shot. He pointed me down the subway stairs. As I went down, he shouted his goodbye.
“I made my mark! I took part!”
He walked away.
Dad died the following year in his Bronx apartment while watching John Wayne on TV in She Wore A Yellow Ribbon. From London, I rang his wife, Sarah, who was terribly kind. Did he say anything about me? After a long pause, she lied. “Of course. All the time. After all, you were his son.”
I was his son, too. Maybe not exactly beau ideal of what a real boy should be, but his son nonetheless. Not until I began researching Jennie’s story did I realize how much of my life belonged to her, but also how much of it had been, possibly still is, devoted to gaining Leo Sigal’s approval. All the time I thought I was acting autonomously I was fulfilling his pattern of kicking in doors that were wide open and bashing my head against doors made of stone. I wanted to be like him and to be liked by him for all the “incorrect” reasons—his macho swagger and Homburg-hat-cocked-over-one-eye style, his pugnacity, and his fighter’s stance in the world. I admired him and probably still do. So today, like Jennie, he watches over me, Old Cyclops Eye forever pushing me to mix it up and face the music. “You’re a tough kid,” he used to tell me in my most cowardly moments, “so act tough.” Camus and Sartre couldn’t have said it better.
The emotion comes too late, as it usually does. Waiting to give love is possibly the greatest sin of all. I am blessed by a mother who everyone but Joe and I believe is dead and gone. But at any moment I expect her to swoop up Joe in her arms as only grandmothers can.
Leo Sigal is something else. A part of me wants to protect Joe from the Leo-in-me, the troubled eagle wildly thrashing its wings, and part of me wants to have a long earnest talk with Dad about sons and fathers. Problems aside, it would be good, if only because my Joe, over five feet tall and big and strong, and I already have “issues” the more he becomes like a younger version of me. Joe listens to the “wrong” music and has the “wrong” friends and his changeup slider isn’t what it could be and any moment now I expect him to reinvent the Kedzie alley rubber gun.
I want to break the cycle of misplaced hate and violence that probably began somewhere in the depths of a Russian forest as my father’s father’s father escaped through the birch trees from wildly plunging Cossack horsemen slashing their way with sabres to catch the Jew who drinks the blood of newborn babes on Passover eve. If responsibility begins in dreams, I want my son to live unshackled from anxieties he did not create, terrors and fears he doesn’t own, the hidden, fist-in-the-mouth reflex signifying a human reaction to overwhelming chaos. It stops with me, maybe here.
Epilogue
Los Angeles, Today
Speed bonnie boat like a bird on the wing
Onward the sailors cry
Carry the lad that’s born to be king
Over the sea to Skye
—Old English lullaby
JOE SOMETIMES COMES OUT with me jogging on the red-cindered track at Beverly Hills high school, where I go evenings before the setting sun backlights Century City against the Hello, Dolly set of Fox Studios. When I run alone, Jennie’s voice speaks to me from behind the athletic scoreboard by the carcinogenic oil well just down the hill from the Century City high-rise where Bruce Willis stood off all those terrorists in Die Hard. These are my private moments with “Granma Jennie,” as Joe calls her. My speaking out loud to her passes unnoticed by the trim, tanned Spandexed entertainment lawyers and aerobically top-of-the-line, sweater-tied-at-midriff, Oliver Peeples-shades-on-scalp Beverly Hills wives, all serious Botox and triple diamond and platinum renewal-vow rings, because almost all the joggers are chattering into neck-clamp cell phones, looking at least as loony as me talking into the dry California air.
From behind the scoreboard, Jennie passes the word. “Get Joe to drop the “Granma,” will you? I may be gone, but I’m not passé.” “Ma,” I say, “I’ll try, but you know what a stubborn kid he is.” “I wonder where he gets it from,” she says.
Then Joe shows up in his Carolina Mudcats baseball uniform and falls in step beside me. “How’s Granma Jennie?” he asks casually.
“She says to stop calling her Granma,” I say.
“Why?”
“Vanity,” I say.
“What’s vanity?” he asks.
“It goes with being a Sigal.”
We do one slow lap. The sun is gone now but not the strong hot Santa Ana breeze.
“Can we go home now?” Joe asks.
“Say good-night to Jennie first.”
Joe stops on the track so that the lawyers and second wives have to detour around him. He opens his arms in a wide panoramic embrace and turns in all four directions like a Native American to the elements.
“See you tomorrow, Jennie! I’m hungry.”
Image Gallery
Acknowledgments
THIS ACCOUNT OF JENNIE’S life has involved a number of people who helped me peel away the layers of dust and evasion.
In the actual writing, thanks to Amy Scholder, who gave me the professional push I needed to see the whole in perspective.
A special thanks to Dr. Barry Cohen whose office and patience I used to lay out this book’s pages.
To Sam Stoloff and Frances Goldin my gratitude for demonstrating perseverance above and beyond the call of duty.
This book could not have been written without the memories and assistance of the “Chicago gang”: Ron Grossman and Diane Wagner, Jack Weinberg, and of course Studs Terkel, who fought hard to see this come to birth. I am also grateful for those graduates of Howland Elementary, Marshall High, and Jones Commercial High who wish to remain anonymous.
Over the years I have plundered the formidable Persily clan for stories, tales, fragments, and remembrances of Jennie Persily and Leo Sigal. Thanks to Coleman (Charlie) Persily—viva the Lincoln Battalion!—his wife Pearl, and sons Fred and Harold, and Harold’s wife Christy; cousin Ida, bless her; my cousins Claire and Bernard Persily; Joan Levinson, and Persilys no longer with us, Fannie and Clem.
Harriet Glickman, who knew Jennie so well has been an invaluable source of testimony.
Robert Berkovitz has been most generous in sharing memories of our life together and in GVS, the old neighborhood. His support and assistance have been invaluable.
In Los Angeles I have been encouraged by the shre
wd advice of Frances Ring, as always.
Suzanne Potts helped to de-clutter my mind and my files. My thanks for their staunch support, and love of Joe, to Eliane Parisi and Alda Aguinaga.
For technical and moral support my hat is off to James Spottiswoode and Constance Meyer and their daughters Natasha and Tatiana, and to Roger Spottiswoode.
Corky Gordon kept my chapters safe and welcome as I wrote them.
My early reading of Grover Lewis’s unfinished memoir “Goodbye If You Call That Gone” showed me how it could be done. Many thanks to Rae Lewis and to Grover now resting in Texas heaven.
And to all of the Tidwells, especially Joe and Sue, my anchor in life.
Index
A | B | C | D | E
F | G | H | I | J
K | L | M | N | O
P | R | S | T
U | V | W | Y | Z
AFL (American Federation of Labor), 32, 181
African Americans, 23, 76-77
American Tragedy (Dreiser), 246
Andy Hardy films, 109
antisemitism, 40, 71, 88
epithets, 185
Father Coughlin radio program, 101-102
high school, 174-175, 213
and interracial dating, 218-222
Russia, 10-11
Southern, 19, 20, 22
U.S. armed forces, 170
armed forces, 170, 226. see also World War II
arson, 140-141
Ball, Lucille, 257
baseball, 105, 150-152, 153
Battle of the Viaduct, 32
Beatty, Warren, 138
Berkman, Alexander, 138
Blossoms in the Dust (film), 146
bomb, thrown through window, 147-149
bourgeoisie, 244-246
boxing lessons, 82-84, 178-179
brick, thrown through window, 134-137
