Quite likely, my mother wanted to take Rose in her arms and hold her for a while, as she’d so often wanted to do. But even now the stiffness was there in Rose and she could not breach the distance between them. And even in that moment the business of the parlour in England could not be forgotten.
My mother must have been choking back her tears. She managed to say, ‘Well, I hope we’ll be seeing you again soon.’
‘Not very soon,’ Rose said with her haughty accent, looking away from my mother.
‘You can’t come any sooner?’ my mother asked, with an attempt at humour.
Jim broke in quickly. ‘Don’t worry, Ma’ – he was already calling her Ma – ‘we’ll see you again very soon.’
I saw Rose give him a dirty look, the kind she often gave my mother, or any one of us, and I thought to myself, ‘Poor Jim.’ We did quite often in the future feel sorry for Jim.
They left, and my mother broke down then and went off to be by herself and weep. My father had not said goodbye to them. He was sitting with his back to the door, glowering darkly at the floor. I am sure he was thinking of the money Rose’s departure was going to cost him.
Chapter Fourteen
THE CHICAGO MAIN post office was a grim, dark, hulking building on Dearborn Street, with a tall flight of steps leading up to the entrance. From the outside it looked like a prison and for many of those working inside that’s what it was. I would soon find out.
On a cold February night, bundled in a heavy overcoat with earmuffs covering my ears under my cap, I mounted those steps and entered the building to begin my job as a substitute clerk.
A week earlier I had graduated from my four-year architectural course at Lane. Architecture was out of the question for me. My drawing teacher had made that plain to me after viewing my first house design. He had suggested also that I get a job on a garbage wagon. Instead, I took a civil service exam for the post office while still in my last year at Lane, realising then that I’d have to work for a few months to make enough money to go to college. My mother and I had argued about this before. She had wanted me to go straight to college and she still wanted it, but with less vigour than before. The fact was the loss of Rose’s income had made things difficult for her. As she might have expected, my father gave her no more to make it up than the little he had before, and history could have repeated itself, with her waiting and shivering every Saturday to see what he would dole out to her.
But it never reached that point. There were just two of us now for her to worry about, Sidney and myself, and I had a job and would soon be earning money that I could give her. It was not hard to pass the exam and soon afterwards, just about a week before graduation, I received a notice informing me there was a substitute clerk’s job available. And here I was on that bitterly cold night.
It was to be a night job and I had prepared beforehand by sleeping late that day. A guard directed me to the superintendent’s office. I had to climb two flights of narrow iron stairs to get there. Three other new men were there already, waiting for the superintendent to come in. We all stood silent, eyeing each other covertly out of the corners of our eyes.
One of them was wearing a racoon coat and I would learn later that this was Dave, a former student at Northwestern University, who like myself was here temporarily until he’d earned enough money to go back to college. The other two were Joe, a worried-looking fellow with a bad case of acne, and Shorty, a pot-bellied little man with a swarthy complexion, an Italian whose real name we quickly abandoned to call him by his well-earned nickname.
It wasn’t long before a large, burly man swung through the door and into the room calling out a jovial, ‘Good evening, boys.’
Yes, he’d called us ‘boys’ and we might have taken offence except that there was a friendliness about him that made up for it. He checked out our names, the letters of acceptance we’d brought with us, and gave us a bit of a pep talk about working for the government and the great future we could find working in the post office. He added a few other things, such as the importance of the job, the service we would be performing for the good of the country, and how we represented the cream of the crop, having passed an exam that hundreds of others had failed. Finally he said, ‘Now you boys just follow me and I’ll take you on a tour, and show you how a post office operates and the part you’re going to play in it.’
Dave and I exchanged glances and smiled. We had already sized each other up as kindred souls, a cut above the other two, and perhaps everyone else in the post office, one a college man already and the other soon to be, both of us tolerating our surroundings through necessity. Dave was about a year older than I was and it would turn out that we had much in common, particularly in our thinking.
The four of us tramped along, with the burly superintendent leading us, and it came as a bit of a surprise to us when he opened a heavy door and led us into the mailing room. We had not been prepared for the din, the whirring of belts overhead, the rattling of metal cans, the shouting of voices and the strange sight of rows of men standing in front of stacks of wooden cases that were divided into pigeon holes with each one marked with the name of a state. The men were holding bundles of letters in one hand and with the other hand were thrusting letters into the various pigeon holes, their arms going back and forth swiftly like machines.
Shouting over the din in a voice that grew slightly hoarse, the superintendent announced that this was the room where we would be working most of the time. This was the mail sorting room.
Once again Dave and I glanced at one another, but this time without smiling. We were both thinking the same thing. The exam we took to get in here had specified a clerk’s job. That meant working at a desk. I had dressed accordingly for it, putting on my best brown double-breasted suit that had served me well over the years with occasional alterations by my mother to accommodate my growing figure, and that I put on only for special occasions. Dave had done the same thing with his best blue serge suit. We both wore starched white shirts and ties that matched the suits. Yet, looking around, we saw rows of men working in their shirtsleeves, some without shirts at all but simply the top parts of their BVDs, or sweaters.
Was this a clerk’s job?
I know I reserved judgement and gave myself a little more time. Perhaps I had been mistaken. I paid little attention to the rest of the tour. It was a blur through which I saw vaguely other parts of the post office workrooms, the second-class, the third-class room, the parcel post, the weighing machines, the stamp windows. I was too preoccupied battling my disappointment and wondering where I would land up eventually.
It was the mailing room, with its factory-like atmosphere, and all my hopes were dashed. The superintendent brought us back there with a few more words spoken in the same jovial tone as when we’d started. ‘Here you are again, boys,’ he said. ‘This is where you’ll be every night from now on. It’ll soon feel like home. Next time I see any one of you I hope it’ll be twenty years from now when you come to my office to apply for your retirement. Good luck.’
Then he was off, and a thin, spidery man with a pallid complexion and head cocked to one side as if he might be seeking something, suddenly appeared with a small notebook and pencil in one hand, and in a squeaky voice began assigning each of us to one of the cases. I discovered later that he was one of the foremen who went around keeping watch on the men to see they kept working. They all carried the same kind of notebook and pencil, and just as it was done in the mail order house where my brother had worked, demerits were given to those who broke a rule.
One good thing happened that pleased Dave and myself. We were assigned to cases next to one another. We soon got to know each other. Warned by the sight of the spidery foreman hovering nearby, we talked out of the corners of our mouths while keeping our eyes on the pigeon holes and tossing mail into them from the piles that had been dumped on to the ledge in front of each of us. The pile never lessened. It was replenished continuously by a man wheeling a wagon loaded with the mai
l that had been collected from the mailboxes by carriers. There was no end to it. The arms in front of the cases flashed back and forth. It went on and on through the night.
But for Dave and myself there was some relief in our talk. He’d had one year at Northwestern. He lived in Evanston still, not far from the university, in a small furnished flat with a sister, who was also a student at the university and still there. They came from a small town in southern Illinois where their father was a minister. There hadn’t been enough money for both of them. Dave had to take time off college to work and finance his way through another year.
I was in the same boat, practically. I told him about myself, how I’d just graduated from Lane Tech where I’d tried to become an architect, but now thought I wanted to be a writer, and talking helped pass the time and break the dull monotony of the work. But without realising it we had grown careless and forgot to lower our voices, especially when Dave began to tell jokes, of which he had an inexhaustible stock, most of them dirty, and he soon had me convulsed with laughter and the mail tumbled out of my hand.
Suddenly, I felt a tap on the shoulder and a thin, squeaky voice was saying, ‘What’s your name?’
I turned round. It was the spidery foreman. He had his notebook and pencil poised ready for writing. I gave him my name. He wrote it down. He wrote something else. ‘You get ten demerits,’ he said, then he turned to Dave and was saying, ‘What’s your name?’
So Dave and I started our careers in the post office auspiciously with ten demerits each.
The shift began at eight. Somewhere around midnight the foremen went round the rows of cases bawling out through cupped hands, ‘Everybody to lunch!’
There was no time lost. Letters were dropped instantly on to the ledges and the rush commenced for the narrow iron stairs. Dave and I kept together. We followed the others down two flights of stairs to the basement and into the din of the cafeteria, the rattle of crockery and metal trays, the chatter of voices, laughter and the smell of food. A haze of cigarette smoke half covered the scene, men sitting at tables eating or playing cards or simply lounging in between the various shifts. Dave and I trailed after others alongside the steam tables with trays in our hands, selecting our food, and we were able to find an empty table. Joe and Shorty soon joined us.
We got to know these two. Shorty was probably the oldest among us, but he was vague about his life. Maybe he’d had so many different kinds of jobs he could no longer remember them. He was certain of one thing: he was going to be rich some day. The post office was only a stopgap for him, too. Right now he was working on an invention for a new kind of wine press that would bring him a fortune. He was also writing a play – about a girl who went wrong and was driven out of her home by an intolerant father.
Dave and I winked at one another. It was obvious to us that Shorty was a nut. Joe didn’t say anything. It was hard to say how he felt about Shorty. Joe was inclined to be silent. He gave us little information about himself, the kind of jobs he’d had. Then one thing came out that astonished us. He was married. And he had four kids. Four! We let out gasps. He couldn’t have been much older than Dave. And he was married and had four kids – eh, wait a minute! – Joe was grinning, he’d been holding something back. ‘You can call it practically five,’ he said.
‘What!’ Dave and I yelled it simultaneously. Shorty just sat looking blank.
Joe nodded. He was still grinning. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘In about another month.’
‘Holy smothering Moses,’ Dave said. ‘Then you’ll probably be working in this dump for the rest of your life.’
Joe shrugged. It didn’t seem to bother him. Then he said, ‘I’ve had worse jobs.’
‘You have?’ Dave said, and I shared the incredulity that he felt. ‘Such as what?’ he asked.
Joe didn’t answer. He simply shrugged. ‘Working for the government isn’t so bad,’ he said. ‘After twenty years you can retire and they give you a good pension.’
‘Twenty years in this place would drive me up the wall. I’d never make it. They’d be carrying me out in a straitjacket after one year,’ Dave said.
I agreed with him, absolutely, but there wasn’t time to say much more then. We only got half an hour for lunch, then a bell rang and we went back up the narrow iron stairs to the mailing room.
Chapter Fifteen
WE WERE SO sure of ourselves, Dave and I, as confident of our future as so many people were in those heady times. Prosperity filled the air. People were becoming millionaires in the stock market. There seemed to be no end to it all. Dave and I felt part of it and we were filled with pity for people like Joe and Shorty, who’d never get anywhere in life and who’d probably be working in the post office for the rest of their lives. We weren’t like them. We were going places.
In the meantime, we had to put up with this grind as the nights of dull, monotonous work went on. It never varied and the piles of mail dumped on you never lessened. The hours dragged with interminable slowness. You stood in one place hour after hour, with only your arms in motion. And then there came something else. It was sprung on us suddenly one night. The scheme.
‘What’s this?’ Dave asked, looking at the stack of small white cards fastened with a rubber band that the spidery foreman had tossed on to his ledge. He was carrying a basket filled with them. He tossed one over my shoulder on to my ledge. I looked at it. There were street names with postal areas on the cards. There were about two hundred of them in the package.
‘Yeah, what is it?’ I asked.
An older man standing at the other side of Dave said, ‘That’s your scheme.’
‘What’s it for?’ Dave asked.
The older man answered, keeping his eyes on the case in front of him, tossing mail into it, speaking out of the corner of his mouth. He was an ex-newspaper man who’d been working here ten years. He was quite expert at sideways conversation. His name was Tomlinson.
‘It’s a present from the postmaster general. You’ll soon be getting a letter from him telling you all about it. And it’ll tell you that you’ve got to memorise every single one of those fucking names – or you get kicked out.’
He was right. The letter came the following day and informed us that we would be tested on the scheme and if we failed to pass the test the post office would regretfully ask for our resignation. The letter also congratulated us on having entered the postal service. Other new men had received the letter and their little bundle of cards, and most of them lost no time memorising the names on the cards. It occupied every moment of their spare time. You could see them in the cafeteria, sitting at the tables, turning the cards over and mumbling to themselves. Joe and Shorty were among them and they shunned our company at the table so that they could be by themselves to study their scheme. And I have no doubt that this went on when they were at their homes, and when they were riding on streetcars to and from work.
I made a feeble attempt myself at studying the cards, but gave it up almost immediately. Dave did the same thing. We scoffed at the others. They weren’t fit for anything else.
‘It’s just a lot of shit,’ Dave stated.
I agreed with him. We were both inclined to quit right then, but we didn’t. I loathed the place and the job, and couldn’t wait to get out of there at night. The shift varied in the length of time you worked. We were being paid by the hour and it could end late or early, depending on how much mail had been brought in. Often Dave tried to get me to go with him to one of the all-night entertainment spots he knew so well and visited so frequently. He spent his money freely, on clothes a good deal of it, always buying a new tie or some fancy shirt, and much on these nightspots. He knew of a speakeasy not far from the post office that attracted a lot of men from there on pay day, since it doubled as a whorehouse. Dave tried hard to get me to go there with him, but I refused. I was afraid of clap and syphilis, and besides I was saving my money. I knew that I was going to need it, for college and to give to my mother while I was away.
At last, at last, the streetcar came lumbering along. I would let the charwomen go in first with their buckets and brooms and mops, and I would follow into the stale but welcome warmth, and would sit near a window and watch the dark streets roll past and the harsh grinding of the streetcar wheels would often lull me to sleep.
I usually got home around three in the morning and immediately went to bed. At first, when I had just started working at the post office, I had difficulty falling asleep, and when I did it was with nightmares of tons of mail flashing before my eyes, and addresses with names like Robinson and Melrose and Teitelbaum and Richards and street numbers and states like Iowa, Nebraska, California, Florida, and letters and more letters, and more states, Washington, Oregon, Ohio …
Gradually, however, after I had grown accustomed to working there, these nightmares vanished and I slept soundly, and did not awaken until it was almost noon. My mother was alone in the house. Sidney was at school and of course my father was at work, and it was pleasant being with her and seeing her smile.
‘So how was it?’ she would ask.
‘Oh, fine,’ I would say.
I told her nothing about my discontent, the intolerable dullness and monotony of the job, and the scheme that had to be learned. I told her nothing about Dave, either. I didn’t want to spoil the pleasure she was having at the way things seemed to have worked out. I was making good money in her opinion. ‘Enough’, she boasted to the relatives, ‘to get married on.’ It was her measure of any man’s worth. I was getting paid by the hour, 50 cents an hour, which was considered quite good in those days. It came to about $25 a week, which was far more than my brothers or sister had earned, and I gave my mother a good portion of it, enough so that she didn’t have to beg my father for more money every week. I still went with her to the bank, where she deposited her $2 or $3 proudly into an account that by now had reached a little over $50.
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