They took Ella Rice to the city hospital, the only one that admitted black people. She had a healthy boy baby, and Hal paid for it.
Hal and Mary brought her and the baby back to their new house. The old house was on the market. And Mary, who couldn’t have a baby herself, fixed up one of the seven bedrooms for mother and child, with cute furniture and wallpaper and toys the baby wasn’t old enough to play with. Mother and child had their own bathroom.
The baby was christened in a black church, and Mary was there. Hal wasn’t. He and Mary were hardly speaking. Ella named the baby Irwin, in honor of the people who were so good to her. His last name was the same as hers. He was Irwin Rice.
Mary had never loved Hal, but had managed to like him. It was a job. There weren’t many ways for women to earn their own money back then, and she hadn’t inherited anything, and wouldn’t unless Hal died. Hal was no dumber than most men she’d known. She certainly didn’t want to be alone. They had a black yard man and a black laundress, and a white housemaid from Ireland, who lived in the mansion. Mary insisted on doing the cooking. Ella Rice offered to do it, at least for herself. But nobody except Mary was allowed to cook.
She hated the new house so much, and the gigantic car, which embarrassed her, that she couldn’t even like Hal anymore. This was very tough on Hal, extremely tough, as you can well imagine. Not only was he not getting love, or what looked like love, from the woman he’d married, but she was giving ten times more love than he’d ever gotten, and nonstop, to a baby as black as the ace of spades!
Hal didn’t tell anybody at the office about the situation at home, because it would have made him look like a weakling. The housemaid from Ireland treated him like a weakling, as though Mary were the real power, and crazy as a bedbug.
Ella Rice of course made her own bed, and kept her bedroom and bathroom very neat. Things didn’t seem right to her, either, but what could she do? Ella nursed the baby, so its food was all taken care of. Ella didn’t eat downstairs with the Irwins. Not even Mary considered that a possibility. Ella didn’t eat with the servants in the kitchen, either. She brought upstairs whatever Mary had prepared especially for her, and ate it in her bedroom.
At the office, anyway, Hal was making more money than ever, trading stocks and bonds for others, but also investing heavily for himself in stocks, never mind bonds, on margin. “On margin” meant he paid only a part of the full price of a stock, and owed the rest to the brokerage where he worked. And then the stock’s value would go up, because other people wanted it, and Hal would sell it. He could then pay off his debt to the brokerage, and the rest of the profit was his to keep.
So he could buy more stock on margin.
Three months after the magic-lamp episode, the stock market crashed. The stocks Hal had bought on margin became worthless. All of a sudden, everybody thought they were too expensive at any price. So what Hal Irwin owed to his brokerage, and what his brokerage owed to a bank in turn, was more than everything he owned—the new house, the unsold old house, the furniture, the car, and on and on. You name it!
He wasn’t loved at home even in good times, so Hal went out a seventh-story window without a parachute. All over the country, unloved men in his line of work were going out windows without parachutes. The bank foreclosed on both houses, and took the Marmon, too. Then the bank went bust, and anybody with savings in it lost those savings.
Mary had another house to go to, which was her widowed father’s farm outside the town of Crawfordsville. The only place Ella Rice could think of to go with her baby was the black church where the baby had been baptized. Mary went there with them. A lot of mothers with babies or children, and old people, and cripples, and even perfectly healthy young people were sleeping there. There was food. Mary didn’t ask where it came from. That was the last Mary would see of Ella and Irwin Rice. Ella was eating, and then she would nurse the baby.
When Mary got to her father’s farmhouse, the roof was leaking and the electricity had been shut off. But her father took her in. How could he not? She told him about the homeless people in the black church. She asked him what he thought would become of them in such awful times.
“The poor take care of the poor,” he said.
Coda to My Career
as a Writer
for Periodicals
Some of these stories have been edited for this book, with minor and major glitches repaired, which editors and I should have repaired before they were printed the first time. Rereading three of them so upset me, because the premise and the characters of each were so promising, and the denouement so asinine, that I virtually rewrote the denouement before I could stop myself. Some “editing”! They are “The Powder-Blue Dragon,” “The Boy Who Hated Girls,” and “Hal Irwin’s Magic Lamp.” As fossils, they are fakes on the order of Piltdown Man, half human being, half the orangutan I used to be.
No matter how clumsily I wrote when I was starting out, there were magazines that would publish such orangutans. And there were others that, to their credit, would not touch my stuff with rubber gloves. I wasn’t offended or ashamed. I understood. I was nothing if not modest. I remember a cartoon I saw long ago, in which a psychiatrist was saying to a patient, “You don’t have an inferiority complex. You are inferior.” If the patient could afford a psychiatrist, he was earning a living somehow, despite his genuine inferiority. That was my case, too, and the evidence seems to be that I got better.
Thanks to popular magazines, I learned on the job to be a fiction writer. Such paid literary apprenticeships, with standards of performance so low, don’t exist anymore. Mine was an opportunity to get to know myself. Those who wrote for self-consciously literary publications had this advantage, their talent and sophistication aside: They already knew what they could do and who they were.
There may be more Americans than ever now embarking on voyages of self-discovery like mine, by writing stories, come hell or high water, as well as they can. I lecture at eight colleges and universities each year, and have been doing so for two decades. Half of those one hundred sixty institutions have a writer-in-residence and a course in creative writing. When I quit General Electric to become a writer, there were only two such courses, one at the University of Iowa, the other at Stanford, which my President’s daughter now attends.
Given that it is no longer possible to make a living writing short stories, and that the odds against a novel’s being successful are a thousand to one, creative-writing courses could be perceived as frauds, as would pharmacy courses if there were no drugstores. Be that as it may, students themselves demanded creative writing courses while they were demanding so many other things, passionately and chaotically, during the Vietnam War.
What students wanted and got, and what so many of their children are getting, was a cheap way to externalize what was inside them, to see in black-and-white who they were and what they might become. I italicize cheap because it takes a ton of money to make a movie or a TV show. Never mind that you have to deal with the scum of the earth if you try to make one.
There are on many campuses, moreover, local papers, weeklies or monthlies, that publish short stories but cannot pay for them. What the heck, practicing an art isn’t a way to earn money. It’s a way to make one’s soul grow.
Bon voyage.
I still write for periodicals from time to time, but never fiction, and only when somebody asks me to. I am not the dynamic self-starter I used to be. An excellent alternative weekly in Indianapolis, NUVO, asked me only a month ago to write an essay for no pay on the subject of what it is like to be a native Middle Westerner. I have replied as follows:
“Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, who never to himself has said, this is my own, my native land!”
This famous celebration of no-brainer patriotism by the Scotsman Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), when stripped of jingoistic romance, amounts only to this: Human beings come into this world, for their own good, as instinctively territorial as timber wolves or honeybees. Not lon
g ago, human beings who strayed too far from their birthplace and relatives, like all other animals, would be committing suicide.
This dread of not crossing well-understood geographical boundaries still makes sense in many parts of the world, in what used to be Yugoslavia in Europe, for example, or Rwanda in Africa. It is, however, now excess instinctual baggage in most of North America, thank God, thank God. It lives on in this country, as obsolescent survival instincts often do, as feelings and manners that are by and large harmless, that can even be comical.
Thus do I and millions like me tell strangers that we are Middle Westerners, as though we deserved some kind of a medal for being that. All I can say in our defense is that natives of Texas and Brooklyn are even more preposterous in their territorial vanity.
Nearly countless movies about Texans and Brooklynites are lessons for such people in how to behave ever more stereotypically. Why have there been no movies about supposedly typical Middle Western heroes, models to which we, too, might then conform?
All I’ve got now is an aggressively nasal accent.
About that accent: When I was in the Army during the Second World War, a white Southerner said to me, “Do you have to talk that way?”
I might have replied, “Oh, yeah? At least my ancestors never owned slaves,” but the training session at the rifle range at Fort Bragg in North Carolina seemed neither the time nor the place to settle his hash.
I might have added that some of the greatest words ever spoken in American history were uttered with just such a Jew’s-harp twang, including the Gettysburg Address of Abraham Lincoln of Illinois and these by Eugene V. Debs of Terre Haute, Indiana: “While there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
I would have kept to myself that the borders of Indiana, when I was a boy, cradled not only the birthplace of Eugene V. Debs, but the national headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan.
Illinois had Carl Sandburg and Al Capone.
Yes, and the thing on top of the house to keep the weather out is the ruff, and the stream in back of the house is the crick.
Every race and subrace and blend thereof is native to the Middle West. I myself am a purebred Kraut. Our accents are by no means uniform. My twang is only fairly typical of European-Americans raised some distance north of the former Confederate States of America. It appeared to me when I began this essay that I was on a fool’s errand, that we could be described en masse only as what we weren’t. We weren’t Texans or Brooklynites or Californians or Southerners, and so on.
To demonstrate to myself the folly of distinguishing us, one by one, from Americans born anywhere else, I imagined a crowd on Fifth Avenue in New York City, where I am living now, and another crowd on State Street in Chicago, where I went to a university and worked as a reporter half a century ago. I was not mistaken about the sameness of the faces and clothing and apparent moods.
But the more I pondered the people of Chicago, the more aware I became of an enormous presence there. It was almost like music, music unheard in New York or Boston or San Francisco or New Orleans.
It was Lake Michigan, an ocean of pure water, the most precious substance in all this world.
Nowhere else in the Northern Hemisphere are there tremendous bodies of pure water like our Great Lakes, save for Asia, where there is only Lake Baikal. So there is something distinctive about native Middle Westerners, after all. Get this: When we were born, there had to have been incredible quantities of fresh water all around us, in lakes and streams and rivers and raindrops and snowdrifts, and no undrinkable salt water anywhere!
Even my taste buds are Middle Western on that account. When I swim in the Atlantic or the Pacific, the water tastes all wrong to me, even though it is in fact no more nauseating, as long as you don’t swallow it, than chicken soup.
There were also millions and millions of acres of topsoil around us and our mothers when we were born, as flat as pool tables and as rich as chocolate cake. The Middle West is not a desert.
When I was born, in 1922, barely a hundred years after Indiana became the nineteenth state in the Union, the Middle West already boasted a constellation of cities with symphony orchestras and museums and libraries, and institutions of higher learning, and schools of music and art, reminiscent of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before the First World War. One could almost say that Chicago was our Vienna, Indianapolis our Prague, Cincinnati our Budapest, and Cleveland our Bucharest.
To grow up in such a city, as I did, was to find such cultural institutions as ordinary as police stations or firehouses. So it was reasonable for a young person to daydream of becoming some sort of artist or intellectual, if not a policeman or fireman. So I did. So did many like me.
Such provincial capitals, which is what they would have been called in Europe, were charmingly self-sufficient with respect to the fine arts. We sometimes had the director of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra to supper, or writers and painters, or architects like my father, of local renown.
I studied clarinet under the first-chair clarinetist of our symphony orchestra. I remember the orchestra’s performance of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, in which the cannons’ roars were supplied by a policeman firing blank cartridges into an empty garbage can. I knew the policeman. He sometimes guarded street crossings used by students on their way to or from School 43, my school, the James Whitcomb Riley School.
It is unsurprising, then, that the Middle West has produced so many artists of such different sorts, from world-class to merely competent, as provincial cities and towns in Europe used to do.
I see no reason this satisfactory state of affairs should not go on and on, unless funding for instruction in and celebration of the arts, and especially in public school systems, is withdrawn.
Participation in an art is not simply one of many possible ways to make a living, an obsolescent trade as we approach the year 2000. Participation in an art, at bottom, has nothing to do with earning money. Participation in an art, although unrewarded by wealth or fame, and as the Middle West has encouraged so many of its young to discover for themselves so far, is a way to make one’s soul grow.
No artist from anywhere, however, not even Shakespeare, not even Beethoven, not even James Whitcomb Riley, has changed the course of so many lives all over the planet as have four hayseeds in Ohio, two in Dayton and two in Akron. How I wish Dayton and Akron were in Indiana! Ohio could have Kokomo and Gary.
Orville and Wilbur Wright were in Dayton in 1903 when they invented the airplane.
Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith and William Griffith Wilson were in Akron in 1935 when they devised the Twelve Steps to sobriety of Alcoholics Anonymous. By comparison with Smith and Wilson, Sigmund Freud was a piker when it came to healing dysfunctional minds and lives.
Beat that! Let the rest of the world put that in their pipes and smoke it, not to mention Cole Porter, Hoagy Carmichael, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Louis Sullivan, Twyla Tharp and Bob Fosse, Ernest Hemingway and Saul Bellow, Mike Nichols and Elaine May. Toni Morrison!
Larry Bird!
New York and Boston and other ports on the Atlantic have Europe for an influential, often importunate neighbor. Middle Westerners do not. Many of us of European ancestry are on that account ignorant of our families’ past in the Old World and the culture there. Our only heritage is American. When Germans captured me during the Second World War, one asked me, “Why are you making war against your brothers?” I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about….
Anglo-Americans and African-Americans whose ancestors came to the Middle West from the South commonly have a much more compelling awareness of a homeland elsewhere in the past than do I—in Dixie, of course, not the British Isles or Africa.
What geography can give all Middle Westerners, along with the fresh water and topsoil, if they let it, is awe for a fertile continent stretching forever in all directions.
Makes you religious. Takes your breath away.
&nb
sp; Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications, where the stories collected here first appeared:
Argosy, for “A Present for Big Saint Nick” (published as “A Present for Big Nick”) and “Souvenir.”
The Atlantic Monthly, for “Der Arme Dolmetscher.”
Cape Cod Compass, for “The Cruise of The Jolly Roger.”
Collier’s, for “Any Reasonable Offer,” “Mnemonics,” “The Package,” “Poor Little Rich Town,” and “Thanasphere.”
Cosmopolitan, for “Bagombo Snuff Box,” © 1954 Hearst Communications, Inc.; “Find Me a Dream,” © 1961 Hearst Communications, Inc.; “The Powder-Blue Dragon,” © 1954 Hearst Communications, Inc.; and “Unpaid Consultant,” © 1955 Hearst Communications, Inc., all reprinted by permission; and “Hal Irwin’s Magic Lamp.”
Redbook, for “Lovers Anonymous.”
The Saturday Evening Post, for “Ambitious Sophomore,” © 1954 The Curtis Publishing Company, Indianapolis; “The Boy Who Hated Girls,” © 1956 The Curtis Publishing Company, Indianapolis; “Custom-Made Bride,” © 1954 The Curtis Publishing Company, Indianapolis; “A Night for Love,” © 1957 The Curtis Publishing Company, Indianapolis; “Runaways,” © 1961 The Curtis Publishing Company, Indianapolis; and “This Son of Mine,” © 1956 The Curtis Publishing Company, Indianapolis, all reprinted by permission; and “The No-Talent Kid.”
Worlds of If, for “2BR02B.”
Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction Page 29
