Touch and Go (6 page)

“The name rings a bell.” A pause; something of a sigh.

“She was someone I knew.” And he knew I knew.

 

 

SOME YEARS LATER, when I came across
Look Homeward, Angel
by Thomas Wolfe, I associated Annie Terkel with Eliza Gant, the narrator's mother: small, bony, swift, and murder on deadbeats. Eliza ran Dixieland, a boarding house in Altamont (Asheville). American Style was its generic name: meals along with rooms. Ours was European Style: rooms only. Now and then, a guest working in the city's sanitation department, after the thankless job of keeping Chicago clean, was too weary to visit the all-night diner nearby. My mother, for two bits, would toss him a piece of lettuce, a thin slab of beef, and a boiled potato. On seeing the greenery, what little there was of it, an indignant howl was heard from the usually quiet man, “What am I, a rabbit?”

“Hetty Green”—Henrietta Howland Green, 1835–1916. My mother knew all about her when she took over the rooming house in 1921. I never could figure out how she came to know Hetty so much better than she knew Jane Addams, who founded Hull House only blocks away from us. How could this be, a matter of defying both geography and the calendar? I think I know. It was a sudden empathy my mother felt for a genius of her gender beating the male of the species at his own game.

Hetty Green, at the age of six, was immersed in reading the financial section of the newspaper to her ailing father. Yes, Annie knew of Mme. Curie and Rosa Raisa,
⁵
but their giftedness is not what attracted Annie. Hetty became known as the richest woman in the world—her spheres were special: investment, real estate holdings, understanding of the market, free or free-fall. She also had a reputation for being the most miserly; that she was tight-fisted was obvious to anyone who had dealings with her. She never turned on
the heat, nor used hot water. She wore one old black dress and undergarments that she changed only after they'd been worn out. Yet in the panic of 1907, she bailed out New York City with a million-dollar loan. It was not a philanthropist's gesture: she took it out in short-term bonds and picked up millions in repayment.

In defense of Annie, though in all business dealings she simply assumed she was about to be cheated, my mother never reached Hetty's level of parsimony. Though on occasion, Annie did try to save a penny or two in buying Octagon soap, a product quite abrasive and not meant for the human body. My father would sometimes sneak in a bar of Ivory soap: 99 and 44/100 percent pure. Annie could never have been indicted for undue philanthropy. She had a coin or two for the wayfaring mendicant, provided the unfortunate one was a woman. Males with outstretched hands were beggars and bums.

Of course, she knew of the Triangle Fire in Manhattan where management had locked exits while working girls died after flying through the air. Of course, she was for labor unions. She, as a matter of rote, even expressed admiration for Gene Debs. But it was the saga of Hetty Green that most enthralled her. She would not have minded being called the “Witch of Wall Street.” Hetty caught the brass ring; my mother missed it, though she flew through the air. Luckily there was a net: the rooming house.

In seeing William Bolcom's opera
McTeague
, based upon the Frank Norris novel and Erich von Stroheim's film
Greed
, I thought of my mother, Eliza Gant, and Hetty Green. Catherine Malfitano, the soprano who played the role of Trina, the young charwoman who wins the lottery, sensed a real challenge.

MEYER WAS BACK AND FORTH between Chicago and New York. Much of the time, he was absent from the family while in New York earning his degree in education at CCNY and courting his childhood sweetheart, Sophie, to whom he was to be married; their union would last thirty years.

My father's heart, by this time, was in worse shape than ever, and he was frustrated at being stuck to his bed. I had been, for most of my life, my father's bedmate. And again, we were together listening to the crystal set, which consisted of a piece of mineral and a thin wire you had to wind around and around. We'd hear KYW, with Wendell Hall at the ukelele. The red-headed music maker he was called, and of course, the song we knew:

It was 1925 and we listened to WGN, with Quinn Ryan at the microphone, broadcasting the Scopes Trial of Dayton, Tennessee—
the Monkey Trial. A young teacher was being penalized for violating a state ordinance prohibiting the teaching of Darwin. His defense attorney was Clarence Darrow, the brilliant agnostic. The prosecution's most prestigious witness was William Jennings Bryan. We were listening as the world heard Darrow humiliating Bryan on the matter of Jonah and the whale; the Nebraskan claiming that Jonah set up light housekeeping in the belly of the whale. It was Bryan who said, “Instead of studying the age of rocks, sing ‘Rock of Ages.' ” The week after the trial ended, Bryan died. It was attributed to diabetes, but we know deep down it was the humiliation and the heartbreak he suffered. Therein lay the tragedy of the populist William Jennings Bryan. Out of Nebraska, he was known as the Boy Orator of North Platte. When he spoke, the audience was mesmerized. He was anti-corporate, anti–the Big Boys, and pro–the small farmer. During the 1896 Democratic convention at the Coliseum, he was at his most eloquent: “You shall not press down upon the brow of Labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind on a cross of gold.”

The profound tragedy of William Jennings Bryan was the conflict between his secular and religious beliefs; yet, he himself saw no such struggle. Even today, due in no small part to the success of the play and film
Inherit the Wind
, a great many of us see a fool KO'd by a witty man. He, as a mere congressman, three times candidate for president, represented the small, beleaguered farmers, those up against it. He fought against the Gilded Age robber barons, the corporate bigwigs, with an eloquence rare, and fervor unending, his battle waged in so soaring a manner that he caught fire as the populist hero of working stiffs everywhere. Remember, too, that he turned down President Wilson's offer of Secretary of State; in fact, he resigned on learning that Wilson was planning entry into World War I. His lucid eloquence, seemingly improvised, has hardly been matched.

Though to many of the intelligentsia (what a lovingly sadistic time H.L. Mencken had with Bryan) and the urban “learned,” circumstances
meant one thing; for the poor, bedraggled farmer, who sang “Poor Pilgrim of Sorrow,” circumstances meant something else.

Now, some eighty years gone by and we still have a problem with creationism, without determining where the ache lies.

There were more country songs written about Bryan than about Abe Lincoln; at least twenty-five. Just about every country-song bard had one, including Vernon Dalhart, whom my father and I heard so often on the crystal set. Surely, you of an age remember “The Prisoner's Song”—“Oh, I wish I had the wings of an angel, over those walls I would fly.”

Here's a Carson Robison song, written in grief shortly after Bryan's death. Years later, I heard a kid sing a few stanzas of this one in a Pennsylvania town, Girard.

WHAT EXCITED MY FATHER MOST was that we were one block away from Lindlahr, the hospital where Eugene B. Debs, his number-one hero, was spending his last days. Debs was visited by those who were to us the celebrities of the time: Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, Ida Tarbell. Often we'd take a slow walk and hang around the corner outside Lindlahr, just as young groupies later waited for Mick Jagger, wondering who of our favorite muckrakers
would be there. The irony was, Debs was no longer there. He had been moved to the hospital in Elmhurst, where he died.

Unfortunately, neither my father nor I knew too much of Bryan, being most ignorant of the farmers' trials and tribulations. Oh, we knew the phrases “Crown of Thorns,” and “crucified on the Cross of Gold,” but that's about all. It was Gene Debs whose glory possessed Sam. Of course, he knew the statement old Gene made on the day of his conviction for treason. Remember that? Oh, Jesus, how could you? Your grandmother had hardly been born. It was in Canton, Ohio, in 1916. Debs was challenging Wilson's plan to enter World War I. As he was sentenced to Atlanta Penitentiary for ten years, Gene spoke up: “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.”

It was President Harding, a Republican political toy, who, as one of his first acts in office, granted Debs his pardon. It so happened that the genial Harding and Gene were mutual admirers of the film cowboy hero Tom Mix. Was that a factor in Harding's inviting Debs to the White House? In fact, he not only invited Debs. He ordered Harry Daugherty, his attorney general, who escaped prison himself on a technicality, to put Debs on the train without a guard. Woodrow Wilson, our professorial chieftain, was a movie fan, too. According to Eric Foner, the American historian, Wilson found
Birth of a Nation
“as awful as lightning, but unfortunately true, quite true.”

Eugene Salvatore, in his biography of Eugene Debs, reveals to us the deep affection and love Debs' fellow inmates of Atlanta felt for him, and what happened during his farewell as his old buddies met him at the Atlanta gates.

There is a grotesque epilogue to the story of Gene Debs and his life and meaning. The dean of the Yale Law School, who advised LBJ during his lowest days, the Vietnam War, continued as governmental wise man. He was LBJ's coldest warrior during the Vietnam War. His name was Eugene V. Rostow. His folks were admirers of old Gene; so was he. Did the irony of this escape the former Yale Law School dean?

Some years earlier, at the Wells-Grand Hotel, a guest, Harold Hanson Utterbach, swears he attended Debs' funeral; likewise that he had heard Bryan at his most eloquent at the Coliseum in 1896; and furthermore, that he saw Babe Ruth point to the right-field stands of Cubs Park in advance of the Bambino's long-flying home run to that very region. I've a hunch he was a liar, but what the hell, his stories made the day go faster. This information was offered in 1936, about a year or so before we ceased our hoteliers' life. I figured this one story might be truth; the arithmetic made sense. In any event, he was a fairly old gaffer and entitled to some poetic license. I know a little something about that.

I now roam back to the rooming house where the time had come for my father to demand a change in our lives. He could not spend his last days as an invalid. There was some work he had to do. My mother, astonishingly, agreed that a change was necessary. They decided on an amicable pro-tem split. My mother would join Meyer in New York and relax. My father, through a loan from his brother-in-law, raised enough to lease a men's hotel in Chicago.

A
-la-ba-ma!Twenty-foah votes fo Un-da-wood!
How clinically I remember the sound and slight fury of that voice of the Deep South. Translated into English, the single language we should all speak, as our self-proclaimed philologists demand, it was: “Alabama, twenty-four votes for Underwood.” His was, for 102 ballots, the first delegate's voice to be heard during each session. I don't know his name, simply that the same Southern voice spoke again and again. Tom Walsh, Senator from Montana, was the chairman of the 1924 convention. He was my hero. My elder brother had told me that Thomas Walsh, of the no-nonsense full black mustache, was the
bête noire
of Anaconda Copper, the corporation that ran Montana. So, too, it was with the junior senator from that state, his fellow populist, Burton K. Wheeler.