Even now, a full generation beyond my own childhood and in the backwash of another holiday season, the toy department worked its special magic on me. It stretched into room upon room filled with bicycles and tricycles, Shirley Temple dolls and doll houses, Lincoln Logs and Tinker Toys, scooters and wagons, Chinese Checkers and chemistry sets, and of course trains — but now the brands were Lionel and American Flyer.
With Peter leading the way we wound up, hardly to my surprise, in a corner where an Erector display, including a Ferris wheel and a double-arch bridge, gave testimony to what could be fabricated by aspiring civil engineers. “Aren’t these swell, Dad?” he said, eyes wide as he studied the constructions. “I just want to stay a minute and see how they’re built, okay?”
“May I be of help to you gentlemen?” a grandfatherly sales clerk asked, peering over dark-rimmed glasses perched halfway down his nose.
“Indeed you may, sir,” I answered. “My colleague here and I are in dire need of some extra parts for our Erector set — girders, nuts, bolts, the works. Have we by chance come to the right place?”
He nodded and winked, moving to a shelf behind him, and Peter smiled up at me.
Chapter 4
Either it was false modesty or Helen Hayes had sold herself and her troupe short: The single matinee performance of The Merchant of Venice was pronounced an unqualified success by the only theater critics in Chicago who counted — Collins in the Tribune and Lloyd Lewis in the Daily News. For what it’s worth, if anything, I liked it, too, although this was the first time I had seen any Shakespeare since high school, when the junior class performed Hamlet and the cardboard set of the castle fell over on Billy Murakowski, who was playing a sentry. He crawled out from under the fallen citadel and bowed to the audience, easily getting the biggest applause of the evening.
True to her word, Helen Hayes left two tickets — ninth row center — in my name at the Erlanger box office for that Saturday performance in late January. I took Peter, figuring a little culture couldn’t hurt him. Actually, although he seemed to have as much trouble as I did with some of the language, he came away impressed by the experience.
“She was really good, Dad,” he said as we walked out of the theater. “And so was that guy who played Shylock. I guess Shakespeare didn’t like Jewish people, huh?”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, I couldn’t understand a lot of what they were saying, but it seemed like it was very important that Shylock was Jewish. Remember, somebody said he was a devil in one place, and almost everybody in the play called him ‘Jew,’ like it was a bad word.”
“To be honest, I struggled with some of the phrases, too. But I thought Shakespeare gave Shylock some sympathy when he had him talk about how Jews bleed when they’re pricked and die when they’re poisoned, and so on like that.”
“Yeah, I suppose so. Do you like Jewish people, Dad?”
“I haven’t known very many, Peter. Almost none.”
“Mr. Baer is Jewish, I guess.”
“I assumed he was. That’s often a Jewish name.”
“Oh. I didn’t know. Well, one day a few weeks ago, he and Mama picked me up from school in his red car, and the next morning, James Keller, he sits right behind me in class, told everybody that I got a ride from a kike. That’s a word for somebody who’s Jewish, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, and not a very nice word,” I said, recalling how often I’d mouthed it myself over the years. I remembered how a bunch of us in the fifth grade shouted it as we chased Sammy Horowitz, the grocer’s kid, home after school, throwing stones at him all the way to the store. “I hope you never use it,” I told Peter.
“I won’t, Dad. I promise.”
On Monday mornings, the day side reporters in the pressroom at Police Headquarters invariably spent the first half hour or so recounting their weekend escapades. At least a third of the stories may have held some kernel of truth.
“I ran into the goddamndest broad Saturday night at the bar in the Chez Paree. A blonde with hair like Jean Harlow, you know, real smooth and soft, almost white, and like cotton candy. She was a looker in this red, silky, low-cut job that stuck to her like flypaper.” It was Eddie Metz of the Times, all five-feet-four of him, disheveled and semi-shaven as usual, sitting on one leg at his desk and sucking an Old Gold between slurps of coffee. “She was dy-NO-mite, a real prize.”
“As in booby prize, Eduardo? That’s about where you’d come up to on her,” cracked lanky Dirk O’Farrell of the Herald and Examiner, who was a master at pulling Eddie’s chain. “You’ve got to switch brands of smokes — those things are making you hallucinate, for God’s sake. No Harlow look-alike would go within a furlong of you unless — wait, I take it back, I take it all back, my apologies. Now I see.” O’Farrell snapped a suspender and threw his hands up in mock surrender. “She probably wanted to use the top of your flat head as a table for her highball.”
That brought the expected horselaughs, and before a flushed Eddie could begin to mount a counterattack, Anson Masters of the Daily News, the dean of the city’s police reporters, ran a hand over his freckled, balding pate and weighed in. “Edward, Edward, you shouldn’t be wasting your time on these lamentable floozies who drape themselves across the bar at the Chez. How often have I counseled you about the high-quality women who can be found...”
“Oh, Christ, Anson, not that old go-out-and-get-yourself-a-classy-call-girl spiel again,” jeered Packy Farmer of the American, the town’s other Hearst paper... as if we needed two. Packy, who like Masters had long been divorced, leaned back, stroked his thin moustache, and grinned. “Bear in mind, Anson, that I’ve met some of those ‘quality women’ of yours, like that one you introduced me to with the gold tooth who drank scotch and Coke — and drank it through a straw, yet. And who insisted on being called Nefertiti or some crap like that, even though her name was Agnes... or was it Maud?”
“Now, Cyril,” Masters parried haughtily with Farmer’s despised middle name, “you fail, not surprisingly, to appreciate true individuality and uniqueness in a woman.”
“Yeah, Farmer,” Eddie Metz jumped in relieved he was no longer the target. “If your name was Agnes or Maud, you’d change it to Nefertiti, too.”
At his junior-sized desk in the corner, the kid from the City News Bureau, the local reporting service owned by the daily papers that also supplied police news to the radio stations, looked wide-eyed from one speaker to the next. He was a skinny redhead no more than 20 whose name none of us knew — City News shifted its young, underpaid reporters around like chessmen — and he was new enough on the beat that he likely thought he was seeing the flower of Chicago journalism indulging in witty repartee. He’d realize soon enough that all these flowers were wilted, and that their repartee wore very thin very quickly.
Each pushing sixty, O’Farrell and Masters were solid reporters who knew their beats — and the city — well; but both were simply playing out the string. Farmer had worked on papers across the country, leaving — so the talk went — a trail of bad checks and angry women in his erratic wake before he landed in Chicago just after the Fair in ’33; Metz, who had the Headquarters beat only because his older brother was an assistant city editor on the Times, would never go anywhere on the tabloid, a loud and scrappy little imitation of the New York Daily News that itself didn’t seem to know where it was going.