The 42nd Parallel
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John Dos Passos's USA trilogy (comprising The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money), named one of the best books of the twentieth century by the Modern Library, is a grand, kaleidoscopic portrait of a nation, buzzing with history and life on every page.
Told in stories and "newsreels" consisting of front-page headlines and article fragments from the Chicago Tribune, the lives and fortunes of five characters unfold. Mac, Janey, Eleanor, Ward, and Charley are caught on the storm track of this parallel and blown New Yorkward. As their lives cross and double back again, the likes of Eugene Debs, Thomas Edison, and Andrew Carnegie make appearances.
While Fitzgerald and Hemingway were cultivating what Edmund Wilson once called their "own little corners," John Dos Passos was taking on the world.
John Dos Passos
John Dos Passos (1896–1970) was a writer, painter, and political activist. His service as an ambulance driver in Europe at the end of World War I led him to write Three Soldiers in 1919, the first in a series of works that established him as one of the most prolific, inventive, and influential American writers of the twentieth century, writing over forty books, including plays, poetry, novels, biographies, histories, and memoirs.
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The 42nd Parallel - John Dos Passos
First Mariner Books edition 2000
Copyright 1930 and © renewed 1958 by John Dos Passos
Title page illustration by Reginald Marsh copyright 1946 by John Dos Passos and Houghton Mifflin Company, copyright © renewed 1974 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.
hmhbooks.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Dos Passos, John, 1896–1970.
The 42nd parallel / John Dos Passos.
p. cm.
Volume one of the U.S.A. trilogy.
ISBN 0-618-05681-5
1. United States—History—1865–1921—Fiction.
I. Title: Forty-second parallel. II. Title.
PS3507.0743 F6 2000
813'.52—dc21 00-028263
Author photo courtesy of Lucy Dos Passos Coggin
eISBN 978-0-547-52491-7
v4.1219
U. S. A.
The young man walks fast by himself through the crowd that thins into the night streets; feet are tired from hours of walking; eyes greedy for warm curve of faces, answering flicker of eyes, the set of a head, the lift of a shoulder, the way hands spread and clench; blood tingles with wants; mind is a beehive of hopes buzzing and stinging; muscles ache for the knowledge of jobs, for the roadmender’s pick and shovel work, the fisherman’s knack with a hook when he hauls on the slithery net from the rail of the lurching trawler, the swing of the bridgeman’s arm as he slings down the whitehot rivet, the engineer’s slow grip wise on the throttle, the dirtfarmer’s use of his whole body when, whoaing the mules, he yanks the plow from the furrow. The young man walks by himself searching through the crowd with greedy eyes, greedy ears taut to hear, by himself, alone.
The streets are empty. People have packed into subways, climbed into streetcars and buses; in the stations they’ve scampered for suburban trains; they’ve filtered into lodgings and tenements, gone up in elevators into apartmenthouses. In a showwindow two sallow windowdressers in their shirtsleeves are bringing out a dummy girl in a red evening dress, at a corner welders in masks lean into sheets of blue flame repairing a cartrack, a few drunk bums shamble along, a sad street-walker fidgets under an arclight. From the river comes the deep rumbling whistle of a steamboat leaving dock. A tug hoots far away.
The young man walks by himself, fast but not fast enough, far but not far enough (faces slide out of sight, talk trails into tattered scraps, footsteps tap fainter in alleys); he must catch the last subway, the streetcar, the bus, run up the gangplanks of all the steamboats, register at all the hotels, work in the cities, answer the wantads, learn the trades, take up the jobs, live in all the boardinghouses, sleep in all the beds. One bed is not enough, one job is not enough, one life is not enough. At night, head swimming with wants, he walks by himself alone.
No job, no woman, no house, no city.
Only the ears busy to catch the speech are not alone; the ears are caught tight, linked tight by the tendrils of phrased words, the turn of a joke, the singsong fade of a story, the gruff fall of a sentence; linking tendrils of speech twine through the city blocks, spread over pavements, grow out along broad parked avenues, speed with the trucks leaving on their long night runs over roaring highways, whisper down sandy byroads past wornout farms, joining up cities and fillingstations, roundhouses, steamboats, planes groping along airways; words call out on mountain pastures, drift slow down rivers widening to the sea and the hushed beaches.
It was not in the long walks through jostling crowds at night that he was less alone, or in the training camp at Allentown, or in the day on the docks at Seattle, or in the empty reek of Washington City hot boyhood summer nights, or in the meal on Market Street, or in the swim off the red rocks at San Diego, or in the bed full of fleas in New Orleans, or in the cold razorwind off the lake, or in the gray faces trembling in the grind of gears in the street under Michigan Avenue, or in the smokers of limited expresstrains, or walking across country, or riding up the dry mountain canyons, or the night without a sleepingbag among frozen beartracks in the Yellowstone, or canoeing Sundays on the Quinnipiac;
but in his mother’s words telling about longago, in his father’s telling about when I was a boy, in the kidding stories of uncles, in the lies the kids told at school, the hired man’s yarns, the tall tales the doughboys told after taps;
it was speech that clung to the ears, the link that tingled in the blood; U. S. A.
U. S. A. is the slice of a continent. U. S. A. is a group of holding companies, some aggregations of trade unions, a set of laws bound in calf, a radio network, a chain of moving picture theatres, a column of stockquotations rubbed out and written in by a Western Union boy on a blackboard, a public-library full of old newspapers and dogeared historybooks with protests scrawled on the margins in pencil. U. S. A. is the world’s greatest rivervalley fringed with mountains and hills, U. S. A. is a set of bigmouthed officials with too many bankaccounts. U. S. A. is a lot of men buried in their uniforms in Arlington Cemetery. U. S. A. is the letters at the end of an address when you are away from home. But mostly U. S. A. is the speech of the people.
Newsreel I
It was that emancipated race
That was chargin up the hill
Up to where them insurrectos
Was afightin fit to kill
CAPITAL CITY’S CENTURY CLOSED
General Miles with his gaudy uniform and spirited charger was the center for all eyes especially as his steed was extremely restless. Just as the band passed the Commanding General his horse stood upon his hind legs and was almost erect. General Miles instantly reined in the frightened animal and dug in his spurs in an endeavor to control the horse which to the horror of the spectators, fell over backwards and landed squarely on the Commanding General. Much to the gratification of the people General Miles was not injured but considerable skin was scraped off the flank of the horse. Almost every inch of General Miles’s overcoat was covered with the dust of the street and between the shoulders a hole about an inch in diameter was punctured. Without waiting for anyone to brush the dust from his garments General Miles remounted his horse and reviewed the parade as if it were an everyday occurrence.
The incident naturally attracted the attention of the crowd, and this brought to notice the fact that the Commanding General never permits a flag to be carried past him without uncovering and remaining so until the colors have passed
And the Captain bold of Company B
Was afightin in the lead
Just like a trueborn soldier he
Of them bullets took no heed
OFFICIALS KNOW NOTHING OF VICE
Sanitary trustees turn water of Chicago River into drainage canal LAKE MICHIGAN SHAKES HANDS WITH THE FATHER OF THE WATERS German zuchterverein singing contest for canarybirds opens the fight for bimetallism at the ratio of 16 to 1 has not been lost says Bryan
BRITISH BEATEN AT MAFEKING
For there’s many a man been murdered in Luzon
CLAIMS ISLANDS FOR ALL TIME
Hamilton Club Listens to Oratory by Ex-Congressman Posey of Indiana
NOISE GREETS NEW CENTURY
LABOR GREETS NEW CENTURY
CHURCHES GREET NEW CENTURY
Mr. McKinley is hard at work in his office when the new year begins.
NATION GREETS CENTURY’S DAWN
Responding to a toast, Hail Columbia! at the Columbia Club banquet in Indianapolis, Ind., ex-President Benjamin Harrison said in part: I have no argument to make here or anywhere against territorial expansion; but I do not, as some do, look upon territorial expansion as the safest and most attractive avenue of national development. By the advantages of abundant and cheap coal and iron, of an enormous overproduction of food products and of invention and economy in production, we are now leading by the nose the original and the greatest of the colonizing nations.
Society Girls Shocked: Danced with Detectives
For there’s many a man been murdered in Luzon
and Mindanao
GAIETY GIRLS MOBBED IN NEW JERSEY
One of the lithographs of the leading lady represented her in less than Atlantic City bathing costume, sitting on a red-hot stove; in one hand she held a brimming glass of wine, in the other ribbons drawn over a pair of rampant lobsters.
For there’s many a man been murdered in Luzon
and Mindanao
and in Samar
In responding to the toast, The Twentieth Century,
Senator Albert J. Beveridge said in part: The twentieth century will be American. American thought will dominate it. American progress will give it color and direction. American deeds will make it illustrious.
Civilization will never lose its hold on Shanghai. Civilization will never depart from Hongkong. The gates of Peking will never again be closed to the methods of modern man. The regeneration of the world, physical as well as moral, has begun, and revolutions never move backwards.
There’s been many a good man murdered in the Philippines
Lies sleeping in some lonesome grave.
The Camera Eye (1)
when you walk along the street you have to step carefully always on the cobbles so as not to step on the bright anxious grassblades easier if you hold Mother’s hand and hang on it that way you can kick up your toes but walking fast you have to tread on too many grassblades the poor hurt green tongues shrink under your feet maybe thats why those people are so angry and follow us shaking their fists they’re throwing stones grownup people throwing stones She’s walking fast and we’re running her pointed toes sticking out sharp among the poor trodden grassblades under the shaking folds of the brown cloth dress Englander a pebble tinkles along the cobbles
Quick darling quick in the postcard shop its quiet the angry people are outside and cant come in non nein nicht englander amerikanisch americain Hoch Amerika Vive l’Amerique She laughs My dear they had me right frightened
war on the veldt Kruger Bloemfontein Ladysmith and Queen Victoria an old lady in a pointed lace cap sent chocolate to the soldiers at Christmas
under the counter it’s dark and the lady the nice Dutch lady who loves Americans and has relations in Trenton shows you postcards that shine in the dark pretty hotels and palaces O que c’est beau schon prittie prittie and the moonlight ripple ripple under a bridge and the little reverbères are alight in the dark under the counter and the little windows of hotels around the harbor O que c’est beau la lune
and the big moon
Mac
When the wind set from the silver factories across the river the air of the gray fourfamily frame house where Fainy McCreary was born was choking all day with the smell of whaleoil soap. Other days it smelt of cabbage and babies and Mrs. McCreary’s washboilers. Fainy could never play at home because Pop, a lame cavechested man with a wispy blonde-gray mustache, was nightwatchman at the Chadwick Mills and slept all day. It was only round five o’clock that a curling whiff of tobacco smoke would seep through from the front room into the kitchen. That was a sign that Pop was up and in good spirits, and would soon be wanting his supper.
Then Fainy would be sent running out to one of two corners of the short muddy street of identical frame houses where they lived.
To the right it was half a block to Finley’s where he would have to wait at the bar in a forest of mudsplattered trouserlegs until all the rank brawling mouths of grownups had been stopped with beers and whiskeys. Then he would walk home, making each step very carefully, with the handle of the pail of suds cutting into his hand.
To the left it was half a block to Maginnis’s Fancy Groceries, Home and Imported Products. Fainy liked the cardboard Cream of Wheat darkey in the window, the glass case with different kinds of salami in it, the barrels of potatoes and cabbages, the brown smell of sugar, sawdust, ginger, kippered herring, ham, vinegar, bread, pepper, lard.
A loaf of bread, please, mister, a half pound of butter and a box of ginger snaps.
Some evenings, when Mom felt poorly, Fainy had to go further; round the corner past Maginnis’s, down Riverside Avenue where the trolley ran, and across the red bridge over the little river that flowed black between icy undercut snowbanks in winter, yellow and spuming in the spring thaws, brown and oily in summer. Across the river all the way to the corner of Riverside and Main, where the drugstore was, lived Bohunks and Polaks. Their kids were always fighting with the kids of the Murphys and O’Haras and O’Flanagans who lived on Orchard Street.
Fainy would walk along with his knees quaking, the medicine bottle in its white paper tight in one mittened hand. At the corner of Quince was a group of boys he’d have to pass. Passing wasn’t so bad; it was when he was about twenty yards from them that the first snowball would hum by his ear. There was no comeback. If he broke into a run, they’d chase him. If he dropped the medicine bottle he’d be beaten up when he got home. A soft one would plunk on the back of his head and the snow began to trickle down his neck. When he was a half a block from the bridge he’d take a chance and run for it.
Scared cat . . . Shanty Irish . . . Bowlegged Murphy . . . Running home to tell the cop
. . . would yell the Polak and Bohunk kids between snowballs. They made their snowballs hard by pouring water on them and leaving them to freeze overnight; if one of those hit him it drew blood.
The backyard was the only place you could really feel safe to play in. There were brokendown fences, dented garbage cans, old pots and pans too nearly sieves to mend, a vacant chickencoop that still had feathers and droppings on the floor, hogweed in summer, mud in winter; but the glory of the McCrearys’ backyard was Tony Harriman’s rabbit hutch, where he kept Belgian hares. Tony Harriman was a consumptive and lived with his mother on the ground floor left. He wanted to raise all sorts of other small animals too, raccoons, otter, even silver fox, he’d get rich that way. The day he died nobody could find the key to the big padlock on the door of the rabbit hutch. Fainy fed the hares for several days by pushing in cabbage and lettuce leaves through the double thickness of chickenwire. Then came a week of sleet and rain when he didn’t go out in the yard. The first fine day, when he went to look, one of the hares was dead. Fainy turned white; he tried to tell himself the hare was asleep, but it lay gawkily stiff, not asleep. The other hares were huddled in a corner looking about with twitching noses, their big ears flopping helpless over their backs. Poor hares; Fainy wanted to cry. He ran upstairs to his mother’s kitchen, ducked under the ironing board and got the hammer out of the drawer in the kitchen table. The first time he tried he mashed his finger, but the second time he managed to jump the padlock. Inside the cage there was a funny, sour smell. Fainy picked the dead hare up by its ears. Its soft white belly was beginning to puff up, one dead eye was scaringly open. Something suddenly got hold of Fainy and made him drop the hare in the nearest garbage can and run upstairs. Still cold and trembling, he tiptoed out onto the back porch and looked down. Breathlessly he watched the other hares. By cautious hops they were getting near the door of the hutch into the yard. One of them was out. It sat up on its hind legs, limp ears suddenly stiff. Mom called him to bring her a flatiron from the stove. When he got back to the porch the hares were all gone.
That winter there was a strike in the Chadwick Mills and Pop lost his job. He would sit all day in the front room smoking and cursing:
Ablebodied man by Jesus, if I couldn’t lick any one of those damn Polaks with my crutch tied behind my back . . . I says so to Mr. Barry; I ain’t goin’ to join no strike. Mr. Barry, a sensible quiet man, a bit of an invalid, with a wife an’ kiddies to think for. Eight years I’ve been watchman, an’ now you give me the sack to take on a bunch of thugs from a detective agency. The dirty pugnosed son of a bitch.
If those damn lousy furreners hadn’t a walked out,
somebody would answer soothingly.
The strike was not popular on Orchard Street. It meant that Mom had to work harder and harder, doing bigger and bigger boilersful of wash, and that Fainy and his older sister Milly had to help when they came home from school. And then one day Mom got sick and had to go back to bed instead of starting in on the ironing, and lay with her round white creased face whiter than the pillow and her watercreased hands in a knot under her chin. The doctor came and the district nurse, and all three rooms of the flat smelt of doctors and nurses and drugs, and the only place Fainy and Milly could find to sit was on the stairs. There they sat and cried quietly together. Then Mom’s face on the pillow shrank into a little creased white thing like a rumpled up handkerchief and they said that she was dead and took her away.
The funeral was from the undertaking parlors on Riverside Avenue on the next block. Fainy felt very proud and important because everybody kissed him and patted his head and said he was behaving like a little man. He had a new black suit on, too, like a grownup suit with pockets and everything, except that it had short pants. There were all sorts of people at the undertaking parlors he had never been close to before, Mr. Russell, the butcher and Father O’Donnell and Uncle Tim O’Hara who’d come on from Chicago, and it smelt of whisky and beer like at Finley’s. Uncle Tim was a skinny man with a knobbed red face and blurry blue eyes. He wore a loose black silk tie that worried Fainy, and kept leaning down suddenly, bending from the waist as if he was going to close up like a jackknife, and whispering in a thick voice in Fainy’s ear.
Don’t you mind ’em, old sport, they’re a bunch o’ bums and hypocrytes, stewed to the ears most of ’em already. Look at Father O’Donnell the fat swine already figurin’ up the burial fees. But don’t you mind ’em remember you’re an O’Hara on your mother’s side. I don’t mind ’em, old sport, and she was my own sister by birth and blood.
When they got home he was terribly sleepy and his feet were cold and wet. Nobody paid any attention to him. He sat whimpering on the edge of the bed in the dark. In the front room there were voices and a sound of knives and forks, but he didn’t dare go in there. He curled up against the wall and went to sleep. Light in his eyes woke him up. Uncle Tim and Pop were standing over him talking loud. They looked funny and didn’t seem to be standing very steady. Uncle Tim held the lamp.
Well, Fainy, old sport,
said Uncle Tim giving the lamp a perilous wave over Fainy’s head. Fenian O’Hara McCreary, sit up and take notice and tell us what you think of our proposed removal to the great and growing city of Chicago. Middletown’s a terrible bitch of a dump if you ask me . . . Meanin’ no offense, John . . . But Chicago . . . Jesus God, man, when you get there you’ll think you’ve been dead and nailed up in a coffin all these years.
Fainy was scared. He drew his knees up to his chin and looked tremblingly at the two big swaying figures of men lit by the swaying lamp. He tried to speak but the words dried up on his lips.
The kid’s asleep, Tim, for all your speechifyin’. . . Take your clothes off, Fainy, and get into bed and get a good night’s sleep. We’re leavin’ in the mornin’.
And late on a rainy morning, without any breakfast, with a big old swelltop trunk tied up with rope joggling perilously on the roof of the cab that Fainy had been sent to order from Hodgeson’s Livery Stable, they set out. Milly was crying. Pop didn’t say a word but sucked on an unlit pipe. Uncle Tim handled everything, making little jokes all the time that nobody laughed at, pulling a roll of bills out of his pocket at every juncture, or taking great gurgling sips out of the flask he had in his pocket. Milly cried and cried. Fainy looked out with big dry eyes at the familiar streets, all suddenly odd and lopsided, that rolled past the cab; the red bridge, the scabshingled houses where the Polaks lived, Smith’s and Smith’s corner drugstore . . . there was Billy Hogan just coming out with a package of chewing gum in his hand. Playing hookey again. Fainy had an impulse to yell at him, but something froze it . . . Main with its elms and street cars, blocks of stores round the corner of Church, and then the fire department. Fainy looked for the last time into the dark cave where shone entrancingly the brass and copper curves of the engine, then past the cardboard fronts of the First Congregational Church, The Carmel Baptist Church, St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church built of brick and set catercornered on its lot instead of straight with a stern face to the street like the other churches, then the three castiron stags on the lawn in front of the Commercial House, and the residences, each with its lawn, each with its scrollsaw porch, each with its hydrangea bush. Then the houses got smaller, and the lawns disappeared; the cab trundled round past Simpson’s Grain and Feed Warehouse, along a row of barbershops, saloons and lunchrooms, and they were all getting out at the station.
At the station lunchcounter Uncle Tim set everybody up to breakfast. He dried Milly’s tears and blew Fainy’s nose in a big new pockethandkerchief that still had the tag on the corner and set them to work on bacon and eggs and coffee. Fainy hadn’t had coffee before, so the idea of sitting up like a man and drinking coffee made him feel pretty good. Milly didn’t like hers, said it was bitter. They were left all alone in the lunchroom for some time with the empty plates and empty coffee cups under the beady eyes of a woman with the long neck and pointed face of a hen who looked at them disapprovingly from behind the counter. Then with an enormous, shattering rumble, sludgepuff sludge . . . puff, the train came into the station. They were scooped up and dragged across the platform and through a pipesmoky car and before they knew it the train was moving and the wintry russet Connecticut landscape was clattering by.
The Camera Eye (2)
we hurry wallowing like in a boat in the musty stably-smelling herdic cab He kept saying What would you do Lucy if I were to invite one of them to my table? They’re very lovely people Lucy the colored people and He had cloves in a little silver box and a rye whisky smell on his breath hurrying to catch the cars to New York
and She was saying Oh dolly I hope we wont be late and Scott was waiting with the tickets and we had to run up the platform of the Seventh Street Depot and all the little cannons kept falling out of the Olympia and everybody stooped to pick them up and the conductor Allaboard lady quick lady
they were little brass cannons and were bright in the sun on the platform of the Seventh Street Depot and Scott hoisted us all up and the train was moving and the engine bell was ringing and Scott put in your hand a little handful of brass tiny cannons just big enough to hold the smallest size red firecracker at the battle of Manila Bay and said Here’s the artillery Jack
and He was holding forth in the parlor car Why Lucy if it were necessary for the cause of humanity I would walk out and be shot any day you would Jack wouldn’t you? wouldn’t you porter? who was bringing appolinaris and He had a flask in the brown grip where the silk initialed handkerchiefs always smelt of bay rum
and when we got to Havre de Grace He said Remember Lucy we used to have to ferry across the Susquehanna before the bridge was built
and across Gunpowder Creek too
Mac
Russet hills, patches of woods, farmhouses, cows, a red colt kicking up its heels in a pasture, rail fences, streaks of marsh.
Well, Tim, I feel like a whipped cur . . . So long as I’ve lived, Tim, I’ve tried to do the right thing,
Pop kept repeating in a rattling voice. And now what can they be asayin’ about me?
Jesus God, man, there was nothin’ else you could do, was there? What the devil can you do if you haven’t any money and haven’t any job and a lot o’ doctors and undertakers and landlords come round with their bills and you with two children to support?
But I’ve been a quiet and respectable man, steady and misfortunate ever since I married and settled down. And now what’ll they be thinkin’ of me sneakin’ out like a whipped cur?
John, take it from me that I’d be the last one to want to bring disrespect on the dead that was my own sister by birth and blood . . . But it ain’t your fault and it ain’t my fault . . . it’s the fault of poverty, and poverty’s the fault of the system . . . Fenian, you listen to Tim O’Hara for a minute and Milly you listen too, cause a girl ought to know these things just as well as a man and for once in his life Tim O’Hara’s tellin’ the truth . . . It’s the fault of the system that don’t give a man the fruit of his labor . . . The only man that gets anything out of capitalism is a crook, an’ he gets to be a millionaire in short order . . . But an honest workin’ man like John or myself we can work a hundred years and not leave enough to bury us decent with.
Smoke rolled white in front of the window shaking out of its folds trees and telegraph poles and little square shingle-roofed houses and towns and trolleycars, and long rows of buggies with steaming horses standing in line.
And who gets the fruit of our labor, the goddam business men, agents, middlemen who never did a productive piece of work in their life.
Fainy’s eyes are following the telegraph wires that sag and soar.
Now, Chicago ain’t no paradise, I can promise you that, John, but it’s a better market for a workin’ man’s muscle and brains at present than the East is . . . And why, did you ask me why . . . ? Supply and demand, they need workers in Chicago.
Tim, I tellyer I feel like a whipped cur.
It’s the system, John, it’s the goddam lousy system.
A great bustle in the car woke Fainy up. It was dark. Milly was crying again. He didn’t know where he was.
Well, gentlemen,
Uncle Tim was saying, we’re about to arrive in little old New York.
In the station it was light; that surprised Fainy, who thought it was already night. He and Milly were left a long time sitting on a suitcase in the waitingroom. The waitingroom was huge, full of unfamiliarlooking people, scary like people in picture-books. Milly kept crying.
Hey, Milly, I’ll biff you one if you don’t stop crying.
Why?
whined Milly, crying all the more.
Fainy stood as far away from her as possible so that people wouldn’t think they were together. When he was about ready to cry himself Pop and Uncle Tim came and took them and the suitcase into the restaurant. A strong smell of fresh whisky came from their breaths, and they seemed very bright around the eyes. They all sat at a table with a white cloth and a sympathetic colored man in a white coat handed them a large card full of printing.
Let’s eat a good supper,
said Uncle Tim, if it’s the last thing we do on this earth.
Damn the expense,
said Pop, it’s the system that’s to blame.
To hell with the pope,
said Uncle Tim. We’ll make a social-democrat out of you yet.
They gave Fainy fried oysters and chicken and icecream and cake, and when they all had to run for the train he had a terrible stitch in his side. They got into a daycoach that smelt of coalgas and armpits. When are we going to bed?
Milly began to whine. We’re not going to bed,
said Uncle Tim airily. We’re going to sleep right here like little mice . . . like little mice in a cheese.
I doan like mice,
yelled Milly with a new flood of tears as the train started.
Fainy’s eyes smarted; in his ears was the continuous roar, the clatter clatter over crossings, the sudden snarl under bridges. It was a tunnel, all the way to Chicago it was a tunnel. Opposite him Pop’s and Uncle Tim’s faces looked red and snarling, he didn’t like the way they looked, and the light was smoky and jiggly and outside it was all a tunnel and his eyes hurt and wheels and rails roared in his ears and he fell asleep.
When he woke up it was a town and the train was running right through the main street. It was a sunny morning. He could see people going about their business, stores, buggies and spring-wagons standing at the curb, newsboys selling newspapers, wooden Indians outside of cigarstores. At first he thought he was dreaming, but then he remembered and decided it must be Chicago. Pop and Uncle Tim were asleep on the seat opposite. Their mouths were open, their faces were splotched and he didn’t like the way they looked. Milly was curled up with a wooly shawl all over her. The train was slowing down, it was a station. If it was Chicago they ought to get off. At that moment the conductor passed, an old man who looked a little like Father O’Donnell.
Please, mister, is this Chicago?
Chicago’s a long way off yet, son,
said the conductor without smiling. This is Syracuse.
And they all woke up, and for hours and hours the telephone poles went by, and towns, frame houses, brick factories with ranks and ranks of glittering windows, dumping grounds, trainyards, plowed land, pasture, and cows, and Milly got trainsick and Fainy’s legs felt like they would drop off from sitting in the seat so long; some places it was snowing and some places it was sunny, and Milly kept getting sick and smelt dismally of vomit, and it got dark and they all slept; and light again, and then the towns and the farmhouses and the factories all started drawing together, humping into warehouses and elevators, and the trainyards spread out as far as you could see and it was Chicago.
But it was so cold and the wind blew the dust so hard in his face and his eyes were so stuck together by dust and tiredness that he couldn’t look at anything. After they had waited round a long while, Milly and Fainy huddled together in the cold, they got on a streetcar and rode and rode. They were so sleepy they never knew exactly where the train ended and the streetcar began. Uncle Tim’s voice went on talking proudly excitedly, Chicago, Chicago, Chicago. Pop sat with his chin on his crutch. Tim, I feel like a whipped cur.
Fainy lived ten years in Chicago.
At first he went to school and played baseball on back lots on Saturday afternoons, but then came his last commencement, and all the children sang My Country, ’Tis Of Thee, and school was over and he had to go to work. Uncle Tim at that time had his own jobprinting shop on a dusty side street off North Clark in the ground floor of a cranky old brick building. It only occupied a small section of the building that was mostly used as a warehouse and was famous for its rats. It had a single wide plateglass window made resplendent by gold Old English lettering: TIMOTHY O’HARA, JOB PRINTER.
Now, Fainy, old sport,
said Uncle Tim, you’ll have a chance to learn the profession from the ground up.
So he ran errands, delivered packages of circulars, throwaways, posters, was always dodging trolleycars, ducking from under the foamy bits of big truckhorses, bumming rides on delivery-wagons. When there were no errands to run he swept out under the presses, cleaned type, emptied the office wastepaper basket, or, during rush times, ran round the corner for coffee and sandwiches for the typesetter, or for a small flask of bourbon for Uncle Tim.
Pop puttered round on his crutch for several years, always looking for a job. Evenings he smoked his pipe and cursed his luck on the back stoop of Uncle Tim’s house and occasionally threatened to go back to Middletown. Then one day he got pneumonia and died quietly at the Sacred Heart Hospital. It was about the same time that Uncle Tim bought a linotype machine.
Uncle Tim was so excited he didn’t take a drink for three days. The floorboards were so rotten they had to build a brick base for the linotype all the way up from the cellar. Well, when we get another one we’ll concrete the whole place,
Uncle Tim told everybody. For a whole day there was no work done. Everybody stood around looking at the tall black intricate machine that stood there like an organ in a church. When the machine was working and the printshop filled with the hot smell of molten metal, everybody’s eyes followed the quivering inquisitive arm that darted and flexed above the keyboard. When they handed round the warm shiny slugs of type the old German typesetter who for some reason they called Mike pushed back his glasses on his forehead and cried. Fifty-five years a printer, and now when I’m old I’ll have to carry hods to make a living.
The first print Uncle Tim set up on the new machine was the phrase: Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.
When Fainy was seventeen and just beginning to worry about skirts and ankles and girls’ underwear when he walked home from work in the evening and saw the lights of the city bright against the bright heady western sky, there was a strike in the Chicago printing trades. Tim O’Hara had always run a union shop and did all the union printing at cost. He even got up a handbill signed, A Citizen, entitled An Ernest Protest, which Fainy was allowed to set up on the linotype one evening after the operator had gone home. One phrase stuck in Fainy’s mind, and he repeated it to himself after he had gone to bed that night: It is time for all honest men to band together to resist the ravages of greedy privilege.
The next day was Sunday, and Fainy went along Michigan Avenue with a package of the handbills to distribute. It was a day of premature spring. Across the rotting yellow ice on the lake came little breezes that smelt unexpectedly of flowers. The girls looked terribly pretty and their skirts blew in the wind and Fainy felt the spring blood pumping hot in him, he wanted to kiss and to roll on the ground and to run out across the icecakes and to make speeches from the tops of telegraph poles and to vault over trolleycars; but instead he distributed handbills and worried about his pants being frayed and wished he had a swell looking suit and a swell looking girl to walk with.
Hey, young feller, where’s your permit to distribute them handbills?
It was a cop’s voice growling in his ear. Fainy gave the cop one look over his shoulder, dropped the handbills and ran. He ducked through between the shiny black cabs and carriages, ran down a side street and walked and walked and didn’t look back until he managed to get across a bridge just before the draw opened. The cop wasn’t following him anyway.
He stood on the curb a long time with the whistle of a peanutstand shrilling derisively in his ear.
That night at supper his uncle asked him about the handbills.
Sure I gave ’em out all along the lakeshore . . . A cop tried to stop me but I told him right where to get off.
Fainy turned burning red when a hoot went up from everybody at the table. He filled up his mouth with mashed potato and wouldn’t say any more. His aunt and his uncle and their three daughters all laughed and laughed. Well, it’s a good thing you ran faster than the cop,
said Uncle Tim, else I should have had to bail you out and that would have cost money.
The next morning early Fainy was sweeping out the office, when a man with a face like a raw steak walked up the steps; he was smoking a thin black stogy of a sort Fainy had never seen before. He knocked on the ground glass door.
I want to speak to Mr. O’Hara, Timothy O’Hara.
He’s not here yet, be here any minute now, sir. Will you wait?
You bet I’ll wait.
The man sat on the edge of a chair and spat, first taking the chewed end of the stogy out of his mouth and looking at it meditatively for a long time. When Tim O’Hara came the office door closed with a bang. Fainy hovered nervously around, a little bit afraid the man might be a detective following up the affair of the handbills. Voices rose and fell, the stranger’s voice in short rattling tirades, O’Hara’s voice in long expostulating clauses, now and then Fainy caught the word foreclose, until suddenly the door flew open and the stranger shot out, his face purpler than ever. On the iron stoop he turned and pulling a new stogy from his pocket, lit it from the old one; growling