Growing Up (34 page)

I didn’t know then nor for many years later that I’d been conceived before she and my father were married. Not knowing that, I couldn’t grasp the complex emotions behind her cry: “Just like your father.” She must have seen life repeating itself as a macabre dance. It must have seemed that I was reliving with Mimi my father’s affair with her, that she was reliving Ida Rebecca’s struggle against a foolish son and a wayward girl, and that I was in danger of reliving the disaster that love had made of her own life. She had overcome that and had transformed me from the agent of her disaster into a promise of a triumph for herself. Now the taint had surfaced to threaten everything, and, looking on me for that one terrible moment, she must have seen me as disaster recurring.

“Just like your father!”

After that, Mimi no longer came to Sunday dinner. Lines of battle had been drawn. The time for conciliation had passed.

I had no thought of marrying Mimi and no intention of giving her up. I was only twenty-one, poor, without exciting prospects, and enjoying the indolent sensuous life. Naturally I would marry later, when I was old and stuffy, and when I did I would naturally choose “a good woman,” the sort my mother would approve. In the meantime I refused to spoil the joy of youth by parting with Mimi, the only woman with whom I felt happy. Eventually, of course, Mimi would have to be put aside for some drab woman of sound pedigree with all the social graces, but Mimi would surely understand that. She was the most sensible girl imaginable. She would understand the difference between youthful love and the marital requirements of an ambitious man.

In this spirit I let the months go blithely by, and gradually the months turned into years—1946 became 1947 which became 1948 which became 1949—and I was content. Mimi was not entirely content, to be sure. It was annoying when, as she occasionally did, Mimi suggested that she was looking forward to marriage. It was this annoying suggestion that I’d first tried to squelch by telling her, “It’s not in the cards.” With the passing months, though, she continued to talk rather dreamily about marriage, and, having grown fond of the phrase, I repeated it several times a year.

“Not in the cards,” I said. “It’s just not in the cards.”

After graduating from Johns Hopkins in 1947 I began working for the
Baltimore Sun
. Elliott Coleman had steered me to the job. Elliott had come to Hopkins the previous fall to teach writing. He was a poet, a tall willowy man, prematurely white-haired, with a slightly fey manner and the great writing teacher’s gift, which was to identify an ounce of quality in a ton of verbal trash and encourage the student to mine it. When I met him I was enamored of Ernest Hemingway, like almost everyone else in his course, and ground out story after story about sardonic fellows sitting in bars before trudging off to brutal ends. After reading a hundred stories like this, Elliott, who wanted us to discover Marcel Proust, threw up his hands in class one day, cried, “Hemingway’s swell, but he’s out! out!” and strode from the room.

Even in my embarrassing Hemingway imitations, however, he found something to encourage. “You write dialogue extremely well,” he said. It wasn’t true, but he’d identified my one skill that might be worth developing. The encouragement kept me from dropping the class. Still, my characters remained hard types who lumbered off to defeat or death with stoic resignation. After laboring through a dozen such tales, Elliott gave me one of the most valuable suggestions I’d ever had about writing.

“Don’t you think it would make your tough guys a little more interesting to the reader if once in a while you had one bend down to smell a rose?” he asked.

Learning that I had no job prospects after graduation, Elliott said, “Maybe you should get on at the
Sun
. I’ll speak to Dol Emmart.”

In my senior year I’d helped edit the campus weekly newspaper, but it had been only a lark. It certainly didn’t qualify me to work on Baltimore’s great metropolitan daily, the
Sun
. Nor was I much interested in journalism. My passion was to become the new Hemingway, not a newspaperman. The new Hemingway, after all, would be a great artist; what could a newspaperman ever be but a hack?

Elliott spoke to Dol Emmart anyhow. Emmart had had a distinguished career at the
Sun
and was now a highly esteemed editorial writer and a close student of T. S. Eliot, on whose poetry he had spoken in our writing course. Emmart said there was, in fact, an opening for a police reporter at the
Sun
. I must phone Mr. Charles Dorsey, the managing editor, for an appointment. And so in June of 1947, for the first time in my life, I set foot in a newspaper city room.

Mr. Dorsey was precisely what years of movie-going had led me to expect of a managing editor. Encased in a glass-paneled office, looking imperiously out on a confusion of jangling telephones, scurrying copy boys, aged gents in green eyeshades, and marvelously cynical-looking men at typewriters who could only be reporters, he seemed as hospitable as a famished tiger. He was tall,
lean, cool-eyed, a man obviously at ease on a telephone to London, placing bets at the $100 window at Pimlico, or firing a reporter for misplacing a fact. Admitted to his glass cage, I wanted to apologize for wasting his time but hadn’t the courage to speak.

He ran a hand impatiently through his iron-gray hair, gazed down his patrician nose at me from great height, though he was no taller than I, and snorted loudly at what he saw. A flicker of his solemn gray eyes told me I was a damn nuisance. “Sit down,” he commanded.

I sat. “So you think you can be a newsman,” he said.

I didn’t, but before I could say so the phone interrupted. “I’ve got to talk to the Washington bureau,” he said. “It’ll only take a minute.”

I sat paralyzed with awe. He was talking to the Washington bureau right there in front of me. To be in a real newspaper office was heady enough. But to sit in the presence of a man who was actually talking to the Washington bureau—“What the hell is Truman up to now?” he was saying.

Somebody at the other end of the line was telling him. It was intoxicating. The rough familiarity with which he spoke of the President of the United States. The Washington bureau at the end of his phone line. A great correspondent of that Washington bureau who could tell him on demand what the hell Truman was up to. Here was glory indeed.

“What’s your experience?” Mr. Dorsey was suddenly asking me.

“I’ve worked on the
Johns Hopkins News-Letter.”

How ludicrous it sounded. Mr. Dorsey snorted loudly from his altitude, and when I recovered my wits, I realized he was pointing me toward the exit. So much for newspaper work. Still, nobody could take one thing away from me. I had been there when a genuine managing editor talked to the Washington bureau.

A week later the telephone caught me at home at dinnertime. “This is Dorsey,” the voice said. “If you still want to work for me, you can start Sunday at thirty dollars a week.”

Thirty dollars a week? This was 1947, not 1933. I thought,
Thirty dollars a week is an insult to a college man
and instantly replied, “I’ll take it.”

Maybe Elliott thought journalism was the obvious way for the new Hemingway to start. I certainly did. The
Sun
thought differently. Two years passed before it let me write a word for publication. I spent those years prowling the slums of Baltimore, studying the psychology of cops, watching people’s homes burn, deciphering semiliterate police reports of dented fenders and suicides, and hanging around accident wards listening to people die. I wrote about none of this myself, but phoned the information to rewrite men. They packaged it to fit the space demands of the paper each night. On a slow night a suicide might merit three paragraphs if the deceased had found an interesting way to finish himself off. On a normal night the best he could hope for was a single paragraph, and on a busy night his final deed on earth went unrecorded.

Melodrama among black people, whom the
Sun
carefully identified as “Negro,” went at a high discount. When still green on the job, I phoned the city desk in some excitement one night with my first murder story. After saying I had “a good murder,” I heard the rewrite man tell the night city editor to listen in as I started to recite the details. After I’d said the dead man had been found in an alley severely beaten over the head with “a blunt object,” the night editor interrupted. He knew I was covering a black district.

“Is this guy a jig?” he asked.

“Yes, Negro,” I said.

“Hell, don’t you know you can’t hurt ’em by hitting ’em on the head?” he said, and rang off.

“Give me enough for one paragraph,” the rewrite man said. “Maybe we’ll need it for filler.”

It was all night work. Sometimes I was off at midnight, sometimes not until two
A.M
. Tedium alternated with Grand Guignol, and Grand Guignol with high comedy. One night, sitting in a West Baltimore police station, patiently hating a skinny little clerk but forcing a smile nevertheless as he described for the hundredth
time the pleasure he derived from attending hangings, I saw a cop come in with his ear in one hand and the man who had bitten it off gripped firmly in the other.

I reveled in the raffish upside-down life, passing the nights in a world of gore and vice, getting to bed at four
A.M
., sleeping till noon. My attachment to Mimi intensified. If I was off at midnight, I dropped by her apartment to drink coffee and talk about the night’s grotesque events, like any husband rehashing his day at the office. If I was covering police headquarters, she might pick me up there after midnight and I’d take her to an East Baltimore Street joint to drink a beer, watch strip-teasers bump and grind, and lecture her on the sociology of low life. If I worked until two
A.M
. and there had been too much horror, I’d telephone her.

“Are you asleep?”

“I went to bed early for a change. Where are you calling from?”

“University Hospital. I’ve been covering a fire up in the northwest. A whole family on the top floor of one of those rotting slum houses. The father’s still dying down here in the accident room.”

“Do you want to come by?”

“Not tonight. There were four kids. When they brought them out they were nothing but charred cinders. It was sickening.”

“You can come by if you want to.”

“I don’t think so. Go back to sleep. I just needed to talk to somebody for a few minutes. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

Friends began to assume that we would inevitably marry. “It’s not in the cards,” I told George, but I was alarmed by a growing dependence on Mimi and began looking for a way to break it. The chance came when Mimi announced she could no longer afford the apartment. Jennie had moved to New York, and for a while Mimi had hoped to make the rent alone by finding a job that paid better than selling cosmetics. She worked as records clerk for a company that used frogs to make pregnancy tests, then for a few dollars more moved to an electrical wiring company as bookkeeper. She quit after learning she was expected to maintain a double set of
books to hoodwink the tax law. The next job—as switchboard operator for a real-estate tycoon—paid less, and the tycoon fired her for not knowing how to work a switchboard.

Why not try show business? she asked herself, and went to the Gayety Theater on East Baltimore Street to ask for a job in the chorus. The Gayety was Baltimore’s burlesque house, but not finicky about talent. The manager handed her a set of flimsy transparent garments and told her to put them on right away. She would go on stage in the chorus’s next performance. She recoiled upon noting that the G-string was smeared with grape jelly, but she wriggled out with the chorus for one performance. She hadn’t told the manager she couldn’t dance, but at the Gayety that didn’t matter. As soon as the chorus bumped offstage she dressed, left without farewells, and hurried home to take a bath.

Then show business called again. She answered a help-wanted ad for a woman interested in theater. “I’ve got a dog act,” the man told her. “I need a girl to help out on stage and look after the dogs.”

They would be traveling constantly of course. He showed her his truck. It contained a double bed and six dogs. “This is where we’ll be living,” he said. “Cozy, isn’t it?”

That was her last stab at show business. She found a job as a drugstore clerk, but couldn’t pay the rent on the salary. “So what do you plan to do?” I asked.

“What do you think I should do?” she asked.

“Look,” I said, “it’s just not in the cards.”

Economically it wasn’t even possible. My
Sun
salary had just risen, but to a mere $45 a week. There was a terrible quarrel. She said I cared nothing for her, we had no future together. I denied the first and agreed with the second. It was time for her to start a new life, she replied, give up the apartment, find a cheap room somewhere, put me out of her life, start seeing other men. There were bound to be men who would treat her more decently than I ever had. I agreed.

By now we had been together three years. I felt strong enough to make the break. “Give me a chance,” she said. “Don’t call me again. Don’t try to come back into my life.”