Pop and I got into it one night in the city. We were supposed to meet at Gene the Wop’s for supper, off Clark; I was late and didn’t arrive until he’d finished his meal. He glared at me as I walked in. I also smelled of bourbon. “You’ve been in a speakeasy,” he whispered. “I thought you’d changed your mind about prohibition,” I answered, and all he said was, “Law’s still the law.” Then he saw some of Leigh’s handouts I had with me. “Oh you’re a bolshevik now,” he said. “No,” I said, and forlorn pain shot through me because I thought of her and wished I was a bolshevik, I kept thinking I’d gladly be one if it got me Leigh, and yet the fact was that, for some reason inside me I couldn’t understand, I wouldn’t be one, glad or any other way. From there on Pop and I just began yelling at each other across the table, and the more I thought of Leigh the worse it got. Finally he just pushed away, stood up and put on his coat, and walked out without a word; it was the last conversation we had in a while, until my uncle died.
In the face of the Depression, as he struggled to save his paper, in the face of his estrangement from his son as he struggled to save his family, Jack Mick Senior received a letter one day from Bart’s wife, Melody. By now Bart was nearly sixty. The early sexual disappointments of the marriage had come to be, after ten years, profound failures as his wife, past thirty, lived in the late afternoon of her fertility. “These things never mattered to me,” Melody wrote, “but he doesn’t believe this.” She was frantic. He drank all the time. “There’s one soul prohibition never saved,” Jack said bitterly to Rae. “I can’t continue with this much longer,” Melody went on. “I don’t know what to do.” Two months later she left him.
The last time Leigh and Jack made love it was at twilight on a cold May day down by the water, where she unzipped and straddled him, her coat pulled around her neck and a flurry of revolutionary announcements flung from her fingers. “Damn you,” she snarled in his ear when they had finished, and he knew by the way she looked at him as she left that he would never have her again. In the subsequent nights he continued to wake to the black roar of the trains and the despair of an irretrievable connection with her; and he would throw the sheets from him and go to his dark window naked, erect and aroused, standing in the window and pressing his whole body against the glass so as to freeze the black roar of his veins. He supposed he could put out the fire this way. To the tracks below, to the country beyond them, he called her name, and the hardness burst beneath him, the wet white of him rivering off into the beyond country; and he called her again. Later he could not remember how long he stood there or how many times he said it.
On the day of John Michael’s commencement Bart died, some six months after Melody had left him. The father and son accepted a mutual truce long enough to journey to Milwaukee, where they and Rae spent the afternoon with Bart’s daughter and her own children. Most of these hours were taken up with a general discussion among members of the family about the tragedy of Bart’s end and his awful second wife. Bart’s awful first wife — that is, his daughter’s mother — went unmentioned. Jack Mick Senior did not comment on any of this except once when he interrupted a rather euphemistic autopsy report to say, “Medical complications due to kidney disorder helclass="underline" the man drank himself to death.” After that the entourage traveled to the mortuary together amidst the continuing castigation of Melody Lake. The mortuary was small and filled with light; the open casket was at the front. The family filed in and there in the corner of the room, in an empty row, Melody sat sobbing with such a spastic grief that John Michael couldn’t imagine she would ever stop. Her face was invisible in her hands and she choked with desolation, gasping. The family stood watching in cold mortification.
And I was looking at her, and I was thinking that someone crying like this could never stop, and then I saw my father walk over to her and touch her gently on the shoulder and just rub his hand back and forth on her arm, over and over. I guess my cousins were stunned. My mother’s eyes had that way-back look in them. And my father stood there a long time, rubbing her shoulder over and over, not saying anything as she clutched the bottom of his coat and held on. It was the greatest thing I ever saw anyone do for any one. He didn’t care whether the family liked it or not. It didn’t matter that the last of his brothers was gone, well of course it mattered, it mattered in that he’d lost everything of his childhood, but it mattered a little less than the fact there was this stricken woman alone in an empty row who needed the mercy of the living to survive the judgment of the dead. And my father stood there alone with her, and all I wanted was to know that sometime in my life I would do something as good. “She gave him the worst moments of his life,” someone said to him later. “She gave him the best too,” he answered. That night we sat in our house by the fire where I had found the two brothers so stunned on that morning years earlier, returned from the west; and my father remembered all the nights they had sat there, back to when I was an infant sleeping in a bed by the heat, and they talked about the war and whether we’d be getting into it or not and how Jack Johnson lost the heavyweight championship of the world. Now on this night he said to me gently, “Go easy on the drinking, son,” thinking I guess of our argument in Gene the Wop’s and how I had smelled of bourbon. I flushed with shame. “I will, Pop,” I said. We had fights to come; we were still different. But not on this night.
On the last morning of her life Leigh got into an argument with Jack about his father. She dismissed the stories Jack Senior had printed in his newspaper about the Klan and the Indians as mere bourgeois reformism, the last throes of a dying society trying to resurrect itself. “My father,” the son answered, “is worth three of you.” Walking away she said, “Go do it to yourself, college boy.” She said it without her usual malicious gaiety; the scorn was bottomless.
He wasn’t in college anymore anyway. He was in town trying to get a job. Since everyone was losing jobs, he didn’t have much luck. There had been a riot at the market two days before with people nearly killed by the police; on this morning there were rumors that unemployed workers were building a barricade of blocks pried from the brown stones along the street. All Clark Street was brownstones with holes. Men passed the stones down a line to those mortaring them into a wall in the middle of the road. He could hear the pickaxes chiming all the way up the block; by that afternoon the wall was a man’s height and ten feet long. For a while he sat on some steps with other passersby and watched.
At some point he looked up and there was nothing but police.
The sun was burning and rows of police stood snapping sticks in their hands, and the men building the wall in the middle of the street began raising their heads, looking up at the police and dropping their arms to their sides. There were many people just watching, children with their faces between the rails of the fences along the walkways and old women with yellow sashes around their waists, stopped in midstroll. Jack had an idea that there was some zone where the police couldn’t touch them, those like himself who weren’t political. But there wasn’t any zone like that. The police sealed off the street and everything stopped, the air itself stopped; and when Leigh suddenly appeared in the middle of it, it was as though her auric flash was a signal for everything to begin.