Dumas, till he found out that pere and fils were different people).
Not long after she and my father started to court, Pa landed in court, then in jaiclass="underline" his work with unions was repeatedly bringing him into conflict with cops, and his arrest came during a textile plant strike, landing him a month in Bridewell Prison.
Which was a hellhole, of course. A sandstone hellhole with no heat, no toilet facilities other than a five-gallon bucket in the corner of a rusty, paint-peeling cell with two wall-suspended bunks with straw mattresses and wafer-thin blankets, and a stench you could almost see. No water in the cells, though each morning at six, prisoners were given a few moments at a trough with cold running water before one of the two cell-mates got his turn at joining the parade of slop cans, which were carried from the cells and dumped outside in huge cesspools and then scrubbed clean with chemicals. And once a week, a gang shower. The shower came in handy after a week in a clay hole, which is where Pa was assigned: a stone quarry; a deep pit where big pieces of limestone got turned into little ones.
Pa was used to hardship: Aunt Anna had seen to that. And he was pretty healthy: he had the same framework as me, roughly six feet with one-eighty or one-seventy attached to it. But one month in Bridewell took its toll even on a healthy man, and he came out twenty pounds lighter- meals ran to a breakfast of bread and dry oatmeal, lunch of bread and thin soup, supper of bread and a concoction that was peas and fragments of corned beef swimming in something unidentifiable, all servings negligible, with the three pieces of bread the only thing that got him and the other prisoners through the day (one odd thing: Pa often said it was the best fresh-baked bread he ever ate), and he had a cough from breathing quarry dust, and was of course very proud of himself for the moral victory' of going to jail over a union matter, and loved his martyr's role.
But Jeanette was not impressed, not with the glory aspects of it, anyway. She was horrified at the condition Pa was in after Bridewell, just as she'd been horrified the times she'd cleaned and bandaged him after strike-related beatings. Before he went to Bridewell, he'd proposed marriage; he'd asked her permission to ask her parents for her hand. She had said she'd think about it. And now she said she'd many him on one condition…
So Pa left union work.
Pa was no stranger to Maxwell Street; he'd been there, from time to time, passing out political and union literature. He didn't want to work for a "capitalist" institution, like a bank (he'd leave that to his brother Louis); and he couldn't work in a factor)' he'd been black-listed from most Chicago plants, and the ones where he wasn't black-listed would only present the temptation of future union work. So he opened a stall on Maxwell Street selling books, used and new, with an emphasis on dime novels, which, with school supplies- pencils, pens and ink, notebooks- attracted kids, who were his best customers. Occasionally, a parent frowned upon the union and anarchist literature that rubbed shoulders with Buffalo Bill and Nick Carter on Pa's stall; even the similarly politically conscious Jeanette was critical of this, but nothing could sway Pa. And Maxwell Street was a place where you could get away with selling just about anything.
About a mile southwest of the Loop, Maxwell Street was at the center of a Jewish ghetto a mile square, give or take, and on Maxwell Street it was mostly the latter. The Great Fire of 1871, thanks to Mrs. O'Leary's less-than-contented cow purportedly kicking a lantern over, left Maxwell Street, which was just south of the O'Leary barn, untouched. The Maxwell Street area had a big influx of new residents from the burned-out areas of Chicago, and the now densely populated area attracted merchants- most of them Jewish peddlers with two-wheeled pushcarts. Soon the street was teeming with bearded patriarchs, their caftans brushing the dusty wooden sidewalks, their black derbies faded gray from days in the sun, selling. Selling shoes, fruit, garlic, pots, pans, spices…
By the time Pa opened a stall there, Maxwell Street was a Chicago institution, the marketplace where the rich and the poor would go for a bargain; where awnings hung from storefronts to the very edge of the wooden stalls crowding the curb, the walkway between so dark a tunnellike effect was created, and lamps were strung up so bargain hunters could see what they were getting- but not too many lamps, and not overly bright, because it wasn't to the seller's advantage to let the buyer get too close a look at the toeless socks, used toothbrushes, factory-second shirts, and other wonders that were the soul of the street. Whether the street had a heart or not, I couldn't say, but it did have a smelclass="underline" the smell of onions frying: even the smell of garbage burning in open trash drums couldn't drown that out. Accompanying the oniony air were the clouds of steam rising from the hot dogs; and when the onions met the hot dogs in a fresh bun. that was as close to heaven as Maxwell Street got.
Pa and his bride moved into a one-room tenement flat at Twelfth and Jefferson, in a typical Maxwell Street-area building: a three-story clapboard with a pitched roof and exterior staircase. There were nine flats in the building and about eighty people; one three-room flat was home for an even dozen. The Hellers, alone in their one room, sharing an outhouse with twenty or thirty of their fellow residents (one outhouse per floor), had room to spare, and maybe that's what led to me.
I would imagine Pa was living your typical quiet life of desperation: his union work, which meant so much to him, was in the past; taking its place was his stall, in an atmosphere more openly capitalistic than the banks he loathed (and Pa was a well-read, intellectual type, remember; irony didn't get past him).
So all he had in life was his beloved Jeanette, and the promise of a family.
But mother was still frail, and having me (in 1905) damn near killed her. A midwife/nurse from the Maxwell Street Dispensary, pulled her- and me- through; and, later, diplomatically suggested to them, separately and together, that Nathan Samuel Heller be an only child.
Big families were the rule then, however, and a few years later, my mother died during a miscarriage; the midwife didn't even make it to the house before my mother died in my father's bloody arms. I think I remember standing nearby and seeing this. Or maybe my father's quiet, understated but photographically vivid retelling (and he told me this only once) made me think I remembered, made me think it came back to me from over the years. I would've been about three, I guess. She died in 1908.
Pa didn't show his feelings, it wasn't his way. I don't remember ever seeing him weep. But losing mother hit him hard. Had there been relatives on either side of the family that Pa was close to, I might've ended up being raised by an aunt or something; there were overtures from Uncle Louis, I later learned, and from mother's sisters and a brother, but Pa resisted them all. I was all he had left, all that remained of her. That doesn't mean we were close, though, despite the fact that I was helping at the stall by age six; he and I didn't seem to have much in common, except perhaps an interest in reading, and mine was a casual one, hardly matching his. But I was reading Nick Carter by age ten and used hardbacks of Sherlock Holmes soon after. I wanted to be a detective when I grew up.
Conditions in the neighborhood got worse and worse; shopping in the Maxwell Street Market could be an adventure, but living there was a disaster. It was a slum: there were 130 people crowded in our building now, and the father and son who shared one room were looked upon with envy by their neighbors. There were sweatshops which of course got my union-in-his-blood father's ire up- and diseases (mother had had influenza when the miscarriage took her. and Pa used to blame the flu for her death, perhaps because in some way it absolved him); and there was the stink of garbage and outhouses and stables. I attended Walsh school, and while I managed not to get involved directly, there were gang wars aplenty, bloody fights in which kids would slash each other with knives and fire pistols at one another. And that was the six- and seven-year olds; the older kids were really tough. I managed to live through two years of Walsh before Pa announced we were moving out. When? I wanted to know. He said he didn't know, but we would move.