Origin of a Species

By Judy on July 5, 2021 in Chapters & Stories, My Books

I am not an historical novel writer, but The Inheritors grows out of the history of Chicago, especially of the neighborhood I’d chosen as a setting. This early industrial area area just west of the downtown (or Loop, as it’s called) , drew immigrant groups in the early Twentieth Century. My research carried me into the diaries of Jane Addams, a social activist whose Hull House in this neighborhood is a city icon, and they began to produce short stories long before the novel took shape. Many of them found their way into the book, some did not, but all gave depth to the central story. Here is one of them.

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Origin of a Species

1910

In the back room lived a one-legged mound of raging flesh. Grandfather. Every day, Chickie Bartley prolonged his trip home from school, walking the fences along the alley, jumping from the coal mounds or pitching the black lumps at imaginary targets on garage doors and trash cans, delaying the moment he would bang in the gate and climb the wooden stairs to the first floor porch. Once they had lived at the top of the building, three stories up the wooden stairs to the glassed-in porch at the top where you could see across a whole block of backyards, alleyways, and even rooftops if you got the angle right. In the summer, that porch was his room, a perch at the top of the world. He could watch earthbound boys playing hide-and-seek, spy on them in their hiding places and watch the search—like God. Unseen and unheard, he could watch mothers hanging out the wash far below or watering the flowers struggling to grow through Chicago’s coal smoke on the open lower porches.

But then Grandpa Sullivan came to live with them, and they had to move downstairs, because Grandfather had only one leg now. He sat in the window that overlooked the first floor open porch, waiting to say, “Where the hell have you been?” or “Here’s your Prince, Em!” Sarcastic-like, as though it was Chickie who was the nuisance of the family.

Em was his mother, Emily Sullivan Bartley. Grandfather was waiting for Chickie and his mother to get him “out of this stinking hole,” as he called their apartment, for the daily walk that was supposed to strengthen him so he could ‘become a man again,’ as he said. He was too heavy for either of them, so he leaned his weight on Chickie’s shoulder, and his mother steadied him on the other side. Once they were down the short flight of stairs, he could hobble along on crutches himself, but Chickie’s mother made him go along anyway, to help the old man up if he should fall. Grandfather cursed the whole way, swinging a crutch at anyone he caught looking at him.

“You should have known him before the accident,” Chickie’s mother told him. “He was the best pipefitter at the foundry. The strongest and the smartest too. They always called him in to figure out a problem. Ray—that was his best friend—said there wasn’t anything Daddy couldn’t get straight. He would have become foreman for sure if it weren’t for the accident.” His mother kept repeating those stories; she’d repeat them to the windows if Chickie wasn’t in the room, as though she could blot out the cursing from the other room.

Chickie could remember the man she was talking about from the time before the accident, before Grandfather came to live with them. He was muscled like Chickie’s father then, though his belly pushed against his buttons, and he and Chickie’s father would sit on the front stoop talking about ingots and furnaces that had names, man to man. But that was the man he had called ‘Grandpa.’ After the accident, the only times Chickie caught a glimpse of that man was when Grandfather’s friends would drop in after shift sometimes. Then Chickie would see Grandpa’s face clear—but only for a moment. Once they’d finished their ‘hellos’ and Chickie’s mother had brought them beer, they mostly sat in silence. Grandfather would ask how things were at the foundry, but he’d always start his sentences with “I suppose” – like “I suppose the bastard Minelli’s got my job now,” or “I suppose there’s no one watching that the floor’s left clean.” They would just shrug and nod and the talk would stop—because it was Chickie’s father who was foreman now, the job Grandfather would have had if it hadn’t been for the accident.

This grandfather wouldn’t even speak to Chickie’s father; he refused even to come to the table. All through the meal they listened to the clink of his fork against his plate through the open bedroom door, letting them know he was listening to every word. The regular rhythm became shotgun loud whenever his father talked, particularly about the plant, so their dinner talk had long since been reduced to grunts and sighs.

But the men soon stopped coming to visit after shift. Grandfather’s flesh grew softer and his belly swelled over his belt; stubble grew thick on his jowls and he only wore an undershirt. And Chickie’s father wasn’t at the table anymore; he’d gone on the afternoon shift. It was to get a promotion, mother said, but they both knew it was to get away from Grandfather.

So his father wasn’t there to toss a baseball with Chickie in the backyard either. Or help with long division. And there were no men’s voices laughing at the kitchen table over beer, the way they had when they lived on the top floor. Sometimes on his father’s day off, he’d take Chickie to the park or the lake—just the two of them. One icy winter day as they were walking on the concrete blocks set along the lakeshore, Chickie asked why it couldn’t be the way it was before.

His father stopped and looked out over the water for a moment before answering. “Well, I tell you, Chick, I don’t know. I thought I could help your grandpa get back to himself by talking about the plant, but it didn’t work. It’s too bad what happened, but there’s no undoing it, nothing to do but get up, dust yourself off, and go on. Your grandpa, he’s stuck going over and over and over that day. I just can’t stand being around someone like that without shooting my mouth off. Best let your mother do what she can for him without me messing it up.”

“Don’t seem like she makes him any happier, though.”

“No, but not for lack of trying. He’s going to have to pull himself out of this. Like you learning how to jump down off the rocks. Remember when you were afraid to do that?”

Chickie nodded. “And you just walked off.”

“Yep. I knew you could do it; you just had to make up your own mind. No one could do it for you.”

Chickie nodded. Now he could match his father step for step, even with the wind pushing against him, taking his breath. “Mother says he’s angry he can’t work—that he has to be taken care of like a ‘frigging child.’”

“Your mother said that?” He stopped and looked at Chickie hard.

“Well—mostly. Grandfather said the ‘frigging’ part.”

He grunted. “No need to go copying his foul mouth, Chick.” He turned and resumed their walk, “and as far as the not working part, he can settle for that or not—up to him.”

“With only one leg?”

“There’s lots of one-legged, one-armed men holding down jobs, Chick.” He jumped to the lower tier of rocks. “You look around you, you’ll see them—watchmen, ticket takers, even switchmen on the railroads. He just can’t get past being mad, finding someone to blame for being reduced to a job like that. Meanwhile, he’s settled for being a cripple, that’s all.”

“Like you settling for the afternoon shift?” Chickie asked, almost under his breath as he jumped down after him. His father stopped so abruptly Chick crashed into him. When he regained his footing, his father was looking down at him with a sort of half annoyed, half admiring look in his eyes.

“I’m not settling for anything, Chick. I don’t intend to settle for working shifts at all. Working afternoons is the best way to get promoted to floor manager, and being floor manager is the best way to learn enough to own my own shop.”

“Oh.” Chickie thrust his hands in his pocket and tried to match his father’s wind-defying stride. “Will that be soon?”

“I hope so.” He looked down at Chick, then turned back to the South, so the wind was at their backs. “Besides, it keeps the peace.”

“With Grandfather?”

He laughed harshly. “Don’t imagine anyone can do that. No, with your mother.”

“Because she wants you to be nice to him?”

“He’s her father, Chick.”

“She says he’s a kindly man, but he’s not—he hit her with his crutch.”

His father stopped and looked at him hard. “That so?” He shook his head. “She’ll just have to learn to keep her distance, I guess. She keeps seeing what used to be. Come on, you’re freezing—let’s go get some cocoa.”

And so from that day on, Chickie waited.

The old man grew fatter and meaner, his mother grayer. Chickie became Chuck when he started junior high, and his father did start his own foundry. He started wearing suits and ties, but still he didn’t come home for dinner. When he did come home, it was as though he really belonged somewhere else now, as though he was looking down at them from some third floor porch. Sometimes he’d reach out a hand and pull Chuck along, taking him to see the new shop, with its clanging metal, screeching furnace doors and white-hot fires, a place where pointing took the place of talk. But at home, the hole between his mother and father widened and deepened, leaving Chickie floundering somewhere in the emptiness between them.

Then the war came. The railroad tracks near their house filled with troop trains and his uncles Bernie and Reggie Sullivan from St. Louis showed up at the Bartley apartment in uniform. His father came home then and shook their hands. They had chicken and dumplings in their honor, and there was color in his mother’s cheeks. Even Grandfather beamed with pride at his handsome sons. “The Sullivans are the same as the Bartleys now, I guess,” his mother said. They all laughed as though they understood, leaving Chuck to wonder what they meant. He decided it didn’t matter much, for the talk went on, and he felt held tight and proud among them as they all talked in one voice about getting the Kaiser and his ‘Hieni bastards.’

Just as they were starting their pie, there was a sharp crack at the window, like a shot, as though the war was right there. Then there was another, and another. “It’s kids,” his mother said. “They did the same thing day before yesterday.” She rose, opened the window. “Hiene! Hiene! Dirty Hiene!” came the cries.

“Over there!” she cried, pointing to the Schultz’s apartment entrance. “Not here!” They shifted their target, but no one appeared at the Schultz’s windows, so they went off to join a group down the block, stoning the little wooden house where the Reinholtzes, who spoke hardly any English, lived. Everyone returned to their pie as though nothing had happened at all.

“Why’re they doing that?” Chuck asked his father.

“Just being patriotic,” his Uncle Reggie said. “Don’t want any Germans around here, do we?”

“Johnny Schultz isn’t German,” he objected.

“His papa is, though,” his mother said, as though that explained everything.

Chuck frowned at his pie, a small pain in his stomach where his exuberance had been. Johnny Schultz was his best friend, and his mother knew it. Why didn’t she stick up for them? And Sammy Reinholtz had the best collection of baseball cards on the street—“I’m American now!” he’d beam, showing them around.

In the days that followed, Chuck joined the two of them where they walked alone, and shouted back at jeering passersby, daring them to throw a stone. They didn’t dare, not when he was there, and it made him feel proud and important. He took them home after school, daring his mother to say anything. She didn’t, and he felt power growing in his chest.

As the war went into high gear, his father’s foundry grew overnight from a blacksmith shop into a plant making helmets and bayonets. His father was only home on Sundays now, and Chuck began to dread the day because his mother always went from tearful to angry that he was never home and wouldn’t go to mass. Chuck couldn’t remember a time his father had gone to mass, but they hadn’t fought about it in the past. His father would just avert his head from her pleading look, and she would sigh and go off with her son alongside. Now his father yelled that the Bartleys weren’t Catholic and never would be and cursed the day he got himself tangled up in the Sullivans. Then he slammed out of the house.

He wasn’t there the day they heard Uncle Bernie had been killed. Chuck had to hold his mother’s head as she sobbed. It was Grandfather who was silent now, staring out the window, picking things up and putting them down. All in silence. Then Chuck was startled out of his chair by a terrible thumping on the wall behind him. “Goddamn, goddamn, goddamn!”

At that, his mother lifted her head, dried her eyes, and went into his room. She shut the door behind her, and Chuck could hear only the occasional sound of voices, ragged and low. He sat alone, remembering the man he had seen only once, handsome in his uniform; he remembered how proud and smiling everyone was. How could that be when they were sending him to die? It was the middle of the night when his father came home and found him huddled in the dark on the window seat in the long hall.

“Chuck? What are you doing there?”

Chuck woke and sat up, listened; no sounds came from Grandfather’s room. “It’s Uncle Bernie. Mama got a telegram.”

His father’s hand dropped from his shoulder. “Missing or killed?” His voice sounded louder and sharper in the bare-floored hallway. Like shots.

“Killed.”

He saw his father’s head drop. He stood motionless for a long time, then turned to Grandfather’s door and looked at it. Finally, he turned the knob and opened it to darkness and silence.

“Em?”

There was no answer. In the light from the hallway, they could see the two figures—Grandfather’s in the chair, his mother on the footstool her head against his knees, both asleep. Quietly, his father went in and lifted his mother in his arms; she stirred but did not wake. When he had carried her to her bed and laid her there, removing her shoes and covering her with a quilt, he returned and called to Chuck to help lift Grandfather to his bed; he pulled his one shoe off and covered him likewise. Then he put an arm around Chuck’s shoulders, and led him to his bed, removing his shoes and covering him, also, as though he was a little kid. Then he sat on the edge of his bed and rubbed his forehead.

“This is what it is, son. This is what war is. God knows—don’t ever go asking for it. Don’t let the songs and flag-waving fool you. It’s not flag-waving and songs; it’s bayonets and blood. But sometimes men just got to do it anyway, to get the bastards. Remember that, too.” He fell silent but sat there, waiting for Chuck to fall asleep. In years to come, whenever he felt overwhelmed with cold or loneliness, Chuck would play over his father’s anguish and his gentleness that single night.

Then the war was over. The family moved to the large stone house along the park—a house with heavy oaken double doors, stone terraces and a gated iron fence. What had once been the library, a high-beamed, walnut paneled room with French doors opening onto its own terrace, was made over for Grandfather. A bath was installed in what had once been a cloakroom and a door was cut in one wall into the room behind it, “for a nurse,” his father said.

“It’s a suite,” his mother beamed. “Maybe it will make him feel like an honored guest instead of an albatross.” Chuck, who had just had to memorize the Rime of the Ancient Mariner in school, was struck by the word and forever after looked at his grandfather as a curse on the family for some unknown crime.

His father hired a maid to help his mother with the house, but Grandfather soon made it clear he was having nothing to do with a nurse. He swung his crutch against the paneling and threw the artificial leg mother had made him get at anyone who entered except Chuck (who entered only when ordered) or his mother. Soon the room stank just like the one they’d left behind.

Chuck’s new room had a big bay window overlooking the park across the street and soft rugs on the floor. His mother had put his toy soldiers and forts from his childhood on the shelves, put his books into the bookcase, and hung college pennants on the wall. It felt like some other boy’s room, some boy dressed in his clothes. He understood this stranger was the boy he was to become, that all else—the alley-bred public schoolboy who climbed through coal chutes to basement club meetings, made blood pacts with other boys, pelted garage doors with coal—had been left behind.

He would leave for the university in a month because his father was rich now, and that’s what rich boys did. They didn’t wear overalls and feed furnaces. Of that world, all that was left was Grandfather—plus the daughter who took care of him but who once in a while became the mother who stood behind him now, waiting anxiously for his approval. He turned and smiled, hiding his shock at how thin she was becoming, how exhausted she looked already from running up and down the stairs at Grandfather’s every call.

But then it was spring; forsythia bloomed, concealing the iron fence, and the lilacs along the terraces were heavy with buds. Soon the terrace doors were flung open, and their scent filled the house. One Saturday, his father opened the mail and gave a cheer. Then he spun around and announced they were going to the Club for dinner.

“The Club?” his mother asked, looking frightened.

“The Country Club, my dear. You are now a member of the Chicago Country Club—oldest in the city.” He grasped her hands and danced her around. “Now go and get into your finery!”

“But I have none, Charles. None at all!”

“Well, then, hie yourself downtown and get some, Em. This is your brand new life! Chuck will take care of his grandfather for the afternoon.”

And so she did. When she appeared at the top of the stairs that evening, she was dressed in a sheath of sky-blue lace that ended just at her knees and she wore blue pumps to match. Her thick blond hair, usually pulled into a messy pile on the top of her head, was bobbed and shiny like a cap. Chuck gaped. How tiny she was! The lines around her mouth had been smoothed away with makeup; only the terror in her light-blue eyes gave lie to the svelte princess who waited for her husband’s arm to descend the stairs.

The Country Club lobby was full of golden evening light, and their white-clothed table looked out over the greens of the golf course into the trees. His father shook hands with seersucker-suited men Chuck didn’t know and introduced him as Charles, Junior. By the end of dinner Charles Junior was signed up for golf and tennis lessons and had a date to join a party at the pool.

So began the oddest summer of his life, alternating between the furnaces of the foundry, where his father had gotten him a job as an errand boy, to the greens of the Country Club, where he talked and played with private-school boys in white knickers and polished shoes, and girls in tennis dresses and shining caps of hair. He barely touched home and only rarely saw his mother and grandfather. His mother fled his father’s suggestions that she join the bridge or garden club with frightened fluttering hands and would only appear there clinging to his father’s elbow. Charles Junior was aware that his worlds were splitting irretrievably, but he was so relieved to be cut loose from his life at home that he gave himself gladly to this oasis.

At the end of the summer, Chuck set off for the university to bury himself in the life of fraternity hazing and pub-crawling with the same sort of boy he’d spent the summer. He became less awkward in their presence and went along on their escapades; their adult-defying antics weren’t so different from the groups he’d grown up with, but they seemed boys’ antics to him, and he was no longer a boy. By the end of his first year, the pretending had become more exhausting than the studying; he understood, finally, that he was never going to become one of these private school polished boys. They would remain acquaintances only, leaving some inner core of himself untouched.

So he became the student he’d never intended to be because it allowed him to spend hours alone without the demands of human company. He continued to look forward to the holidays and to be continuously disappointed because he could never quite remember that the home he carried around in his mind was gone—indeed, had been gone since they moved from the third floor apartment that overlooked the world of which he was king. When he opened the oaken doors to the opulent, unused rooms, their brocade and crystal as new as the day they were bought, he was a stranger. Only the stench of Grandfather’s room was familiar.

More and more, he spent his holidays with his father at the foundry. There, as at the Club, he was Charles, Junior. He felt like an ill-fitting stranger again in the offices, but when he and his father put on coveralls over their suits to make the rounds of the foundry floor, he remembered being the child of this man—the man who came home blackened with soot, carrying his lunch bucket. Every summer he worked on the floor. The men touched their caps with respect when he arrived for his shift; the talk of pregnant wives and errant children left him little to say, but they called him ‘Chuck,’ at his request, and he enjoyed feeling his muscles work. He went home alone most evenings, leaving his father in the office, “to get some work done,” he said. There were other evenings, though, when his father slammed shut the books, stretched, and suggested they dine at the club. Neither of them ever took anyone home for dinner.

On the rare occasions when his father himself was home before midnight, the fragile peace his mother had accepted was splintered by his father’s presence. “This is ridiculous, Emily,” his father burst. “You’ve got to find a way to keep him quiet. I didn’t buy this house as a loony ward for your father. I need to entertain people, you know. I can’t just keep taking them to the country club.”

Then his mother’s face would tighten. “Well, if you weren’t ashamed of him—“

“Don’t start!”

And they fell silent again. The hole left by the unfinished argument swelled until it became the house itself. For Chuck, the great paneled rooms with their velvet portieres and sliding doors, the dinners at the country club, his fraternity pin, were the painted shell of a blown egg. The house remained empty of guests.

His mother appeared without make-up now, her face pasty and puffy; she didn’t go to the beauty parlor anymore. Her graying hair was pulled back in a bun like the old women in the shops. The mother he remembered dressed in blue lace, became a thin stooped shadow wandering aimlessly about the empty house. His father never took her anywhere anymore. They all lived in the void left by the unfinished quarrel.

It wasn’t until he’d finished college and was working at the plant full time that he made one last effort to regain his past. He was feeding the giant maw of the furnace, proud of his strength, his sweat, his stamina, his will to survive both the furnace and the glaring heat of a Chicago summer—survive and get stronger. He decided to be the workman he was and go to Nick’s Place, where the mill men hung out for a pint before going home to their families.

A mistake. Silence fell like a blanket when he brought his beer to the scarred oak table where three men already sat. He decided to sit down anyway. These were the men that had sat out on the front stoop of the little wooden house where his grandfather had lived before the accident, drinking beer and catching the lake breeze at the end of their shift. The tall skinny man named Jake used to swing him in the air; the heavy jowly Danny had had more hair then, but still had the look of a joker, and Tim, the third, was a giant of a man still, though he looked less huge than he had to a five-year-old. There’d been another, a small, freckled-faced man named Ray who sang songs to him. He was killed in the same accident that severed his grandfather’s leg.

They were the ones who’d toss him between them and take them along if they found him out front of his apartment building on their way down the block to grandfather’s house. Sometimes his father and Tim’s son would be with them, the generations joshing each other, the old remembering their own youth at the mills. He greeted them by name and sat down, turning his attention to his beer. The talk between the others started and died and started again, like an engine trying to catch. Finally, it quit altogether and there was only the sound of mugs being set down.

“How’s Pete?” Tim asked into the void, startling Chuck into looking up. “He still with you?”

It took Chuck a full five seconds to remember that ‘Pete’ was Grandfather. When he did, it was with a great sinking feeling. Was the man to haunt him, too, as he haunted his father? He nodded. “Still with us, yes.” He took a drink. “Mean as ever,” he added on impulse, then realized it was another mistake as the table went silent.

“No,” Danny said. “Mean wasn’t always the way with Pete.”

Chuck looked at his glass, knowing he was about to hear the story of the truckload of steel that spilled. “So my mother says,” he mumbled.

Tim nodded. “Em, she always insisted it wasn’t him.”

“Wasn’t him? Who? What do you mean?”

Tim blinked, surprised at the question. “Well, someone didn’t tie that load down, son.”

“We all said it was the last shift,” Jake said, looking around at the table, “but your father—he was the one inspecting wagons at the beginning of the shift—he insisted that the wagons were all tethered right then.”

“You would’ve thought he’d stand by Pete, being his son-in-law and all,” Danny said, louder, with the air of a man nursing an old grudge.

“But he didn’t,” Jake, agreed, taking a swig of his beer. “Never was a one for loyalty, if you pardon my saying so. “None of the kids do; they don’t stick together like we used to.”

“’Twas more than that, Jake. Bart always thought it was Pete who forgot to tie that load,” Danny said, setting his mug down hard to emphasize his point. “Even with Pete lying there, his leg trapped, bleeding like a pig, yelling for Ray. Just yelling for Ray. You’d think the man would have a little mercy—take the part of his own.” He shook his head. “But no, he had to be a good little soldier—tell the boss those loads were tied at the start of the shift and leave his own father-in-law on the spot.”

“Why?” Chuck asked. “Couldn’t anyone have tied them—or not?”

“Pete and Ray were tethering for the shift. We said no one could tell which load it was that went, but without Bart to back us up . . .” Danny shrugged and sunk his jowl into his beer, saying no more.

Chuck stared into the unfinished sentence. “So—what happened?”

“Pete lost his job, of course,” Jake said shortly. “Left him with one leg, no best buddy, no way to even feed himself.”

“He would have been a damned fine foreman, even with one leg,” Tim added.

“Instead, the whole thing ate his mind out,” Danny finished, thumping his empty mug on the table.

“Losing a leg, having to move in with Em and Bart—the very man who hadn’t stood by him and with Ray’s death between ‘em,” Jake shook his head. “That’s enough to drive any man over the edge.”

“Then Bart got the foreman job Pete was in line for,” Jake added. “That topped it off. The thing just kept festering until you couldn’t talk to him anymore.”

“You were his friends,” Chuck said, trying to lessen the bitterness of the story a bit. “You stood by him.”

“You bet. Tried to, anyway,” Tim said amid nods from the others.

“But you –how come I never see you at the house anymore?”

“What? That big place across the park? T’isn’t a place folk like us would go, son.”

“But–” He broke off. They’d stopped coming long before they moved to the house, but something told him not to push it. They would never come when his father was there, he realized now, so when his father went on the night shift—they’d stayed away rather than risk encountering him in the kitchen or hallway of the Bartley apartment.

“Emily had to do what she did, Tim was saying “No one questioned that. Bart’s her husband, after all.”

“But it wasn’t a place Pete could be. We all knew that,” Danny continued. “Was like Bart was throwing it in Pete’s face—where he’d gotten to, where Pete would have gotten if it weren’t for the accident.”

“Bet no one calls him ‘Bart’ anymore,” Jake chuckled. “That right son?”

Chuck nodded. “Never heard it before.”

“No, well you tell the old man we miss him, okay?”

Chuck nodded. It was not his father they meant. He finished his beer and left, knowing he would not return. He walked home through his old neighborhood, watching boys play stickball in the streets, the men drinking beer on the front porches of the few wooden houses that remained, mothers calling for their children as the light died. He stopped for a minute to look at the gray stone front of the six-flat that had been his home. It still looked as formidable and grim as ever, but the third floor windows glinted gold with the last rays of sunshine. He went through the gate to the back, where the wooden lacing of stairs and porches ran up the back face. A woman pulling her laundry from the line eyed him with suspicion.

“I used to live here when I was a kid,” he explained, smiling.

“Ah!” She laughed. “’Twasn’t so long ago, then. What name?”

“Bartley.”

She frowned and shook her head. “Before my time.”

He stiffened, wanting to argue that it had only been four years. But the first floor porch was full of baby carriages and tricycles, and the third floor sunporch windows were covered over with curtains. No trace of his life remained here.

The lake breeze had lifted the day’s heat and women stepped out onto porches to catch it in their skirts as his mother had, when she finished cleaning the house or could take a moment to escape the heat of the kitchen. The mothers would call out to each other or wave, or sit together on the steps, their voices carrying up and down the wooden stairs. The breeze filled their sails and gave them the momentum for another day.

Everyone talked of working themselves to an easier place the way his father had. Most of them hadn’t; they were far more content than his father with this life Chuck so longed for now. His father never talked fondly about his years in these streets the way his mother did; he wasn’t a man to settle for things the way they were.

Charles turned away and walked until the park trees rose over his head. Then he sat and stared into the night, the scene at the bar settling into his gut. A memory rose of his father standing before the mirror in their bedroom, his back to his mother who stood behind him looking at his image in the mirror. They were angry, talking through the mirror, each stiff-backed.

“What I did I did because I had to.”

“Sticking with your own is what you have to do—that’s the only right I know.”

“Then you don’t know me!” His father swung away so suddenly, Chuck had no time to duck away from the open door. His father stopped and looked at him. He started to speak but changed his mind and only gave a jerk of a nod before striding past him and out the door. When Chuck turned back, his mother had sunk to the bed, holding her head in her hands.

Chuck raised his head to the smell of damp earth that had replaced the smell of the streets, the leaf-dappled light on the walkway replacing the flat glare of streetlights on cement. Had his father walked alone here that night, letting the familiar buildings fade with the day? He had left that street, moved onward to the great stone house, but he returned to the same question, the same deadlock, day after day; the albatross still hung about his neck.

The stone house was dark and silent. As he groped for the light switch, he tripped over something at the foot of the stairs. When he switched on the light, he was looking into his mother’s staring eyes. A cry of shock burst from him as he bent over her. Her housecoat was ripped where she’d caught her heel and her body, twisted by the fall, was lifeless. A terrible rage rose in him as he crossed the hall to the library door.

“Well, where the hell have you been?” Grandfather’s voice responded to the sound of the opening door. “Where’s your mother?” he asked as soon as Chuck came into the light. “I’ve been hollering for an hour!”

Chuck looked around the room. There was nothing amiss, except that Grandfather’s empty dinner tray hadn’t been removed.

“So what are you looking at? Where’s Emily?”

Chuck turned on his heel and left him. It was over. The deadlock was broken; the question answered. He yelled for his father, but no one answered. Tears streaming with the weeping that comes with the end of things, he picked up the telephone and called for an ambulance; then, knowing he would find him at the plant, he called his father and listened, curled over on himself as his father’s scream of shock turned to rage, then to an anguished, “God—God—God–” as the phone dropped into its cradle.

Chuck lowered the receiver at his end slowly and turned back to his mother. As he covered her face, his rage turned to stone; he felt his bones harden, felt a barrier rise up around him. Nothing—no crime of his father’s, no duty of his mother’s—justified this, this swallowing of her life. Nothing like this was going happen to him again. A slave he would never be. Not ever.