THIS IS A factual story about childhood and death, but I will try to make it salient, which, the dictionary says, is from the Latin saliens and clearly means “moving by leaps and springs.” And what is thinking? Well, it is “mental concentration on ideas as distinguished from sense perceptions or emotions.” It’s a word from Middle English, which is sometimes cloudy. The point I want to make is that in the short period of my life with which we are dealing here—the child from thirteen to seventeen—I didn’t think about death. I was aware of it, but I didn’t give it thought. Not in the dictionary sense. Not, at least, until after the incident that has to do with a cockatoo at the zoo in Washington, D.C., in the summer of 1922. That comes toward the end of the story.
I suppose some young people start thinking about a number of things, if not about death, long before they are seventeen, but I’m not sure of this. The young are receivers. In order to have something to give, they must take, and in order to give what they have taken—even if it is only to give it to themselves—they must think. In the dictionary sense. I know only about myself, of course, but about myself I know everything. I know the things I heard and saw in those years, the things I felt and smelled, and I know on what smooth-running reels my imagination turned to show me things that weren’t there. And I know what I did. I have forgotten nothing.
If I had had any thoughts, I would remember them. I haven’t isolated every conceivable subject on which I might have had thoughts (in the dictionary sense) and dipped them one by one into memory to test and make sure beyond all doubt that no thinking went on in connection with them; I don’t think that is necessary. If I wasn’t able to think about death in this thirteen-to-seventeen period, it must be that I wasn’t able to think about anything. I experienced the sense perceptions, the ripples and breakers of the emotions, the excursions of the imagination, and the goings on that occur in dreams and nightmares, and I acted this way and that way.
MY FATHER REACHED the age of fifty-two before he died. I was thirteen then, and was getting over a case of scarlet fever. When I first came down with it, my mother decided it would be easier to take care of me if I occupied the second-floor bedroom in which she and my father customarily slept. Accordingly, I was tucked into their double bed, and my father was moved into a bedroom on the third floor. My mother nursed me and slept on a couch in her sewing room, which was next to their former bedroom. When I was still in bed but getting better, my father brought me my first Meccano set, No. 1-A. He had left his office early and gone to buy it at the toy department of Woodward & Lothrop’s. And he was a very busy man. He was a Doctor of Divinity, like practically everybody else we knew, but had given up preaching to Presbyterians in order to become secretary of the National Child Labor Committee. He was trying to get Congress to take the first steps toward adoption of an amendment to the Constitution that would keep children from being put to work in the cotton mills of the South, many of which were owned and operated by Presbyterians. Because of the danger of catching my infection or carrying some of my germs with him when he left the house to go to his office, he wasn’t allowed to enter his former bedroom, where I was, but could only stand at the door while I lifted up what I had made with No. 1-A and showed it to him. The house was quarantined. My mother, who was in constant contact with me and my germs, wasn’t allowed to leave the house. My two older brothers were away at training camps, getting ready to fight in the World War, and my sister had been sent to stay with some cousins in Maryland until the quarantine was lifted. The only other person at home was our Scotch-Irish housekeeper, Miss Annabelle, who had become a member of the family before I was born. Since she dealt with the tradesmen who came to the house, she couldn’t come into the sickroom, either. The doctor didn’t need to tell me about the contagiousness of my infection. My mother had already told me. She knew all about sickness, and in many ways was at her best when confronted with it. She had a great deal of love for those close to her but also a strong sense of responsibility to God for their shortcomings. When they were hale and active, they sometimes felt oppressed by the relentlessness of her critical faculty, but when they were ailing and stationary, she eased up and put her whole self into ministrations of devotion.
My father brought me No. 1-B, No. 2-A, No. 2-B, and No. 3-A Meccano sets in the weeks of my convalescence, and would have brought me No. 3-B if he hadn’t come down with an infection himself. My mother told me he absolutely had not caught my infection. What he had was a bad case of bronchitis, she said. Then she told me he had confessed to her that he also had heart trouble. A doctor he’d gone to see, about the time I first got sick with the scarlet fever, had told him so, but he hadn’t wanted to worry her. My mother said this meant he would have to take things easier after he got over the bronchitis. He would have to walk very slowly the six blocks up the hill to the streetcar line, and, of course, after I got well, he wouldn’t have to climb the three flights of stairs to the room she had put him in. In the meantime, she could nurse him as well as me, because he wouldn’t be going out of the house until after the quarantine for my scarlet fever had been lifted.
Then, one morning about a week after my father got the bronchitis, my mother came in to see me and, as usual, I asked her how he was.
“He’s gone away from us,” she said. “God has taken him. He went very peacefully. It was late last night after you went to sleep, son. I took him some warm milk and crackers, and I was just helping him sit up in bed while I fluffed up the pillows for him. He sighed and sank back and was gone.”
“He’s dead?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Go ahead and cry, son.”
She waited until I pretended to cry and then left the room. The doctor said the six-week quarantine was almost over, that my skin had stopped peeling, that in his opinion I was no longer contagious, and that consequently he would take a chance, in view of the circumstances, and just go ahead and lift the quarantine. Two days later, I was allowed to dress and go downstairs to the parlor, where everything was ready for the funeral, which was to be held the day after that. From the parlor I went into the kitchen, where Miss Annabelle kissed me on the cheek and then made out that she was busy with something she was cooking. I knew she was crying and that she wasn’t crying because of my father; she was crying because I was a fatherless child. In the back yard was my Boston terrier, Bessie. My father had brought her to me from a pet store on K Street almost six months back, at Christmastime. She jumped on me and began to race around in circles, because she hadn’t seen me since I got sick. I cried then, but I didn’t cry at the funeral or afterward at the Rock Creek Cemetery.
THIS WAS BEFORE the invention of the talking pictures that were later to come to the movie houses in Washington and elsewhere, but talking pictures were showing in my head just the same. Some of them were entirely from the memory, some were from the imagination, some were from the emotions, and some were from wherever it is that nightmares come from. At times the memory, the imagination, and the emotions became merged with one another into a continuous series of overlapping pictures, with accompanying dialogues. But in the nightmares it was the same scene over and over, and all nightmare. I would find my father after hunting for him in banks of clouds, and I would upbraid him, shaking my finger at him and sometimes screaming at him. I would tell him he ought to be ashamed of himself for going away from us. I would tell him he had to come back to us right then or I would tell my mother. I would tell my mother our secret about the partridges he let me shoot that time on Sunday when just the two of us went on the hunting trip to his birthplace, in Charlotte Court house, Virginia. I tried to stamp my foot to show him how angry I was and to show him I meant every word I said—that I would tell my mother he had lied when he said it was on a Saturday that he let me shoot the partridges—but my foot would only go through the cloud I was standing on, and my stamping made no noise, and my father would just look at me and put on the imitation painful-face he had teased me with the time I pretended to have the stomach ache at our first house in Washington—the house in Georgetown, not the house in Mt. Pleasant, where he had died—when I was just starting grade school. Then he would grin at me and wink at me, and I would wake up. My memory would thereupon quickly show me some talking pictures connected with the nightmare. For example, it would show me the stomach-ache scene—my mother putting me to bed and saying I needn’t go to school that day, and my father coming in before he left for his office and seeing me make my painful-face and then making his imitation painful-face at me, indicating he knew I was malingering. My mother took my side that time and told him he shouldn’t tease the sick child, and he winked at me and went off chuckling, and I was mad at him because he had made fun of me. But I felt conspiratorial with him at the same time, because he had winked at me, indicating he knew I was putting on a show to keep from going to school but that he wouldn’t tell.
Then my memory, as likely as not, would bring out the pictures of Siegfried dying in the back yard of the Mt. Pleasant house right after we moved there from Georgetown. Siegfried was my brother Zan’s Great Dane. We all loved him as if he were a member of the family, like Miss Annabelle. When he was a puppy, he was so big and heavy that his forelegs buckled under him, and the veterinarian said there was nothing to do with a Great Dane when that happened but chloroform him. My mother said that was perfectly ridiculous; all the puppy needed was some splints. So we made some splints out of pine kindling wood and sandpapered them until they were as smooth as the piece of Chinese jade my mother’s missionary cousins had given her on her thirtieth birthday. My mother fixed them on Sieg’s legs with sticking plaster, and as he grew bigger and stronger, we made new splints, and when she finally took them off for good, Sieg’s legs were perfectly straight and didn’t buckle, and my mother said, “So much for veterinarians!” But then, a long time afterward, Sieg caught distemper, because we had the vanity to show him in the dog show when we should have just been proud and happy to have such a nice Great Dane as a member of the family. My mother said it was vanity, and that all of us, including herself, were guilty of it. Sieg won blue ribbons but he got distemper and died. Only, he didn’t die, exactly. The veterinarian had said he was surely going to die and ought to be put out of his misery, and everybody had said we couldn’t let him be put out of his misery, and Sieg lay in the back yard in a tent Zan put up for him, and barked and bayed and howled and whimpered in his delirium, and my father said he was having ancestral dreams of the chase, hundreds of years before in Denmark. But Sieg barked and bayed and howled and whimpered day and night for a week, and everybody was going around very melancholy, and nobody could eat, no matter what Miss Annabelle cooked, and finally my mother— on her own responsibility, she said it was—told the veterinarian to put him out of his misery, and the veterinarian did when we were all at school. He put a cloth over Sieg’s face, with chloroform on it. When my brother Zan got home from his high school, where he played left halfback on the football team, he said Sieg had been killed, murdered, and he shouted at my mother, “I’ll never forgive you as long as you live!” She burst into tears, and so did my sister and I and Miss Annabelle.
My imagination would then show me pictures of my mother putting a chloroform cloth over Sieg’s face, and then pictures of her putting a chloroform cloth over my father’s face while she told me he was in misery and had to be put out of his misery and that this would have to be our secret. But then I would see other pictures of my germs flying up the third-floor stairs and killing my father, murdering him, and still other pictures of God coming down to see him in the third-floor bedroom where my mother had put him, and God saying, “McKelway, I need you up here; you’ve got to come,” and my father saying, “I’m willing, God,” and going away from us. God called him by his whole last name that way, the same as President Woodrow Wilson did. The President was strongly in favor of the child-labor amendment to the Constitution. My mother said there had to be an amendment, because the federal child-labor bill my father had worked on so hard and got Congress to pass had been declared unconstitutional after the President signed it. There was a real picture, a photograph, of the President signing that bill, and in the photograph, from left to right, were my father, my mother, my sister, the President, and me. It was framed, and it was in my father’s study, standing on the mantelpiece. In that photograph my father was looking very solemn, and my memory gave me a picture of him in his coffin on the day of the funeral, and he looked the same way he looked in the photograph except that his eyes were closed.
There were some pictures I kept making my memory show me over and over, because I liked them best and they didn’t make me nervous. They were about the day when I was nine years old and was going to be punished by my father with a razorstrop, which was something he had never in his life used on anybody—not even my brothers. Through carelessness and bad judgment, I had dropped a milk bottle filled with live grasshoppers from quite a height, intending for it to break on some rocks near where a congressman’s son was playing in Rock Creek Park, and it had hit that boy on the head and made him bleed, and the doctor had had to take twelve stitches. The pictures showed my father coming home from his office while I was waiting for him in my room, to which my mother had sent me, and coming straight upstairs with the razorstrop and saying, “I’m very sorry, son, but this is mighty serious.” It seemed the congressman had walked into his office without knocking and had told him to stop bothering Congress about the children in the cotton mills of the South and start looking after his own children in the District of Columbia. The congressman had said I ought to be sent to the reform school. The talking pictures showed my father asking me to tell him all the circumstances before he punished me severely, and me telling him all the circumstances, and him dangling the razorstrop and beginning to moan and sputter. I thought he was crying, but he was laughing, and when he recovered, he couldn’t bring himself to whip me with the razorstrop, or even spank me, but could only say, “Oh, son, it makes me laugh because at least it was a congressman’s son and not a senator’s son.” And the only punishment I got for the whole thing was that I had to pay that boy’s doctor’s bill and go and apologize to him and his father, the congressman. I paid it out of money I had made raking leaves at the zoo during the summer.
THINGS WERE MOVING very fast all around me as well as in my head. My brothers came home on leave for the funeral, and went away again. It was the first time I had seen them in their uniforms. At the funeral, which was held in the parlor and was attended by many prominent Washingtonians and some congressmen and two senators, my mother and my sister and my brothers and Miss Annabelle and I sat in chairs on the second-floor landing, where we could hear everything but couldn’t be seen by the people downstairs. My mother cried with a handkerchief held over almost her whole face, and my sister cried the same way. Miss Annabelle didn’t cry, because it would have attracted attention to herself, and that was something she never did, but her face was all screwed up as if she were in agony. My brother Zan, in his uniform of a naval flier, cried and used his handkerchief, and my biggest brother, Bo, in his uniform of a second lieutenant in the infantry, cried and didn’t use his handkerchief, and the tears rolled down and dropped off the end of his nose. I tried to cry but I couldn’t, so I pretended to cry and used my handkerchief. Then, soon after the funeral, my mother rented the house and all its furniture to a wartime official of the Interior Department, on a year’s lease. My sister was sent away to normal school to start learning how to be a schoolteacher. Miss Annabelle was given a leave of absence and sent to visit some of her relatives in North Carolina. My mother and I went to visit one of her sisters in Virginia. My mother knew that her sister’s husband didn’t approve of dogs, and she said she wouldn’t want to impose Bessie on him, so Bessie was sent to some friends of Mother’s in Georgetown, who said they’d give Bessie a good home. My mother said they would let us have her back again after we got settled, unless the children in that family got too attached to her, in which case she would find me another dog somewhere. All during those first days after my father died, whenever my mother looked at me I would avert my eyes. I couldn’t help it.
Toward the end of that summer, my mother and I returned to Washington and boarded with the Hobarts, a family who lived up the block from our rented house. The Hobarts’ boy, Phil, was a close friend of mine, but my mother didn’t care much for the Hobarts. They were what she called common. My mother said she didn’t want to obligate us to the Hobarts by asking them to let Bessie stay there. I had the influenza at the Hobarts’, and it left me depressed, exactly as my mother said it would. Influenza germs did something to the metabolism, she said. When I got over the influenza, we went to board with the Whitmans, in Georgetown. My mother and Mrs. Whitman were bosom friends, as they said, but my mother didn’t think much of Mr. Whitman. She said he was an autocrat. They had a daughter, Justina, who was my age. I ignored her. I was starting my first year at Western High School, I frequently smoked cigarettes in secret, and I had fallen in with some freshmen who not only smoked but knew all about everything. What they said seemed incredible, but after a while I believed it. Although there were girls in my head, I had no use for them in the flesh. I was unnecessarily mean to Justina. If one of the pleasant pictures about my father was going on in my head, the girls there sometimes broke right in and started running off a reel about themselves when I didn’t want them to, but if some of the bad pictures about him were going on, I couldn’t make them stop even if I deliberately tried to get the girls started up. I kept having the same old nightmare almost every night.
I was still in short pants, and my mother said I couldn’t wear long pants until I was fifteen. I joined the Western High cadets in order to get one of their long-pants uniforms, and when I got it, I wore it whether it was a drill day or not, and also on Saturdays and Sundays. I was almost six feet tall, and many people thought I was at least sixteen. My mother gave in and bought me a long-pants civilian suit, a single-breasted blue flannel, at Woodward &Lothrop’s. My uncles and my aunts and my first cousins and my mother’s friends would say, “So this is the man of the family!” when we went to see them or when we ran into them after church on Sundays, and my mother would say “Yes, indeed, he’s the man of the family now.” They would smile at me, and I would look serious. My mother talked to me a great deal when we were alone together, and told me all her worries. I couldn’t look straight into her eyes, and I couldn’t ask her if she had a secret she wanted to share with me. Still, I felt as if I really was the man of the family. I cut down on cigarettes, broke off relations with the carefree gang of freshmen I had first taken up with at Western, made new friends among sophomores, juniors, and even seniors, and started going to dances with real girls, some of whom I hugged and kissed on the lips in the back seats of automobiles on the way home. Then the war ended abruptly, and my mother and I moved back into the Mt. Pleasant house. Miss Annabelle returned to active duty. My brothers came home, took off their uniforms, and joined the family circle. I was sure they didn’t like me any more because I was so grown up. I began to smoke even more than I used to, and, for the first time, to steal and to skip school.
When my mother decided to take two or three of what she called paying guests into the house, I resented them as intruders but, at the same time, welcomed them because of the stealing I was going in for. In the daytime, with some of my best friends as accomplices, I stole all kinds of stuff from ten-cent stores. Once in a while, at night, we stole somebody’s automobile that had been left on the street with the ignition key in it. We would drive the car around for an hour or so and park it in some other neighborhood. Singlehanded I occasionally stole quarters and half dollars from my mother’s handbag. She always missed the money and questioned me about it, without, of course, accusing me. When the boarders came, I stopped stealing from her and stole only from the boarders. One of them, a Mr. Gireaux, was a gold mine. He was a bachelor, a clerk in the Treasury Department, who tittered shyly at my mother’s dinner-table conversation, raising his napkin to his mouth and ducking his head. My mother liked him. She said he came from good French Huguenot stock—the Gireauxes.
She thought he might be related to the Huguenots on her father’s mother’s side of the family—the Micheauxes. In any case, Mr. Gireaux fell in love at first sight with one of the lady boarders. When he went down the hall to take a bath and comb his hair down slick, I would step into his room and steal some of the loose change he always left on top of his bureau. He never seemed to miss it. I began looking into his billfold and taking, sometimes, as much as three dollars. Not a word or a sign came from him. He was befuddled with love.
I used the money I stole to supplement my allowance of two dollars a week, which barely covered the cost of carfare and lunch. Miss Annabelle made me an excellent lunch every day of chicken or roast-beef or Virginia-ham sandwiches and fresh fruit, wrapped it in a paper bag, and tied it up with string, but I tossed it every day into the sewer at the corner of Klingle Road, on the way to the streetcar, because the older crowd I was going with ate lunches of hot dogs or baloney sandwiches, and no fresh fruit, at the delicatessen across the street from the high school. I had forty-five dollars in a savings account at the National Savings & Trust on Pennsylvania Avenue—money I’d earned during the Christmas holidays delivering flowers for a florist—but I wasn’t supposed to touch that, and I didn’t. I depended on Mr. Gireaux. Finally, I took a ten-dollar bill out of his billfold, and this time he did miss the money. He told my mother he couldn’t be sure, but he thought a ten-dollar bill had disappeared from his billfold. She questioned me about it, without, of course, accusing me. That blew over. Mr. Gireaux and the lady boarder became engaged to be married, and seemed happy, although my mother was inclined to think she was too young for him and was close to being common.
I PROBABLY WOULD have gone back to Mr. Gireaux and his billfold again if I hadn’t run away from home about that time. I had been skipping school for days at a stretch and persuading a girl, a senior, to write excuses for me, to which she forged my mother’s name. On the whole, skipping school was a tiresome and worrisome business. The free time hung heavy on my hands. It was too cold to go swimming or fishing. About the only thing I could think of to do was to go to the movies. But the movies didn’t open until eleven o’clock, and in order to pretend to be going to school I had to leave the house at half past eight. From then until eleven, I was at a loose end. I spent most of those mornings at the Smithsonian Institution, a museum which, along with other museums, I loathed at that time, owing to its educational values. It was warm inside the Smithsonian, though, and as good a place as any to hang around in at that hour of the morning. Sometimes I went to the zoo, which was not far from our house, but I had worked there in past summers raking leaves, I knew all there was to know about it, and it interested me even less than the Smithsonian. I couldn’t smoke in the Smithsonian, but, once inside a movie theatre, I could sit down in a deep leather chair in the gentlemen’s lounge in the basement and smoke. But if I smoked a whole cigarette when I went in, I would miss some of the picture. I usually smoked half a cigarette and didn’t really settle down to smoking until the program was over. Then I would go back to the smoking room and smoke for a long time, and afterward would see some of the program over again if I felt like it. Unless I wanted to spend the rest of the day alone, I had to leave the theatre before the end of the second showing and catch a streetcar over to Georgetown, in order to be outside the high school when the classes were dismissed at three o’clock. Then I could join up with some of my friends and find something to do until time to go home to supper.
At last, things came to a head. I went back to school one February morning with a forged excuse, handed it in, and, after an hour or so, was summoned by the principal. He told me he had found out my excuse was a forgery, that he had been in communication with my mother, that I was suspended indefinitely, and that I could go home. It was around half past eleven. I got on a streetcar, expecting to change at Dupont Circle and get on another one for Mt. Pleasant and go home, but before I got to Dupont Circle I had a picture showing me running away. The streetcar was going downtown, and I stayed on it. I went to the National Savings & Trust and drew out my savings. Things still seemed to be moving very fast. I realized I couldn’t get far on forty-five dollars, and it also occurred to me that I would need some clothes and a suitcase to carry them in. I took a blank check from the desk in the bank lobby on my way out.
I then went to Woodward & Lothrop’s. My mother had a charge account there. I had occasionally bought things for her in the past, at her direction, and charged them. But before charging anything this time I went to the cashier’s window in the bookkeeping department, filled in the blank check for forty-five dollars, signed it, and gave it to the cashier, a Mr. Maltby. I told him I had a checking account at that bank, which was a lie, and added that my mother had one there, which was the truth. He knew me and he knew my mother. He cashed the check without hesitation.
I then went to the gentlemen’s-clothing department and asked to see some lightweight suits. I didn’t know where I was going to run away to, but I pictured a place that gave me a feeling of being a long way off, probably somewhere south of Washington, where it was warmer. The clerk said he didn’t have any lightweight-wool suits, and added laughingly that it was a little too early for Palm Beach suits. I said that as a matter of fact I was going to Florida—that a cousin of mine had been taken ill down there—and a Palm Beach suit might be exactly what I was looking for. He said their summer supply had come in a few days before and wasn’t on the racks yet but that he would be glad to show me some. I tried on several and chose one—they were all the same cream-colored shade—and charged it to my mother. It fit perfectly except that the trousers were a little long. The clerk wanted to have them altered, but I said my train was leaving in a couple of hours and that I would get my sick cousin’s wife to shorten the trousers when I got to Florida.
I went to the haberdashery department and charged two white shirts and two semi-stiff collars with long points, two suits of B.V.D.s, two pairs of black lisle socks, and two cotton handkerchiefs. I couldn’t think of anything else I wanted. I decided the shoes I had on were all right and that I would buy a straw hat with a red-and-black striped band when I arrived in Florida. I was wearing my single-breasted blue flannel, a dark green-and-crimson plaid mackinaw, and a woollen snow cap with ear flaps. I carried my bundles to the luggage department, charged a medium-priced imitation-leather suitcase, had my initials, which were rather long and complicated, stamped in gilt letters on the top of it, and put my bundles into it. I can’t understand to this day why somebody in that department store didn’t suspect something crooked was going on. I can only presume that it was because I had an honest face.
By the time I left the store, I had made up my mind to go to Key West. It was the only place in Florida I had ever heard of except Palm Beach, and it was as far away from Washington as I could get in a southerly direction and still stay in the country. I had a notion I might wind up somewhere in South America later on, like an O. Henry character, but I didn’t want to go there first off. At Union Station, I inquired about trains, bought a through ticket, and engaged an upper berth on a Pullman. The total price was outrageous. While waiting for my train to be called, I bought a cheap edition of O. Henry short stories at the newsstand and put it in a pocket of my mackinaw. I also bought some plain stationery. I found a desk in the waiting room and sat down and wrote a short letter to my mother—the kind of letter, I suppose, that a runaway fifteen-year-old customarily writes. It expressed regret for the worry I was causing her and for the failure I had made of my opportunities. It gave assurances that I would let the family know from time to time that I was in good health, but said that I wouldn’t reveal my whereabouts until I had made good. It promised to pay back the National Savings & Trust the forty-five dollars I had drawn by means of the blank check and also to pay for the items I had charged at Woodward & Lothrop’s—as soon as I had made good.
I DIDN’T BEGIN to make good until after I returned to Washington, five months later, and got a job as a messenger boy in the advertising department of the Herald. In Key West I lived for a few days at a commercial hotel, and then in a boarding house, which was less expensive, until my money ran out. The only work I was able to find was soliciting subscriptions for a Miami newspaper—Key West had no newspaper— and there was obviously no future in it, Key West was not a resort in those days, very little of anything was going on except fishing and cigar manufacturing, and the last thing any resident of Key West wanted was a subscription to a Miami newspaper. When I had no more money, I packed my suitcase and walked down to the wharves, carrying it. I was, of course, wearing my Palm Beach suit and the straw hat with the red-and-black band that I had bought on arrival. I had found that turning up the cuffs of the trousers made them the right length without my spending money on having them altered. I pictured a tramp steamer leaving for South America, but there were nothing but fishing boats, and the captains of these spoke only Spanish. I knew some Latin but no Spanish. Finally, when I got hungry, I went into a lunchroom and asked the man behind the counter if I could do some kind of work in exchange for a meal. He seemed surprised. I suppose I looked rather well dressed. He gave me a meal without requiring me to do any work, and advised me to go to Miami or Jacksonville if I was looking for a job.
I got on the train for Miami and told the conductor when he came around that I had no money but would send him the price of the fare from Key West to Miami if he would tell me the amount and give me his name and address. He seemed dumfounded. When I pressed him for his name and address, he said “Ah, the hell with it,” and went to the end of the car and read a copy of the Saturday Evening Post, which he slapped every now and then.
After a while he came back and said, “If you want to bum around the country, you can’t bum around in those clothes with that hat and that suitcase. You won’t get away with it on this railroad or any other railroad. It just happens I’m a softhearted man. Why don’t you go back wherever you came from? What do you want to run away from home for anyhow?”
When I told him I was going back home as soon as I had made good, he said “Oh, my God!” and went back to the end of the car and picked up his magazine again.
As I was stepping down from his train in Miami, he said, “Jacksonville’s the best place around here to find work. Miami’ll be as dead as a doornail until next winter. But you’ll have to hop a freight, you understand? You can’t get away with this.”
I asked him where I should go to hop a freight.
“Oh, my God!” he said. “They slow down at that bend there, going out of the yards,” he went on, pointing. “They’re mostly empties.”
I had established contact with my family by telephoning the house, collect, about a week after I arrived in Key West. I persuaded myself to make the call on the ground that it would relieve my mother’s worries if she heard my voice, but I didn’t care for the way she talked to me, or for the way my brothers and one of my uncles talked to me, after I had let it be known that I was in good health. They demanded that I return home immediately, and said they would wire the money for the railroad fare. All their sentences ended with the interrogation “you hear?” I replied that I wasn’t ready to come home, that I had just got a good job as a reporter on a newspaper in another city, in another state, that I was leaving Key West for that city and state right away, that it would do no good to put the police on my trail but would only bring disgrace on the family name, and that I would let them know from time to time that I was in good health. As a matter of fact, I wanted to be a newspaper reporter, but I knew that newspapers paid cub reporters only five or ten dollars a week and sometimes asked them to work for nothing while they were getting experience.
I hopped a freight to Jacksonville without difficulty, and learned from some of the other passengers in the empty freight car that there was always work on the Jacksonville docks, at seventy cents an hour. In Jacksonville, I got a room in a first-class rooming house in a good neighborhood without having to pay anything in advance to the landlady. For many weeks, I worked as a stevedore on the docks. I figured that eight hours a day, six days a week, at seventy cents an hour would be thirty-three-sixty a week, on which I could live handsomely and save money, but I usually gave up working after about five hours, drew my pay, had something to eat, and went to the rooming house and lay in bed. Most of the time, I didn’t feel lonely, because my head was full of optimistic daydreams of the future. They ran along in my head in between the regular showings of the pictures about my father, and about the girls.
In time, my landlady took an interest in me. She discovered how I was earning the money for my room. She said her brother-in-law was in charge of the Union News restaurants at all the railroad stations in Florida and Georgia, and offered to ask him if he had a respectable job for me. He had one for me in a railroad restaurant at Saint Augustine, not far from Jacksonville. I was to be the all-night counterman, and the hours were to be from seven in the evening until seven in the morning. I could have all the food I wanted to eat, and would receive twelve dollars a week in salary. All I had to pay for was my room, which would be in the house where the restaurant manager and his family lived. I accepted the job. I had written several notes to my mother, saying I was getting along fine but not giving her any address where she could reach me, and now I decided to let the family know where I was. Soon I began to receive letters requesting, not demanding, that I come home. I needn’t go back to high school, they said, if I didn’t want to. I could go to work in Washington, if that was what I wanted to do, and make good there while living in comfort at the house in Mt. Pleasant. All I had to do to get the money for the railroad fare home was to ask for it, they said. Miss Annabelle sent me three dollars of her own money in cash and said she hoped I would buy something I needed with it. I wrote to my mother and said I was getting some valuable experience at the restaurant, that it was a great place to study human nature, and that I would come home as soon as I had finished an article I was doing for the Atlantic Monthly on what it was like to be an all-night counterman in a railroad restaurant in Saint Augustine, Florida. I typed out the article on the manager’s typewriter between trains in the early-morning hours and sent it to the Atlantic, but they rejected it. Then I typed out and sent to Judge an anecdote I had heard my mother tell at the dinner table. It seems that Mr. Burleson, the Postmaster General, had told Alice Roosevelt Longworth that he was opposed to woman’s suffrage because woman’s place was in the home. “Ah, Mr. Burleson,” she told him, “I see that you know as little about the female as you do about the mail (male).” Judge liked it and sent me a check for five dollars.
I hadn’t been able to save anything out of my salary as an all-night counterman, because the rent for the room in the manager’s home was nine dollars a week and that left me only three dollars for cigarettes, toothpaste, soap, stationery, and other incidentals. This was only a dollar more than the allowance I used to get when I was in high school. After I received the check from Judge and the manager had cashed it for me, I told him I would like to quit as soon as he got a replacement. He said, in a bored tone, that there had been complaints from customers that I was always either asleep behind the counter or writing on the typewriter in his office, and that I could consider myself fired as soon as I packed my suitcase. I glared at him, and ignored him when he wished me good luck.
I had learned all about railroads from the train crews that stopped at the restaurant. Carrying my suitcase, I climbed on the next train for the North, and stood up in the small space between the locked door at the front end of the baggage car and the rear end of the coal car, behind the engine. The journey was uneventful, but by the time I got to Washington, my Palm Beach suit, my straw hat, and my face and hands were black with coal dust and soot, so I jumped off the train when it slowed down in the yards before it reached Union Station, made my way toward Mt. Pleasant through out-of-the-way neighborhoods, and was able to approach the house from the woods at the edge of Rock Creek Park, instead of coming down the block, where everybody could see me.
I had often pictured what my reception would be like. I had guessed it would be like the return of the Prodigal Son, and it was, except that Miss Annabelle cooked a chicken pie, my favorite dish, instead of roast veal, which I liked only moderately. My brothers treated me as if I were almost as old as they were, and seemed genuinely interested in the narrative I gave them, covering the highlights of my experiences in Florida. My mother held family prayers after supper and thanked God for allowing me to get home safe and sound, but she didn’t go on about it, and when she talked to me alone before I went up to bed, she only said she wished she hadn’t rented the house after my father went away from us, because she was afraid that year had been hard on me. I told her it was just that I was tired of school and wanted to earn my own living and make good, and she said I could do anything I wanted to, that she wouldn’t interfere. I still couldn’t look her in the eye.
IT WAS ONLY after I had got the job as messenger boy on the Herald and had been promoted to mail clerk, then to stockroom clerk, then to assistant bookkeeper, and finally to payroll clerk and was making thirty dollars a week and studying to become a certified public accountant that I began to feel I still wanted to be a newspaper reporter. As payroll clerk, I was well acquainted with all the department heads, including the managing editor. I knew what everybody’s salary was, and the department heads knew I did, which made them treat me with a kind of hollow cordiality when I came around each Friday, the day before payday, to get their signatures on the payroll sheets I had made out. The managing editor was a kindly, patient man named Mike Flynn (who inherited a share of the paper years afterward, when Cissy Patterson died), and I used to ask him about the chances of getting a job as a reporter. I was full-grown by this time and was saving up to buy a Ford coupé, and my seventeenth birthday was behind me. I was interested in girls, motorcars, and the wide variety of Arrow collars on display in the haberdasheries. I was troubled by the talking pictures about my father only once a month or so.
Mike Flynn and I always came to what seemed to be a dead end on the subject of my becoming a reporter. I said I couldn’t afford to take a reduction in salary, because I was saving up to buy the Ford coupé, and he said he couldn’t pay an inexperienced reporter anything like thirty dollars a week. Some of his best local men, he said, pointing at the payroll sheet in front of him, weren’t making that much. Flynn seemed to like me, though, and, besides, the impasse made him angry. Like all newspaper editors in those days, he detested the business office, and felt it was an affront to the editorial department when a likely young man could be worth so much money in the business office that he couldn’t afford to become a reporter.
“If you’re really keen on this,” he said one Friday afternoon that summer of 1922, “you could try doing some feature stories in your spare time. I couldn’t pay you anything for them, but if you wrote some that we could print, maybe I could argue that you weren’t a cub—that you were an experienced man—and get you the thirty a week. Take a run out to the zoo on Sunday, why don’t you? There’s always a feature story at the zoo.”
“What kind of thing did you have in mind?” I inquired.
“Oh, a piece about some animal. Some animal gets born or dies, or something like that. You know—human interest.”
He signed the payroll sheet, and I thanked him.
On the following Sunday afternoon, I wandered around the zoo, talking to the keepers. I knew most of them having met them when I was a leaf-raker. I found that the elephants were all in good health and had produced no offspring. It was the same with the lions, tigers, and pumas, the bears, monkeys, buffaloes, wolves, and foxes, the camels and giraffes, and the seals and sea lions. I was finally reduced to the bird house. There, though, I learned from Wally, the bird house keeper, that a cockatoo had died of old age on the floor of its cage that morning. It was a white male cockatoo from Malaya. It had been there for more than twenty-five years, and had lived all that time in a cage with its mate, a white female cockatoo, also from Malaya. Their names were on the signs on the cage. The dead cockatoo’s name was Jack, and his mate was named Jill.
I pumped Wally from every angle. “I’m a reporter on the Herald now, you know,” I told him. Like all keepers in all the zoos of the world, he was anxious to coöperate with the press. He racked his brains. He began to bring out, bit by bit, a small store of anecdotal material having to do with Jack and Jill. I took him across the road to the refreshment stand, bought him a sarsaparilla, and urged him to sit down comfortably on a bench and relax. “Just keep thinking of Jack and Jill,” I suggested, “and say whatever comes into your mind.” He recalled a number of little characteristics that served to differentiate the one cockatoo from the other. He cited their preferences in grain and seed, he described the billing and cooing they did at certain seasons of the year, he told how Jack liked to hang upside down using only one claw and how Jill customarily perched in her corner in a dignified fashion. He remembered that Jack and Jill sometimes had their squabbles and pecked at each other, their wings outspread and flapping.
I began to picture a kind of true O. Henry story of a long, happy marriage of two cockatoos from Malaya that had ended tragically in the death of the husband, by which circumstance the bereft widow was left alone in her cage with only a few of his feathers to remind her of him. When Wally wanted to know if the Herald was going to take a photograph of Jill, and said he’d be glad to pose with her, I went to a telephone booth, called up Mike Flynn, and told him the gist of the story, with the idea of finding out if he thought it would be worth sending a photographer out to take Jill’s picture.
“It’s worth a picture on a dull Monday morning,” he said, “but it doesn’t sound like much of a story. She didn’t kill her mate, by any chance, did she?”
I hesitated, and a strange emotion took hold of me. The emotion of a very young person who is anxious to write something? I don’t know. What I do know is that I told Mike Flynn that the birdhouse keeper had, as a matter of fact, said Jack and Jill used to fight, flying at each other with their wings outspread and flapping.
“That might do it,” he said. “She loses her temper and pecks him to death, and now she’s in solitary confinement for life. Anyway, it’s worth a picture. Come on in after you get through, and you can take a shot at doing a story.”
MY STORY APPEARED in the Herald the next morning, under a three-column headline on page 3, and my name was on it in a byline. Although some unknown copyreader in the Herald city room was put to the trouble of correcting the spelling and the syntax, I had no difficulty in writing it. It had poured out of me. The headline composed by the copyreader was:
COCKATOO AT ZOO KILLS MATE; KEEPER PUTS HER IN “SOLITARY”
And there was a two-column picture of Jill in her cage and Wally frowning up at her.
I showed the paper to my mother, in the dining room after breakfast, and she read it through, pausing only to reconstruct one of my sentences so it wouldn’t end in a preposition. I listened to her and watched her. She read my story aloud to Miss Annabelle—not because Miss Annabelle couldn’t read it herself but because my mother enjoyed reading aloud. Then she told me she’d always known perfectly well I wasn’t cut out to be a certified public accountant, and added that as a journalist I would have almost as much opportunity for doing good as I would have had if I’d gone into the pulpit, like my father and my forefathers before me. I looked at the glowing, adored face, and into the blue eyes that had never been averted from me. She started to smile and stopped, and said, “You know, son, you haven’t looked at me like that since your father went away from us,” and I left the dining room quickly, because I felt I was about to cry. But it was only that I was about to think. (In the dictionary sense.) Creatures and people could die from death, I thought. I concentrated on the idea. I thought of death, of the death of my father. He’d been killed by death, my germs hadn’t killed him, my mother hadn’t killed him, he didn’t want to die, he hadn’t agreed to die because God needed him, there was no secret, nothing hidden, he had died of death, in this house he died, where I loved him he is dead, my father is dead.
By leaps and springs, the father’s dead, the child’s dead, the child’s a man. And what is man?