Growing Up (21 page)

This morning, however, there was a bloodcurdling revelation. Page one was half filled with a picture of several parcels, crudely wrapped in newspapers, lying on a police-station table. The story said they were pieces of a human body which had been dissected by an insane killer and discarded in the Baltimore sewer system. I scanned the story rapidly and felt a little better to learn that all the human parts so far recovered had been found in East Baltimore, a full two miles from West Lombard Street. Police had still not found the victim’s head, however, and what was worse, the insane dissector was still at large.

A few months earlier Baltimore movie theaters had shown
Night Must Fall
, a terrifying film about a killer who carried his dismembered victim’s head around in a hatbox. I had seen this film. So, apparently, had the reporter writing this morning’s story. It was possible, the story said, that the Baltimore madman was wandering the streets carrying his victim’s head. The
American
was a Hearst newspaper, and I knew Hearst papers sometimes tried to make a good story better than it actually was, but at that hour of the morning, alone on the streets of southwest Baltimore, I was incapable of mustering any reassuring skepticism. Still, the newspapers had to be delivered, no question about that, and I would do it, but I didn’t want to meet anybody on those abandoned streets this morning while I was getting it done.

With a tonnage of Sunday papers held to my hip by the web strap, I set off up the Lombard Street side of Union Square. This was the best part of the route. There was good street light, and all the customers paid their bills every Saturday. Twelve cents for six afternoon papers and a nickel for the Sunday. Seventeen cents a week. Everything was quiet on Lombard Street and around on Gilmor Street, too. Not a sound stirring, not a shadow moving.

Out of papers, I went back to the drop point for a second bundle. This part of the route took me to Pratt Street, where half my customers were slow payers, wanting me to carry them three or four weeks until the bill ran up to 51 or 68 cents. When I finally
threatened to cut off their service, they might come up with seventeen or maybe thirty-four cents and promise to pay in full next week. The worst part of Pratt Street was that the houses were cut up into small apartments and the customers expected me to come inside buildings, climb steps, and leave papers at their doors. Often there was no hallway light, which meant groping around in the darkness on tricky staircases and maybe falling over somebody’s roller skate and spilling my whole load of papers. Trying to recover fifteen or twenty Sunday papers in a pitch-black hallway was no picnic. I always walked in these places like a soldier in a mine field.

This morning I had no intention of going inside those houses. Delivering news of a mad dissector and the missing human head, I was in no mood to grope around on dark staircases. If I’d touched something human in there, which was possible since every once in a while I stumbled across drunks sleeping it off in unlit hallways, I might have died of fright. So I left the papers in downstairs hallways, deciding to let the customers howl next payday when most of them weren’t going to pay anyhow.

When I went back to the drop point for the third bundle I was tired, and I sat down for a break to treat myself to the funny papers. I knew the natural sounds of the city at this hour—the clang of a distant trolley car, the clatter of a dog rooting in a garbage can, the faint wail of fire engine sirens far away. I could detect the unfamiliar sound—and therefore the potentially dangerous sound—at considerable distances. This was what I heard now while I was looking at “The Katzenjammer Kids.” It was the sound of footsteps, a man’s footsteps. One man, and coming toward me from the east.

I saw his silhouette a block away, down at Calhoun Street. Quickly hoisting a bundle of papers, I rammed them under the strap and set off at a right angle to his line of march. It was dark in this direction. Halfway down the block there was an alley with two outlets. If he’d seen me and followed, I could dump the papers and run. I ducked into the alley and waited. No footsteps. Peeking around the corner, I saw why. He had stopped at the
intersection I’d just abandoned and seemed undecided which way to go.

When he started to walk again it was not in my direction, but towards Union Square. I’d had a good look at him while he stood under the gaslight at the corner. He was short, wore a dark overcoat with the collar turned up around his neck, and was hatless. Under the light, his hair looked silvery gray. He was not carrying a hatbox.,

My imagination had got the best of me. He was probably a drunk out too late, I thought. I saw drunks like that now and then on these Sunday mornings. Sometimes they bought a paper, gave me a quarter, and told me to keep the change. I’d probably missed a bonus by running away from this one. I resumed the work, feeling relaxed now that the bad moment was over. I finished the third bundle and was almost finished with the last when I turned the corner at McHenry and Stricker streets and found myself face to face with a man in a black overcoat. The collar was turned up around his neck. His hair looked silvery gray.

“Good morning,” he said.

I was beyond speaking. I still had a few papers left to deliver and, like an automaton, headed toward the houses where they belonged.

“Mind if I walk along with you?”

Terror made me speechless.

“It must be lonely with nobody to talk to,” he said.

I shook my head. No, it wasn’t lonely.

“It’s cold this morning. Aren’t you cold?”

With the combination of exertion and fear, I was sweating.

“I’m lonely too,” he said.

I’d been mechanically dropping newspapers on doorsteps, and now as I dropped the last and turned from the doorway I was facing him under a good light. I’d never seen a man who looked so elegant. Certainly not in southwest Baltimore. He was from another, fancier section of town, I thought. His shoes glistened like patent leather. His overcoat seemed to have been finely tailored, as if molded to his body. The face was soft, sallow under the dim
gaslight, but the eyes were piercing. The hair, I could now see, was not silver but yellow gone to gray. It was fastidiously barbered and slicked back with an unguent. I could smell a faint perfume.

“I’ve got to get home now,” I said, sliding the strap off my shoulder. It was fitted with a heavy metal buckle. When doubled up so that the buckle was at the end of the loop, it made a weapon of sorts.

“You don’t want to go home yet, it’s early,” he said, striding along beside me. “I know where there’s a party. Would you like to go to a party?”

It was now around four-thirty in the morning.

“I’m too tired,” I said.

“Don’t you like parties? There’ll be girls there.”

“Not tonight,” I said. We were getting closer to Lombard Street. I groped in my pocket for the door key.

“You’ll like these girls,” he said. “They’re the kind of girls who let you do things to them.”

I didn’t believe that. Even if I had it wouldn’t have tempted me to set off with him. I’d begun to have fantasies about such girls, but fantasy girls and real girls were not the same. I was scared in the presence of real girls, but I was not stupid about them. I knew that the kind of girls who let men do things to them weren’t going to pass time with somebody like me at four-thirty on a Sunday morning.

We’d finally reached Lombard Street, just a few doors from home.

“Come on,” he said. “I’ve got a nice girl for you. She likes to do things and she’s fourteen years old. She knows what to do.”

“I don’t like girls,” I said.

I had my key out now. With a quick bound, I was up the steps and had the key in the lock, but he was just as fast, and he was up the steps leaning against me with his hand slammed down over the key before I could turn it. I twisted aside to free the hand that held the web strap and swung it as hard as I could, but in such close contact I couldn’t get any momentum into the blow and the strap whacked him harmlessly across one shoulder.

The hostility of the blow, though, cooled him a bit, and he backed down two steps and studied me.

“Come on, you’ll have a wonderful time,” he said, speaking very low now, almost whispering.

“No.”

He took one step back toward me. I brought the strap around as hard as I could and heard it slash across the side of his face and saw him back off holding his hand to his jaw. I twisted the key in the lock, pushed the door open, slid into safety, and slammed the door behind me. I stood in the vestibule, soaked with perspiration, my hands shaking violently. Inside, the house was silent, the mourner still slept soundly in his armchair, and the old gentleman in the coffin was still motionless.

When I woke around noon I decided against telling my mother, or anybody else, about the man with the silvery hair. A few days later when the madman who dissected his victims was arrested, the pictures of him in the
News-Post
showed a squat and shabby longshoreman with matted black hair who had lost his temper in a lover’s quarrel and, panicked by what he had done to his love, dismembered her with a butcher knife. For months afterwards I spent the dark hours before Sunday dawn on guard against the man with the silvery hair, just as I spent the daytime hours on guard against Pete, but I never saw him again.

The paper route earned me three dollars a week, sometimes four, and my mother, in addition to her commissions on magazine sales, also had her monthly check coming from Uncle Willie, but we’d been in Baltimore a year before I knew how desperate things were for her. One Saturday morning she told me she’d need Doris and me to go with her to pick up some food. I had a small wagon she’d bought me to make it easier to move the Sunday papers, and she said I’d better bring it along. The three of us set off eastward, passing the grocery stores we usually shopped at, and kept walking until we came to Fremont Avenue, a grim street of dilapidation and poverty in the heart of the West Baltimore black belt.

“This is where we go,” she said when we reached the corner of Fremont and Fayette Street. It looked like a grocery, with big
plate-glass windows and people lugging out cardboard cartons and bulging bags, but it wasn’t. I knew very well what it was.

“Are we going on relief?” I asked her.

“Don’t ask questions about things you don’t know anything about,” she said. “Bring that wagon inside.”

I did, and watched with a mixture of shame and greed while men filled it with food. None of it was food I liked. There were huge cans of grapefruit juice, big paper sacks of cornmeal, cellophane bags of rice and prunes. It was hard to believe all this was ours for no money at all, even though none of it was very appetizing. My wonder at this free bounty quickly changed to embarrassment as we headed home with it. Being on relief was a shameful thing. People who accepted the government’s handouts were scorned by everyone I knew as idle no-accounts without enough self-respect to pay their own way in the world. I’d often heard my mother say the same thing of families in the neighborhood suspected of being on relief. These, I’d been taught to believe, were people beyond hope. Now we were as low as they were.

Pulling the wagon back toward Lombard Street, with Doris following behind to keep the edible proof of our disgrace from falling off, I knew my mother was far worse off than I’d suspected. She’d never have accepted such shame otherwise. I studied her as she walked along beside me, head high as always, not a bit bowed in disgrace, moving at her usual quick, hurry-up pace. If she’d given up on life, she didn’t show it, but on the other hand she was unhappy about something. I dared to mention the dreaded words only once on that trip home.

“Are we on relief now, Mom?”

“Let me worry about that,” she said.

What worried me most as we neared home was the possibility we’d be seen with the incriminating food by somebody we knew. There was no mistaking government-surplus food. The grapefruitjuice cans, the prunes and rice, the cornmeal—all were ostentatiously unlabeled, thus advertising themselves as “government handouts.” Everybody in the neighborhood could read them easily
enough, and our humiliation would be gossiped through every parlor by sundown. I had an inspiration.

“It’s hot pulling this wagon,” I said. “I’m going to take my sweater off.”

It wasn’t hot, it was on the cool side, but after removing the sweater I laid it across the groceries in the wagon. It wasn’t a very effective cover, but my mother was suddenly affected by the heat too.

“It is warm, isn’t it, Buddy?” she said. Removing her topcoat, she draped it over the groceries, providing total concealment.

“You want to take your coat off, Doris?” asked my mother.

“I’m not hot, I’m chilly,” Doris said.

It didn’t matter. My mother’s coat was enough to get us home without being exposed as three of life’s failures.

From then on I assumed we were paupers. For this reason I was often astonished when my mother did me some deed of generosity, as when she bought me my first Sunday suit with long pants. The changeover from knickers to long pants was the ritual recognition that a boy had reached adolescence, or “the awkward age,” as everybody called it. The “teenager,” like the atomic bomb, was still uninvented, and there were few concessions to adolescence, but the change to long pants was a ritual of recognition. There was no ceremony about it. You were taken downtown one day and your escort—my mother in my case—casually said to the suit salesman, “Let’s see what you’ve got in long pants.”

For me the ritual was performed in the glossy, mirrored splendor of Bond’s clothing store on Liberty Street. She had taken me for a Sunday suit and, having decided I looked too gawky in knickers, said, “Let’s see what you’ve got in long pants.” My physique at this time was described by relatives and friends with such irritating words as “beanpole,” “skinny,” and “all bones.” My mother, seeing me through eyes that loved, chose to call me “a tall man.”

The suit salesman displayed a dazzling assortment of garments. Suit designers made no concessions to youth; suits for boys were just like suits for men, only smaller. My mother expressed a
preference for something with the double-breasted cut. “A tall man looks good in a double-breasted suit,” she said.