Memorial Bridge (4 page)

And she was still doing it. She always had her coins ready, to enact what by now was a ritual from which she expected nothing for herself. She was giving those men pennies and nickels because they needed them.

"God bless
you,
Miss," one derelict said, raising his eyes to her.

Cassie sensed that the man wasn't nearly as old as he looked. His face, what she saw of it beneath his lumpy felt hat, was etched with that familiar shame. But nothing else about him was familiar, and she hurried by.

She hopped onto the first step of the stairway going up to the El. The iron structure shook with the weight of all the people. As she climbed with them, it seemed to Cassie she could feel the sadness of her fellow commuters.

As if to change her mood, she swung her shoulder bag from her right side to her left as she took the last steps up to the platform. A man tipped his hat at her, and she smiled unselfconsciously. There was always more to be glad about than sad. God bless
you,
she said to herself, repeating the derelict's words, but as a prayer.

Halfway down the crowded platform she found her usual waiting place by the cloudy, cracked window from which she could both watch for her train and look back down on the street. Her eyes went automatically to the beggar in the felt hat a few paces beyond the stairway. From there, seen through the hazy glass, he seemed a figure in a mournful side window at church. God bless
you,
she said again. And then she added with a sharp, unexpected pang, All of you.

A few minutes later her train came. Cassie always welcomed the jolt of departure, the sensation at the base of her spine as the car began to accelerate. She thought that riding the El above Chicago was as close as she would ever come to flying. That was why, despite her weariness and the perennial crush of the other riders, the time it took to go from North La Salle to Canary ville seemed sometimes to be the best of her day. She never refused a gentleman's offer of his seat if it let her face the window, especially the window on the right side of the car from which she could stare out over the western stretches of the city as the sunset approached. Chicago was so flat and, once away from downtown, the buildings were so low that, even lifted above the rooftops only that much, it was possible to see for miles. The sight of the squared-off ribbons of roadway soothed her with its familiar uniformity. The dwellings of working people were all alike, and to look out above them was to see a checkered plain of tar paper and asphalt. Only the sharp upward thrust of church spires and factory chimneys broke the horizontal monotony, and those towers glowed in the kindly light of the early evening.

When the train jogged off Archer Avenue to turn due south onto the branch of tracks that ran down Halsted, the Elevated began its slow descent to the level of the street, and Cassie strained to get a last glimpse of the distant city. Between the jagged rooflines of tenements and warehouses she saw flashes off the sheen of the south fork at the point where it met the old canal, the Illinois and Michigan, that joined the waters of the lake and the Mississippi thirty miles away. She'd read in one of the books her supervisor had given her—Ellen Flynn thought she should be educating herself—that the linking of those two great waterways was what had made Chicago happen in the first place. The city would have developed in a straight band westward, straddling the canal, if the whole water system hadn't been made suddenly obsolete by the invention of the railroad. You just never know. Trains had come into Chicago mainly from the south, so it was southward the city went. The
South Side, Cassie's world, was built around the railroad, and that seemed fitting, since it was the Irish enclave, and most Irishmen, including her own father, had made their way west from Ellis Island as laborers on those railroads. Cassie Ryan was quite aware that her part of Chicago, instead of straddling water which never tired of flowing, straddled iron which never moved. She herself was more like water than iron, but she could not imagine that she would ever leave her family, her neighborhood or her parish behind. But neither could she imagine that Halsted Street and North La Salle would be the boundaries of her world forever.

"We Feed The World," the huge billboard read as the train—now the streetcar, not the El—crossed Thirty-ninth Street, into the yards district. The big sign had been there on top of the five-story corner building for as long as Cassie could remember. It was the slogan of Armour and Company, but South Siders generally took it as their motto. Cassie could not read that sign anymore, though, without immediately dropping her eyes to the Halsted sidewalk where the ragged line of men in torn jackets and battered hats always waited. It was the laborers' line outside the Armour jobs office; the men there now were hoping for something on the night shift. Cassie saw them as a hiring agent might: desperate, unsteady men, half of them cradling brown paper bundles, the bottles they brought with them everywhere. We Feed The World, she thought harshly, not for the first time, but who feeds us?

When Cassie stepped off the streetcar onto the island in the middle of the broad avenue, she took a deep breath, as if daring the stench of her own neighborhood to offend her nostrils. She chided herself for even noticing it, but that was the great disadvantage of leaving St. Gabriel's each day. For years stockyard odors had bothered her no more than the smells of her own body. She looked across at the Stone Gate and beyond. The chimney-ridden yards even then at the end of the day were pumping clouds of burnt offal into the wind.

Above the street noises she heard the sound of a voice on the air, someone calling her name. She turned toward it, knowing right away that something was wrong.

Cassie had six brothers and sisters, only two of whom were still at home. But her family was bigger than that, even, for in the flat upstairs lived her aunt and uncle and their four young daughters, the eldest of whom, Molly, was standing on the far curb now. She was waving
frantically. Molly was thirteen. She was still wearing the white blouse and blue skirt of her uniform. Why hadn't she changed clothes after school? One tail of her blouse overhung the front of her skirt.

Molly cried Cassie's name again and stepped from the curb into the street. But immediately an automobile screeched to a halt just short of her. The driver honked violently and Molly jumped back. A beer truck swerved away from her, cutting off a car in the next lane. Rush hour traffic had thinned out just enough that the cars were traveling at speed again, whipping along in the three lanes between the cousins. Molly froze, her hands at her mouth, staring across at Cassie.

Cassie could see that her eyes were nearly blind with tears. "Wait there!" she called with the authority of a parent. "Get back on the sidewalk!"

Cassie's legs twitched to be moving, but she forced herself to wait on the streetcar island until the traffic broke. She never took her eyes from Molly, her darling, clever Molly. Molly whose mind gave her no peace, who fussed forever over pencils and foot rule, over lists of state capitals and the great dates of history. Of all her cousins, or even sisters, Molly was the one most like Cassie herself.

"Molly, Molly," Cassie said, enfolding her when finally she'd crossed the avenue. "What is it, hon?"

But Molly only sobbed into Cassie's body. How thin she is, Cassie thought, pressing her own long fingers into her cousin's bony back. Molly was a girl who had nightmares over and over, but who on waking could never say what had so terrified her.

"What is it, darling?" Cassie gently pushed the girl out of the corner her arms had made.

Molly opened her mouth but could not speak. She seemed retarded or mute. A wave of worry washed over Cassie. This was the child, more than the others, to whom she'd given herself. Molly's intelligence had been evident early, and one of the things Cassie's salary had always meant to her was that Molly was not going to have to drop out of school. But Molly was as fragile as she was smart. She stared into Cassie's eyes now, a look of pure terror on her face.

Jerry's face flashed into Cassie's mind. Jerry? Her brother, two years her junior, was the only one of her siblings who had a steady job, but it was a job Cassie had never liked. He worked in the carshops where the meat packers' refrigerated railroad cars were repaired. How many col
lections had been taken up at St. Gabe's for carshop men whose legs or arms had been crushed under the huge iron wheels of—

"Pa's dead, Cassie." Molly's face collapsed around her mouth as she forced the words out again. "Pa's dead."

Cassie's elbows stiffened, an involuntary reflex which pushed Molly away the length of her arms. It was like pushing off from the ground, a seesaw.

"Ma sent me to wait for you. I didn't know—"

"What?"

"Pa's dead."

"Pa?
Your
Pa? Uncle Mike?"

Molly shook her head up and down, making the tears fly from her cheeks.

Cassie pressed her cousin's shoulders, but really it was into herself that she was pressing, to force calm into her voice. "Tell me, Molly. You've been waiting here to tell me."

But already Cassie knew she was not going to believe her. Uncle Mike? Dead? It couldn't be. Uncle Mike was the man who'd taken over the place in Cassie's heart, what her own Pa had left empty. But then an image shot into her mind of her poor, soft Uncle Mike sprawled face-down on the sidewalk outside Dooley's. Like most of his kind, Mike Foley was long unemployed and by now beaten down by the sense of his own failure. Unlike so many others, he had never turned that frustration against his wife, and his daughters loved him. Cassie loved him.

She shook her cousin. "What happened?" And while she waited for the stunned girl to speak, she repeated to herself, It can't be.

Sean Dillon stared at the cross. The figure of the crucified Christ seemed tidy, a man in vertical repose, a positively tranquil image compared to the bloated cadaver from the blood pipes. Moran's knuckle-draggers had taken their time getting to the box basin, but when they came they plopped the corpse onto an iron-wheeled hand truck and took it away without a word, as if they were carting off the remains, say, of a disease-ridden rejected hog. Where were the police? Where was a doctor to pronounce the body dead? Those questions had occurred to Dillon, but he had to get downtown.

Now he was sitting in the anteroom of the dean's office at Loyola. His restless fingers jitterbugged on his knees. To his great regret he was still
wearing the threadbare shirt and trousers he had changed into at the slaughterhouse, not having dared take the time to go to his room. Not the rancid overalls he'd worn to and from the blood pit, true, but not the suit and tie he usually wore to night school either. He was nobody's idea of a professional-in-training now. The skin on the backs of his hands and on his face glowed even more from the ruthless scrubbing he'd given himself in the shower again. If he'd scraped away whole layers of skin, exposing nerve endings and pores, perhaps that was the reason for his strange, unsettled sense of vulnerability. He saw himself as a rube, hadn't felt so ill at ease in years. How long had it been since he was publicly rebuked by a professor. "Get out!" the man had screamed. "Get out!" As if Dillon was an obnoxious janitor come too early to clean the classroom.

Dillon's eyes went from the dean's secretary's vacant desk to the wall behind it where a clock showed that it was nearly eight, which was when his classmates would finish the exam. He'd found it impossible to explain himself to his stern professor, and the dean would be worse. If he told him the unvarnished truth—lifting the swollen, rotten corpse had been like lifting a mass of congealed lard—would the Jesuit think him mad? What would justify tardiness, even to a final exam, if not such a grotesque event? But Dillon had sensed shame in Hanley, and he knew he was uneasy now because, however unaccountably, he felt ashamed too. Why? For being one of a species that would do such a thing? The poor bastard had been stuffed into the blood pipe like a cork.

He focused again on the crucifix which hung on the wall directly opposite his chair. He had never beheld the sacred object as a source of consolation, and in the seminary that had come to seem like a failure of faith. Always the corpus's gnarled boniness—the ribs like teeth, the knees like fists—had seemed a rebuke to him for his not being in pain. The figure's hollow eyes were grottoes out of which accusations flew. Turning away from the crucifix, in fact, had been like turning away from the sight, on the street, of the desperate characters whom the years had reduced to human offal. That Dillon had long ago given up even imagining that he could help them had come to seem like both the height of his new realism and, still and always, the serious sin a pious boy sees in his furtive omission. He had concluded that the most insidious thing about the Depression was the way in which people who were barely scraping by—most of the people Dillon knew—felt that their survival, such as it was, came at the expense of those—the rest of the people he knew—
who'd been chewed up by the age and spit out.

The man in the pipes: Why do I feel ashamed? Someone else did that, not me.

He remembered Moran's reference: Whose mark was it, the shredded skin of a flogging?

Dillon shook the questions off, but he was still unable to look away from the cross. What the cross proves, he thought, is that if you befriend a leper, as Jesus did so famously, you become one. No wonder the religion could be so bitter. The cross was pure warning, a clenched, stingy gesture. No wonder most of what it promulgated served mainly to keep people in their cramped, dark corners. Normal Catholic piety had been impossible for Dillon since before he'd abandoned his vocation to the priesthood, and doubly so since.

The dean was a priest, and he could blast him the way Professor Corrigan had, but the dean would know no more about what had mattered at the yards than the dandruff-ridden torts professor had.

"Tort," Dillon recited to himself, "any wrongful act not involving breach of contract, for which a civil action will lie."