No Promises in the Wind

Table of Contents

 

 

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

NO PROMISES IN THE WIND

 

A Berkley Jam Book/ published by arrangement with Modern Curriculum Press

 

PRINTING HISTORY

 

Follett Publishing Company edition published 1970
Sixteenth Tempo printing / August 1985
Berkley/Pacer edition / July 1986
Berkley edition / August 1993
Berkley Jam edition / January 2002

Copyright © 1970 by Irene Hunt.

 

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eISBN : 978-1-101-14220-2

 

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Joey
stirred on his side of our bed when the alarm clock jangled at a quarter to four. “You want me to go with you, Josh?” he asked sleepily.

I reached out to the bedside table, stopped the alarm, snapped on the shaded study lamp, and lay back on my pillow. The chill of early October had sharpened during the night, and the discomfort of being cold together with too few hours of sleep made me irritable and moody. I didn't even feel particularly grateful to Joey for offering to go with me. In the first place he wasn't a lot of help, and anyway, three hours of delivering papers in the dark city streets was too hard for him though he'd never have admitted it. Joey had been frail since he was a baby, but he was tough. He'd have been up in a minute if I had said, yes, I needed his help.

As it was, I didn't answer his question and he sighed deeply as he turned his face away from the light. I couldn't tell whether that sigh was one of relief at being able to go back to sleep or one of hurt at my rudeness. Ashamed, I got up and found an extra blanket, which I threw over him and tucked around his shoulders. I could sense his feeling of comfort as he curled up into a tight little spiral and snuggled down under the extra warmth.

When I was dressed, I sat down in the big mohair chair beside the window, twisting my body to avoid the broken spring in the chair's back. “Just five minutes,” I told myself, “just five minutes to rest and get used to being awake.”

I stared at the faded paper on the wall in front of me without really seeing it until I became conscious of the yellowed figures of cowboys riding their broncs in precise paths from baseboard to ceiling. My mother had allowed me to select that paper five years before when I was no older than Joey, and I had held out for cowboys and broncs, scorning Mom's preference for pots of flowers or bright colored birds. I studied the horses and their daredevil riders for a long time as if they mattered. They didn't, of course, but concentrating on them kept me awake.

Finally I roused myself. My paper route didn't mean much money, but it was important. Dad had been out of work for eight months, and only the day before, my sister had received notice of a cut-back in personnel which cost her the clerking job she'd had for nearly a year. Every few pennies counted in our family; a job was a job, and to risk losing it by being late was out of the question.

It was dark in the kitchen when I went downstairs, but I could see the outline of my mother's figure as she stood at the stove. “Why did you get up, Mom?” I asked gruffly. “I tell you over and over—”

She put her hand on my arm. “Hush, Josh, let's not wake Dad. He couldn't sleep until about two hours ago.” She poured out a cup of hot milk and handed it to me. “Here, drink this; I'll have a little breakfast for you at seven.”

She was not as tall as I was; she had to lift her face when she kissed my cheek. “I'm so proud that Miss Crowne wants you to play for the school assembly next week. I'm very proud of you, Josh.”

“I wish you could come and hear us. Howie and I are going pretty good lately.”

“I know. I want to hear you so much—but, then, I can't and there's no use talking about it.” She turned back to the stove and moved some pans aimlessly. “You can stay after school and practice if you want to. There isn't much for you to do around here.”

My mother ironed all day in the laundry a few blocks down the street. She shouldn't have been doing work like that. She played piano beautifully, and for a long time she had given lessons to children in our neighborhood until recently when no one had money to pay for a luxury like music. She taught me for seven years, up until I was thirteen and we had to sell the piano at the time Dad's work at the factory was cut to three days a week. She understood my love for music and she encouraged it—always there was encouragement from my mother.

Dad had mixed feelings about my playing. He loved music too, really; it was a common love of music that had drawn him and Mom together when she was a black-haired little Irish girl of eighteen and he was a Polish widower almost twice her age. Dad's parents had been musicians in Poland, good ones too, but poor as far as money was concerned. There had been poverty in Dad's childhood, and he placed the blame for it upon a father who had never been able to leave his music for the toil of farm or mine or factory. I had heard him talking to Mom about his feelings toward men making music a means of livelihood.

“These hands, Mary,” he had said, spreading his own hands in front of her, “these are a man's hands. They've become calloused and they've been split sometimes, and bleeding. But they've never dawdled over a keyboard while you and the children suffered.”

Mom came quickly to my defense. “Josh is a worker too, Stefan. A boy who has gone out to deliver papers on bitter winter mornings since he was ten is no soft child. Your son is much like you. He respects hard work, but there's no reason why work must deny him the gift he has inherited from both of us. He's quick, Stefan, and he learns so naturally. We mustn't deny him.”

He usually agreed with her in earlier years, sometimes grudgingly, but without rancor. As times grew harder, though, and work became a matter of the highest importance in the minds of most people, Dad's impatience with my practicing became bitter. Sometimes it seemed to me that his impatience with my every act or word became bitter.

The year 1932 was not a good one in which to be fifteen years old and in close quarters with a hopeless father. I was not young and appealing to people as Joey was; I was not docile and quiet like Kitty. Dad and I clashed during the year, often and with greater anger as the hard times continued.

It hadn't always been that way. In the early years of my life I had been the young prince in our home. I was Dad's first son, and he was a man for whom sons were a symbol of his own strength and manhood. He was a very kind father to Kitty, who was the child of his first marriage, but he couldn't help being a little cocky about his son. He used to take me everywhere—out to the ball parks, to the amusement park where I could try every ride and eat popcorn to my fill, down to the plant to meet his friends who thought my old-fashioned name and sober face were funny. I used to hear Dad bragging to them, “You should see this boy eat. It's all Mary and I can do to keep him full of milk and potatoes. What we'll do when he's fifteen, I don't know.”

And that was true—he didn't know. By the time I was fifteen, the problem of a healthy appetite was no longer funny.

We went through some bad times beginning with the year I was five, the year Joey was born. My brother was a sickly baby, given only a slim chance of living. Mom and Dad wore themselves out that year, taking turns at sitting up all night to rescue Joey from strangling spasms that threatened to snuff his life out. There were huge doctor bills and anxiety over money as well as the puny child; there was great fatigue for both my parents, and Dad was not a man who took hardship or physical discomfort quietly. If I forgot that Joey was asleep and came into the house banging doors and yelling as I'd always done, Dad would turn on me in a way that soon convinced me he'd lost all the love for me he'd ever had. Kitty escaped much of his frustration, being older and gentler by nature. She used to play quiet games with me and take me for long walks to keep me away from the baby's room. I loved Kitty very much, Kitty and Mom, but a harshness sprang up between Dad and me during the first years of Joey's life. Somehow that harshness increased with time, intensified by the unyielding coldness I felt toward Dad, a stubborn unwillingness ever to respond to his attempts toward regaining my affection.

Those attempts grew more infrequent as times grew worse. In 1930 there were fewer and fewer hours of work each week for Dad; in 1932 he lost his job completely. With that loss, with the loss of his savings when the bank closed, maybe with the loss of being the proud man he'd once been, Dad's attitude toward me grew less and less like that of a father who loves his son.

He was a man who had liked to talk about how he had pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, how he, a poor immigrant in 1910, had risen to be foreman at work, had a small, neat home with a mortgage gradually dwindling, was able to take his family for Sunday rides in his own automobile, could buy his wife an electric sewing machine for Christmas. And if he could do all this, was there any reason why others couldn't? None whatever, except that those who hadn't done as well were lazy, improvident, or stupid.