By Al Craz

Introduction

About four years ago teacher retirees in New York began a campaign to pass a COLA bill and protect their pensions. Inflation had cut them down big-time. So I wrote “The Old Teacher’s Story,” trying to inject some Anderson touches as a personal exercise. I tried for Anderson’s simple, folk tale approach, hoping that as in Anderson the simple begins to resonate in more complex and perhaps profound ways.
A county retiree newsletter published it. A COLA bill did not pass.

A few months ago, retirees again began a COLA campaign. I sent copies of the story to my reps in Albany. One called and asked permission to send a copy to the governor! “Sure,” I said.

Then, just a few days before a huge rally by retirees in Albany, the state teachers’ union published the story in their monthly newspaper, New York Teacher, circulation 435,000. I called and asked where they got it, and they said it was from a labor relations person.

The rally was a success. Retirees were promised a permanent COLA bill this year by the four most powerful politicians in New York.

A few days after, the union newspaper editors called and asked if my story were true. People were calling to ask where to send the “old teacher” a check. The spirit of Sherwood Anderson still lives!

When the old teacher retired after 35 years teaching in a public school, he felt good and said to his wife, “Let’s go!” So they took a little trip by car to the west and visited some national parks. “What a beautiful and great country it is,” the old teacher thought.

After that summer and fall passed, the old teacher fidgeted and decided to look for a job. Living on the pension would be tight. With inflation, things would get tighter without a cost of living adjustment. So he worked driving limousines and made a little supplement so he and his wife could eat out once a week in a small nearby restaurant.

That winter they planned a larger garden, and the old teacher went skiing once in awhile. They visited their two kids and the grandchildren. Occasionally the old teacher and his wife went to the city and heard the great music in the grand halls. They had always lived simply and these were good days.

Some years passed this way and the old teacher one June was in the garden and he realized he was tired and things weren’t quite right. His pension by now had shriveled because of inflation, higher taxes and bigger utility bills. If he and his wife took a little trip the tolls had all doubled or tripled, and gasoline was very expensive. The special trips to the city became impossible: parking spaces made more an hour than human beings; tickets, even a cheap restaurant, were beyond the old teacher’s reach. “Well,” thought the old teacher, “We will just have to give some things up.”

Summer he worked in the garden; the added vegetable garden came in handy. The old teacher knew the house needed new storms and screens, and painting. He had always figured he would do those things himself, but he was a bit tired now, and going up a ladder scared him a little. He did paint the living room and kitchen, though. “I must think of something,” he said to himself.

The house was theirs. they had created a fine garden over the many years. He trimmed everything, planted everything, cut the grass and kept it all alive and green. In the spring, tulips, daffodils and crocus flashed their colors against the green grass and shrubs. In summer, iris, phlox, lilies and hydrangea grew and flourished beneath his caring hands. When a grandchild was born he would plant a tree.

A patio behind the house overlooked the garden. “Our patio,” thought the old teacher. He and his wife could sit there before dinner in the summer under the old sycamores and have a drink, and hear the birds and see the flowers. Suddenly a dark thought–perhaps an intuition–flashed in the old teacher’s mind.

He lost the job driving limousines. Business was slow. But a nearby liquor store let him sweep up and straighten out the rows of bottles a few hours each week. He smiled quietly: “A master’s plus 60 sweeps clean.”

Sweeping one day, the old teacher remembered buying a case of champagne. “Probably for our 25th wedding anniversary,” he thought. “I was probably teaching college at night in those years. They were pretty good years.”

In the summer, the weeds lay beneath the lovely blossoms. And the old teacher tore them out before they grew high and shoved through the flowers to the sunlight. The ugly weeds sneaked beneath the swaying petaled stems, taking moisture and nutrients for themselves, away from the loveliness above. “There’s a story in this somewhere,” thought the old teacher, as he moved through the bed of flowers, carefully tearing out the hidden weeds.

One winter night after a simple dinner, the old teacher’s wife said, “The property taxes have gone up again. Over 30 percent the last years. Fuel oil is up again. We’re going to have to…” “I know,” said the old teacher. “Go into the savings.”

That winter was extra cold and long. The old teacher cut a lot of wood for a small woodstove in the living room. One night, standing in the bare garden, on a very cold, clear night, a full moon dazzling the snow, the old teacher carried an armful of cut wood toward the house.

Suddenly something grabbed at the inside of his chest and he stopped walking. He could hardly breathe. He waited. slowly his breathing became easier. The grabbing loosened and he continued into the house.

That night he lay awake in bed for a long time. Feeling alone and small in the dark, he thought about his old body and what was happening to it. He thought about the West. “Should have gone again. I wish I had skied more, traveled more…the lovely music…” and he slept.

The next morning blazed winter sunlight, brighter than summer because of the clarity and the new snow. The old teacher pored over the many books shelved neatly in the living room. “Ah! I knew I kept it. Death of a Salesman.” The old teacher flipped toward the end and found the lines, “You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away…a man is not a piece of fruit! Now pay attention.”

“I must send these lines to my state senator and my assemblyman. They will read them and understand why…well, why we must keep our house. Especially now. We created it. It is our art, created for ourselves. How else can I tell them that? Perhaps there are no words. But they must know about houses. They must worry sometimes about their houses. They pay taxes. They must know…”

The old teacher scribbled Miller’s lines on a neat white sheet of paper and added, “We just want to keep our house.” He carefully placed the sheets in the two envelopes, sealed them and put on the expensive stamps. Then he walked to the red, white and blue mailbox with the brave eagle on it and mailed his letters to the Capitol.

That year, once again, the Capitol defeated the bill increasing pensions for retired teachers.

The next year, the weeds grew through the flowers.

Al Craz is a retired teacher and Anderson collector, residing in East Moriches, New York.

By Charles E. Modlin

Of the many unfinished manuscripts that Sherwood Anderson left behind, one of the most interesting is “Letters to Cynthia,” a rare experiment in epistolary fiction, which follows the adventures of a brother and sister as they venture outside their small Midwestern hometown and explore the bohemian intellectual worlds of New York and Chicago. It provides some detailed observations of the Chicago literary scene in the period following the publication of Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and explores a major theme in Anderson’s published works: the Midwesterner distracted away from his family and business toward the world of the arts. On a personal level, it also expresses a characteristic ambivalence toward the relative merits of country vs. city life, which Anderson retained throughout his life.

The fourteen-page manuscript,1 which is housed at the Newberry Library in Chicago, begins with a section in Anderson’s handwriting that introduces Sidney and Cynthia Adams. He is a pump manufacturer living in La Salle, Illinois, an actual town, 85 miles southwest of Chicago; she is his sister, who has gone off to live in Greenwich Village, New York. The narrator, purportedly Anderson himself, explains that he had met Sidney through writing advertising for the pump company. This part also includes a brief, incomplete letter from Sidney to Cynthia, which provides some background on their father and their recently deceased mother. The mother, “the stronger and sweeter” of the two, left her money to the children, and the father, who was originally from New England, has become moody and resentful.

The rest of the manuscript, which is typed, apparently by Anderson, consists of four detailed letters–three from Sidney to Cynthia and one from her to him. Sidney writes the first of these from the Auditorium Hotel in Chicago, staying over after seeing her off on the train to New York. He reports that he had visited Krock’s bookstore on Michigan Avenue and bought a copy of The Education of Henry Adams.2 Feeling culturally deprived, he asks Cynthia to write him the literary news from New York. “Sometimes,” he observes, “I think you and I have lived as isolated lives out there at La Salle as La Salle himself could have lived when he and his Indian guides first came into the country and set up housekeeping on Starved Rock.” He laments his own isolation at home now that Cynthia has gone. While he is happy with his wife, Hallie, she doesn’t fully share his interest in books, art, and music. He misses his long walks in the country with Cynthia and describes one particularly happy afternoon when she induced him to leave the office to go hiking in the Midwestern countryside. He recalls that “you kept laughing about nothing and so did I. It was an odd sort of afternoon for two Adamses to put in.”

The next letter, written by Cynthia after her arrival in New York, expresses her misgivings about leaving home. She wonders whether she has exaggerated the defects of life in La Salle and has already experienced petty irritations with the trendy airs of Greenwich Village as expressed by the friend with whom she is staying:

Fanny has grown to be what she calls “esthetic” since you thought her so charming years ago at college. Of course her hair is short but she’s careful to explain that her first haircut was contemporary with Mrs. Vernon Castle’s, when cutting one’s hair was something of a revolt; and that as to clothes, they take too much time from “the real things of life.” I suggested mildly that clothes were about as solid realities as I could grasp and that since you had to wear some sort, in any case, good ones took no more trouble than bad ones if one had any eye for such things. But she just sniffed at that. The truth is that she spends more than she should on rent and always feels too poor for clothes. That’s nothing to her detriment, but why pretend? I gathered that my idea was Middle Western, than which there is nothing lower in the eyes of the Village.

Despite her criticisms, Cynthia concludes that “Fanny and her friends are really kind and jolly and have some freedom and opportunities of companionship that we have always hungered for.”

Sidney answers Cynthia’s letter, again lamenting that she is unavailable, and Hallie too busy, to roam the countryside with him after work, which he has prized as a time to escape the small-town preoccupation with “the details of existence.” He expresses reservations about Fanny and hopes that Cynthia won’t bob her hair, since “An Adams doing that would be a rather funny notion, wouldn’t it?” He hopes that she will get beyond the Greenwich Village esthetes and find writers of genuine value. He mentions Floyd Dell, formerly the literary editor of the Chicago Evening Post, who in 1913 had come to New York to edit the Masses: “You will remember how we used to follow everything he said. I always thought there was something missing in him. He got us started reading Dreiser, you know. Do you suppose you will see Dreiser?”

Sidney’s next letter, written in two installments, is much longer, detailing what he calls his “Chicago adventure.” He writes the first part on the train returning home from Chicago, where he had gone to see about some improvements to the Adams pump. While there he went into a bookstore that was “the strangest place I have ever been in…a tiny room, hardly larger than the bathroom at our house here,” yet it excited him because it seemed to be “a hangout for political, religious and philosophical radicals.” Two men were there arguing–one “a heavy-featured, long-jawed man” and the other a tall Irishman with “the loose, somewhat slack mouth of the orator” and beautiful hands. The Irishman left after angering the other man, who, with “a bulldozing air about him,” called the Russian revolution “the greatest experiment for human freedom ever made” and, Sidney observes, “seemed somewhat sentimental on the subject of labor.” The proprietor, “a slender, sick-looking man,” afterwards identified the Irishman as Jim Larkin, controversial Irish labor leader, and the other man as Carl Sandburg, whose Chicago Poems (1916), Sidney recalls, “I got excited about a year ago, although, as I remember, you did not.”

While at the bookstore, he also met the proprietor’s blind wife and their daughter:

We were speaking of books and once the daughter, who at fourteen seemed to have read everything, turned to speak to me and at the same time tried to thrust a newly lighted cigarette into her mother’s mouth. She made rather wild stabs at the spot where her mother sat and struck her on the nose, the cheek and the forehead before the cigarette had found its way to its natural resting place.

They all laughed good naturedly over this rather grotesque incident and that permitted me to laugh with them.

In a “romantic” impulse, Sidney avoided revealing to these people his occupation as a pump manufacturer and, instead, told them that, like the family in “The Egg,” he left a chicken farm to come to town. His ambition, he told them, is to start a bookstore. The proprietor replied that he had been a minister in a Wisconsin before becoming a radical in “politics, religion, love and philosophy.” In the course of their conversation a policeman came in the shop to buy pamphlets by Robert Ingersoll and Clarence Darrow, and then they were joined by a young man who began a discussion of eroticism in modern fiction with the proprietor’s daughter. The girl, “talking eagerly, thrusting her body forward on the box on which she was seated,” made comments about relationships between men and women that, Sidney notes, left him “breathless” and feeling like “a thorough backwoodsman.”

Sidney buys two books–Waldo Frank’s Our America (1919) and Van Wyck Brooks’ America’s Coming of Age (1915)–and a ticket to a lecture that evening by the blind woman at the Dill Pickle, an actual speakeasy on the Near North Side, run by Jack Jones, a former labor organizer.3 Again resorting to duplicity, he wires Hallie that he is detained overnight by business. On the train going home the next day, he writes that he has begun reading The Education of Henry Adams and suggests that “there is another Adams, one Sidney Adams, who will be educated a little here.” He confesses, however, to a certain disappointment that “The poets, the new ones, I am afraid, do not look like the poets of our dreams,” and adds that “The poet Sandburg did smoke such awfully rank cigars.”

A day or so later, Sidney writes a long second installment of the letter from his office when “everyone but me is gone and I can just sit here, sometimes for hours, and have fancies.” After acknowledging feelings of guilt over his “innocent lie” to Hallie about having to stay overnight for business, he continues his account of his experience in Chicago. Arriving at the Dill Pickle, he entered “a long low room” where, in addition to the bookseller, his wife and daughter, seven people with “rather dull faces” sat waiting. The owner of the Dill Pickle invited Sidney to a meeting at which a Madame Freiburger was to speak on “Men who have made love to me.” A fat man introduced the blind woman as “the best mind on intellectual things of anyone in America,” and then sat down and dozed off.

The woman spoke on Dostoevsky, and by the time she finished, Adams writes, “I suppose I and the husband and the rowdy daughter, now sitting with her hands crossed and looking very demure and solemn, were the only ones in the audience not asleep.” Afterwards, Adams invited the three of them out to dinner. On the way the daughter spoke of marriage, stating “in a matter of fact tone” that she had no interest in marrying but that “In a year or two” she would “go in for some experimenting with lovers.” Later in the restaurant she spoke to him about her interest in Russia: “I will never be an intellectual like Mother and so I should be a woman of action. I wish I lived in Russia now. I would like nothing better than the chance to get out and fight for the liberation of the proletariat.”

After dinner they went to the family’s two-room apartment, which was strewn with “Smelly vegetable tins, an overflowing garbage can, women’s underwear lying about on chairs and even on the table among the unwashed dishes of the last meal.” Despite the mess Sidney observes that he felt oddly happy.

Just why I can’t say, dear sister. Is there something in me, a New England Adams, deeply at war with the notion of being an Adams and a son of New England? I wondered. “Is there something of the same sort in Cynthia too?” I asked myself. “Is that why she wanted to run off to New York and live in Greenwich Village?”

The blind woman began again to talk about Russian writers, this time with “an odd sort of fire and swing to everything she said” that had been lacking at the Dill Pickle, asserting that “the Russians had revolutionized all Western thought.” For the next three hours, he writes, “she ruled like a queen over the three other minds in the room and then I went stumbling down the dark stairway and after some little trouble found an elevated station from where I could take a train back into the Loop and back into the tone of the life I have always known.” The narrative ends at this point, and thus we never learn the ultimate fate of either of the Adamses, although Anderson in his introduction indicates that later on Cynthia is still living in New York when he meets her there, and he has established a close friendship with Sidney, frequently exchanging visits with him in La Salle and Chicago.

Dating the “Letters to Cynthia” is difficult because Anderson apparently made no mention of the work elsewhere, but a few internal clues would suggest a date of around 1920 or ’21. Of the books Sidney Adams mentions, the latest is Waldo Frank’s Our America, which appeared in late 1919. The time period of the story, however, may be somewhat earlier. In November 1920 the Radical Book Shop, located at 826 North Clark Street and clearly the model for the store Sidney visits, held an exhibition of Anderson’s paintings. The owners at that time were Thiem and Netta Cooper. On November 12, 1920, Anderson wrote that his show of watercolors was going on and that “there is a good deal of discussion as to whether I am insane, decadent, or a new note.”4 Many years later, Netta Cooper crustily recalled Anderson’s “bloody” paintings and his frequent visits to the store when he was “usually…displeased with [the] way his books were displayed–that is, not well, because [they were] not selling.”5

The Coopers, however, had only recently bought the shop and were not the models for the family described in “Letters to Cynthia.” Howard Udell, formerly a Unitarian minister, and his wife Lillian, who was blind, began the Radical Book Store in 1914. True to its name, it specialized in radical publications, and Sandburg and Larkin did in fact often go there. The Udells had two daughters, Phyllis and Geraldine. The younger one, Geraldine, appears to be the one Anderson depicted in “Letters to Cynthia.” In an interview in 1963 she recalled taking modern dance classes and piano lessons with Tennessee Mitchell, Anderson’s second wife. For the latter she went to the Andersons’ apartment on Division Street. She added that she knew Sherwood and enjoyed talking with him. She later became the business manager of Poetry magazine.6

Although Anderson was impressed by The Education of Henry Adams, which he first read in December 1918, and would go on later to include numerous allusions to it in his own autobiography, A Story Teller’s Story (1924), “Letters from Cynthia” shows little direct influence of it beyond the general theme of broadening one’s cultural horizons. Anderson in fact felt that his own region had certain advantages over Adams’s New England, asserting that “We do, I am sure, both live and die rather better in the Middle West. Nothing about us is as yet so completely and racially tired.”7 In an article published in 1918, a year after Anderson’s first visit to New York, he criticized writers and artists there as too ingrown and elitist: “In New York, when artists began to gather in groups about Washington Square, when Greenwich Village became their abiding place, the chance for a distinctive Manhattan literature went to the bow-wows.” In contrast, he wrote, Chicago writers and artists are fortunate to live in a city that is “sprawled out over the prairies” and, in going back and forth, they “rub elbows with the laborer, the clerk, the professional and business men.”8

Thus there is something that Anderson considers healthy and typically Midwestern in the mingling that takes place in “Letters to Cynthia” between the small-town manufacturer and the radical literary crowd in Chicago. However, Sidney at times seems overly impressionable, and the culture he finds in Chicago is thin. Many of the writers who had made up what Anderson called the “Robin’s Egg Renaissance”9 of previous years, such as Dell, Burton Rascoe, Margaret Anderson, Max Bodenheim, and Ernest Hemingway, were gone. Jim Larkin by November of 1920 was in prison in New York. Even though Sandburg was still around, he seems, as presented in “Letters,” rather affected. Sidney’s evening at the Dill Pickle is unappealing, although he does enjoy the woman’s stimulating talk at the house afterwards.

The story was left unfinished perhaps in part because Anderson was unsure of how to proceed with either Sidney or Cynthia. Eventually they would both likely tire of too much exposure to the excesses of those whom Anderson called the “Little Children of the Arts,”10 and even though Sidney may have outgrown the provinciality of LaSalle, he continues to enjoy the closeness of nature there.

Another factor that may have prevented the completion of the story was Anderson’s own mixed feelings toward city vs. country life. He was well aware of the advantages and drawbacks of both, but in 1920 his movements were for the most part away from the city as he spent the winter in Fairhope, Alabama, and the summer at Ephraim, Wisconsin, traveled frequently during the year to Owensboro, Kentucky, and moved in the fall to Palos Park, a small village near Chicago. After he left the Chicago area in 1922, he lived in New York, Reno, and New Orleans, then in 1926 settled in southwestern Virginia, spending much of the summer at his country home, Ripshin, and the small town of Marion. But he also traveled widely and stayed often in New York. Ultimately, it was in a balance of both city and country that Anderson himself found most satisfaction. Like Sidney Adams, he enjoyed them both in turn and knew, when he had enough of one, to light out for the other.

Notes

1. Quotations from “Letters to Cynthia” are used with the permission of the Sherwood Anderson Literary Estate Trust and the Newberry Library.
2. Privately printed in 1907 and published by Houghton Mifflin in 1918.
3. Anderson wrote about Jones in “Jack Jones-The Pickler,” Chicago Daily News, June 18, 1919, p. 12; and in Sherwood Anderson’s Memoirs, ed. Ray Lewis White (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1969), 356-69.
4. Letters of Sherwood Anderson, ed. Howard Mumford Jones and Walter B. Rideout (Boston: Little Brown, 1953), 64.
5. Dale Kramer, Chicago Notebooks, Newberry Library.
6. Kramer Notebooks.
7. Letters, 43.
8. “Chicago Culture,” Chicago Daily News, Feb. 20, 1918, p. 7.
9. Memoirs, p. 317.
10. Memoirs, p. 347.

By Sherwood Anderson

Editor’s note: These impressions of the inauguration of Herbert Hoover, which took place on March 4, 1929, were published in Anderson’s Smyth County News, March 7, 1929, 1,4. The text is edited from a later typescript.

I had got into Washington from New York in the morning. The railroad yards were filled with trains. Our train moved forward a few hundred yards at a time. At last we got in. I lost myself in the crowd.

The crowd was centered about Pennsylvania Avenue. All along the streets, wherever there were a few feet of vacant space, a stand with seats had been put up. The side streets, coming into Pennsylvania Avenue, were roped off. Enterprising men had built a series of tents on trucks and had backed them into the street ends. The papers say there are three hundred thousand curious visitors, like me, in the city. How do the papers know such things? One paper says one hundred and fifty thousand, another three hundred thousand. Evidently they do not know. There is a vast crowd.

The little stores along Pennsylvania Avenue, down near the Capitol, have narrow windows facing the street. They have put two or three chairs that are for rent in each of the windows.

They are all rented. Middle aged women and girls sit in the chairs. They sit for hours patiently. Nothing happens. They look like wax figures. No woman can sit so, nowadays, without showing a great deal of leg. The legs are not particularly attractive.

It is a day when no pretty women are to be seen. It is odd about a man’s reactions to pretty women. It may be that on some days all women look pretty, and even lovely, while on others they nearly all look rather sad. Well, they never do all look pretty.

I have been wandering about with friends. Among them is a fair Russian aristocrat [Baroness Marie Louise Koskull]. She is tall, strong, magnificent. I keep thinking of the old days in Russia, the days of Gogol and Turgenev and of the Russian grand dukes. This fair, tall Russian woman has what the painter Renoir was always speaking of as “a skin that takes the light.” What a subject for a magnificent painting she would make.

She is speaking to me of the Americans in the crowd. She has lived a great deal in Europe. She says American crowds always impress her by their patience. “In Europe on such an occasion,” she says, “there would be all sorts of protesting organizations out marching.

“There would be the socialists, the anarchists, the labor people. They would march and shout, the police would rush upon them.

“At the same time there would be more gaiety. People would dress in brighter colors, they would dance and sing.”

The Baroness has got an idea that the Americans have no nerves. “There are no neurotics here, are there?” she asks, and I laugh.

I think of the queer little outbreaks of neuroticism all about me, everywhere I go, of my own neuroticism.

In a European city, on such a gala occasion, everyone would be sitting in comfortable chairs, in the sidewalk cafes. They would be drinking wine. There would be little or no drunkenness.

I see a good many drunken people in this crowd. These drunken young men brush against us. They laugh. One of them says he slept the night before in a park in Washington. (It must have been cold sleeping.) Obviously he is lying. I like imaginative liars. He says that during the night a squirrel bit him. The others in his party gather about me and laugh. They have all been bitten by the same squirrel. They can just stand on their legs. “You have got the squirrel in your pocket now,” I suggest to the man who had addressed me. “Yes,” he says. He invites me to go somewhere with him, to also be bitten by the squirrel, but I decline.

Pennsylvania Avenue is a broad street. It runs straight down from the White House to the Capitol. Once it was lined with trees but there are no trees now. The street has been roped off with heavy wire ropes.

Cars are going with terrific speed along the avenue, forty, fifty, sixty miles an hour. Along the street, on the broad sidewalks, among the crowd, move strange figures.

Tall Indians, dressed in their former war regalia, go past. They are magnificent creatures. There are innumerable people, evidently intent on getting into the picture pages of the newspapers. Young girls have put on Texas cowboy hats. There are no marks of the plains on them. Their cheeks are not wind-burned. The accommodating newspaper photographers, mingling with the crowd, are glad to take pictures. A little flapper with a pert face tells the newspaper men that they would all feel better on a bronco on the plains than on the pavement. The newspaper man takes it down. It is wonderful what the movies have done for our civilization. I look closely at the flapper. She is a stenographer. There is a way you can tell by looking at the hands.

And, at that, stenographers have lovely hands. So have waitresses for that matter. Women who work have, almost without exception, lovely expressive hands.

O, how well dressed are the women of an American crowd. Where do all these furs come from? Who pays for them? The men look tired. They must have to work hard to pay for all these furs. Untold thousands of animals slaughtered. Many of the furs are imitations but the real ones are seen by the thousands.

In the street within the wire ropes there is a roar and bustle. Police rush past at sixty miles an hour. They are in cars and on motorcycles. Gaudily dressed diplomats are passing. Now there comes a troop of cavalry. The horses are beautiful. The faces of the soldiers are set and stern looking.

It may be they are like the cowgirls from Texas. The movies may have taught them their trade.

Surely the officers are not inspired. Living the life of a military man does not make for a sensitive face. The faces of the officers look dull.

The politicians in their tall black hats have dull faces. The officers are wearing all of their medals. The breasts of some of the officers are loaded with decorations.

Most of the politicians have piggish-looking faces. They are amazingly fat.

I have followed the crowd and have gone to see the inauguration. The skies are grey and cold. Mr. Hoover and Mr. Coolidge have gone to the Capitol in a slow moving car. Mr. Coolidge looks happy. It is as though he were saying to himself”This lets me out. Now I can go freely about. People will bow to me. ‘Good morning, Mr. President.’ I can keep out of trouble.” He bows to the right and left. Walking beside me is a man in a hunter’s jacket and a coonskin cap. He tells me he is impersonating Daniel Boone for the Governor of Pennsylvania. We pass a statue of General Grant and talk about it. “He was a good man all right,” the Pennsylvania Daniel Boone says. “Let’s see, wasn’t he President once? Or was he just a general.”

“He was both. Poor man, he was both,” I say and laugh.

In the Capitol grounds a vast crowd has gathered. We cannot hear the words of the new President. He is talking about prohibition, as we learn later from the newspapers. Near me a political marching club is passing a bottle of whiskey from hand to hand. They drink openly, without attempt at concealment. They also are from Pennsylvania.

It has begun to rain now and, although the crowd stands patiently in the rain, hearing nothing, I go away. I have lunch in a side street, away from the crowd. When I come back into Pennsylvania Avenue the bands, the sailors, the soldiers, the marching clubs–all their gay feathers drooping-are marching patiently. It rains harder and harder. Four huge airships float in the air above. They nose their way slowly through the mist. The crowd sits patiently in the rain. I hear no cheers, although tomorrow the newspapers will speak of “cheering crowds.”

As there is no place to get dry and as my friends have long since gone to their homes, I go to a movie house. It is the only place I can find to sit. The hotel lobbies are crowded.

On the screen they are showing the ideal American woman. She is called “Miss America.” She spends her time putting on and taking off expensive clothes. We see her in bed in her bedroom, at tea, in the theater. She wears pajamas, tea gowns, bathing suits, party gowns without number. The women in the theater watch her breathlessly. Their eyes are filled with envy.

When I come out of the theater, the parade is over. It still rains. The new president has gone to his home in the White House. The Washington newspapers take a great amount of space to tell about the gowns worn by the various wives of the new men, just come into power.

By Will Schuck

“Write an electronic communication vehicles study,” my boss said. “I need it for a meeting one week from tomorrow.”

Having written for the trade press for nine years, much like Sherwood Anderson had in his days at Long-Critchfield, I had developed a style was standard modern newsroom: inverted pyramid. Put the important stuff first and the unimportant stuff last.

I had also written corporate expenditure policies in my career. This experience stiffened my style, knocking out about all the creative element that was left. Surely, an “electronic communication vehicles study” would benefit from such a background. Or so I thought.

Diligently, I scribbled down a list of our company’s electronic (non-print) communication vehicles: e-mail, intranet, voicemail, videoconferencing, and the human resources information database. Next was to conduct interviews with the “owners” of each vehicle to find out the details: Who has access? How is it maintained? What is its purpose? Who is the audience? How does one use it? And so on.

After four days, I was quite proud of myself. I had interviewed all the electronic communication vehicle owners and documented the information in an organized format. I even photocopied and three-hole-punched the document and put it in a black binder with tab dividers. Boy, it looked slick.

I put the report on my boss’s desk a day early while she was at an offsite meeting. I went home on time and bragged to my wife how well I did the job. I lay on the couch that evening after our son went to bed and continued reading Kim Townsend’s Sherwood Anderson. Life was great.

The next day, as I sat in my ergonomic office chair pursuing completion of the next project on my list, my boss stood in my cubicle opening. Her hands were on
her hips. The black binder with the tab dividers was under her arm. She didn’t say a word. I pretended not to see her right away, giving her the chance to have the first word. Of course, she came to congratulate me.

“This is not what I wanted, AT ALL,” she thundered. Fear penetrated me as I turned my head from my computer screen to look up at her. My throat tightened as I stammered to say, “What do you mean?”

“This is not right,” she began in stern but softer tones. “No doubt you went to a lot of effort to gather this information. But the way it’s presented just is not right. It’s far too academic or something.”

This was the story of my life. Professors told me I sounded too much like Hemingway before I ever read him. High school and college girlfriends left me because I was “too nice.” Now, my Electronic Communication Vehicles Study was “too academic.” I wasn’t going to guess what “or something” meant. I was furious but buried my wrath until she left with “I want it re-written by
tomorrow and I want it to be more user-friendly.”

“User-friendly!” I went for a shaky walk around the floor wishing I could make a phone call or tell someone in the office how angry I felt. I ended up going to the men’s room to cool off.

As I sat in a stall, assuming the position of The Thinker, I quietly thought of appropriate forms of revenge, like quitting. Realizing I couldn’t do that, I began to think of Sherwood Anderson when he walked out of his Elyria office and followed the railroad tracks to Cleveland. Here I was in Cleveland, feeling the same pressure to produce. Suddenly, I had it.

I marched back to my desk, opened a new document, and started typing away. This would put her in the corner! Her meeting was tomorrow and she had to use whatever I produced.

I typed into the evening, crumbing-up my keyboard by eating lunch and dinner at my desk. The words seemed to come naturally, sounding just like one of Anderson’s “reason why” advertisements.I had read in Townsend’s biography the night before. As Townsend described the ad copy, “It is the word of a writer trying to create a voice that makes you feel he is talking directly to you, in words that you can trust.” As Anderson himself put it in the ad, “Every word of this book is written under my personal supervision. As you and I may never meet face to face I give you my word now that what is written in this book is true in spirit and in fact.”

Like Anderson, I pleaded with the reader (or “user” as my boss liked to say) about the importance of the information in my Electronic Communication Vehicles Guide. I
reasoned with the reader-user that this information would make him the star of his department because now he had the keys to understanding how the company’s electronic communication vehicles work, to whom they are delivered and who is the intended audience of each. I personally guaranteed the compilation’s accuracy by applying dates to each section of information, promising an annual
update and putting my name first on the report’s outside front cover.

I heard Anderson’s voice urging me on as I wrote. “Muttered” and “damned” were the only words I refused from him as he took over for me at the keyboard.

When Anderson finished dictating to me and I stopped typing, I felt relieved, like I had come clean about my feelings for my boss and the project. This was a real gamble, and could mean my getting fired, but I didn’t care. To me, it was just one project in a heap of paper I produced since I began writing for a living nearly 10 years ago.

It was done. All that was left was to print a copy and put it in my boss’s red “urgent” folder. Then, I could sleep on the bus ride home. As I lifted the still-warm 30-some pages from the output tray and slid them into her in-box, I
trotted to the elevator and slipped away.

The next day was like a scene from the film “Groundhog Day.” I again sat in my ergonomic office chair pursuing completion of the next project on my list. My boss again stood in my cubicle opening. Her hands were on her hips. The black binder with the tab dividers was under her arm. She didn’t say a word. I pretended not to see her right away, giving her the chance to have the first word. Of course, she came to fire me.

“This is JUST what I wanted!” she thundered. Fear penetrated me as I turned my head from my computer screen to look up at her. My throat tightened as I
stammered to say, “What do you mean?”

“This is perfect!” she began. “No doubt you went to a lot of effort to rewrite this. It’s just perfect! What inspired you?”

I didn’t dare to tell her. I only hoped that this was the beginning of the new story of my life. Career-wise, with Anderson as my muse, perhaps I’d stop feeling like the stifled George Willard of Winesburg, Ohio. Anderson had given me a voice and a confidence that would carry me through the next corporate assignment (a field communications guide) and, six months later, to a promotion.

Thank you, Sherwood. You saved my career.

Will Schuck is a corporate communications writer living in Avon Lake, Ohio. He is director of The Anderson Project, a community literacy center planned for Elyria, Ohio.

By Paola Corso

Pittsburgh, 1966

Prologue
When I was little, I saw the very last bubble of air from Rico’s breath ride the Allegheny River. I was too young to realize that empty circle was the last I’d see of my brother. While it floated so light and easy on the water, he and his friend were sinking to the bottom. And the second the bubble popped, my brother was dead to this world.

All I knew was they had disappeared after their boat capsized. The worst of it, though, was when I ran to tell Mama what happened. I knew then and there it would take us both a long time to face the river again. A long time to find Rico.

I spent years searching for him and Stanza, and it seemed as though I couldn’t think of anything else until I knew where they had gone. Once I did, I wanted nothing more than to get my mama to believe me.

Even before Rico drowned, she always said the river was a hell that froze over and melted. She just cursed it all the more after he died. I tried to listen when she said I wasn’t allowed to look in the river’s direction anymore for fear it would tempt me with its coolness and surface so smooth and shiny. This was not easy since we lived on First Avenue in Tarentum, right along the Allegheny.

She made me walk up to the spring every morning because what poured out of the spigot came from the river, and she didn’t want us filling ourselves up with what she called devil’s brew. If not out of respect for our bodies, then for Rico. Now my papa said he lost a son too, but he believed the river wasn’t filthy dirty like she said–it was as clean as we made ourselves to be.

I never understood what the Allegheny ever did to her, although Mama had her reasons for despising the river from the time she was a girl my age. If only I had known this, maybe it would have been easier, and yet, Rico’s drowning was always enough for me to forgive Mama for her hatred and fear, though I carried none of my own. Only hers until I found what I was looking for there.

Although I’m standing with Mama on a boat along the Allegheny, not once did I think I’d see this day since he drowned. As I gaze into its inkwell blue
waters, now I know that his bubble floating on the river will never really disappear. Not until another one rises to the surface to take its place.

Tarentum, 1965

Chapter 1
Mama is making me wear my First Holy Communion dress to Easter Mass. It zips in the back so I can’t take it off by myself. I swear this is no accident. She tugs so hard when the metal teeth catch a thread that my knees are ready to buckle.

“Nobody’s going to notice it’s halfway up with my coat on.”

Mama doesn’t answer. It’s one of those times when she can’t yell and yank at the same time.

“I’ll keep it on even if I get hot,” I promise, thinking what difference did being overheated in church make when my straw hat pinches my ears. Lace anklets scratch my toes. Starched gloves stiffen my fingers. Patent leather shoes grow me blisters. At least if I keep my coat on, the ribbon dangling from my bonnet won’t tickle my neck and make me squirm more than I already will in those hard wooden pews.

My sister, Dina, is lucky. She outgrew her First Holy Communion outfit years ago. I keep trying to get Mama to see that I’m too big for mine, too. “I need the next size,” I insist.

“Ooofa,” she says, annoyed. “You complained when I bought it last year and it fit perfect then. The fungo you had on your face.” That’s the Italian way of saying I was pouting so much my face had as many wrinkles as the bottom of a mushroom cap.

“I won’t hear the priest with this hat over my ears. And I’ll have to limp up to the altar to receive Communion if you make me wear these shoes.”

“Eccosi.”

“I can’t turn the thin pages of my missal with these on. And it’s not right to dip dirty gloves into holy water.”

“You are not to take your outfit off until we set foot in this house. Capisci?”

Most of the time, Mama’s heart-shaped face reminds me of a Valentine box of chocolates, but when she’s mad about something, she sticks out her jaw. I’m more afraid of her crooked bottom teeth than anything else about her. Even the pink lipstick she wears doesn’t soften her bite.

While Mama is still zipping me up, Rico struts into the room and hands her a pot of hyacinths with that colored aluminum foil wrapped around so she’ll forget to inspect him. Because Rico’s weight hasn’t caught up with his height, his clothes are so baggy, you’d think there’s nobody inside if it weren’t for his wrists and ankles. He’s getting so tall for his pants that he has to make sure his shoes are polished and his socks match. His ties are always lopsided, but he tucks the long end inside his pants with his shirt so Mama never notices. The part in his wiry hair is straight. He greases it back for church, which makes his deep-set eyes stand out. In fact, Mama always says she can see all the way to Italy in Rico’s eyes when they aren’t under the shadow of curls. And since Rico is about to pass Mama’s height, she gazes into them all the more while she still can.

“What a beautiful flower, Rico. Put it by the Blessed Mother.”

Rico hesitates. With so many statues of the Virgin Mary in our house, he has to ask which one.

Mama signals as she ties a tight bow in the back of my dress. “On my dresser.”

Now that there’s no getting out of my chiffon puff, the only good thing I can say is that the skirt’s so frilly, the crumbs on my lap from snacking without a plate don’t show, which means I can sneak something from the kitchen even though I’m supposed to fast before receiving Communion. I guess the color’s okay, too, because the powdered sugar Mama sprinkles on her bowties doesn’t show either on a white dress. Even so, I still can’t wait to be a size 10. I pray I’ll fill out because I know my mama will make me wear this torture for the rest of my life until I do.

I sneak over to empty out the crumbs in my dress over the wastebasket before I put on my spring coat. Mama and Dina are upstairs. Mama’s probably switching her rosary and holy cards from her regular purse to her Sunday one. If I’m right, I’ll soon hear the sound of snapping fingers the gold clasp makes when she opens and closes it. And Dina’s in her bedroom, slamming drawers to find the hairband she stuffed between her clothes. Serves her right for hiding it from me.

My papa and Rico are waiting for us on the front porch. They’re sitting on the brick wall Mama had Nonno Vernese build a couple of years ago after Dina fell off doing a cartwheel and sprained her ankle. But behind Mama’s back, Dina sits on it and watches her friends outside of Mrs. Adler’s corner store a block away, her legs kicking the bushes. Sometimes, she walks it like a tightrope, and her arms bat the thick green-striped awning above. Mama also doesn’t like Papa and Rico sitting on the brick either. Says it snags their good suits.

Only on special occasions does Papa put on so many clothes. Around the house, he wears a white, V-neck T-shirt, his holy medal Mama gave him somewhere under the bush of chest hair. The crane he operates at work is air-conditioned but even so, the temperature breaks 100 degrees as soon as he hauls his first piece of iron over to the fire. So when Papa comes home from work, he doesn’t want to sweat a drop. Rico and I take turns filling up his pitcher of ice water next to the couch.

Papa stares down at his watch. “Let’s get a move on in there.” Most of the time, his mouth is cracked open as if he were about to say something, but he prefers to speak with his eyes. Everything closes in on them–his lids hang low, his cheekbones push up and the ridge of his nose is wide. I believe the less of Papa’s eyes we see means the more he can see of us.

Rico grabs the broom Mama stores by the doorbell. He jumps onto the Country Belle milk box and pretends to sing into a microphone, hiccuping every syllable: “That’ll be the d-a-a-a-a-a-y that I die.”

Dina parades out onto the porch, rattling her charm bracelet. She turns to Rico, “You sound like you’re gasping for air.” She has brown, shoulder-length hair ironed straight, pale, buttery skin and a look on her face that makes me think she’s going to yawn. I ask if she’s tired and she says, “Mellow yellow.”

As Mama scurries out, Rico is still on the milk box crooning. She grins. “Get down from there, you’re already too tall.” Papa closes the door behind her, and we all start walking along First Avenue toward St. Peter’s Church.

Tarentum is one of those lanky river towns, a mile and a half long and only 10 blocks wide. Bordered by the railroad tracks on one side and the river on the other, it’s filled with two-story brick houses that are identical except for the different colored porch awnings. This is practically the only way families can tell which house is theirs since even most yards have the same green clipped hedges–high enough to keep dogs off the grass but low enough that kids hurdle over.

Tarentum’s a place where you know what’s going to happen before it happens. Like Harry’s Pizza. Every time we order a pepperoni pie, there’ll be exactly two pieces of meat on every slice. At the bank, it never fails that the clerk tucks lollipops in the drive-through envelopes along with the money, and on Saturday mornings at Weisburg’s, there’ll be a line all the way back to the saltine crackers when we go to buy city chickens. Only the railroad tracks and the river are different. You never know what’s coming or when.

As we pass a sign with the town’s name on it, I ask Rico how Tarentum got its name.

“Why are you asking him for?” Dina butts in with her sarcasm. She hates that I look up to my brother even though she’s the oldest.

“Because I want an answer, Dina. Not another question.”

“You think he’s such a know-it-all.”

“It’s named after a city in Italy along the water that was really fertile. Mr. Dudek said the Romans conquered it for its honey and olives. Stanza has a different reason: He’d say, ‘Why did the fisherman bring his boats here? Ta-rent-em.'”

“What a sorry excuse for a joke,” Dina mutters.

“The river’s high today from all the rain. See for yourself, Carlotta,” Papa says, picking me up so I can peek my head over a bush. I like it when I see the world from his height. The sky is pale and the river looks like bare skin, shivering.

The boats tied to the dock bump up against it every time a wave comes in. The motorboats make a heavy knocking sound, the rowboats a soft one. It’s the difference between my father banging with his fists on the bathroom door when he needs to use it and my mother tapping with her fingernails.

The place where people unload their boats into the water on a pulley is quiet. From my window I often hear cinder stones kicking up under car tires, since we live so close by, but everyone in Tarentum is in church now.

Papa points. “It’s high and mighty all right. One of those days when it’s tired of providing all the time. Tired of giving. Every now and then, it gets the urge to take.”

Rico grins. “Na-ah. The bank’s sinking.”

I spot a tree with a droopy branch along the bank and decide if any part is touching water on the way back from church, then Rico must be right. We walk under the Tarentum Bridge. Being under a steel span is like being at the foot of a giant Erector Set.

Mama flattens the wrinkles on my dress as soon as Papa puts me down.

I tug at my brother’s suit coat. “How does land sink?”

Rico pulls at my arm. “It gets dragged under.”

“Basta. That’s enough, Rico,” Mama scolds. “You’re scaring her.”

“There’s nothing to be afraid of. It’ll come back up. They taught us about floods at school. Mr. Gazerick says that’s why all the high schools in our area have pools because we need to learn how to swim and be lifesavers.”

I ask Rico if our house will come back up again.

“Maybe. Maybe not. There’s life down there, too.”

“I said that was enough!” The hat veil covering Mama’s face blows from the wind of her breath.

“That’s what Nonno Vernese told me. He said there’s all kinds of life. If you get to the bottom.”

“Can’t you tell when Grandpap’s pulling your leg, Rico? Wise up,” Dina says, pounding the sidewalk with her first pair of high heels so she can hear each and every step to remind herself Mama actually let her have them.

Papa adjusts the knot in his tie. “Did you know your grandfather was one of the best storytellers in all of Sicily? People came from all over to hear him.”

“How far’s the bottom, Rico?”

“Further than you could ever imagine, Carlotta. Nonno said–and these are his exact words mind you since I memorized them–that he made himself a special fishing rod with a line that was miles long. And one day, he decided to find out just how deep the river was. He tied the thickest slab of shale he could find onto the line and rolled it into the water, working up a sweat as if he were pushing a dead car off the road. That hunk of stone made such a splash that Nonno had to take off his shirt and wring out a bucket of water before hanging it on a willow tree to dry.”

“How do you know, Rico? You weren’t there,” Dina sneers.

“I’m just telling you the way he told me.”

“So you could make an English paper out of it.”

“Your brother is going to college, Dina,” Mama said. “You think he’s going to work in a mill like your father?”

“He’s in sixth grade, Mom. How do you know what he’s going to do?”

“He’s not like you. He works hard in school.”

Dina pushes her bonnet away from her face as far back as she can without it falling off. “I don’t care if he wants to go to college. Then you can quit nagging me. I plan to find a job in London.”

The Beatles don’t know it yet, but Dina’s going to work for them as soon as she finishes high school.

“Remember what President Kennedy said when he was alive: Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” Mama recites.

“Yeah, and look what happened to him.”

“He was a good man. Bless his soul.”

“You just say that because he was Catholic. Plus you’re superstitious.” Dina lags behind to peek in the store windows on Fourth Avenue. She puts her face up against the glass of Cogley’s Jewelers and mumbles to herself, “Those are the earrings I want,” then yells to me, “Carlotta, I see the Timex watch Uncle Coco got you for your First Holy Communion last year.”

I kick an acorn stuck in a crack between the slate sidewalk. I wait for it to roll uphill where the roots of the oak trees are so overgrown that they’ve raised the thick gray slabs.

“Stop that, Carlotta. You’re going to scuff your good shoes,” Mama scolds. I hide the hand she slaps in Rico’s pocket until he continues Nonno’s story.

“It was dawn. The birds burst into the sky like fireworks. The fishing line began to unwind itself. It started out as slow as a bedroom slipper in the morning so Nonno plopped himself down along the bank and waited.”

“Listen to him!” Dina leads the way across the railroad tracks, past the boarded up train station.

“Come on, Dina. So by mid-morning, the sun was a hot coal on his back. He kept his eye on the reel going round and round, tracing one circle after the other. He got so hypnotized by the motion, it put him to sleep. He didn’t wake up until the sun darted down on his head so straight, the feather in the center of his green felt hat was its bull’s eye.”

“That hat again,” Mama grumbles.

“When Nonno found the same amount of line left as when he last looked hours ago, he figured it was caught on something, but it was still moving.”

Mama nudges Papa as we wait to cross the street. “Where did your father get this story? From his come si chiama?” She always says “what do you call it” in Italian when she’s thinking of a word she’d rather not say.

“What’s wrong with his story, Nica?”

Mama tugs at her dress so half her leg is showing, or as Mama probably thinks, half her leg is hiding. When she finishes, she brushes the shoulder of Papa’s suit coat. “Your father sure likes to hear himself talk.”

We wait for the traffic light to change. It’s a long one since we’re at a big intersection–the YMCA and Tarentum High School where Mama went to school after she came over from Italy.

“I’m not finished.” Rico leaps up on a bench, pulling out a piece of folded paper. “I wish I were wearing Nonno’s green felt hat. Then you’d listen.”

“Want to make a bet? That hat is so sorry.”

“Nobody asked you, Dina. Listen, okay, Nonno said night began to cover the sky in layers–a cotton sheet, a blanket, a quilt spreading its puffy corners. He decided he wasn’t going to leave no matter how long it took for the line to reach the river’s bottom.

“He sat there until the blackbirds flew to the crack of light opening the lidded sky to morning. And when he was convinced the line wouldn’t stop, even if he could sit there forever, he hurled the fishing rod into the river.”

“So Nonno never got his fishing pole back?”

Dina peers at Rico’s paper. “Mrs. Walters gave you an A+!”

Rico slips it back in his pocket. “I picked this story to write up because I believe it.”

“Papa, was Nonno telling the truth?”

“Of course not,” Mama snaps. “But that doesn’t mean your brother didn’t earn his A. He better not tell his classmates his grade or one of them will give him malocchio, so they will.”

Papa turns to Mama before we climb the hill. “You don’t like my father’s story, but you like our son’s A for writing it down. Same difference.”

“Rico put that fishing story to work. I don’t know why your father wastes his time in that river in the first place, Carlo. For what? It’s filthy.” Mama chokes the handle of her pocketbook. “I keep telling him if he catches anything from there, he’s not going to serve it on no table of mine!”

“Not even on a Friday when we eat fish anyway?” I ask.

“Not on my table!”

The St. Peter’s parking lot is one long breath of spring. People are lined up in their powder blue and pretty peach and honeydew green spring coats, waiting to get in the door. But nobody cares when we stand towards the front. Parishioners are only too happy to let their neighbor step ahead of them. Not like the lines at the A&P.

High, wooden seats box us in. Marble pillars in each corner are guards who stand perfectly still, watching over us. Lights, hanging on long chains from the ceiling, make me worry if I fall asleep, God will drop one on my head to wake me. During Mass, I finally figure out why we have to stand up and sit down and kneel so much and why the altar boy rings those bells all the time. It’s to keep people from taking naps.

We stand for the gospel: “Now on the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they came to the tomb bringing the spices which they had prepared. But they found the stone rolled away from the tomb. Then they went in and did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. And it happened, as they were greatly perplexed about this, that behold, two men stood by them in shining garments. Then, as they were afraid and bowed their faces to the earth, the men said to them, ‘Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen! Remember how He spoke to you when He was still in Galilee, saying that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and the third day rise again.'”
I drop to my seat as soon as Father Feeney says this is the gospel according to Luke. I can tell by the way he’s smiling that this is going to be one long sermon. He’s got more teeth showing than they do on those Pepsodent commercials and cheeks as red as his hair.

“I woke up this morning at 5:30, my usual time, and didn’t stop thinking about what I could possibly say to you after reading Luke’s gospel. I’ve given my share of sermons over the years–many of them right here in this church–but it never fails that every Easter I am so overwhelmed by this glorious, glorious day that I find myself speechless. It’s been a long, hard winter and we can all thank God for the miracle of spring in our midst so if you bear with me, I’m going to tell you about something that happened to me on one of those spring days that re-enchant us with life. On that blessed day, the magnolia petals exposed the wounds of Jesus for us to bear witness. The daffodils splashed front yards with sunshine yellow, the tiny white bells of the lily of the valley were ringing with the sweetest scent and people were smiling again–just to smile. Something told me I had to spend the day outdoors so I arranged to go golfing. Now I’m not much of a golfer, and the divots were so numerous that I must have spent as much time re-landscaping the grass as I did swinging the club. This went on for three or four holes until I started to make real contact with the ball. I began to drive it maybe 100 yards, which was absolutely amazing for me. And I thought to myself, no more getting down on my knees to patch up the earth like some hack. I’m really golfing now. Well, like a hack golfer, I started slicing the ball and by the fifth hole, I was in the woods looking for my Top Flight. On my hands and knees…..”

I listen for the part in his sermon where he’ll talk about the resurrection, but the closest we get is Father looking for a missing golf ball in the woods like an Easter egg hunt. And after all that, he never finds it. I decide that if he can’t even explain a missing golf ball in the brush, then there isn’t a chance he’ll get to Jesus rising from the dead. Besides, I really don’t expect him to tell how it was done. Priests are like magicians. They don’t want to give away secrets. Otherwise, people’ll stop believing in their powers. It just isn’t the same as Nonno’s story about the river bottom. I believe that, but as hard as I try, I can’t picture our priest down on his hands and knees in the dirt looking for a little ball when you know he had a lot more in his bag.

After Father Feeney finishes his sermon, all the grownups reach into their pockets and purses for money to drop in the collection basket. Dina’s staring down at her fingernails so I know she wasn’t listening, and the organ is loud enough that I can’t whisper in Rico’s ear. I think how the Blessed Mother must have felt to find Jesus again after she thought he was gone for good. There’s no way I’d ever compare that to finding a golf ball.

We all march up to the altar to renew our baptismal rights. Father Feeney dips a stem of leaves into a bowl of holy water and splashes us in the face as we pass by. Dina speeds by him, but Mama holds the back of her shoulder until the next splash hits her. After that, she turns around to make sure Rico and I are blessed with the water and doesn’t start back until it drips down our foreheads.

On the way home from church, the branch seems closer to the water so my brother must be right. I wonder if Nonno’s fishing pole is still working its way down to the bottom of the Allegheny River, and if it’ll float back up to the surface once it gets there.

As soon as Papa puts the key in and turns the doorknob, Mama hurries straight to the oven. The door makes that same squeaky sound as our refrigerator, only with a lower pitch. That’s how I can tell what she’s doing in the kitchen without having to be there. She takes out the artichokes and the sweet potatoes and puts them in a cake pan for Rico to carry over to Nonna Nedda’s a few blocks downstreet.

I’m hoping that since I behaved myself in church, Mama will let me take off this outfit. My sister keeps on her dress plus flesh-colored stockings that are held up with a garter belt and girdle. I can’t believe she goes to so much trouble to make her skin look darker when she brags that hers is lighter than mine. She claims the freckles on her arms are proof she’s really from England. It’s because she likes the Beatles so much. Ringo especially since she doesn’t have to fight her girlfriends for him.

It seems to me she actually wants to wear as many uncomfortable things as she can. She even parts her hair down the side with a tight hair band and sharp bobby pins. Dina doesn’t mind covering up her ears because she isn’t allowed to pierce them until she reaches senior high. Just maybe Mama will change her mind then.

Dina grumbles on the way to Nonna’s. “Why can’t I get my ears pierced?”

“When you’re 18.”

“I’ll be able to drive a car before I can get my ears pierced?”

“Says who?”

“It’s legal, Mom.”

“That’s entirely too young. Your father hasn’t even taught me how to drive. Besides, we only have one car and he needs it for work.”

“But Grandma got her ears pierced when she was a baby. So did you. Why do I have to wait so long?”

“That was in Italy. We pierced our ears so it was another place where we could wear a tiny cross or holy medal blessed by the Pope. Not some cheap-looking costume jewelry from the five and dime that makes your ears turn green.”

“I said I’d only wear 14-karat gold, and if you give me the money, I’ll go to Italy and have all my earrings blessed by the Pope.”

“Salsiccia,” is all my mama has to say. What sausage has to do with anything I’ll never know.

Halfway to Nonna’s, Rico starts picking up potatoes in their foil and tossing them in the air. I bet he’s aching to do the same with the stuffed artichokes. It’s just that he knows if Mama’s homemade breadcrumbs drop out, she’ll give him what he calls a knuckle sandwich.

He and Stanza use all kinds of funny sayings. They have this club and only the two of them are members. They brag how nobody else can pass their initiation test, but I believe nobody else wants to put up with their silliness. They send messages to each other in pig Latin so only they can decode them. They plan to build a tree house outside their real house and hang a wire between them with a basket to send messages. When Rico mentioned this to Dina, she said that Stanza needed to fix his house on the ground first or else the government was going to condemn it.

Rico taps Mama on the shoulder. “Are we going to eat when we get there? I’m hungry.”

“You should know by now we eat as soon as everything’s cooked. Not a minute before and not a minute after.”

The kitchen fan vent is popped open and makes a whirring sound as we walk by the side of the house to Nonna’s back entrance. We can smell her stuffed artichokes and see Nonna Nedda through the kitchen window, fishing in a big pot with her wooden spoon for a noodle to test.

“Asta-pay ime-tay.”

“You better not talk that way in school. That’s for dropouts like Stanza.”

“It’s just pig Latin, Mama.”

“I’ll give you Latin. The kind you hear the priest say in Church.”

“I don’t want to learn Latin. I want to learn more Italian.”

“Then start speaking it. Not that dirty language.”

“Not more Italian,” Dina complains. “I already hear too much.”

“No monkeying around,” Nonna says when she greets us at the door.

As soon as Mama slips off her coat, she puts on an apron that matches Nonna’s. When I stand real close so all I can see is the faded yellow print, I can’t tell who’s who until I notice the veins on Nonna’s legs from standing at the fruit store all day. She even eats standing up there because she’s too busy to take a break.

Mama hands me and Dina dishes to set the dining room table. I don’t mind because I play my game of finding old round glass stains through the holes in the lace tablecloth and setting the glass on the exact spot. The circles are from the orzata the grownups drink while playing cards. The glasses of almond drink start out all icy, but by the end of the night, they break out in a sweat and drip on the table. Everyone’s eyes are so busy drilling holes through their cards, nobody bothers to get coasters. Not even Mama. I wish she would play cards more often so she wouldn’t notice all the things I do wrong.

Mama peeks her head through the doorway. “Oggi, Carlotta. Today already.”

“Are you going to play cards after supper?”

Rico chimes in. “Yeah, are you going to play cards?”

There’s something about dealing a deck with her sisters that changes Mama. It’s the perfect time to tell her you spilled sugo all over your dress because you forgot to wear a napkin. She’ll look up from her hand, holding a fan of cards, and say, “I pass.”

I have this feeling she’s not after the money, since she can make more collecting S&H green stamps. She’s just a better player than her twin sisters, so they both wouldn’t mind being her partner even though they still pair up in an instant. Mama gets so annoyed with Nonna when they’re partners. Nonna uses her cards to fan herself, and Aunt Flo and Aunt Rose both sneak looks at her hand when the cards dip their way, although they pretend not to notice. If Mama loses the game, she gets mad at her sisters for cheating. If she wins, she worries her good luck will bring the evil eye. Seems to me she doesn’t like winning or losing.

Uncle Coco arrives, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief. His porous, shiny skin reminds me of a colander. As soon as he stuffs the cloth in his back pocket, he plops in the seat where Nonno Nedda sat before he died. That’s not the only special treatment he gets. He’s allowed to call his sister by her full name, Domenica, when he’s mad at her. Everyone else, including Papa, calls Mama Nica. That’s two more syllables longer he gets to yell at her. Uncle Coco must be hungry. He isn’t even settled in his chair when he mumbles the shortest prayer I ever heard in his low, sandpaper voice. “Bless us, oh Lord. Amen.”

He forgets the part about “and these thy gifts which we are about to receive from thy bounty through Christ, our Lord.” I bet Papa wishes he could get away with this. Mama’s so stunned, she can’t move her lips, and by the time she can, Uncle Coco grabs the gravy dish of sauce and pours half of it on his pasta.

“Pass me the cheese.” His head is down so low, his nose is practically touching a meatball.

“Are you talking to me?” I ask.

“Who do you think I’m talking to? The man on the moon, for Christ’s sake?”

Uncle Coco always shouts as if he were yelling over the noise of canning machinery at the Heinz factory where he works. His voice is so loud, he could speak over a train if he wanted. Being that Nonna Nedda lives right beside the railroad tracks, one zooms by as we finish up our pasta. I swear this is better for ajita than Alka-Seltzer because nobody bothers to argue about anything for a whole five minutes while the train passes, even Uncle Coco. For once, something’s louder than he is.

Rico puts down his fork. “May I be excused?”

“Wipe your muso.” Nonna uses the word for an animal’s face when she speaks to us kids.

“Don’t you want a slice of ham, Rico?”

“I’m full. I can’t help it Nonna’s sugo is so good.”

Rico is the kind of person who knows what to say, when to say it and mean it. Now Dina knows what to say a lot of the time too, since she’s a teenager, but her words are as empty as Rico’s are full. It is true about Nonna’s sugo. We always give some to Nonno Vernese since he doesn’t have a wife to cook for him anymore. And Mama can’t stand the thought of him eating what he catches from the Allegheny River.

Rico starts collecting plates. Nonna runs them through the spigot real quick for our next course. He sets them back on the table so it looks as though we never ate a thing. It could have fooled me if only my stomach weren’t so full.
Then he offers to take a bushel of chestnuts back home that Nonna Nedda brought from her fruit store. I jump up to go with him.

Dina rolls her eyes. “Leave him alone, Carlotta.”

“I’m just going back home. No big shakes,” Rico says to me.

“I’ll pick up all the chestnuts that drop out of the bushel for you and open all the doors.”

He lifts the bushel up just enough to measure its weight.
“I’m taking Carlotta with me,” he announces.

Mama waves the spoon in her hand. “Don’t get that dress dirty. And come right back. It’s going to storm.”

As I pass Dina, she whispers, “Collo,” the word for neck. The only words my sister rattles off in Italian are the ones she’s not allowed to say in English. Mama tells Dina she’s not allowed to call me that, but anytime my picture’s taken at school, it’s Mama who tries to get me to cover it up with a turtleneck. My long neck is the only reason she lets me grow my hair long. Not because I want pigtails.

Rico carries the bushel basket of chestnuts on the bottom just in case it drops out. His chin rests on a mountain of chestnuts the same color as his eyes. I open the door and tell him when there’s a break in the sidewalk so he doesn’t trip and fall.

“Now,” I blurt out as he’s about to set his foot on the crack. I figure he’s as good as blind with his face in that basket.

“You don’t have to tell me when there’s a regular crack. Just something out of the ordinary. Like when I come to a moat or a gangplank. Or a conveyor belt.”

“What’s that?”

“Once you get on, there’s no escaping. You’re like a bottle of milk. It presses on a label and smashes down a cap and seals it so you can’t get out.”

“Sounds like Mama dressing me in my Communion outfit.”
“Wearing a dress isn’t that bad, is it?”

“What does it look like to you?”

He licks his lips. “Like the meringue on top of Nonna’s coconut cream pie.”

“That’s no fair. You like coconut cream pie.”

“Pssst.”

I spot a pair of Band-Aids behind a shrub. It has to be Stanza, since he’s constantly skinning his knees. And I see his bushy eyebrows that Mama’s so afraid of. She thinks he can cast spells with them.

“We see you, Stanza. You can come out,” I yell.

About the count of ten, Stanza, whose cotton ball cheeks are whiter than his yellowing teeth, pops out of one of those perfectly round evergreen bushes you have to trim in the summer with clipping shears. “Let’s go fishin’!”

“I’ve got to take these home.”

“That won’t take no time.” Stanza pokes my brother in the arm with his finger. He stands there with his feet pointing inward, which kids in the neighborhood say is because he’s from Ducktown, the place along the river where all the ducks live.

“Get out of my road. This is heavy.”

Stanza grabs at the metal handle. “You carry half and I’ll carry half.”

As soon as Rico lets go of one side, the basket tips over. Chestnuts spill everywhere. On the sidewalk, in the grass, on the brick road.

“If there’s an even number, it means good luck. If there’s an odd number, we’re in deep trouble,” I say as we stoop to pick them up.

“That don’t make no sense.”

I explain to Stanza that Mama doesn’t like odd numbers. Especially with chestnuts. I’ve seen her at the market. After she scoops in a pound, she counts them. And when there’s an odd number, she adds one more. She says if you have an odd number, you upset the balance and that means trouble.

“We have to find them all!”

“Mama’s superstitious, Carlotta. That’s all.”

I insist we get down on our knees. I see how many I can hold in one hand. I’m pretty sure I can fit a fifth one but that’s an odd number. I sure don’t want to touch bad luck with my bare hands, and if I put my gloves back on, I won’t be able to grip any.

“I count 137. We’ve got to make the number even.” I begin combing the grass with my fingers. Every time I touch a bald spot, I wonder if that’s where a dandelion used to be, and if the person boiled it up for supper like my mama did when she was little. Or if that’s where the even chestnut is now. “Keep looking! We need to find one more!”

“Don’t bother,” Rico yells. When I walk over to them sitting above the sewer, I notice a chestnut down there.

“Lower me so I can reach it.”

“You can’t.”

“Yunz want me to go down ‘ere?”

“You won’t be able to get back up, Stanza. It’s only a chestnut.”

I shake my brother’s arm. “But we can’t keep an odd number. It’s bad luck!”

“Can’t you just give Stanza one to eat?” Rico asks.

“Yeah, I’ll eat it.”

“No. We need to add one.”

I can’t believe after what happened, Rico is going to let Stanza help him carry the bushel the rest of the way home, but my brother has the same patience with me when I act clumsy. What matters is that the even chestnut is down the sewer.

“Wait!” I scream.

“Come on! We need you to open the door,” Rico calls back.

I take one last look at the good luck through the bars and run with my blisters right behind me.

Paola Corso received the 2000 Sherwood Anderson Foundation award at the North Carolina Writers Network annual conference in Raleigh, North Carolina, on November 11. She teaches creative writing at Fordham University and, as her autobiographical sketch in this issue indicates, has published extensively.

Editor’s note: Paola Corso, winner of the Sherwood Anderson Foundation Award for 2000, has given us permission to publish in this issue the first section of her novel manuscript, “The River in Me.” Paola has also provided this account of her life and writing career to date:

Paola Corso was born in an industrial river town outside of Pittsburgh when the steel mill was the region’s primary employer. Her paternal grandfather, a crane operator at the mill, was so determined not to miss his shift when his 1936 Chevy stalled that he got out and walked to work, leaving the car on the railroad tracks. Her maternal grandmother, who worked at the family fruit store, was just as hard a worker. Nonni had her daughter get married on Thanksgiving because a holiday was the only time she would take off from work.

Though Paola was raised in a working class background, she began to write in the fourth grade after her family moved across the river. Since she hadn’t yet made friends, she spent a great deal of time alone in her room scribbling down poems and starting a mystery novel inspired by the Nancy Drew books she had read.

While there was no reason to believe anyone in her family would aspire to make a living as a writer, Paola found herself thinking again about it in college. She worked for the student newspaper at Boston College while pursuing a joint degree in political science and sociology. She also cited the influence of John Mahoney, a professor of English Romantic poetry who heightened her appreciation for literary work.

After graduation, Paola decided to travel, living in Denver where she studied publishing and then spending three months in Europe. Much to everyone’s surprise in Pittsburgh, she moved to San Francisco where she got a degree in community organizing from San Francisco State University. She wrote grant proposals for non-profit organizations and eventually gravitated back to journalism, working as an editor at a weekly paper before freelancing for The San Francisco Examiner.

She pursued her career back to the East Coast, eventually winding up back in Pittsburgh where she became a staff reporter for her hometown newspaper, The Valley News Dispatch. She was able to walk to her Nonni’s at lunchtime. It was then over fried eggplant or ricotta cheese spread on a slice of Italian bread that she got reacquainted with her Italian American upbringing. At the same time, she realized that she had grown tired of the daily grind of reporting city council meetings and began to try her hand at creative writing. Paola explored her Sicilian background and then social issues. With playwright Michael Winks, she co-wrote and produced dramas about homelessness and hunger, which garnered attention from USA Today and support from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

In 1991, Paola moved to New York City and began writing fiction. Her story collection, “Giovanna’s 86 Circles,” which explores how young girls and childless women make magical leaps in order to find alternative ways to give life in a seemingly barren region of the Rust Belt, was nominated for a Pushcart Editors’ Book Award. She was fortunate to be selected as an instructor in the Bronx for the National Endowment for the Arts Writers Corps, a federal program to introduce literary arts to underserved communities.

In 1993, Paola co-founded the National Writers Union Community Writing Project at a women’s shelter where she taught creative writing and literature in small groups to teenage mothers. She co-edited the project literary magazine, See It Through, and co-organized participant readings. As a graduate student in English at The City University of New York, she studied under English Professor Felicia Bonaparte and fiction writing instructor, Linsey Abrams. With their guidance, she completed her novels, “The River in Me” and “San Procopio,” and won three writing awards.

Paola explores her Italian roots, folklore and magical leaps in her writing. “The River in Me” is set in the 1960s along the Allegheny River where the Italian American narrator’s brother drowns in high waters. The novel flashes back to the 1936 flood in Pittsburgh as well as to drought-stricken Southern Italy during the 1920s. “San Procopio” is about a New Yorker who is determined to overcome obstacles which prevent her from burying her mother in a Southern Italian village where she was born. The novel flashes back to the post-World War I peasant struggle for land reform and violence between Socialists and Fascists that killed her grandparents.

Her fiction has appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies. She was the winner of Voices in Italian Americana’s Aniello Lauri Award for Creative Writing, the American Italian Historical Association Award for Italian American Studies and recipient of a literature fellowship from the Vogelstein Foundation. Yet the journey to publication of her novels has been arduous. Agents and publishers have uniformly praised her literary work but believe it is a difficult sell in the marketplace. Paola hopes that her winning the Sherwood Anderson Foundation Award will boost further interest in her work.