Eddie had
never gotten a personal telegram before.
It had
surprised him as much as it surprised his boss when it had been hand delivered
to him at the brokerage office of T.J. McCracken and Co. on the fifth floor of
11 Broadway in New York City.
His boss
came over behind the telegram delivery boy who made Eddie sign for the envelope
and enclosed message.
Eddie knew
that the boss might be suspicious of such a thing being that someone might be
making a stock purchase and through an employee’s account at the firm to avoid
full commission payment on the transaction.
But being
new on the job for some seven weeks Eddie had heard of such accounts and
employees hanging on to every loose word around the office ticker tape machine
and he had not gained a lot of trust or confidence yet with some of the other
office fellows to talk about “hot” item stocks to keep an eye on.
Eddie read
the telegram and its cryptic message before casually handling it over to his
boss to inspect, he still standing over his desk.
“Important
stuff Eddie?” his boss asked as he began to read the message.
“Urgent.
Meet me before 10:00 A.M. tomorrow 3832 Frankford Ave – get off at Frankford
Junction station. Two blocks. Funeral begins at 11:00 sharp. Aunt Rose.”
“Who died Eddie?”
Eddie was
unable to answer with anything specific.
“Gee. I
didn’t know anybody was sick and I don’t know anybody at that address.”
“Ah – we all
got a lot of relatives, some of who we have never met.” said Eddie’s boss.
“Your Aunt
Rose got a husband?”
“He is. Was
alive last I heard. A big shot in the
wholesale grocery business down there in Philly. Won’t hire any relatives or so
I have been told. Otherwise I wouldn’t
have come up to New York to try my luck on Wall Street sir.”
His boss had
heard the story about Eddie’s uncle and had done some marketing research on
him. He had organized a hundred or so independent corner grocery stores in
Philly to create and sell their own brand label of canned goods. Kind of a cooperative situation at the moment.
No stock offerings yet. Great commercial possibilities in consolidated grocery
retail. Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company was an up and coming lead in that
growing field of retail.
“You take
off tomorrow Eddie. Go to the funeral with your aunt. Be back in the office on
Wednesday.”
The boss
walked away and back to his desk as Eddie was saying a polite thank you.
The focus on
the past few minutes had devalued the surrounding atmosphere of telephones
ringing, typewriters typing, people running back and forth booking and confirming
buying and selling of stocks.
For a moment
Eddie wondered if he had done the right thing leaving Philly and then he
realized that being a cog in a wheel of some other person’s business is
sometimes better than being some dumb sap found floating face down in the
Delaware River which might have happened is he had stuck around town.
A slight
chill went up his spine. He walked over to a nearby window and briefly looked
below to the people and traffic around Bowling Green Park at the beginning of
Broadway going north. He closed the
window without looking at the magnificent temple built to the gods of commerce,
the Customs House designed by Cass Gilbert, begun in 1901, finished by 1907 and now barely more than a dozen years old as complete. The immense building of an old style seemed an
awkward start, an anchor, on the other side of
that tiny park that had once been the old town square of the original
Dutch town and now merely was the very beginning of the very large and
impressive modern Manhattan moving ever upward along Broadway.
* *
He had to
switch trains at Trenton out of New York to catch the local south to Philly.
The
conductor announced Frankford Junction as the next stop.
Eddie put on
his coat and folded up a newspaper and put it under his arm.
The train
platform onto which he stepped was a flat patch of concrete between two train
tracks. He looked about as the train cleared out view and the station was over
across several tracks that had no wooden walkways laid out across the tracks as
should be the custom. It was a way of
making the awkward walk across tracks easier to travel as well as direct the
uninitiated in the right direction as they exited a maze of tracks to get to
the street.
It was then
that he saw a wooden pathway over one set of tracks and leading to what looked
to be a downward set of concrete steps leading to a tunnel and walkway under
the many tracks and likely leading over to the station house. There was an underpass tunnel. One flight of steps down into the pedestrian
tunnel lit by only two bare light bulbs along the short distance and one flight
of steps up. He had to stop briefly to adjust to darkness at the bottom of the
tunnel where the light of the bulbs did not seem to reach. It was rather
disorientating to walk where you could not see your shoes to reassure yourself
that you were stepping along a safe path. The light adjusted in his eyes and he
then saw the faint outline of his legs leading to his walking cautiously feet.
The station
house was small and of old style architecture but it seemed recently built, not
showing signs of wear and tear of an old line local depot. Perhaps a previous station had burned down
and the railroad merely sent out a few carpenters to replace the basic bones of
a basic local station house?
The nip in
the air of a chilled October morning met him unexpectedly as he had disembarked
the train. That a slight mist, perhaps a faint fog lingered in the morning, no
doubt due to a close proximity of the river.
The morning
chill had hit him that he had not noticed so much as the smell of a native
Philadelphia that somehow smelled different from New York.
It was
perhaps the smell of the soil or the quality of coal burning in a small pot
belly stove in the station house that linked many senses and ideas together
with a thought “I guess it is cold enough to build a fire”.
In any case,
within view were many chimneys of many factories and even if smoke was not seen
this early in the workday coming out of those stacks, stacks of steam floating
up from other factory metal chimneys was already streaming upward here and
there.
There off a
small waiting room was a ticket window next to an open door. The ticket office
was only big enough to accommodate a roll top desk, a telephone and lots of
clipboards full of paper.
This small
office was visible through an open door that was a probable passive heating
system of letting the heated air in the small waiting room to pass into the
office by an open door.
Eddie went
to the ticket window and asked for directions to the address his aunt had sent
him.
Down the
concrete walkway ramp to street level, to the left under the railroad overpass
and in a slight distance was the sight of the Schlicter mansion visible through
trees shedding their leaves and in the fall colors of the season.
Getting from
out under the dark railway underpass he noticed another set of stairs leading
up to the tracks.
“If I was a
local or knew where I was going I could have avoided the whole circle of going
from train to tunnel to train station to here. A wasted effort. Not entirely. I
need to go back to the station to catch the north bound local later. That is if
I am leaving right after the funeral thing.”
Walking
passed a dye factory on his right he could not but help peer into a courtyard
formed by perhaps an old looking, dilapidated factory building on the left side
of the courtyard. The old building was connected by several open to the air
walkways on different levels to a larger newer looking brick building further
right within view and the building was buttressed right up against the nearby
railroad embankment.
The smell of
the dye works and the sight of worn cobblestones in the courtyard and what
appeared to be an abandoned, old gauge by sight measurement by the look it, set
of tracks with one missing and one present metal rail still embedded within the
cobblestones. The old gauge tracks dated
the old building on the left perhaps to the 1840s and the industrial courtyard gave
an overall air of some dismal print of some Dickens’ era novel engraving he had
seen somewhere.
His Aunt
Rose had sent him some to a two week art appreciation summer course at the
Academy of Fine Arts downtown between junior and senior years in high school at
Roman Catholic High. Though tuition at the high school was nominal, the real
expense was in books, transportation every day on the streetcar down Broad
Street to Vine Street all the way back up in Olney. Plans for a subway were
still on the boards for Broad Street. Once that subway got built, his father’s
house would appreciate greatly in value.
The Market
Street subway downtown was building an extension to the old town of Frankford
here block by block and year by year. Once opened all this remaining open land
he surveyed would be built on with row homes and factories. In this area, with
a place in a storefront, a business under the overhead elevated train would be a
great place to do business. The customers would be coming and going all day
long around the new transportation hubs at every el train stop.
His mind
returned to his daily commute to Roman Catholic High and the overall costs with
transportation and clothes to dress in as part of a young Roman Catholic elite
class of males that did not have to go to work in the factories and foundries
after eighth grade in the Catholic school system. That system was built after
the anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant riots in the 1840s. “Separate but equal” was
a term he heard spoken about the coloreds that lived in the various enclaves
around the city. “Separate and superior”
was a term he often heard from the clerics that taught him in that school
system regarding same.
It was at
this moment that a thought came to him. That it was Aunt Rose that had paid for
the expenses of his past grade school and high school education.
His parents
came over on a boat from Ireland as children and had assimilated into the
American way of life. His father still had a touch of an Irish accent and his
attitudes towards many things were definitely old world. It was Rose who had
convinced him to let Eddie and his one brother to go onto high school after
grade school instead of going out and earning wages to contribute to the
welfare of the household.
Not that his
father was a slacker. A Mick off the boat at ten. Trained in engineering at a
technical high school in the public school system. It was odd to see him go off
to work in collar, tie and three piece suit and even stranger to know that in a
paper bag, once a week, he went off to work with a clean set of bib overalls
two sizes too big that his mother used to launder.
Building
engineers had many duties in the basement and occasional above ground visits to
the mighty Witherspoon Building downtown.
Some of those duties included supervising the coal stokers getting the
right amount of fuel into the boilers, or the reading of the many pressure dials and also
involved the occasional turning of a wrench as in plumbing.
Thus the
need for oversize bib overalls to go over a white shirt, vest and suit trousers
along with rolled up sleeves on the shirt to get the job done whatever needed
doing.
On more than
one occasion he had heard Rose’s low sweet voice say “This is blood. We are
family.” To calm his father’s manly
outbursts which in retrospect may have coincided with rents due, or doctor’s
bills or Eddie’s tuition, education, expenses at Roman Catholic High.
He reached
the gateway of a big Queen Anne style house he saw approaching him as he walked
among fallen leaves, dried and crunching under his shoes. He smelled too horse
manure in the streets which was these days something of a novelty in lower
Manhattan.
The area
here still had a few small farms and empty lots but this end of the greater
Kensington was filling up with the newer reinforced concrete factories some
stretching four city blocks alongside block after block of city row house that
here in the northern tiers, not quite suburbs, sprouted porches and bay
windows.
Bay windows
had become all the rage in building here after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
Not that they did not exist before then.
But the idea of an extending bump out on a second story of a house with
three windows instead of two and above a porch said or suggested an air of
pretend eloquence when above a front elevated off the ground porch. Bay windows
suggested a view of San Francisco Bay or more close to home the Atlantic
Ocean. Bay windows were already a
popular item on summer boarding houses there at Atlantic City on the Jersey
shore and before 1906.
So too the
dimensions of newer row houses were a standard fourteen feet wide as opposed to
the old ten or twelve foot widths in lower Kensington and that on porchless
houses where the marble stoop of steps was the mini porch of the working poor when
hanging outside was the only form of relief in hot sticky humid Philadelphia summer
evenings.
Eddie
surveyed this crop of newly minted worker’s housing across the street from
where he was standing. The same color brown adorning the tin embossed facades
of the upper bay windows to complement the Pompeii style colored bricks exposed
on the walls on either side of the tin.
Ionic wooden columns to support the porch roofs. So too in some classical theme were laurel
leave garlands impressed in the tin above the three bay windows. An imitation
of sorts perhaps of the terra-cotta decoration that adorned all the mansions on
Broad Street above downtown.
Having an
analytical mind, Eddie could not but help speculate that these houses from block
to block had one landlord, an insurance company or a factory owner. Workers would not qualify for the standard
five year mortgage with the banks to buy and live here.
His own
father had moved recently to the farthest edge of the northern suburbs near the
city limits into a semi-detached house with comforts like a fireplace, central
heating and an enclosed porch with the real sign of the new age, a narrow
driveway along the side of the house to a garage taking up half the space of
the back yard.
The Queen
Anne style house was impressive and again Eddie who had an appraiser’s eye for
such things thought the house almost newly built but with the out of fashion Victorian
era style architecture.
There was
another gate at the other end of the block. No direct front gate per say to the
house. A driveway entrance and an exit gate down by the railroad. That spoke of
money. That said that whoever built this house very well expected for visitors
to arrive by carriage or automobile. Walking up a driveway to approach this house spoke of tradesmen and the
need of a kitchen or backdoor entrance which he saw did have a break in the
wall on the side street nearby.
Such a house
was a mansion in the eyes of the owner and in the eyes of all who beheld this
large house.
At the front
driveway gate people were stopping to talk to a man with a clipboard. Eddie looked about to see his aunt Rose. “This really was a funeral?” he thought to
himself. “Whose?”
The man with
the clipboard asked him his name and he responded.
“Ah, you are
with Mrs. Flaherty. You have bidding number 62 with her. She is already arrived
and seated up front. The auction is about to begin.”
“Auction?”
he thought to himself as he walked up the driveway and up the front steps, onto
the porch and into the mansion.
Inside a lot
of heat both from the radiators and the body heat of many people sitting and
standing on portable wooden chairs in what once must have been the main living
room or parlor as the older folks called such places.
A lot of
plaster rosettes on the ceiling about a rather plain looking light fixture.
Eddie looked
about and saw his aunt seated in front and with her handbag on the seat next to
her to reserve the seat visually and verbally if need be as well.
“Aunt Rose?”
Eddie said from the side approaching her.
“Eddie. You
made it.”
He pecked
her on the cheek and sat on the seat next to her after she moved her handbag.
Before he
could say anything, she was digging through her bag and withdrew a small tin of
peppermints.
“Your breath
Eddie. I can see or smell, you have taken up that disgusting seegar smoking
habit that you men seem to enjoy.”
Without
fuss, he popped two mint lozenges into his mouth.
“What was
the telegram all about Aunt Rose? You mentioned a funeral.”
“Look about
you Eddie. A once grand age of the upper middle class is disappearing into the
dust. Right before your eyes.”
Eddie knew
to keep silent. Aunt Rose had her public
face on. She presented it to the world in church, to tradesmen waiting for
their invoices to be paid and usually that face was present when she was alongside
that of her businessman husband.
When Aunt
Rose and Uncle Henry came to visit it was a stiff and formal thing. Her husband
was an ambitious man who had tried many things in life but it was as a salesman
that he eventually built his canned goods empire on. That and an ambitious and
frugal woman behind him.
She went on
about the Schlichter house being all old fashioned built on the cusp of
Victorian tastes and before the real modern hit the electric fan after the
great European war that ended in 1918.
Everybody came home with France in their
minds and they were mostly young and ambitious enough to imitate some of the
style and tastes that those people were famous and infamous for. Indeed the decades old vision of a great
boulevard across William Penn’s gray city grid was taking shape finally
downtown in the shape and imitation dimensions of a Champs-Élysées starting at
a grand Second Empire style city hall and making its diagonal way northwest to
a grand Greek temple of a museum built over the artificial hill of the old
obsolete water reservoir.
Classical
new downtown. Classical too in the workers’ houses with porches across the
street. Classical new too with a new breath of the stale European air that
smelled so fresh in dull backwards America.
“…so they
built this house barely a dozen years ago when the daughter’s husband died. The
daughter and granddaughter moved in and then they virtually tore down and
rebuilt this place to accommodate all the new impoverished but aristocratic
southern relatives that the dead husband brought into the blood line. All in
all a sad story…”
The
auctioneer was already sitting on a stool behind a podium to start bidding on
this or that item for sale.
Today the
building was only auctioning carpeting. Small throw rugs, stair runners pulled
off of wooden steps. Hall rugs and other larger oriental and Persian style
tugs.
All through
the bidding, his aunt had been nodding and gesturing. This built into a joint effort with Eddie as
they began to make hand gestures on the lots she indicated and bid on.
She had a
catalogue on her lap with certain lot numbers circled in pencil and with some
handwritten single digit numbers. Eddie quickly learned as her two, three, of
four fingers translated to him into twenty or thirty or forty dollar bids. A movement of bending her index finger seemed
to mean another five dollars. And finally a flat palm waved flat in view of the
auctioneer or to Eddie now doing some the non-verbal bidding meant a stop or
finish by her. On successful bids, Rose
waved a white cardboard tag with the number “62” written on it to finish the
contracted bid.
Eddie found
it all a little exciting with some the numbers involved and his feeding off of
Aunt Rose’s clues offered a surprising bond of teamwork with his mother’s
sister.
Without
saying a word, Eddie realized why his aunt had sent him to things like a two
week art appreciation course in high school during a summer break. She was
grooming him for things other than his status in life would bring him in
contact with, like an auction of a once great man’s mansion full of goods.
The bidding
was intense on some items and lackluster on others.
Finally,
near the last list of the catalogue, one big item was a Persian rug of
something like a seven by ten foot dimension.
The
auctioneer was about to open bidding when Aunt Rose raised her hand. The
auctioneer acknowledged her.
“I addressed
the issue of damage to the rug in this lot. You have not acknowledged it yet.
It is not listed in the catalogue.”
The
auctioneer looked with a puzzled face to some assistant as to what was she
talking about.
Aunt Rose
whispered into Eddie’s ear. Eddie
addressed the auctioneer.
“My aunt
says that the rug is damaged. It has a hole big enough to put your fist
through.”
The auctioneer
gestured his assistant to go into the next room, the onetime dining room to
inspect the rug. The assistant came back and whispered into the auctioneer’s
ear.
“There is an
announcement regarding his next lot not mentioned in the catalogue. There is no
hole in the rug. There is a slight tear in the fabric that can easily be
repaired. With that acknowledgement we
will resume bidding.
“Bidding
opens at five hundred dollars. Four? – pause – Three? – Two? – One? We have an
opening bid of one hundred dollars. Do
we have two hundred?”
The room was
strangely silent. Rose gave an elbow to Eddie. Eddie raised his hand on a two
hundred dollar bid. More silence.
“Lot 383.
Sold to bidder number 62 for two hundred dollars.”
Followed by a gavel bang to the auctioneer’s
table.
The auction
was wrapped up in another fifteen minutes or so. Rose went over the treasurer’s
table to write out a bank draft for the total of all her successful bids and wrote
out instruction as to delivery.
There was
some tea being served to some of the customers.
Aunt Rose
and Eddie took their tea out onto a side porch and sat on a wicker style
settee.
“Interesting
auction Eddie?”
“Yes, quite
an adventure for me. Spending large sums
of money can be very intoxicating especially when it is not mine. Aunt Rose. Rather good of you to have inspected
the rug ahead of time and get a good price in the bargain seeing that it only
needs a simple repair.”
“I wanted
that rug because of its dimensions and I got it.”
“Your Uncle
Henry made a bid on this house. Luckily he was outbid by some factory owner
down the street who will probably tear it down and build another factory. It is not the house that that guy wants but
all this land surrounding it, almost a whole city block.”
“Uncle Henry
wanted to buy this place?” asked Eddie. “Rather expensive in upkeep alone. Coal
alone in winter might cost one to two hundred dollars considering the size of
this place.”
“Precisely
Eddie. Your uncle is rather successful at the moment. He finally agreed to stay
where we are at. We are going to double the size of the dining room so he can
bring his clients home to entertain them.
“Most of his
clients are grocers who live mostly in one room, the kitchen, on the ground
floor and in the back of the store. Feed
them in one big grand dining room and they will think they have died and gone
to heaven.
“Besides,”
she added. “I am thinking of our old age. I want the house paid off and some investments
in place, some tracts of land near the city that will go up in value as the
city expands over into the sticks.
“And
remember Eddie, success can be a sometimes mistress. She comes. She goes. She
never stays around forever.
“You have to
look to the future. Marry a rich girl. Not pretty but plain will do. But rich.
“Do you
remember when you were seven or eight and I asked you if you wanted to become a
priest?”
“No” replied
Eddie.
“You said
that was for sissies.” She said with a bit of a giggle.
Eddie had a
quick but quiet thought. Aunt Rose’s
public face is disappearing
*
*
They had
walked a block passed a clutter of different style row houses and entered a
small luncheonette and sat in a corner booth.
The lunch time crowd from the factories had vacated the joint and it was
only one o’clock.
They ordered
modest fare from the menu and talked over coffee.
“Would
rather have had this talk in a saloon.” She said somewhat to Charlie’s
surprise.
“My
brother’s uncle and cousin were saloon keepers. It’s a rough business. Long
hours. Counting pennies to survive. We lived in a few furnished rooms upstairs
after my dad died, your grandfather.
Your mother was a bit too young to remember it all, some of it I think.
“Mom cooked
in the kitchen and I helped clean up a bit in the barroom and kitchen and then
went up to do my homework.
“The
afternoon crowd was more older men, retired or men out of work, hanging out,
looking for work, word of mouth reaching the saloon. Or some day laborers were taking a break
being hand laborers in the street working on the tracks and cobblestones for
the streetcar companies or digging ditches for new or burst water pipes in the
streets…
“I say quiet
in that there was no shouting or music. And my uncle would allow me out front
to refill the tray on the bar with slices of bread, pickled eggs and slices of
baloney or liverwurst depending on what was cheaper that week at the butcher
shop. And refill the mustard jar. Most
times the bread was pumpernickel from the German bakery down the street. The tray on the bar was the free lunch served
with two nickel beers. If they were in a hurry the beer was a nickel and the
sandwich carried out to the job was a nickel too. All depending on how much
time a street worker could catch under the eye of his site supervisor.
“In bad
times you knew that on the free lunch tray an out of work man was spending a
dime on two glasses of beer drowning his sorrows which ain’t much. That that
poor soul, the free lunch was likely all that man ate that day if he was single
and alone in the city.
“Of course
we had simple fare on a small menu to eat at lunch and supper. Ten and fifteen
cent platters. Soups, seasonal, a lot of
pepper pot in the winter, steaks, chops, mashed potatoes, gravy and it being a
German neighborhood everyday some sauerkraut, dumplings, boiled German style
sausages…”
“Come five
and six o’clock and then workers coming home from the factories, the place
would crowd up and I would not be allowed out front by my mother or me uncle.“
Eddie
listened. He had heard bits and pieces of his mother’s family story all his
life. He had never been privileged to a private telling of it in such large
hunks of history at one time.
Suddenly the
boring stories told over and over again had a fresh breath of life and he felt
the honor of having something of an equal place at the grownups table.
“Never saw
the saloon at night with its crowds and music and such but I heard some of the
men as they gathered outside, smoked, peed, fought and what not. I learned a
lot about life just discreetly listening behind the curtains of my bedroom
window on a hot summer’s night. We never
opened the windows in summer until after dusk. When it was dry, the dust was
terrible and most of it dried horse manure blowing around if we had a breeze…”
Eddie’s
order of homemade vegetable soup and a grilled cheese sandwich arrived. He went
for the soup first and was disappointed with its content, some of which seemed
to contain mushy canned like string beans.
Rose had a
chicken salad on white bread which she barely touched as she continued to talk.
“As a man,
don’t get married before you are thirty and then don’t marry until you can
afford it. Enjoy your youth before you settle down but save for the future. It
arrives sooner than you think.
“Henry
married rather late in life. Always married to his job as a traveling salesman
and all that. He settled down with me,
almost an old maid, we couldn’t have children but we tried…”
“Where is
all this leading to?” Eddie thought to himself.
“Oh do have
a piece of pie darling.” Rose said to her favorite nephew.
Charlie
ordered the peach cobbler special and it arrived shortly.
“I know
about your little mistake with those gangsters. Your mother finally got around
to telling me. You blew town over a year ago now. Had one or two jobs in New York and you are miserable
away from Philly.”
Eddie looked up from his pie on the table with his mouth half open. “Huh.” He thought.
“But don’t
worry. Things are looking better for you all the time.”
She opened
her purse and withdrew a newspaper clipping and put it down on the table.
Eddie picked
it up and read it.
“Johnny
Doyle, local fight promoter found dead in alley…murdered…funeral services
Church of the Holy Paten 11:00 A.M. October 20”. (Today)
“That
clipping is for your boss in New York in case he wants to know about the
funeral you went to today…”
Eddie looked
up speechless from the clipping and over to his aunt.
“You aren’t
safe yet Eddie. Two of his cohorts are still on the lamb and the police are
looking for them. Just a matter of time.”
“All I did
Aunt Rose was loan that bookie S.O.B. a couple hundred for a quick ten percent
return on capital. Somebody was supposed to throw the fight or something. I
knew nothing about that. But that crazy bastard Doyle turns around, accuses me
of being in cahoots with his bookie competition and being in on the fix. Then
he refuses to repay the loan…”
Eddie face
grew redder and redder as he spoke until he stopped and Rose took over the
conversation.
“That goon
Doyle was in the protection racket, asking for donations from a half a dozen
grocers who joined Henry’s co-op operation.
When news of his death reached the streets, forty more corner grocers
joined up with Henry and company. I had
told Henry some time ago to hire some private detectives to look this guy up
and see what they might be able to turn over to the police to get him off the
streets. And lo and behold some of his
fellow goons knock him off in the meantime. It is the most incredible thing in
timing that is, for Henry’s business and for you especially…
“Just one or
two other things Eddie…
“I’ll walk
you to your train…”
* *
Eddie sat
down on the local train and briefly reviewed a big house on the right that he
had pointed to earlier to the station master when he called the Schlichter
house a mansion. Eddie had eyed the top
of a once stately proportioned house and pointed to it out the window of the
station house in the middle of his conversation, much to the annoyance of that
railroad employee.
“That is not
Schlichter mansion, that is Chalkley Hall, an old plantation, goes back to
before the revolution. Schlichter hall,
I mean mansion, is that way on the other sides of the tracks.
The train
car was mostly empty. He was beating the evening rush by two hours. He reached
for a cigar in the inside pocket of his tween jacket, put it to his lips chewing
off a bit and looking around to see if it was clear to spit it on the floor
without anybody noticing. He fumbled in his other coat pockets looking for a
match. Lit the cigar. Took a deep breath and was into reverent reflection of
the day’s events.
He needed a
good double shot of whiskey to steady his nerves right about now. Could not
stick around Philly. All his favorite watering holes had probably disappeared
since Prohibition went into effect.
Even New
York when he first went there over a year ago you could drink your way up
Broadway going from bar to bar when you had the mind to and when you had the
scratch to waste on such things. Now even there, it was a matter of being a
regular before anybody served you even a beer.
And a lot of stuff, beer included, just didn’t taste the same and the
prices doubled and tripled overnight. Just like the stock market. What a mess!
Second puff.
The smell of the smoke, the draw of the flavor, the burst of nicotine on the
brain all calmed him and reduced his anxious psyche within a few moments of
time.
Time to
finish the cigar before transferring to the regular New York bound train in
Trenton? Until then, maybe six or eight
more local stops?
Lunch has
not satisfied Eddie. The watery vegetable soup was warm enough but it needed
too much salt and pepper added to suggest a taste. The grilled cheese was alright. But he could
not get to finish his cobbler. His aunt had the train schedule down to the
minute.
Their walk
to the train station was only two and a half or three blocks. They passed the
Schlichter mansion, the front door padlocked shut after the auction. Workers were still moving rugs through the
side entrance.
Before Eddie
could ask.
“They will
move those rugs to their warehouse downtown. I asked for a delivery date
knowing full well they will wait for my check to clear before they deliver
them.
“They deal
with crooks all the time Eddie. People will have rugs delivered to an empty
house and abscond with them if these auctioneers do not act carefully. “
Eddie wanted
to say something but couldn’t squeeze in a word or two.
“You know.
Henry has set me up with a ten thousand dollar budget to build a new dining
room, tear down the wall into the old kitchen.
And a new kitchen, smaller, will be added onto the house, and into the
back yard. It is small in order to keep
a balance to the general appearance to the outside of the house. Have to always
keep in mind the resale value. Nobody wants to buy a big house if it looks ugly
on the outside. The remodeling and
addition will be first class and modern, the kitchen especially. All the latest kitchen appliances.
“I dare say
I envision Henry bringing his grocer clients into the kitchen to show them a
bit of the modern to excite their imaginations. Tell their wives. It will all add to the image that my husband
sells so well with his canned goods marked “Frankford United Grocers” in green
lettering on a white background and a printed image in color of peas, string
beans, corn, spinach, beets and carrots, the six top sellers. “
They arrived
at the ramp leading up to the top of the railroad embankment above street
level. Eddie could remember when he was eight or nine when the Reading Railroad
lifted all its tracks within the city off the streets around 1910. Quite a feat
and quite a cost, investment in infrastructure in the city all paid for by the
company. If you waited for the city to
finance something like that, well … But this was the Pennsylvania Railroad’s
track. They followed suit with the Reading in pursuit of the modern.
He has
thought his aunt might have stayed at the street level and hailed a cab, not
that many were about this station at this time of day. And considering her
penchant for saving nickels and dimes to build her husband’s fortune, he
thought she might take the street car home which was on the avenue right there.
Once at the
top of the embankment, he went into the station house to buy a ticket. When he
exited, his aunt Rose was standing on the waiting platform examining the
tracks, focusing on something below her.
“Anything
interesting Aunt Rose?”
“Only the
thought about all the Irish labor that went into the building of the railroads.
If there had been no famine in Ireland, there might never have been any
railroads in America.” Followed by a momentary pause.
“Or a civil
war.”
Eddie looked
blank.
“It was
something I heard said a thousand times or something like that from all the
laborers who used to drink my uncle’s beer.”
She paused.
Looked about. Then pointed.
“That big
chimney over there. That is the Schlichter rope factory. Supplied most of the navy‘s needs in the
Civil War. Government contract. Made his fortune.
“So I really
have no guilt about taking a souvenir from the mighty Schlichter family in the
form of a rug.”
“Souvenir?”
“You arrived
later at the auction than I had anticipated. I wanted you to use my pen knife
to puncture a perfect rug and tear it ever so slightly a bit as to bring down
the price a bit.”
Eddie was again
looking puzzled.
“My older sister
Sadie worked in that rope factory for a time. She eventually died of consumption.
They threw her out of their company housing when she was too sick to work. We took
her in, had her for a few weeks but her condition worsened. Then the Sisters of
Mercy took her in to a facility where she died. Whenever the good sisters
personally ask me for help, I always give more than I can out of my monthly
budget. It is the only charity work I do. Write a check.
“Henry is
leaving all his loose money to charity. Leaving me the house and an
annuity. So in all fairness I too am
leaving all I have left when I die to the Sisters that took care of Sadie.
“We have no
children and far too many nephews and nieces on both sides that would get any
big chunk of any money left in our estates.
“But you
Eddie, you I am going to loan you some money to set up that finance company
that you told me about in your senior year in high school. Give you some seed
money to make the big start. Loaning the Irish Catholics in the neighborhood cash
to buy automobiles, refrigerators, washing machines. Loans those Protestant bastard banks won’t
loan to laborers in the old neighborhood. I dare say I see you in a storefront
over at Kensington and Allegheny with a big loan sign hanging out over the
street in neon.“
Eddie was
bewildered.
“Where are
you getting that kind of money to loan me?”
Suddenly all
his big talk and big dreams seemed like they might become a crushing reality.
“I can
salvage four to five thousand out of the house remodeling budget without
compromising the quality of the project.”
The train
was approaching in the distance. Rose began to throw a lot of little things in
talk all at once at Eddie.
“I saw a
rich woman once at an estate sale, damaging a rug and getting the price reduced.
I always wanted to try the same thing myself.
Needed a man around to assert himself in public on my behalf. Nobody
pays attention to what a woman says in place of business like an auction house.
“I had
thought to spend four hundred dollars on the rug. You helped to get it reduced
to two hundred. I’ll tell Henry I paid seven hundred. That’s five hundred of the five thousand I
intend to lend you. You saved me two hundred.
Here is ten percent commission for your troubles Eddie. She pressed a folded twenty dollar bill into
the palm of his hand.
“Any money I
took from the dead Schlichters I took for my sister Sadie. Don’t get angry. Get
even I always say. I did it for her and I did it for you Eddie. “
The train
had arrived. Eddie took the money. Eddie
never refused money. I was in his makeup
as a person. It was in his blood.
He boarded
the train, up the steps. Stood there looking back down at his aunt and briefly
waved and then went to his seat. The
train was still stationary. He saw his aunt approach the station master on the platform
no doubt to order her a cab via telephone.
In a way his
aunt was so stiff and formal when she was at her husband’s side. She was an
interesting if not eccentric person as from what he had seen this day. This pieced
together a lot of loose ends of all his years of memory.
He was
amused sometimes to see a woman play that woman’s game in a man’s world, now
like how she was asking the station master to order her a cab instead of just
doing it herself. There was a pay phone
in the station. She certainly could do
that one for herself. He thought it was more than her saving a mere nickel on
the pay phone and having the station master use the company phone. But
sometimes the formalities and rituals of everyday life were like some small
part of a stage play that needed to be staged in just a certain way and acted
upon.
