|
One of Catherine's memories was of her father taking her
into a bar with sawdust-covered floor and swinging her
up to the dizzyingly high stool. He ordered an enormous
glass of beer for himself and a coke for her. She was
five years old, and she remembered how proud her father
was when strangers crowded round to admire her. All the
men ordered drinks and her father paid for them. She
recalled how she kept holding his arm to make sure he
was there. He was a traveling salesman, and he had
explained to her that his work took him to distant
cities and he had to be away from her and her mother for
months at a time so that he could bring back nice
presents. Catherine had desperately made a deal with
him. If he would stay with her, she would give up the
presents. Her father had laughed and told her what a
precocious child she was and then had left town, and it
was six months before she saw him again.
During those early years, her mother whom she saw
every day seemed a vague shapeless personality, while
her father, whom she saw on brief occasions, was vivid
and wonderfully clear. Catherine thought of him as a
handsome, laughing man, full of humor and warm, generous
gestures. The occasions when he came home were like
holidays, full of treats, presents and surprises.
When Catherine was seven, her father was fired from
his job, ad their life took a new pattern. They left
Chicago and moved to Gary, Indiana, where he went to
work as salesman in a jewelry store. Catherine
attended the local school where she made very few
friends. Six months later, her father lost his job and
they moved to Harvey, a suburb of Chicago. School was in
session, and Catherine was a new girl, shut out from the
friendships that had already been formed.
When Catherine was fifteen, the Great Depression had
set in. Once again, Catherine and her family moved back
to Chicago after her father had lost his job. He was
drinking more and he and her mother were constantly
yelling at each other in a never-ending series of
recriminations that drove Catherine out of the house.
She would go down to the lake shore, staring at the
restless, grey lake.
As the Depression got worse, Catherine's father
borrowed money from his younger brother, Ralph to outfit
a shoe-repair truck to travel around the neighborhood.
"Imagine having the shoemaker coming to your door ! No
one's ever done it before," he said excitedly. Two
months later, the shoemaker and the truck disappeared
and that was the end of another dream.
Catherine's last memory of her father was him lying
like a corpse on the hospital bed after he was knocked
down by a passing car. On receiving the call, Catherine
and her mother had rushed to the hospital. She could
still remember her mother holding her father's hand, her
pale round face blotched with weeping. Catherine then
turned her face to the wall and wept for herself, for
her mother and for her dear father. |
