.jpg)
A Stretch on the River
by Richard Bissell
Chapter One
The years which Mr. Clemens had passed on the
Mississippi, and the rough life of California, lacked
greatly the refining influence of a different civilization.
With that sharp schooling he had become too well
acquainted with all the coarser types of human nature.
— Mrs. Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Sometimes in the early summmmer evenings in those days you could hear the steam calliope playing on the hurricane deck of the steamer Capitol to drum up trade for the moonlight excursion. They would play “Beautiful Ohio” and “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles,” and after a rest period, during which the calliope player would stroll to and fro on the deck smoking a good cigar, perhaps we would hear “Dardanella.” My brother Herb and I used to go down and sit on the railroad tracks by the levee and watch the black deckhands wheeling coal aboard, and smell the damp smell of steam and steam cylinder oil that floated out of the engine room. Herb would rather be the pilot but I would rather be the calliope player or the deckhand that handled the lines on the big red capstan at every landing.
By now the calliope player and the Capitol are dead, and Herb no longer would be satisfied with a pilot’s job. I’m the simple one in the family. I’d still like to throw the lines on that big red capstan, and I’d still like to play that steam piano for a moonlight excursion to Winona or Red Wing, and hear the music come back to me from the Sugar Loaf or Barn Bluff.
Then in the winter I used to take the streetcar down the hill on Saturday afternoon, and sit there in the third row at the Rialto, getting sick on peanut butter kisses, all choked up from the violin music, and see myself in future years as an all-American hero such as racing driver with cap on backwards, fireman carrying beautiful girl in nightie down the high ladder, lounge lizard in dress suit, or leather pusher with several coeds in coatstyle shaker-knit sweaters cheering from the ringside. I was going to do big things in those days — all I needed was the clothes for the different parts. Pass the peanut brittle.
The psychiatrists, phrenologists, and my sister-in-law would say that the way things worked out for me was all because of a blurred parent pattern or a secondary marginal Oedipus rejection. (I am glad I didn’t have to pay a bill for that revelation.)
Papa was the society bootlegger when I was a kid and then after repeal he made a pile with his two aristocratic old-time saloons. Oh, he wasn’t a little fat guy in an outsize overcoat passing bottles of gin in paper bags through the back door — he sold only good stuff, by the case, to the boys at the Elks Club, and gave humorous speeches at Rotary in a double-breasted gray flannel.
“I’m Bill Joyce, and this here is my brother Herb,” I used to say.
“Dan Joyce your daddy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, well, I’m a pretty good friend of your daddy’s. I don’t suppose you and your brother would like an ice cream soda?”
That’s the way it used to go. That’s the way it was all the time.
All we would have needed in town to be a big hit was the money. But on top of all the money he made, Papa was a personality, an institution.
I got through school in the usual ludicrous manner: wore a bedsheet toga in the Latin Club play, drove a splinter right through my hand when we knocked down the Cedar Rapids goalposts, and had many a nice afternoon with Jane Schofield and her sister Helen and Fritz Hindenberg up in the loft of the Schofield carriage house. This was back in the days when the old carriage houses still smelled of horses instead of crankcase oil, even though the horses had long since gone to the glue works, the days before they commenced calling girls Karen and Darlene and Linda Mae, and also the days when some of the girls, if not all, wore bloomers.
I was pretty fresh in high school. I was only about 138 pounds, wore my hair slicked down and parted in the middle and a snake ring on my right hand, not to mention a big shaggy fur coat that Papa got me from one of his eggish friends out on Roosevelt Road in Chicago, and just at the time when Harold Teen and all the simps were wearing them. But except for Jack Schwartz I was the only one in high school that had a fur coat, and his was just his brother’s coonskin, not his at all. The coonskin created quite a stir and made me pretty sick, but after thinking it over the girls decided I was cute after all; besides, all Jack could think of to boost his popularity was to buy extra-thick malteds for everybody and flash five-dollar bills, and once in a while borrow his brother’s Marmon phaeton. Most of the jazz-mad members of the rampant age wanted roadsters but Jack’s brother Jefferson got a phaeton because he could get two or three cases back there and passengers too; he also had some other more conventional ideas about the back seat. Jack did get a good deal of credit when he could borrow the Marmon, but after a while nobody would ride with him as his idea was to emulate Wally Reid as much as possible, and the way he took corners, why once was plenty for the customers in the back seat.
Pretty soon I got so hard to bear that Papa took me over to Chicago to Maurice Rothschild’s and bought me some clothes and a wardrobe trunk as big as a Locomobile and sent me off to a school between four and five thousand years old down in New Hampshire, although I wanted to stay home and play the comic part in Margie’s Chance, the senior class play. I was there just long enough to figure out the accents before being bounced out and then I was home again and all I had learned was how to check my trunk on a through ticket. There were a lot of queer ones down in New England, but nobody seemed to notice; however, there are some nuts right out here in the Golden West that are blue ribbon contenders and you don’t have to hire a radio cab and go outside the city limits to find them.
So I went to a military school with nineteen students and a howitzer on the lawn and learned a good deal from a boy from Indianapolis but nothing much about how to wage war or handle the épée. My brother Herb wanted to go to college so he went to old man Thorwald, the principal of high school, for some advice. Thorwald, who was a graduate soil chemist from South Dakota State (and therefore an ideal high school principal), told Herb that St. Olaf was the best college in the country but Herb told him he wasn’t a Lutheran and if he was he wouldn’t want to be a preacher. So Herb went to the U. of Illinois and took a course covering Proust’s asthma. Presently he astonished everyone by marrying a sensational queen from Cincinnati whose family owned a string of hotels and nine brick factories with tall chimneys. And no kids except Herb’s wife. They got married accompanied by a large shipment of champagne and some girls in marquisette dresses, and father-in-law bought Herb the Palace Hotel back home for a wedding present. My brother is a bird, all right.
Meanwhile, I was sampling the nation’s educational institutions. Finally a bunch of us took our roadsters down to a college in Confederate territory, and after that one I was finished. If Honest Abe had met some of the jelly beans I went to school with down there he would have called off the war and spent the money on a wall instead.
Papa was running his two good money-making places now, the Trocadero and the Five Mile House, both across the river in Illinois. We had a big house up on Westview Avenue, and a yard with hard maple trees, and Papa joined the Country Club. Once upon a time the Country Club was quite an exclusive group of fish, but later all you had to do to get in was be willing to kiss the old girls who got liquored up, and be able to throw up at dances without getting it on your shoes.
Everything was going fine at home and Papa was making a lot of money and Herb was all set, so I went to Europe to conclude my investigations. Two years later it had become 1937 and I had a headache.
I bought mosaic brooches for all the girls and started for home. In the afternoons I was sad, and on the return trip I sat in the men’s bar of an antique Cunarder playing “I’ve Found a New Baby” and “Monday Date” on the upright piano, while the spray of the North Atlantic in November settled on the windows of the promenade deck.
Then I came home one night, and Papa was there at the depot in a chesterfield and bowler hat, and Herb and Sis, with the Duesenberg, and the cold Midwestern rain pattered on the ancient brick streets.
So far my life had been lacking in direction and I was well aware of the hopelessness of everything. For the next few years I played the game and hit the line hard for the furniture factory, Herb’s newest enterprise, and offended untold numbers of citizens with my polo coat with the six-inch lapels. Sometimes I would go down and sit by the Mississippi and watch the strong current from Minnesota sliding under the bridge bound for Basin Street, and once more I would plan great things for myself, and go home and play the piano all night. Who shall know the anguish of a proud young man?
Then, when all America had reached the ultimate in boredom, came resurrection for all the lost young men who weren’t having any fun: the war. In order to maintain my standing with the girls, and in joyous anticipation of an honorable exit, I went to Chicago to secure a handsome navy uniform.
They told me to take off my glasses and read the chart. That was all that was necessary and I was back on La Salle Street again in ten minutes, like a character from Bound to Rise about to hunt up a cheap but clean eating establishment.
“They told me I got bum eyes,” I said, when I had got home and made myself comfortable at the end of the bar at the Sixty-Six, Papa’s new place. It had a walnut bar out of the old Congress Hotel in Chicago, and the only beer sold was National Premium in bottles, from Baltimore. Papa knew how to drag in the boys with money.
“Tough luck, kid,” said Jack Schwartz from behind a necktie with a skyrocket on it.
“What the hell do I need eyes in the navy for?”
“Well, maybe the army will take you. Did you try them yet?” Jack said, and ordered up some more of the Catto’s twelve-year-old.
“Gimme another, Marc,” I said. It was about 4 p.m., a bad hour. “And a little more ice.” Marc had been with Papa since the old days when we had the Chicago connection.
My thoughts about the army will remain unprinted.
A small but useful girl named Adele squeezed my hand. She smelled delicious, a blend of fur and teatime kisses. Marc leaned against the back bar and treated himself to a small Hennessy.
A few weeks later the ice in the river broke up and went south, and the first steamboats bound for St. Paul came up past town and blew for the drawbridge. The kids flew kites on the aphrodisiac spring breezes. Life at the factory was a history of futility, arguing with the salesmen and checking delinquent accounts. Adele, Bunny, Francine, Tootie all did their best, but everything seemed unreal in 1942 — a dream that would have no ending.
Meanwhile the boys were going, going, going. Jack Schwartz took a course in welding, removed the double-breasted sharkskin and was last seen heading in the general direction of a shipyard at Seneca, Illinois. Whether he got there I can’t say for sure, but at least he didn’t resume occupancy of bar stool number three at the Sixty-Six until all the boys had quit discharging firearms at each other. Another enthusiast for the army.
Then, on an unimportant day when the gods had decreed that nothing was ever to happen to me again beyond success as a party piano player, the flood waters of fate broke the dam, and I found myself at last floundering in the torrent. It was a desperate afternoon and everyone in the world seemed to be living but me. I left Myrtle to stall on the incoming calls and went over to the Sixty-Six to rest up for the evening. There was nobody in the bar but the radio and Georgie Whiting, an old boy from high school, now one of our local steamboat pilots. I bought Georgie a couple of Old Hickorys and in no time he was telling me what a sweet deal he had on the river — how much money he made, how many girls there were in St. Louis, and how the draft board never bothered him, or any of the boys on the boats.
“Look at them haw trees in bloom all over the hills,” he said. “Bill, steamboating on the Upper Mississippi is like the old days in high school when you woke up and jumped out of bed in the morning and looked out the window just to see if the wonderful world was out there waiting for you.” This Georgie was quite a poet, a shot-put champ, and president of the Biology Club. “That world is still outside, Bill, but you never see it if you hang around this dump and spend your time with Schwartz and the rest of them mutts.”
“I’m a city kid, Georgie,” I said.
Then he told me how his company was looking for bright young fellows to be pilots, captains, general traffic managers, personnel directors, and candidates for the U. S. Senate. The company was young, he said, and growing fast. They were pushing the younger men and looking for a high type personnel.
“Well, Georgie,” I said, “I’m strictly a high type personnel, but is there any glory in it?”
“Glory! Why Bill, you can live on the boats.”
“I better get in the army, Georgie. They’re already starting to talk.”
“I love that line,” Georgie said. “All our lives we been reading Remarque and telling each other what a line of cheese all that war stuff is. Now the Community Band goes down the street with the cornets playing flat on the high notes and right away you wanna get in the army. Smarten up, Bill. You and I don’t have to prove nothing. The one thing we got in common is we don’t give a damn for nobody or nothing.”
People were doing the most peculiar things in those days.
“Smarten up, boy,” he said. “Leave the dumbbells settle the war. Remember the line we was brought up on? ‘Cannon fodder.’ Remember Paul Baumer? Remember Katczinsky? Smarten up.”
“Wouldn’t it be pretty obvious if all of a sudden a big capitalist like me decided to go off decking on an old Upper Mississippi towboat?” I said.
“Obvious to who? It’d be obvious to me that you was a man. By God you’ll know you’re alive once you get aboard.”
Two more of Marc’s highballs and I had made up my mind.
Papa was amazed.
“Who’s the president of this outfit? Maybe I can fix you up,” he said. “What’s your angle, boy?”
“Never mind, Papa,” I said. “I’m going out and look at the sky for a while and see if I can figure things out.”
“So long, kid,” Herb said. “I don’t know what this is all about, but you must have a slant on it.”
“I’m going for a boat ride,” I said. “I’ll probably be home in a week.”
And then I was in St. Louis in the Union Station, and then I was in a Checker cab, and then I was aboard the Diesel towboat Inland Coal, and the lights of St. Louis sparkled in the sky, and the cars crossed Eads Bridge, and they gave me a bunk and a blanket.
“What do they call you?” the Second Mate said.
“Call me Ishmael,” I said.
