"Quinn & Son" by Rosanne Scott

Quinn & Son

Rosanne Scott

1.) The Overcoat

He would have spotted the money for car fare for both of them, maybe not gladly but he would have, two nickels up, two back, filched it from the paper money which he didn’t have to turn over to Palchuk the distributor until Monday, plenty of time, but his father has his pride all up and wouldn’t ask and so here they are, ten, twelve blocks in and on a morning in December so dark and frozen that clacking in step together along Butler Street it isn’t crystalline breath they emit so much as sparks, blue-gray, sharp and stinging before Jack finally gets it out of him where it is they’re going and his father says, bellows, “Blawnox!,” as if it were obvious and in that how-could-you-possibly-doubt-me tone of voice that signals hair-brained, pointless, and which means they have another dozen blocks to go before they make it to the Highland Park Bridge, cross the Allegheny, then it’s up the north bank along the railroad tracks another two, three miles before they get to the mill. Jack stops, smacks his arms to his sides. “Walk? We’re gonna walk there?” He’s fifteen that year, 1939, another in a string of years gone all wrong, one which he will refer to ever after as “the point at which,” trailing off, never finding an exact word for what point it is that he’s come to with his father, though the point is malleable and stretches between anger and pity, or love and insolence, and will register, even decades later when he’s well into his dotage,

recalling the year, recalling this very day, as something hard and indigestible like the bitter seed of contempt.

“Are you nuts?,” he shouts now. “There must have been three streetcars at least that already passed us! We could have ridden!” Even to him his voice sounds whiny, but he’s freezing, the coat pulled from the St. Vincent de Paul bin missing the buttons, the sleeves so short that his exposed wrists are left raw and aching.

His father ignores him, pounds on his own St. Vincent de Paul number, big and black and flapping behind him like the tail feathers of a big, angry bird.

“All right! All right, Dad! Stop! Can you just stop?”

His father stops, turns, his rapid breathing forming giant puffs. He’s bird-built himself and in the giant overcoat looks even birdier, this former regional manager of Postal Telegraph and Cable, fierce competitor to Western Union for the city’s business accounts, desk the size of a city block, bow-tie, wingtips, two secretaries, expense account. Former. In the twenty-three months since he was let go there’s been nothing. Oh, there’s what the WPA offers: sweeper of streets, digger of ditches and graves, collector of trash. But not what he’ll accept: who exactly do they think I am?, the actual job at PT no more but its privileges and mourned-for rank, however minor, leaving behind peevishness and bloat. So it’s been Neid’s every night since, where he sits on a stool under a grimy light, commiserates, pontificates—did I ever tell you . . . ?, oh, you should’ve seen me . . . I’ll give you my take—drinking Iron City on tick. They don’t take tick, or at least not his tick, at the William Penn Hotel where in the palm-treed and white-linen restaurant, in the red-velveted bar, Postal Telegraph’s Francis P. Quinn, regional manager (was it such a crime to say vice-president?), had once wined and dined every junior executive from J & L to Allegheny Ludlum, coming to prefer, as the barman quickly discovered, his Manhattans without the cherry.

Swamped in the coat, his father now makes in quasi-mockery to bow. “Ah, pardon me, then, Mis-ter Carnegie,” he says, the flush in his cheeks owing nothing to the cold.

Mr. Carnegie is what Jack’s father has taken to calling him lately. Either that or Mr. Rockefeller, though mostly it’s Mr. Carnegie since this is Pittsburgh and it’s Carnegie’s mills pumping out steel that have made Pittsburgh the city it is, gritty but full of opportunity, though the mills are mostly shuttered now, the bottom of the Depression, though who knows where exactly the bottom is. Boom times for Pittsburgh are coming once the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor but that won’t happen for another two years and then there’ll be a time of scrambling until all the mills are at full output. In the meantime, it’s the dole and a patch-together of jobs, catchas-catch-can, Jack doing all the catching: the Sun-Telegraph route; cleaning out the Falconi’s chicken coop, a job he hates so much that it will put him off any meal involving chicken all the rest of his days, though for now there are the eggs the Quinns depend on; Saturdays at Sam’s, the barber, sweeping up, sterilizing the combs and scissors; then at Cavic’s Bakery behind the counter and early mornings three days a week before school hauling sacks of flour, then rushing for the streetcar, then catching another that will take him to Oakland and Central Catholic, dusted with flour and half asleep, but still among the Christian brothers’ star students, on scholarship, of course, owing to smarts and industry and to what Brother Fabian has described to Jack’s father and mother as a winning way, which is not so winning this morning.

“Ah, for shit’s sake, Dad,” Jack slapping his sides, less to keep from freezing, though there’s that, “that mill isn’t open. None of them are.”

“Will be open,” his father says. “Already open. Watch your language.”

“Says who?”

It’s a Thursday, a school day, and had his father, home from Neid’s and yanking him out of half-sleep, come on come on come on, your father’s got a lead on a good one this time!, had asked him for the nickels, had Jack thought to grab a handful, had they caught the flying fraction that runs up and down Butler, ridden it over to the North Side, transferred to the 49 Blawnox which would have let them off in front of the mill where his father could have seen for himself the furnaces stone cold, the lot full of weeds, the gate padlocked, this annoying jaunt, all to humor the old man, would have only cost him the morning. Now that his father insists on walking—walking!, and for what?, to prove what?, and to whom? to prove himself to Jack?, too late now—it’ll cost him the whole day. Up and back, it’s a good seven, eight miles if they don’t freeze to death first.

Out of the turned-up lapels of the enormous coat, his father squints at him. “Where’s your respect?”

Where’s yours?, Jack could ask. The excuse of his father’s having been let go was the Depression but really it was Mr. Grimes having to come to the house one morning too many to dunk Francis Quinn’s head under the tap and get him suited up and float him down to the office on an ocean of coffee and pleading and warnings. His mother, aproned, flipping flapjacks, asking Mr. Grimes if he wouldn’t like a cup himself, trying but failing not to sound humiliated.

“Listen, kid,” his father says now. “I have it on good authority.”

“And what kind of authority could they possibly have at Neid’s?” Jack snaps.

Now there’s a question. The pause that follows, that builds between them on that morning of half-dark and ice right there in the middle of empty Butler Street, is answer all in itself.

Finally his father, stumped but no longer bested by facts or reasons, goes all high-tone, swings for the righteous. “To you to whom I have given life,” he says, “I owe no explanation.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Dad.”

Oh, Jack, can’t you have more patience with him? His mother, dancing a baby on one hip, quelling another who’s put his foot down about oatmeal for dinner again. Think how far he’s fallen. Oh, please, how far he’s fallen. What about us? What about how far we’ve fallen? Can he not just take a job, any goddamn job? Jack! Would digging graves be that far beneath him? That’s not funny. It’s not supposed to be funny. Oh, I’d like to knock some sense into him. When did you become so cruel, Jack? I’ve never known you to be cruel. I’m not cruel. I’m fed up! He’s your father! I don’t care if he’s Jesus Christ Almighty! Jack! How does she stand it, he wants to know, life with such a big-shot, the dole money going to Tim Neid every month while he scrapes the Falconi’s coops to make the rent. How many times does she think she can put over on them that it isn’t oatmeal when it’s oatmeal? It’s not fair, Ma! It’s not goddamn fair!

“It was Herky, wasn’t it. This good authority of yours. Not that it matters. Jesus Christ, Dad.”

“Hey.”

“Hey what?

“Is that how those brothers teach you to talk to your father at that fancy school?”

Could those be fists his father’s now raising? Hard to tell with the coat’s sleeves past his knuckles, but, yes, those are fists. For whatever else his father may have lost, it’s not his sense of the absurd.

“What are you going to do, Dad, beat me up?”

Of course it was Herky, Herky Brzenski, co-commiserator, nightly occupant of the bar stool cattycorner who’d told Francis that he’d heard the rumor that Blawnox was about to reopen, and Herky would know, wouldn’t he? Herky’s sister’s brother-inlaw’s cousin or some damn somebody who was head of the local or who once passed the head of the local on the street or who dreamed he was head of the local had confirmed it. “A definite,” Herky, who drove a dump truck for the city, pilfered engine parts from the city garage, would have said. “Listen, Francis. They’ll be lining up, them men wanting them jobs, they’ll be lining up first thing in the morning, but nobody with your smarts, Francis.” And here Herky, that sycophant, that prevaricator, would have nodded, tapped deferentially an index finger to the side of his head. “Not one of them hunkies with your smarts. Now, you don’t want nothin’ on the floor, like puddler or nothin’, Nothin’ dangerous. Office work I’m thinkin’ you could snap up. Management. Like yinz had before at PT. But take a tip from me, Francis, yinz gotta move fast, get there first thing,” and then his father, that fantast, gassed and scrabbling, so damn gullible, “Yeah? Up at Blawnox? You sure now, Herky?” and Herky, “Yeah, I’m sure, Francis. When ain’t I ever been sure?,” a question not rhetorical but also not for answer, and then his father, expansive with beer and hope, “Hey, Tim, put another one on my tab for my friend Herky here.”

Jack could leave his father in the middle of Butler Street. If he’s quick he could hustle home, grab his books, miss chapel and probably first assembly but make it for first period, let his father make his own way over to Blawnox, if that’s what the old man wants. A tip from Herky Brzenski, for Christ’s sake, who had to memorize all the names of the streets in the city of Pittsburgh

because he couldn’t read the street signs because the nuns didn’t teach reading until the second grade by which time Herky was already shooting craps and had attained the remunerative position of neighborhood bag man because what cop would suspect a seven-year-old?, before his swing through juvenile hall, which hadn’t reformed him but had wised him up, Herky, no doubt thirsty, knowing a light touch when he saw one. Jack could definitely walk away, leave his impossible father right here; he’d be justified. But that’s not what he does.

He grabs the old man by the sleeve, turns him around. Even inside the big coat’s padding it’s all puff and bones. “Come on,” he says, and they start again up Butler.

“

Okay! That’s more like it, show a little respect for your father. Listen, kid, you won’t regret it. You’re going to see your old man win today, and win big. You’re going to see what it looks like.”

“Like what looks like?”

“Success!,” his father says, practically skipping.

“Oh, yeah. Who’d want to miss that?”

“They won’t know what to do with themselves up at Blawnox when they see Francis P. Quinn coming through the door.”

“I bet they won’t.”

“And you! Oh, Jack, my boy, you are going to be witness!”

Cavic’s won’t be open yet, but it’s only in the next block.

“Listen, Jack. I know you don’t like Herky, but don’t underestimate him. He’s been a good friend. He knows an awful lot of people. That man has connections like you wouldn’t believe.”

“Oh, I believe,” Jack says, though it’s belief in, realization of, his father’s capriciousness, proven, unassailable, no mystery of faith here, that will haunt as much as guide him, guides him now. “That coat, Dad. Couldn’t you have pulled something else from the bin? Maybe something that halfway fits? You look like a bug in it.”

The poor you will always have with you, this from Jesus but by way of his mother. There are so many ways to be poor, Jack, so many ways. And so what are you saying, Ma, that we’re supposed to know firsthand every stinkin’ one?

“But it’s an Andersen and Sheppard,” his father says as they hurry along.

“What is?”

“The coat. This coat. Says so right on the label. Want me to show you?”

“No.”

“It’s quality, Jack. Now here’s a tip from your father: always go for quality. Whatever it is in life, go for quality.”

The poor, the poor, the poor. “Sure, Dad.”

When they get to Cavic’s Bakery, Jack says he’ll go in and check if there’s any day-old that Cavic will let them have. “Can’t go all the way to Blawnox on an empty stomach.” And he tells his father to wait out front while he goes around back, Victor Cavic already not so much for the Irish, especially one Irishman in particular, so hustling down the alley Jack thinks of what lie he can tell Victor, but it’s Anna this morning so, no questions asked, she lets him take two nickels from the till, take more, she says but he says two’s enough, that he only needs the one fare, up and back, and she gives him two of yesterday’s stale, insists, pushes, “Take! Take!” she says, watching his huddled father through the front window. “Should you and him have also to starve?”

So Jack hands his father a day-old roll and the two of them chew, in step together again, up Butler Street, and in the next block there’s a car stop and in the bitter air, a car, the flying fraction, rattles toward them from the direction they’ve just come, blue-sparking overhead, one round headlight, a cyclops bearing down, Jack stops, turns to his father, holds out the two nickels, says, “Here.”

“What?”

“Here.”

“I don’t want your money.”

“I’m not giving it.”

“What?”

“Look at me, Dad,” Jack says, spreading his arms, meaning his coat, buttonless and at least two sizes too small. Does he have to explain everything to his father? “You don’t think I’m freezing here? I’m buying your coat. Give me the coat.”

The streetcar slows, stops, hums in its tracks. The door slaps open.

“Take the money. Give me the coat.”

“I don’t want the money.”

“I’m buying the coat.”

“This is an Andersen and Sheppard. I’m not selling an Andersen and Sheppard for two nickels.”

“Jesus, Dad, the nuns gave it to you for free.”

“That’s beside the point.”

“You think you’re going to get a better offer?”

“I’m not selling the coat.”

“You two riding, or what?”

“Just the one.”

“Well, whichever one of yinz it is, let’s step on it.”

“The coat. Give it.”

“Why should I sell you the coat?”

“Because I’m asking you.”

“That’s not good enough.”

“What?”

“Hey! Let’s shake a leg. I got a schedule here.”

“Here’s the money. Give me the coat.”

“I don’t want the money.”

“Take the money and give the kid the coat, will ya?”

“Nobody asked you.”

“Listen, old man, how ’bout I just . . . “

“Just wait, would you? Would it kill you to wait another goddamn second?” Then to his father, that source of all heartbreak whose rebukes and recalcitrance he’ll endure all the rest of his days not with anything like patience, though there’ll be a pleading kind of love marking every effort, Jack says, “I’m freezing here, Dad. Can’t you see that? Take the car fare and give me the coat.”

So his father, sighing, takes the nickels, slowly slips off the coat. “Highway robbery,” he mumbles, handing it over.

“Finally!”

“Will you please stay the hell out of it?”

“It’s quality, you know, Jack.” All he can offer. Where’d he get car fare? It’s the kid’s resourcefulness he can’t get over. Never will. “I want you to know you’re buying quality.”

“You said.”

“And cheap.”

“You said that, too.”

“You ride you’ll get there sooner,” Jack says as his father turns and climbs on board. “You know how those swells up at Blawnox are, Dad. You don’t want to keep them waiting.”

Beneath the coat his father has on, as per usual, one of his suits, reminder and remnant of his glory days, not right for grave digging or garbage collecting, and it’s beer-spotted thanks to his nights holding forth at Neid’s, but at least it fits, the tie snugged up, so that he looks, more or less, presentable.

The issue is the house. Not what to do with it. It has to be sold, that much is clear. The question is: to whom? Generous as the GI Bill is—Jack’s at Pitt, nights, working toward an engineering degree,

2.) Cul-de-sac

free of charge—the V. A. won’t allow carrying two mortgages and he and Danica have their eyes on a little yellow-brick ranch already under construction on a quarter acre out in Baldwin and on which he has already put a down payment (which he’d like not to lose), way out there in a development so newly carved out of what had once been a farmer’s apple orchard that on humid afternoons the air is still ripe with the scent.

The thing is, the baby is a toddler now and they can’t stay in his mother-in-law’s upstairs apartment forever. Three rooms. Butler Street with all its rattling traffic. Good enough when they were first married, but it’s time now. They need space, a little more elbow room. Jack, eldest of seven, would also like to have more than just the one child.

“I don’t know,” Jack’s father tells him. They’re in the kitchen of the Duncan Street house, the one that needs to be sold, the one his father had only been renting and that Jack bought with his GI benefits as soon as he came home from the war, cheap but tumbledown with a dirt-floor basement, a shot roof, and iffy plumbing, the one that he fixed up, the one he’s paying the mortgage on, the one his father is living in rent-free, when this conversation takes place.

“It’s a lot to take on,” his father says, pacing, pacing. He stops to light another Pall Mall. “I’ll have to think about it.”

There’s nothing to think about, as father and son know. The mortgage is $37.58 a month, easy to swing even for the old man, now that he’s working again. Pearl Harbor bombed and the U.S. suddenly in the war, all the mills in Pittsburgh opened as if someone had flung open a door. It was as if nobody had ever heard of the Depression. You couldn’t not get a job. And now that the war is over, nothing has slowed down. All that Pittsburgh steel going for automobiles and kitchen appliances and skyscrapers instead of battleships and tanks.

As if to bolster his case, as if his father might be more amenable to the notion of owning a home, this very one in fact, all fixed up and with the mortgage ready to be assumed, Jack tells his father that the new house, the one for which the foundation has been dug, is on a cul-de-sac.

“A what?”

Jack explains.

“Fancy word,” Jack’s father says. “In this neighborhood, it’s just called a dead end.”

Dead end more or less sums up the problem, Jack realizing too late that mention of a fancy word like cul-de-sac has put his father in that one position he will not tolerate: beholden.

On the day of the closing, while Jack is at the banker’s signing all the papers, handing over the keys to a couple whose name he won’t remember, his father is going from room to room unscrewing all the light bulbs and removing the pulls from the kitchen cabinets. He’ll leave Duncan Street with a bag full of doorknobs after having first scratched his initials in a corner of one of the upstairs bedroom windows, tiny so that it will be years before the new owners or the ones after that even notice: FPQ.

3.) Cursive

Jack doesn’t think of himself as old but it’s true that he’s up there and since he won’t go to his daughter’s—Who lives like that? Like what, Dad?, though they both know that what he means is the imposition—she has insisted on this fancy-pants place. In order to get himself into this fancy-pants place—two pools!, two dining rooms!, two, three, four gardens, one sunken and with goldfish, though he’s an engineer and wouldn’t know a peony from a pine— he has to fill out a wad of paperwork and sign his name again and again and again. His legal name, they mean. Not Jack Quinn, not

the one he goes by, the one he’s been called since he was fifteen, but his real one: Francis P. Quinn, Jr.

§

His name is Francis P. Quinn, Jr. and his father, unlike the other fathers in the neighborhood, goes to work in a suit and tie. His shirts require cuff links. He smells of bay rum and he has his shoes shined in the men’s room of the William Penn Hotel by a man he tips two bits. His father works for Postal Telegraph and Cable at Seventh and Liberty on the tenth floor of the Keenan Building, the one with the gold dome.

§

Those bedspring ovals, those up-down, up-down strokes, every afternoon Sister Cleatus, with her beads clacking and her pointer tapping against the blackboard, drilling them in cursive. The paper they practice on is coarse like newsprint but printed with blue lines; the pencils are number two soft Ticonderogas which Sister has them line up to sharpen. When it’s his turn Francis inserts his into the sharpener, cranks and cranks. The rich scent of cedar shavings, the earthy graphite. Penmanship, it’s called, and it’s one of his favorite subjects, though Sister Cleatus will not allow them to use actual pens with nibs dipped into ink until they come back from Christmas, until they master Palmer with pencils, though Francis, without Sister’s knowing, has been practicing with pen and ink every Saturday when he goes with his father to the office. §

His father, whose name is in gold letters on the frosted glass of his office door, is in charge of the flurry of traffic between the

mill operators and the suppliers of coke from the honeycombed yards of the ovens east of the city, the shipments of iron ore from the Mesabi Range then barged across the Great Lakes and down the Allegheny, all fired and smelted in Pittsburgh’s blast furnaces, ingots of pig iron shipped to the finishing mills up and down the three rivers via the Pennsylvania Railroad’s crosshatching of tracks, receiving and transmitting the industrialists’ messages, coded, secure, the tap, tap, tapping of the telegraph keys—tonnages, oreto-carbon ratios, delivery dates—messages dispatched all across the city by a fleet of bicyclists.

Francis P. Quinn, Jr. became Jack Quinn when he started at Central Catholic, where the boys came from all over the city and no one knew him. “I go by ‘Jack’,” he announced to Brother Fabian that first day, slightly embarrassed by the swaggering sound of that one short, clipped syllable, but didn’t it sound sporting, though, full of spark and gumption.

Miss Wilby, whose Saturday charge he is, sets him up in the outer office while she types and files and fetches and he, on sheets of fine vellum bearing in swirling intaglio the letters of the company’s name, spends hours practicing the bedspring ovals, the up-down strokes, then the Palmer alphabet itself, letters big and small, not with pencil but with pen and ink. He lifts the pen’s ivory shaft from the silver-plated stand, dunks the steel nib into the pot of dark ink. He tries not to drip, but drips, drips, and blobs. And even if he doesn’t drip, he can’t manage to keep enough ink on the nib to write the whole name. It seems an impossible task, but finally, after several Saturdays, he manages without a single drip to

copy in one fluid motion of nib to vellum, his father’s signature exactly, the one his father affixes to the bottoms of all the letters Miss Wilby types. Saturday after Saturday he reproduces his father’s signature, rocking the blotter back and forth over the ink as if in the pressing he might adhere himself if not to his father than at least to the page.

The Palmer capital “Q” is written basically as a large number “2,” though his father, when signing his name, always adds beneath the letter a stack of flourishing loops, extending it beyond the last “n” in “Quinn.” Sister Cleatus objects to this but Francis remains firm in his refusal to obey her. He continues to add the loops. For this and his obstinance he is accused of the sin of pride, an accusation he carries with, well, pride. As for that Palmer capital “F”, that, Jack recalls as he signs his legal name to his will, to the documents giving power of attorney to his daughter, to the sales agreement and the medical directives this fancy-pants place requires, that “F” never seemed to him like the other letters. It faces away from the others, from the lower-case letters in “Francis,” toward the left of the page, as if its attention were elsewhere, as if in defiance or attempting escape.