Henry Steig has been at various times a jazz musician, a cartoonist, a lifeguard, a toolmaker, a photographer, and a teacher of arts and crafts, but he has concentrated on writing for the past twelve years. His stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Collier’s, The Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, and various other magazines, and in 1941 he published a novel about jazz musicians, Send Me Down. Mr. Steig comes from a family of artists; the best-known member of the family in that field is his brother, William. In 1945 the Steig family had a group exhibition at the New Art Circle in New York, showing work by Mr. Steig’s parents, three sons, Henry, William, and Arthur, and their wives. Both of Mr. Steig’s parents have had one-man shows; art has been their main interest for the past ten years or so.

_____________

 

My Father, who was born in Lemberg, now better known as Lvov, in Austrian Poland, came to New York in 1903, at the age of twenty-eight. He came alone. My mother remained in Lemberg with their eighteen-month-old son, to be sent for later.

Papa made the ocean leg of the journey from Hamburg on the German S. S. “Pennsylvania” as a steerage passenger, spending nights in a dormitory below deck with a lot of other men. The three-tiered bunks had shallow sideboards. Occupants who did not hold tight to the woodwork were apt to be spilled, so falling asleep was dangerous. All night long, in rough weather, people were picking themselves off the floor and clambering back to their berths, crying and cursing in twenty-one languages. My father, who knew Polish, German, Yiddish, and some Hebrew, no doubt made himself heard in all four languages.

Steerage fare was only forty dollars, but dollars were worth a lot, then, and he didn’t think that the steamship company was taking a loss on its main cargo. He grumbled about things, as did many of his fellow-travelers. But they, at heart, approved of the profit system, and seemed to feel that they could not expect better food and accommodations than they were getting, at the price. Papa didn’t see it that way. The way he saw it, those below deck were paying for the luxuries of those above, whom they outnumbered by far. The ship exemplified capitalist society, which, he was sure, was going to be changed. Some day, steerage would be abolished; no one would be made to serve as ballast. That day could not be far off, he felt; he had to try to be patient.

But papa had no patience at all with the behavior of the stewards, whom he looked upon as an unbearably arrogant police force. The stewards, in their passion for cleanliness, kept pushing people aside with their mops and brooms. Sometimes, when they were in a hurry, they even used their feet to get immigrants out of their way.

One day my father was sitting on his luggage, near his bunk, reading. A steward began mopping up the dormitory. Rounding a corner at the end of an aisle between bunks and coming upon my father, he kept right on going. Papa was wearing a pair of new, pointy, ankle-high shoes of black patent leather and gray suede with shiny white buttons, very stylish in Lemberg. Before he could jump, they were doused with dirty water, and so was his new carpetbag. “Be careful, there, you slob,” he said. The steward was not accustomed to that kind of talk from a steerage passenger. In a rage, he ordered my father out of there, threatening to hit him with the mop if he did not move fast enough. Now papa, who at seventy-two can still haul himself up a rope hand over hand, though not a large man, must have been an exceptionally strong and agile one in 1903. The steward didn’t stand a chance. Papa got quick possession of the mop and pushed it in the steward’s face. After another day or two at sea, the stewards were referring to my father as “that mad Polack” and treating him like a first-class passenger.

Papa was not a religious man. At sixteen, after thirteen years of intensive religious training, which had begun to bore him, he had got hold of some socialist literature. Karl Marx won. Deciding he’d had enough religion, my father dropped it all. But he remained a firm believer in freedom of worship, and he felt that Jews had as much right to hold religious services as the people of other faiths aboard ship.

There were some cabins in the hold, occupied by family groups. On the first Saturday at sea, a Jewish family in one of those cabins invited some people in to join them in prayer. Presently a team of stewards began sweeping out the place. The congregation found another room, but again were swept out. Somehow, every room they tried to use turned out to be the one which the stewards felt needed their immediate attention. My father decided that this was no coincidence. He put an end to it by going to the captain.

All in all, papa was far from pleased with life below deck and he made up his mind to let the world know about it. In Poland he had earned his living as a house painter, but he had also been a free-lance journalist and had had a lot of stories and articles published in liberal and radical European newspapers. He made up his mind to write a piece describing conditions in steerage on the S. S. “Pennsylvania” and get it printed in an American newspaper.

_____________

 

After getting settled with his older brother, Jake, who had come to America earlier and lived in a lower East Side slum, papa had to find a job. This brought up a problem. He didn’t want to go on indefinitely dividing his talents and energies between house painting and journalism; he wanted to specialize in one or the other.

In those days, any painter worth his salt knew how to grind and mix colors and make varnishes and enamels from raw materials, and how to do all sorts of fancy work, like glazing, wood-graining, and gilding. My father was an expert at all of that. In addition, he could decorate wall panels with garlands of flowers and fruit, or with groups of lively pink cherubs sitting on clouds, copied from a small master print. As a child, I saw an example of his work in the foyer of a swell apartment house and thought papa a great artist.

A man could get a certain amount of aesthetic pleasure out of house painting. Still, writing appealed to papa as the superior trade, intellectually. Moreover, writing could do more to help remake the world. But there was little money in it. Another big trouble was editors. They were forever cutting his stories and changing them, and he didn’t like the way some editors took charge of his ideas, which, he said, they wanted him to express not as his own genius dictated, but in the indescribably wonderful style they would use if they were writers. As a house painter, he could call his soul his own. On the other hand, house painting was a seasonal occupation. A man was lucky if he was kept busy at it more than half the year. Journalism was steady work; people wanted newspapers every day, like food.

Papa decided that the most practical thing to do, right off, was to get a job as a painter and work on the steamship story in his spare time.

The letter which follows, written to mama by papa when he had been in New York for about two weeks, sums up the situation:

May 3, 1903

Dearest Lola,

I’m quite confident that we’ll be happy here, though there may be something of a struggle in the beginning, for things in general look promising. Good beef costs only 12 cents a pound (almost half a kilo) and you can get the choicest steak for sixteen cents. Though I am as yet a poorer man than I was in Poland, I eat like a king on a holiday. I can even afford many delicacies, such as bananas, grapes, nuts, figs, and dates, which we hardly ever saw at home. Gas is so plentiful that it is used not only for lighting the streets but also, in all but the poorest homes, for cooking, which is a great convenience. There is a good variety of excellent clothing at reasonable prices, and, as for cotton goods—just to give you an idea, a fine handkerchief costs only a few cents!

There seems to be plenty of work in the house-painting trade. I’ve already got a job, which pays a dollar and a half a day (seven and a half Polish crowns). That’s not bad, considering I’m new here, and soon, with my experience, I should be doing better.

The language is difficult, mainly because of its chaotic grammar, which contains more exceptions than rules, and so causes a lot of confusion. I’m making fair headway, though, by studying the newspapers, and books which I get from the public library, like Shakespeare’s tragedies, in English, which I know so well in Polish. I do a little writing at night and hope eventually to get some work from one of the local papers.

The customs are strange. New Yorkers hardly ever tip their hats to one another, and when it’s warm, many of them go about without coats or vests or collars. Imagine a tradesman waiting on you in his shirtsleeves! But that’s a common occurrence, and I’m getting used to it. . . .

I miss you and the baby terribly and of course I’m bending every effort to get passage money together as quickly as possible.

Love,
Joseph

_____________

 

At About this time, my father completed the steamship article. He wrote it in Yiddish, having in mind the Forward, a comparatively new Jewish evening paper, then the only one of any importance professing socialist policies. The story took up many sheets of paper. These he joined end to end with paste, forming one long single sheet, the way it was done in Lemberg.

One fine spring morning, taking time off from his painting job, he put on a new gray cutaway, his new shoes, and a black fedora, rolled up the manuscript, and set out for the editorial offices of the Forward. As he walked along through the East Side, swinging his cane, he heard some children behind him chanting:

Greenhorn, popcorn, five cents a bag;
July, July, go to hell and die.

Looking around, he saw one of them pointing at his feet, amidst general laughter. Guessing they might be Jewish children, papa inquired in Yiddish what it was that tickled them so. “The shoes,” one of them answered in Yiddish. “Where’d you get them? Such green shoes!” My father’s shoes looked all right to him. Silly children, what did they know? With a laugh and a shrug, he continued on his way. The kids followed, picking up the greenhorn, popcorn chant again. Fearing that they might escort him thus all the way to the offices of the Forward, he considered flight. But that would be undignified. Finally, pretending to like the ditty, he asked the children to repeat it. They drew away a little and eyed him suspiciously. “Well, let’s hear,” he said and gave them a couple of pennies. They went through it twice while he kept time with his cane. “That was fine,” he said, handing over more pennies. “Come on, now, let’s have it again, all together!” They obliged him, but their hearts weren’t in it. The chanting tapered off, and stopped.

Papa had letters of introduction which showed that he was a capable worker for the Cause and he expected to be welcomed at the Forward as a comrade and fellow journalist. But he was a greenhorn—his get-up gave him away—and the editor’s guards weren’t letting any greenhorns in if they could help it. However, by promising he would not leave until he had seen the editor, he broke through after an hour or so.

Mr. Liessin, the editor-in-chief, read the letters of introduction and then papa handed him the manuscript. Liessin watched in alarm as it sprang open on his desk. It unrolled itself to the end of the desk and down to the floor. Liessin rose from his chair, backing away from papa, and began calling for help. “Save me! Rescue me from the Green Shoes!” Papa was badly startled for a moment.

An assistant rushed in, ready for laughs. He was wearing bright orange shoes, papa noticed.

“Keep your eye on him,” Liessin told the assistant with a gesture at papa, and picked up a ruler. He measured papa’s story and announced that it was three yards long. “What is this, for God’s sake, a romance?”

My father told him what it was.

“Didn’t you ever hear of paper clips where you come from?”

“Where I come from,” papa explained, “editors like manuscripts kept all in one piece.”

“A strange country.”

“I suppose so. All that mattered there was the writing itself.”

“Don’t be a wise guy,” said the assistant. “You’re in America now.”

“All right, all right,” papa answered. “Tomorrow I’ll get a pair of shoes like yours, just give me a chance.”

“That’ll do,” the editor said to my father and dismissed him.

Papa got a criticism a few days later. Liessin said that the writing was passable but the piece would have to be cut drastically. Papa took it home, condensed it, and resubmitted it on separate sheets, clipped together. It was a week before he got to Liessin again. The editor wanted the story cut still more, a lot more. Papa complied, and a few more days passed. The colder the story got, the shorter Liessin wanted it. It shrunk to a few lines, and in the end petered out into nothing. Papa put the pen aside and concentrated on the brush.

_____________

 

It was now June. Mama, waiting in Poland, was getting impatient. She and papa had set up house in Lemberg only a few years earlier, and she had some nice things which were still in good condition. She estimated that by selling the furnishings she could manage to pay her train fare to Hamburg. She hoped, also, to save some money for incidental travelling expenses from a little dressmaking business, carried on at home, by which she was supporting herself and the baby. All she would need, then, would be a forty-dollar steerage ticket for herself and a few dollars for the baby’s passage. She explained this in a letter to papa, adding: “If America is such a wonderful country, it seems to me you should have the forty dollars by now. We’re lonely and the baby keeps asking for you, so please hurry.”

Here’s papa’s answer:

June 16, 1903

Beloved!

Surely my loneliness is as great as yours.

Don’t forget that “The Golden Land” is only a figure of speech and that I started with nothing. There is more than the forty dollars to worry about. I must establish a home for the three of us, but that requires capital, and how much can I save out of nine dollars a week when I have to pay Jake four (three for board and one for my own steamship ticket, which he got for me on the installment plan)?

Then there is something else—a totally unforeseen difficulty involving a certain American trick of the trade which is being kept secret from me, out of professional jealousy. Not to bother you with the details, I’ll say only that it’s costing me three dollars a week! That is, I’d be earning at least twelve dollars a week by now if my employers did not take advantage of that little gap in my knowledge. However, they won’t be able to keep the trick a secret from me much longer. Greenhorn or not, I was a much better painter when I was an apprentice than some of the “journeymen” I see around me, judging from their work.

You must know that our reunion cannot be brought about any too soon for my own happiness. Please be patient.

Lovingly,
Joseph

As the letter indicates, papa had no false modesty about his skill and speed at house painting. He was competent at handling men and materials, too. In the old country, working for a big contractor, he had been in charge of a whole crew of house painters. In New York, however, he was treated as a beginner and given a lot more than his share of the dirty work, such as scraping wallpaper, bleaching floors, pushing furniture about, and cleaning brushes—simply because he did not know how to mix kalsomine. The men he worked with made a big mystery of it, hiding behind closed doors.

That was the trade secret papa had referred to in his letter to mama. He tried again and again to spy on the process, but the other men were on guard. All he got was: “Mind your own business—you’re too damned nosey for a greenhorn.”

Papa quit his first job because of this, hoping to learn the secret elsewhere. But when he applied for his second job, he was asked at once whether he knew how to mix kalsomine, and had to admit he didn’t. Then and there he was marked as fresh off the boat, and given wallpaper to scrape. In vain he protested that he was a master at decorative work. That counted for nothing when the foreman on the job could say to the boss about papa: “He’s a green one—he doesn’t know from kalsomine.”

To get to know from kalsomine became of burning importance to my father. Kalsomine was keeping him separated from mama and the baby—that’s what it all boiled down to.

He stayed on the second job for several weeks, trying to nose out the secret, and failed. The other painters were themselves immigrants, not very long in America, who had had trouble with kalsomine, too, in the beginning. But, as they told my father, “We all had to go through what you’re going through. Why should we make it easy for you?”

_____________

 

With summer came the slack season, and papa was laid off. Having learned that paint dealers often did contracting on the side, he began running around from one paint store to another, trying to pick up odd jobs. What he got didn’t amount to much; it hardly paid for board at his brother’s. He wrote mama sadly: “Please bear with me a little longer. I’m working very hard, dreaming of the day when we’ll be together again in a home of our own, just the three of us. I’m not at all happy at Jake’s place. Were it possible, I’d get out of there tomorrow, if only to escape the bedbugs, which are of an exceptionally large and ferocious breed. Fortunately there is a public park nearby, at Seventh Street. That’s where I sleep when weather permits. A refreshing spot of cool green in the heart of the city. It’ll be nice for the baby . . . “

Not long afterwards, around the middle of July, things began to look up for papa. He had made some samples of his graining work on squares of cardboard, simulating on each a different kind of wood. These made an impression on the paint dealers he showed them to and by luck he found one, by the name of Wernow, who had enough work to keep one man busy for the rest of the summer. Wernow took papa on at the standard rate for greenhorns of a dollar and a half a day, promising to pay two dollars a day when papa proved he was a good all-round house painter.

The next day, papa was put to work, all by himself, in a flat which was to be completely repainted. For the first time, he found himself alone with a bag of kalsomine. Excitedly he opened the bag and examined the white powder it contained. It appeared to be ordinary whitewash. He suspected that he had been the victim of a hoax. He mixed some up in a pail of water and tried it on the ceiling. It still looked like the stuff he had used a thousand times in the old country, so he went calmly ahead. Presently a strange thing happened: the mix began to thicken. It changed rapidly into a sort of pudding. The warm weather and the effort of wielding the big kalsomine brush with such an unwilling vehicle soon had him in a sweat. He tried stirring some more water into it to thin it, but that only broke it up and made it lumpy. He was afraid to go any farther with this unpredictable substance, and after taking a good look at the patch of ceiling he had already done, he left everything as it was and ran away.

Next morning, he was looking for another job. At noon, having found nothing, he went guiltily back to Wernow’s paint store to try to square himself.

“What happened to you, anyway?” Wernow demanded.

“Had a little trouble with the ceiling.”

“A fine mess you made of it!”

Papa had to explain why.

“You green wretch,” Wernow said, “all you had to do was ask me about the kalsomine. I’d have told you.”

“You would?”

“Sure, there’s nothing to it. Mix it with hot water, strain it through cheese cloth, and then set it to cool in a tub of cold water. When it jells, it’s ready to use.”

“Thanks,” papa sighed and waited.

“Well, don’t just hang around! Get to work!”

Back on the job, papa happily cleaned up the ceiling, and did it over, properly. After that, everything went well. At the end of the week he was docked a day’s pay, but the following week Wernow began paying him two dollars a day.

At about this time papa received mama’s answer to his last letter. If he was hinting at the possibility of a very long separation, she said, he had better get the notion out of his head. She wanted him to send her passage at once, and she didn’t care how he got the money for it. If necessary, she would beg, borrow, or steal it herself. She was coming to New York with the baby before the summer was over—nothing would stop her, somehow she’d find a way. The letter tickled papa and had a greatly spiriting effect upon him. He bought a steerage ticket for mama on the installment plan, paying ten dollars down, and sent it right off. Then he rented a three-room flat on Avenue D and equipped it with second-hand furniture and cheap new kitchen ware. He got the money from friends, cheerfully putting himself in hock. What was there to be afraid of, now that he knew from kalsomine?

_____________

 

Mama arrived at Ellis Island with the baby on. a hot day at the end of August. The first impressions she got of America, on the way to Avenue D with papa, were far from favorable. The crowds of noisy people in the shopping district alarmed her. The men walking around without jackets or collars disturbed her, even though papa had warned her about it. And then there was a sight for which she had not been prepared at all: men in their undershirts. She saw them from the trolley-car window—workmen busy at an excavation— and she was dismayed.

She got another shock when they reached Avenue D. Someone was throwing refuse out of a window. Papa got her and their son indoors quickly.

He thought the flat was very nice. His brother’s home, where he had been living since April, had only one window, no running water, and, for cooking, an old coal stove. The new flat had running water, a window in each room, and a real kitchen, with a sink and a gas range. But mama had not as yet seen Jake’s home. She could only compare the new place to her apartment in Lemberg, which had had larger, lighter rooms, besides running water, and also a view. There was no view on Avenue D—no vista, not a speck of green, only dismal brick walls.

Mama made no complaint until she got to the bedroom and took a look from the window into the alley that separated them from the next building. Then she turned to papa, visibly shaken. “A land of barbarians!” she said. “Just look—underwear on the wash-lines! Men’s and women’s underthings, hanging right there for everyone to see!”

“It’s time for supper,!” papa said and took her to the kitchen to show her the gas range, the one big selling point he had left. Proudly he lit a match and touched it to one of the gas rings, opening the valve. But nothing happened. He had applied for service and paid the five-dollar deposit, but perhaps had not given sufficient notice. Anyhow, the gas had not been turned on. There was no way to cook the steak and fixings papa had bought that morning. They couldn’t even warm up some milk for the baby. Mama took him up in her arms and began to cry that she wanted to go home. The baby began crying too. Papa assured mama that the stove would be working the next day, but she wasn’t crying about the stove; that had merely set her off. It wasn’t poverty that she minded so much, either. She had known there would be a struggle at first, she said, and though the general situation was worse than she had expected, she could adjust herself to it. “I guess I can even learn to scrub floors. What I can’t bear is the thought of spending the rest of my life among such low, uncivilized people.”

“You don’t know any of them yet,” papa said.

“I don’t want to know people who put their underwear on public display and who throw garbage out of the window!”

“You’re a snob,” said papa.

Mama gasped and said: “I’m going home with baby on the next boat!”

This became a stock threat. Mama used it on papa for a long while afterward, but only when they had a rather serious tiff. Once she had seen how her brother-in-law lived, she settled down to make the most of what she and papa had.

_____________

 

As a result of his first, abortive attempt at journalism in New York, my father neglected it altogether for two years. He stuck to house painting, working himself up to a weekly wage of eighteen dollars. Then he got back to journalism—directly through house painting, as it happened.

One of his acquaintances was a man by the name of Shalitt, also a house painter, who knew Jaffe, the business manager of the Forward. One day Jaffe called in Shalitt and gave him the job of redecorating the editorial offices. It was too big for Shalitt to handle by himself and he took papa on as a partner. At this time, Liessin was gone. Abraham Cahan had become the editor-in-chief.

Shalitt and my father chipped in for materials and went to work. “It’s a funny world,” papa said on the job. “Last time I was here, I had hopes of being employed as a writer.”

“You’re better off as a painter,” Shalitt said. “This partnership thing may turn out big. But these pencil-pushers around here— notice how shabby they are? I bet they’re all starving.”

Papa sighed.

“You still want to be a writer?”

“If they’d only give me a try at it.”

“Hmm. Well, maybe I can fix it. But don’t blame me if you’re sorry later,” said Shalitt. During the dickering with the business manager, Shalitt had got to know his way around at the Forward. He took my father by the arm and led him straight to Cahan’s office. “This man’s a good little writer,” Shalitt said to the editor-in-chief. “Maybe you can use him. But don’t take him away from me until we get through with the painting.”

Cahan was willing to be shown, and asked papa to hunt up some labor news. The Forward was starting a morning paper to compete with the conservative Jewish Morning Journal, and Cahan said that there was room for a good labor reporter on the new staff he was getting together. Papa began hunting around for material, after work. He submitted some pieces at the end of the week. Cahan found them acceptable, and within a month papa had his own desk at the Forward.

Jaffe was puzzled. He wondered where he had seen my father before. Working on a piece of copy, papa played dumb. Then Jaffe placed him.

“Aha! First you were shmeering with the brush, now you’re shmeering with the pen!”

“That’s right,” papa said. “Isn’t America a wonderful country?”

_____________

 

Pretty soon, papa became a feature writer. Every week he delivered to the Forward four human-interest stories, each of two full columns, dealing with life on the lower East Side, in addition to the labor-news reporting, and, also, occasional translations into Yiddish of currently significant articles from Polish and German periodicals.

For turning out about twelve hundred words of copy per day, on the average, papa got a by-line and twelve dollars a week—six dollars less than he had earned at house painting. My mother was proud of him for making good at the writing job, but she didn’t like lowering the standard of living to which they had been accustomed. Observing that the by-line buttered no turnips, she began to take in dressmaking, at home, to help make up that six-dollar difference.

At first, papa liked the change from house painting; writing was cleaner work, much less strenuous, physically, and more satisfying as a means of self expression. But then he began to run into difficulties. For one thing, Cahan did not like papa’s Yiddish, which he criticised as showing too strong a German influence. He preferred what he called Yiddisher Yiddish, that is to say, a more Russian Yiddish, which was what the readers of the Forward were accustomed to. In this my father was able to make a satisfactory adjustment in a short time, for he had a good ear and the language was a flexible one.

Less easily adjusted were differences of opinion as to how socialism might best be brought about. The Forward backed an organization called the Yiddisher Arbeiter Bund. But papa considered it a separatist group, nationalistic in conception, in violation of the whole spirit of Marxism. Here my father was unwilling to make any concessions. He didn’t hesitate to protest against the Forward’s political policies and, also, about the way some of his pieces were being blue-pencilled. He and Cahan had a number of arguments. Cahan said it seemed that house painting had spoiled my father for journalism. Papa answered that to work any longer on the Forward would make him feel he was betraying the Cause. He quit, then and there, and went back to house painting. Financially, this was a sound move, for a second son had been born and there was an extra mouth to feed.

It was spring, a busy season for painters, and papa had no trouble getting a job. He swung a brush pretty contentedly for a few months. But then the slack season came and he was laid off. He got restless and thought of writing again. He didn’t want another desk job, though; he wanted to put his writing on a free-lance basis. He explained this to Cahan, and Cahan gave him some special assignments. Papa did several during the summer. Then, in September, when things livened up in the painting business, he went back to that.

_____________

 

By 1914, there were four sons in the family. Neither free-lance writing nor working as a painter for wages brought in enough money to provide for us as our parents wished, and mama was too busy looking after us to do much dressmaking. So papa decided to go into the contracting business. He was encouraged by a friendly real-estate agent who let him bid on a small job, as a starter. Awarded the contract, papa rented a little shop and hired a few good men, paying them what he felt they were worth, which was something more than union scale.

Almost overnight, it seemed, he became an employer—or, as my mother had it, an exploiter. I was then eight years old and I can remember the arguments.

Before that, when mama got angry with papa, she sometimes called him a dauber. Now she began referring to him as Boss when she was annoyed with him. “Well, Boss,” she would say, “how much profit did you sweat out of your workers today?” Then they’d square off for a real argument. It appeared, after fourteen years of marriage, that they needed a new subject. Now they had one, and they did very well with it, for it proved inexhaustible, taking them into politics, where, since neither had any influence on the other, a decision could never be reached.

Papa wasn’t getting rich at contracting, but we were better off than we had been, and mama, who felt nothing was too good for her sons, admitted that the new prosperity had its points. But how, she still wanted to know, could papa reconcile the change in his economic status with his socialist principles?

“I am not responsible for the profit system,” papa said, “and I have no choice but to operate under it until the masses wake up.” He was vexed with the masses for being so slow about waking up—the basic ideas of socialism were so simple and logical, a child could grasp them—but if the masses had not yet awakened, that did not mean they might not wake up tomorrow or the next day. When they did, he would be the first to rejoice. “Meanwhile, well, I’m going to be a realist.”

Mama laughed at that. “He thinks socialism is just around the corner and he calls himself a realist! I, at least, don’t fool myself about socialism. I know we’ll never see it in our lifetime.”

“Then wouldn’t it be a foolish martyrdom for me to remain a wage slave?” papa asked. “Don’t I do at least a little good, as a ‘boss,’ by paying my men more than they’d get elsewhere?”

“Behind that,” mama said, “there’s a guilty conscience. You’re still making a profit from other people’s labor, and you know in your heart it’s an unforgivable sin. I don’t see how you can honestly call yourself a socialist any longer.”

Papa became infuriated. He declared, loudly enough for the neighbors to hear, that he was a socialist, and a damned good one. The trouble with mama, he said, was that she saw things in black and white only, whereas he had an eye for grays.

Actually, my father wasn’t happy as an exploiter. He had always identified himself with the proletariat and felt it unseemly not to work with his hands. He often helped with a rush job or with some decorative detail that needed the master’s touch.

But when business was slow, the old longing for recognition as a man of ideas would come over him and he would try to appease it with some free-lance writing. For years he was pulled continually back and forth between manual labor and what some of his friends called “making with the pencil.” The whole problem was not resolved until much later on, in middle age. Then, discovering rather suddenly that what he had always really wanted to do most was to make pictures, papa dropped house painting and journalism, both, for fine art.

_____________

 

+ A A -
You may also like
Share via
Copy link