Part 1

Chapter 14,476 wordsPublic domain

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FINDING YOUTH

_A Human Experience_

NELSON ANDREWS

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS

BOSTON

_The reader of these pages need scarcely be told that there is truth in them, and a deeper truth in the lesson that they teach. For this chronicle, in its essentials, might have been written of many a life other than his whose simple story is here set down._

FINDING YOUTH

This story is told because others need to know it. They need to know it now, when all the world is making a blind struggle to find youth-a new creative spirit.

It is the experience of just a common, everyday man-myself. But thousands of others have gone through my same experience. They are not finding the help, though, that I found. It is because I found this help-found something that man has always been seeking-that I feel impelled to tell my story.

My name is Harvey Allen. I was born in New York City and had lived there all my life. When the Big Thing happened, I was sixty years old. My wife and I had two sons, both married. We had six grandchildren.

We had lived in the same Harlem apartment for twenty years-with front windows looking out on the street, side air-shafts, and a rear view of clotheslines and fire-escapes. I never see a clothesline now that I don’t think of that day in October.

The neighborhood had changed since our coming. The Ghetto had expanded and taken us in. The color-line was drawn just a block away, in the next street. But the place was home, and we had stuck there.

One of our sons, Walter, lived in Yonkers. The younger son, George, lived over in Brooklyn. We didn’t see either of them often. They both worked hard to support their families. Evenings and Sundays they had their different family interests; and their wives had their own relatives to visit.

My wife, however, made frequent trips to their homes. She helped our daughters-in-law by doing most of the sewing for the grandchildren. But she always returned in time to have my dinner ready at night, when I got home tired from my day’s work. She has never neglected me. Our youthful love affair was a good deal romantic, and we have always been real pals. She is a descendant of one of the old New York families of the best American pioneer blood.

Sometimes of an evening we went to a picture-show. But we had dropped into the habit of spending most of our evenings at home. Occasionally some old friend would call; or Miss Marsh, who had a small room in the apartment across the hall, would drop in for a few minutes. But I usually read aloud, and my wife sewed. We both have always been great book-lovers.

I have never lost my youthful satisfaction in just being with my wife. I liked to look and see her seated there by the table, her white head bent above her sewing, and the rays from the droplight falling across her hands. Her slight figure always carried an air about it; and her hands were shapely and delicate, in spite of all the hard work she had done. Her hair still kept its girlish curl, and she wore it in a loose Grecian knot at the back of her head. She wore her cheap clothes, too, with the distinction of a New Yorker.

Whenever she felt my gaze, she would lift her eyes and smile at me across the table. I waited for this smile. A certain light in her soft brown eyes has never failed to fascinate me.

Whenever Miss Marsh dropped in, I would let my wife entertain her. I would smoke my pipe and read to myself. Miss Marsh got on my nerves. She was from the South; had seen better days, but was now clerking in a dry-goods store on One Hundred and Twenty-Fifth Street. She was a thin, little old maid, who tried to be girlish. She laughed and gushed a good deal, and dyed her hair and painted her face. But my wife, who is kind to everyone, always defended her.

“Poor little thing! If she didn’t try to keep up her spirits and look as young as possible, she’d lose her position in the store. And she does say some sharp, bright things. She leads a lonely life. And I don’t believe she has enough to eat.”

I can tell these things now about Miss Marsh; for later she and I came to understand each other better.

I worked in a downtown printing-plant. It was an old established concern, and I had worked there for years. I had been foreman in one of the departments until they put in a younger man. When the old proprietor died, and his son stepped into the father’s shoes, a good many changes were made. The son was a modern efficiency man.

It cut pretty deeply into my pride to be shifted around from one job to another-each a little inferior to the former and commanding less pay-and then being always finally misplaced by a younger man. But I swallowed it all and stayed on. I knew that jobs were not lying around loose for men of my years. My long experience mended a good many blunders made by the younger chaps in the plant. They acknowledged it, too, whenever I jokingly told them. But at the same time they smiled indulgence of “old Pop,” as they all called me.

I took this title goodnaturedly, but something in me always shrank from it a little. It was from the patronage of youth that I shrank-a patronage just tinged with contempt for my years. But I shrank more from their pity the day that I finally got my discharge. And they did pity me, for they all liked me. I know that my sense of humor made me popular with them.

The discharge came unexpectedly, though I had been fearing and dreading it for a long time. This fear and dread had begun to look out of my eyes. I caught it sometimes in the mirror, and felt a pride of resentment against it, as something that hurt my self-respect. But what hurt me worse was the knowledge that my wife saw it, too. I shrank sensitively from any depreciation of myself in her feelings. My masculine pride wanted to keep her always impressed with my strength.

She never said anything; but at times I could feel her anxiously watching me. There was a sympathetic encouragement in her smile, and in the press of her hand on my arm after she had kissed me good-bye when I was starting to work in the morning. I always met this smile with one of whimsical reassurance. But we both had the feeling of bluffing some menacing calamity. And when I walked away, my shoulders drooped under this cringing new self-consciousness, and my feet shuffled heavily. I had always walked upright and with a spring. I realized these changes in myself and resented them. But somehow I didn’t seem to have the power to throw them off.

The boss who discharged me hated to do it, and was as kind about it as he possibly could be. He assured me that it was not because I wasn’t doing my work well. Then, realizing that this was an unnecessary thing to say, he cleared his throat, embarrassed. They all knew there was no part of a printer’s work that I didn’t understand and couldn’t do. But the new management’s policy was for young men. My only fault was accumulated years.

“You’ve done your share of work, anyhow, Pop,” he said; “now it’s up to your two boys to take care of you. You worked hard for ’em, and fitted ’em with the best kind of training to make their own way.”

That’s the conventional balm always put on this kind of hurt. Guess I smiled a little ironically. My two boys were having a pretty hard struggle to take care of the responsibilities they already had. George had had a good deal of sickness in his family, and Walter was supporting his wife’s parents. I had been letting them both have money.

It wouldn’t have been quite so hard if they had waited until Saturday night to discharge me. But they didn’t. It was Tuesday morning. And they were going to give me a full week’s pay because of my long service. They meant to be kind, of course, in their way-trying to let me down easy. But the offer of the full week’s pay added to my humiliation and stirred in me a lot of bitterness. My head went hot for a minute and the blood drummed in my ears. But I managed to speak quietly, and smiled when I said,-

“I only want what’s owing me. I’ve always worked for all I got.”

In going over this scene so many times since, I know that I felt something deeper than just my own bitter resentment. I had a vague sort of feeling that it was up to me to stand for the justice due to other men of my years, in my same fix. These fraternal bonds are in our blood.

The boss tried to expostulate. I stood firm. And they finally made out my time. I took what was due me, and the boss and I shook hands. I could feel him watching me until I got out of the office. I knew the kind of look that was in his face, but I didn’t turn around to see.

Leaving the plant that day was the hardest thing I have ever done. My first impulse was to get my coat and hat and just slip away. But my pride would not let me do that. So I braced and went back to the room where I had been working. I told some of the fellows with whom I was the best acquainted that I had been fired; and shook hands with them in farewell.

There was a pretty tight feeling in my throat. But they helped me to try and carry the thing off as something of a joke. I could see the pity, though, in their eyes.

It was raining-a cold, drizzling, late-October rain. But I did not notice it. I took the same old route I had taken for years, to the Sixth Avenue Elevated station.

I did not remember, however, until I started up the station steps, that it was forenoon and not my usual time for going home. Then I halted and moved back again to the sidewalk, and stood there in the rain. I understood later why I had done this. I had been suddenly jerked out of a deep rut of habit, and was dazed at finding myself in new conditions. Then, too, I was weighted, groggy, with the aching depression that I was done for, out of the game-old.

I dreaded to go home and tell my wife. If I had been a drinking man, I should have gone off on a drunk.

People jostled by me on their way up the stairs to the Elevated. Dripping umbrellas swished against me. My overcoat was wet, and the rain trickled from my hat-brim. But I stood there lost, dead-like one just sent out of life.

Then my gaze was suddenly caught by an old chap who sold newspapers in this district. I often bought my evening paper from him. He was a little old fellow, with watery eyes, a stubby beard, and straight gray hair that grew a little long. He had one incongruous feature, though-good teeth that were kept clean. I had always noticed them. My vague interest in him had tabulated him a boozer. But to-day I watched him with a new and curious fascination.

He had halted in a doorway, and stood there, hunched up, with his newspapers under his arm. He still wore a summer’s stained and battered straw hat, and a dirty bandana handkerchief was tied about his neck. He was wet and pinched with the cold. He had turned up the collar of his old coat, and stood with one hand in his trousers pocket, as with the effort to coax a little warmth. For the minute, he had forgotten everything but his own discomfort. The hopeless misery of the man looked out of his watery eyes.

A dull sympathy of understanding stirred in me. The next instant I resented this feeling. I resented it because it put me in this old chap’s class. Then the man’s necessity to live pushed him on again to work. He started in my direction, calling out his papers in a cracked and wheezy voice.

I bought a paper from him and started across the street. I had the feeling of hurrying away from something that was clutching at me-as a man, using his last spurt of strength to swim for his own life, tries to keep away from the reach of another who is drowning. But I couldn’t get away from this old fellow. The picture of him filled my inner vision. The feeling of him pulsed through my blood. We truly _were_ in the same class-both old, and both on the edge of life making our struggle.

It was noon. I went into a Child’s restaurant and bought a cup of coffee. That brought me back nearer to normal. I decided to look for another job. Having secured that, I could face my wife with more of encouragement.

All that afternoon I went from one printing-office to another. But they all turned me down. Of course, my rain-soaked appearance did not inspire much confidence. Had I waited, and gone the rounds looking a little less down-and-out, I might have met with success. But later experience has made me feel that it would have made small difference.

After each refusal I grew a few years older. I tried to make my sense of humor work a little. But it wouldn’t. That and every other part of my being was caught in the grip of a shrinking fear. By the time I turned into the doorway of my own Harlem apartment house I was a shuffling old man.

The halls of the house, as usual, were filled with the odors of Kosher cooking. I dragged up the one flight of stairs and fumbled the key into the lock of my own door. Downstairs the front door opened and closed. Someone had come in. A quick panic seized me that it might be Miss Marsh. I hurried into my own apartment to escape her. I was feeling now a new shrinking from Miss Marsh.

My wife was not at home. I remembered that she had said at breakfast that she was going over to Brooklyn to see the two grandchildren who had been sick. She might have been held up in the subway. But I was home more than an hour earlier than my usual time.

My first feeling was one of relief, not to find her there. It gave me the chance to change my wet clothing before she came. The rooms smelled of the newly generated steam hissing up in the pipes. The heat felt good. I took off my wet clothes and hung them on two chairs by the front-room radiator.

When I had finished dressing, my wife had not yet come. I filled the teakettle and put it on the gas-range in the kitchen. Then I turned on the light in the dining-room, and sat down by the table to read the want advertisements in the evening paper.

But my thoughts were not on the advertisements: they were seething with other things. Here, in the seclusion and comfort of my own home, they began to work more clearly. I finally threw the newspaper on the table, rose, dropped into the old rocker by the window, and let myself think. I have always been something of a philosopher; and I faced my situation now with more of that spirit.

I, Harvey Allen, was sound and well, with fair intelligence, and a thorough knowledge of my work, gained by long experience. I had never been a drinking man, but had worked steadily, and had always been reliable. Yet, because I was sixty years of age, I was being thrown on the dump-heap. My father had lived to be eighty-four. In all probability I should live to be as old. That would mean twenty-four years on the dump-heap. Twenty-four years!-over a fourth of my existence. It was not good social business. Something was wrong. We don’t allow that waste with a horse or cow.

I had worked steadily for wages ever since I was seventeen years old. Most folks would say that I ought to have laid up enough to take care of myself and wife during our old age. Perhaps I ought. But I hadn’t. My present bank-account was about a hundred dollars.

During the twenty years in which we had lived in this little dark New York apartment I had paid between ten and eleven thousand dollars in rent. Then there had been the expense of educating our two boys. It had been a big expense. For both my wife and I had wanted them to have the best. We had given them both technical educations at Cornell. Of course, they themselves had helped some. Then they had married young. Babies had come fast. I had had to help tide them over some financial rocks. And of late years my wages had been steadily decreasing.

Perhaps I had not been as provident as I should. But we had never spent money very wildly. I sent a look around the apartment. Everything we had was old. No new thing had been bought in the home for years. The only real extravagance had been the piano. But that had seemed almost a necessity to my wife, who loved music, and tried to keep up a little in her playing. And I had paid my debts; had always taken pride in never owing any man a cent. In fact, nothing had ever worried me more than indebtedness. But now-I cringed.

The boss had said that it was up to my two boys to take care of me. Why should it be? They had their children to care for and educate, just as I had had mine. Their first duty was that of fathers. Besides, even though they could, I didn’t want them to take care of me. All I asked was the opportunity to work and take care of myself and my wife, who was dependent upon me.

Then my gaze turned out of the window. It was still raining. The woman in the apartment up above had left some washing hanging on the line-some suits of men’s underwear. The lights from the back windows shone upon them. They flopped about weakly in the drizzling storm. Somehow they brought back to my mind the picture of the old chap standing that morning in the downtown doorway, his newspapers tucked under his arm, a helpless victim of the storm. It stirred, too, a vague, uneasy sense of affinity in me.

The clock struck. I roused from my thoughts and began to feel a little anxious about my wife. It was most unusual for her to be as late as this. I decided to telephone over to George’s and learn if she had started. I was just taking down the receiver, when I heard her key scrape in the lock. I went quickly and opened the door for her. She came in breathless from having hurried. I followed her into the dining-room, and saw that she was looking white and anxious. George was sick. Had pneumonia. He had been sitting up nights with his sick children, was all worn out, and had taken cold. George, who is the younger, has always been the less robust of our two boys.

“I should have gone over and relieved him of the care of the children,” my wife said, with the pain of self-censure in her face. “But I’m going back now to take care of him. I’ve come home to get some things that I need.”

“Why didn’t you telephone,” I reprimanded, “and have me bring over what you wanted, instead of making this long trip in the rain?”

But she had thought that I wouldn’t know where to find the things. And she wanted to see, too, that I was fixed all right, as she might be gone for several days.

“You must have something to eat,” I said, “then I’ll go back with you.”

I carried her wet umbrella into the kitchen, and she went into the bedroom to gather up her things.

I decided not to add to her worry by telling her now about my day’s experience. But she herself made the discovery. I have never been able to conceal anything from her for long. She went into the front room, and saw my wet clothes hanging on the chair by the radiator. Then she came out to the kitchen, where I was making a clumsy effort to brew her a cup of tea.

“How did you happen to get so wet to-day?” she asked.

The question took me unawares, and I hesitated before making the excuse that I had had no umbrella. She did not speak again, but stood there watching me. My hands trembled so that I spilled the hot water when I tried to pour it into the teapot.

Finally, I turned and met her gaze. Then there was no need of further words between us. When her eyes looked into mine, she seemed to know the whole story as fully as if I had told it to her. I could never describe the look that came into her face. It was something like the mother-look that I had seen there when she was nursing one of her babies. But it was intensified. She moved toward me, put her arms around my neck, and gazed up into my face.

“Don’t worry, Harve; you’ll find something else soon.”

I think it was the fine instinct of the thoroughbred in my wife that made her now call me “Harve.” It had been a long time since she had called me that. We had grown to be to each other just “Dad” and “Mother.” But the “Harve” brought with it a certain reassurance of youth-an encouragement to the personality that was mine irrespective of my fatherhood; to the _me_ who had been her lover, husband, pal. It sent a thrill through me that braced my spine. I put my arms around her, drew her to me, and laid my face down against hers.

Since then I have learned that the lover always is young.

From this time on my wife and I fell back into the old habit of calling each other “Harve” and “Mattie.”

During the days that followed I missed her more than I could ever tell. But we were both a good deal worried about George, who was pretty sick. I went over to Brooklyn each evening, to see how he was, and to do what things I could to help. The days I put in looking for work. George’s sickness, which was going to be a big expense, added to my feeling that I must find an immediate job.

It happened that Walter was not at home just at this time. He is an electrical engineer, and his company had sent him out in the state to do some work.

I trailed around to printing-offices, little and big. As yet I had made no attempt to find work outside of my own trade, in which I had had a lifetime of training. But nothing offered. A good many printers happened to be looking for jobs at this same time; and the younger man was always given the preference. I had two or three promises from bosses-men whom I had known. But these promises all turned out disappointments.

Then, one night, I was going home after having traveled the rounds all day in Harlem. I was tired and pretty well discouraged. After having paid my next month’s rent and some other small bills, and taken money over to Brooklyn to help out with the expenses of George’s sickness, I had only about ten dollars left in the bank.

By this time I had come to understand that I must look for some kind of work aside from a printing-office. So this day I had made the try for a job in several stores, and other places. But with no success. They had no jobs for men of my years. If I had been a cook, I might have got a place in a Third Avenue restaurant. There seemed to be more demands for cooks than for any other kind of labor.

As I walked along now, I saw a “Janitor Wanted” sign on the area railing of an apartment house. I halted and looked at it. After having lived all my life in New York apartments, I knew what a janitor’s job was like. It would mean taking my wife to live in a dark garbage-smelling basement. But I had come to a state of desperation-of almost panic. I hesitated, then swallowed my pride, braced myself, and went down the area-steps to the basement. This janitor’s job might tide over until I could find something else.

The wiry little Yiddish superintendent of the building was there, just inside the basement door, talking to two other applicants-a big negro and an Italian. When I arrived, the superintendent turned to me.

“How about this janitor’s job?” I asked; and my manner might have shown a little something of patronage.

He looked me over critically. The negro and Italian watched anxiously. Then the superintendent gave a Jew shrug, shook his head, and dismissed me with a belittling smile.

“I vant a man dat could lif’ de garbage cans und big tings. You vas too old.”

The last drop of gall was added to the bitterness of my humiliation. I was too old to be the janitor of even a third-rate Harlem apartment house. As I stumbled back up the area-steps, I heard him hire the big negro for the job. Every atom of me tingled so with humiliation that I forgot to take a street car, but walked the rest of the long distance home. By the time I reached there, I was trembling and pretty well all in.

III

And then came the happening which led to the final big experience of my life.