Appointment in Samarra (8 page)

In the last year before he got a job with Ed, Al frequently sat at Ed’s table in the Apollo. By that time Al was shooting such good pool that Joe cut him in on the weekly take of the
poolroom, and Al had permission to use house money when he wanted to play pool for money. He was only twenty-one and thinking of buying a half interest in the place. He spent plenty, but he made plenty; anywhere from fifty to two hundred bucks a week. He had a car—a Chevvy coop. He bought a Tuxedo. He went to Philadelphia when there was a musical comedy and he knew a girl there that worked in night clubs and shows, who would sleep with him if he let her know he was coming to town. He liked the name Al Grecco, and never thought of himself as Tony Murascho. The boys who sat at Ed Charney’s table would not have known who was meant if the name Tony Murascho had been mentioned. But they knew Al Grecco for a good kid that Ed liked well enough to ask him to eat with him once in a while. Al Grecco was no pest, and did not sit at the table unless he was asked. He never asked any favors. He was the only one who ever sat at the table who had nothing to do with the stock market, and that was a big relief. All the others, from Ed Charney down, were in the market or only temporarily out of it.

Al lived then at Gorney’s Hotel, which was not quite the worst hotel in Gibbsville. He never went near his home and did not go out of his way to speak to any of his brothers or sisters if he saw them on the street. They did not try to persuade him to come home, either. When they needed money badly they would send one of the younger lads to the poolroom and Al would give the kid a five or a ten, but Al did not like this. It put him off his game. After giving away a five or a ten he would get overanxious in trying to make it up, and the result would be he would lose. He wished the old man would support his family himself. And what about Angelo and Joe and Tom; they were all older than Tony—Al. And Marie, she was old enough to get married and the other kids didn’t have to go to school all their life.
He
didn’t. The old man ought to be glad he didn’t have to work in the mines. Al knew that the old man would have worked in the mines, and glad to get the bigger wages, but all he could do was navvy gang work. Even so, the old man ought to be glad he had outdoor work instead of mucking in a drift or robbing pillars or being on a rock gang
in tunnel work. That kind of work was hard work. Or at least Al thought so. He never had been in the mines himself—and never would, if he could help it.

One afternoon Joe Steinmetz didn’t come to work and he didn’t come to work. Joe did not like the telephone, because it interfered with a man’s privacy, and the next day when he again did not show up, Al took the Chevvy up to Point Mountain, where Joe lived with his wife. There was a crêpe on the door. Al hated to go in, but he thought he ought to…. It was Joe, all right. Mrs. Steinmetz was alone and hadn’t been able to leave the house except to have a neighbor get a doctor. Joe had died of heart disease and was good and dead by the time the doctor had sent the undertaker.

Joe left everything to his wife. She wanted Al to work for her, keep the poolroom going, and at first he thought it would be a good idea. But a few days of taking the day’s receipts all the way out to her house showed him he didn’t want to work for her. She offered to sell the good will and fixtures for five thousand dollars, but Al never had had that much money all at once in his life and there were only two ways he could borrow it: from the banks or from Ed Charney. He didn’t like banks or the people who worked in them, and he didn’t want to ask Ed. He didn’t think he knew Ed well enough to ask him for money. Anyhow, not that kind of money; five grand. So the poolroom went to Mike Minas, a Greek friend of George Poppas’s, and Al went to work for Ed Charney. He just went up to Ed and said: “Yiz have any kind of a job for me, Ed?” and Ed said yes, come to think of it, he had been thinking of offering him a job for a long time. They agreed on a fifty-dollar-a-week salary, and Al went to work. At first he merely drove Ed around on business and pleasure trips; then he was given a job of some importance, that of convoy to the booze trucks. He would follow two or three Reo Speedwagons, in which the stuff was transported. If a state policeman or a Federal dick stopped the trucks, it was Al’s business to stop too. It was an important job, because he took a chance of being sent to prison. When he stopped, it was his job to try to bribe the cops. It was an important job, because he carried up to ten
thousand dollars cash of Ed’s money in the Nash roadster which he used on these trips. It was up to him to use his head about bribing the cops; one or two of them wouldn’t be bribed, but most of them would listen to reason unless they had been sent out to pinch a truck or two to make a showing. He had to be smooth in his bribery offers to some of them. Some of them would take anything from a gold tooth to ten thousand dollars, but hated to be approached in the wrong way. On the few occasions when the cops refused to be bribed, it was Al’s job to get to the nearest telephone, tell Ed, and get Jerome M. Montgomery, Ed’s lawyer, working on the case. Al never was arrested for attempted bribery. In fact he was so successful generally that Ed took him off the convoy job and made him a collector. Ed trusted him and liked him, and made a lot of money for him, or gave him a lot of money. Sitting there at breakfast on this Christmas morning Al Grecco could write a check for more than four thousand dollars, and he had thirty-two one-thousand-dollar bills in his safety deposit box. For a kid of twenty-six he was doing all right.

Now Loving Cup suddenly was standing at his table. “On the phone, you,” said Loving Cup.

“Who is it? Some dame?” said Al.

“Don’t try and bluff me,” said Loving Cup. “I know you’re queer. No, it’s a party I think they said the name was Jarney or Charney. That was it. Charney.”

“Wise guy,” said Al, getting up. “I’ll cut your ears off. Is it Ed?”

“Yeah,” said Loving Cup, “and he don’t sound like Christmas to me.”

“Sore, eh?” Al hurried to the telephone. “Merry Christmas, boss,” he said.

“Yeah. Same to you,” said Ed, in a dull voice. “Listen, Al, my kid got his arm broke—”

“Jesus, tough! How’d he do that?”

“Oh, he fell off some God damn wagon I bought him. So anyhow I’m staying here till he gets the arm set and all, and I won’t be down till I don’t know when. Annie is all hysterical and yelling her head off—shut up, for Christ’s sake, can’t you
see I’m phoning. So I’m staying here. Now listen, Al. Do you have a date for tonight?”

“Nothing I can’t break,” said Al, who had no date. “I had a sort of a date, but it can wait if you want me to do anything.”

“Well, I hate to ask you, but this is what I want you should do. Drive up to the Stage Coach and stay there till they close up and keep an eye on things, see what I mean? And tell Helene I’ll be there if I can make it, but you stay there anyhow, will you kid? There’s fifty bucks in it for you on account of lousing up your date. Okay?”

“Kay,” said Al. “Only too glad, Ed.”

“Okay,” said Ed. “Just stick around and keep an eye on everything.” He hung up.

Al knew what he meant. Helene was not a teetotaler by any means. In fact Ed encouraged her to drink. She was more fun when she drank. But she was liable to get drunk tonight, because it was Christmas, and Ed didn’t want her to become reckless with the spirit of giving.

Anyone in Gibbsville who had any important money made it in coal; anthracite. Gibbsville people, when they went away, always had trouble explaining where they lived. They would say: “I live in the coal regions,” and people would say, “Oh, yes, near Pittsburgh.” Then Gibbsvillians would have to go into detail. People outside of Pennsylvania do not know that there is all the difference in the world between the two kinds of coal, and in the conditions under which anthracite and bituminous are mined. The anthracite region lies roughly between Scranton on the north and Gibbsville on the south. In fact Point Mountain, upon which Gibbsville’s earliest settlement was made, is the delight of geologists, who come from as far away as Germany to examine Gibbsville Conglomerate, a stone formation found nowhere else in the world. When that geological squeeze, or whatever it was that produced veins of coal, occurred, it did not go south of Point Mountain, and coal is found on the north slope of Point Mountain, but not on the south side, and at the eastern face of Point Mountain is found Gibbsville Conglomerate. The richest veins of anthracite in the world are within a thirty-mile sector from Gibbsville, and when those veins are being worked, Gibbsville prospers. When the mines are idle, Gibbsville puts on a long face and begins to think in terms of soup kitchens.

The anthracite region, unlike the bituminous, is a stronghold of union labor. The United Mine Workers of America is the strongest single force in the anthracite region, and under it the anthracite miner lives a civilized life compared with that of the miner in the soft coal regions about Pittsburgh, West
Virginia, and the western states. The “coal and iron” police in the anthracite region have been so unimportant since the unionization of the mines that they seldom are mentioned. A candidate for governor of Pennsylvania cannot be elected without the support of the U.M.W.A., and the Pennsylvania State Police never are called “black cossacks” in the anthracite region. A candidate for any political office in the anthracite counties would not think of having anything printed without getting the typesetters’ union label on his cards and billboards. The union is responsible for the Pennsylvania mining laws, which are the best in the world (although not yet the best there could be), and labor conditions, so far as labor strife was concerned, were all right in 1930, and had been all right since the disastrous strike of 1925. At that time the union called a strike which lasted 110 days, the longest strike in anthracite history. There was no violence beyond the small squabble, and there was no starvation among the miners. But anthracite markets disappeared. Domestic sales were hurt permanently; the oil burner was installed in thousands of homes. Anthracite is practically smokeless, and was satisfactory to home owners, but they could not get anthracite during the strike, and when the oil burner was installed there was no point in going back to coal. And so, as a result of the 1925 strike, the anthracite industry went back to work without nearly the demand for the product that there had been when the strike was called 110 days before. There had been another long strike in 1922, and the two strikes taught consumers that the industry was not dependable. The feeling was that any time the union felt like it, it would call a strike, shutting off the supply of anthracite.

Thus what were boom times for the rest of the country were something less for Gibbsville. The year of Our Lord 1929 saw many of the mines near Gibbsville working on a three-day-a-week basis. The blasts of the giant whistles at the collieries, more powerful than those of any steamship, were not heard rolling down the valleys as they had been before the 1925 strike, every morning at five and six o’clock. The anthracite industry was just about licked.

Still there were a great many people in Gibbsville who had
money in 1930. The very rich, who always had money, still had a lot of money. And the merchants and bankers, doctors and lawyers and dentists who had money to play the market continued to spend their principal. Mr. Hoover was an engineer, and in a mining country engineers are respected. Gibbsville men and women who were in the market trusted that cold fat pinched face as they had trusted the cold thin pinched face of Mr. Coolidge, and in 1930 the good day’s work of October 29, 1929, continued to be known as a strong technical reaction.

II

William Dilworth English (B.S., Lafayette College; M.D., University of Pennsylvania), father of Julian McHenry English, had a salary of $12,000 a year as chief of staff of the Gibbsville Hospital. He lived within that salary, almost to the dollar. His income from private practice was about $10,000, and this totaled up to more than he could spend in a year, without being foolish. In addition to that his wife, Elizabeth McHenry English, had an income which in 1930 was about $6,000. In other years it had been more than that, but Dr. English, in investing his wife’s money, had been no wiser than a lot of other men whose wives had money to invest.

Dr. English came from one of the oldest families in Gibbsville. He was of Revolutionary stock. He wore a ring with an indistinguishable crest (he took it off when he operated). Adam English, one of his ancestors, had come to Gibbsville in 1804, two years after Gibbsville was refounded (Gibbsville was founded by Swedes in 1750, as nearly anyone could make out; the Swedes had been massacred by the Leni Lenape Indians, and the Swedish name of the original settlement has been lost). Old Adam English, as Dr. English called him, who certainly would have been old if he had lived till 1930, was a Philadelphian. It was not old Adam’s father, but
his
father who had fought in the Revolution.

The Englishes were not exactly coal people. They were more in the railroad, the Philadelphia & Reading. But of course the
railroad and the coal and iron once had been all one company. It was much better in those days, Dr. English said, because you could get passes on the railroad if someone in your family happened to be connected with either the railroad or the coal company. But Dr. English did not desire a return to those days, the days when he was in college and at The University (whenever a Gibbsvillian speaks of The University he means Pennsylvania and nowhere else). He rarely spoke of those days, for, as he said, a dark and bitter cloud had been drawn over what should have been remembered as the happiest days of his life. He referred, of course, to the fact that the summer after he got his M.D., his father, George English, stuck a shotgun in his mouth and blew his head all over the hayloft of the English stable. Dr. English thought of his father as a coward. Two or three times in their married life the doctor had said to his wife: “If George English had been anything but a coward he would have gone to the directors like a man and said, ‘Gentlemen, I have been using the bank’s funds for my own uses. I am willing to work hard and make it up.’ And I know the directors would have admired that stand, and they would have given him a chance to make good. But…” And his wife would sympathize with him and try to comfort him, although she knew that her father, for one, would have tried to send George English to jail. As it was, he opposed her marriage to Billy English. Her father had said: “He may be all right. I don’t know. But his education was paid for out of stolen money. That’s enough for me.” But how was Billy to know that? she argued. “He knows it now,” said her father. Yes, he knew it, she went on, and he was anxious to start private practice so he could make good every penny. And he had. Within ten years of his graduation Billy English had paid off the money his father had taken from the bank. It had been a struggle, in a way; what with young Julian’s arrival in the world. Still, Julian had not been deprived of anything, thanks to her own income. Despite the dark, bitter cloud that hung over Dr. English’s college days, Julian, who wanted to go to Yale, was sent to Lafayette. And, probably out of spite, Julian did not accept the invitation to join Phi Delta Theta, his father’s fraternity, but had joined
Delta Kappa Epsilon. By that time his father had given up hope that Julian would study medicine. He had pointed out to Julian that “when I die, you’ll have this practice that I’ve been years building up. I don’t understand it. Plenty of boys in this town would give their right arm for just this chance.” Poor Dr. English, people would say; starting out that way, with that handicap, and then his only son not taking advantage of that wonderful opportunity. No wonder the doctor was such a stern-looking man. He’d had his troubles.