John Passos - The 42nd Parallel

Joe was an untalkative sandyhaired boy who could pitch a mean outcurve when he was still little. He learned to swim and dive in Rock Creek and used to say he wanted to be motorman on a streetcar when he grew up. For several years his best friend was Alec McPherson whose father was a locomotive engineer on the B. and O. After that Joe wanted to be a locomotive engineer. Janey used to tag around after the two boys whenever they’d let her, to the carbarns at the head of Pennsylvania Avenue where they made friends with some of the conductors and motormen who used to let them ride on the platform a couple of blocks sometimes if there wasn’t any inspector around, down along the canal or up Rock Creek where they caught tadpoles and fell in the water and splashed each other with mud.

Summer evenings when the twilight was long after supper they played lions and tigers with other kids from the neighborhood in the long grass of some empty lots near Oak Hill Cemetery. There were long periods when there was measles or scarlet fever around and Mommer wouldn’t let them out. Then Alec would come down and they’d play three-o-cat in the back yard. Those were the times Janey liked best. Then the boys treated her as one of them. Summer dusk would come down on them sultry and full of lightningbugs. If Popper was feeling in a good mood he’d send them up the hill to the drugstore on N Street to buy icecream, there’d be young men in their shirtsleeves and straw hats strolling with girls who wore a stick of punk in their hair to keep off the mosquitoes, a rankness and a smell of cheap perfume from the colored families crowded on their doorsteps, laughing, talking softly with an occasional flash of teeth, rolling of a white eyeball. The dense sweaty night was scary, hummed, rumbled with distant thunder, with junebugs, with the clatter of traffic from M Street, the air of the street dense and breathless under the thick trees; but when she was with Alec and Joe she wasn’t scared, not even of drunks or big shamblefooted colored-men. When they got back Popper would smoke a cigar and they’d sit out in the back yard and the mosquitoes ’ud eat them up and Mommer and Aunt Francine and the kids ’ud eat the icecream and Popper would just smoke a cigar and tell them stories of when he’d been a towboat captain down on the Chesapeake in his younger days and he’d saved the barkentine Nancy Q in distress on the Kettlebottoms in a sou’west gale. Then it’d get time to go to bed and Alec ’ud be sent home and Janey’d have to go to bed in the stuffy little back room on the top floor with her two little sisters in their cribs against the opposite wall. Maybe a thunderstorm would come up and she’d lie awake staring up at the ceiling cold with fright, listening to her little sisters whimper as they slept until she heard the reassuring sound of Mommer scurrying about the house closing windows, the slam of a door, the whine of wind and rattle of rain and the thunder rolling terribly loud and near overhead like a thousand beer-trucks roaring over the bridge. Times like that she thought of going down to Joe’s room and crawling into bed with him, but for some reason she was afraid to, though sometimes she got as far as the landing. He’d laugh at her and call her a softie.

About once a week Joe would get spanked. Popper would come home from the Patent Office where he worked, angry and out of sorts, and the girls would be scared of him and go about the house quiet as mice; but Joe seemed to like to provoke him, he’d run whistling through the back hall or clatter up and down stairs making a tremendous racket with his stub-toed ironplated shoes. Then Popper would start scolding him and Joe would stand in front of him without saying a word glaring at the floor with bitter blue eyes. Janey’s insides knotted up and froze when Popper would start up the stairs to the bathroom pushing Joe in front of him. She knew what would happen. He’d take down the razorstrop from behind the door and put the boy’s head and shoulders under his arm and beat him. Joe would clench his teeth and flush and not say a word and when Popper was tired of beating him they’d look at each other and Joe would be sent up to his room and Popper would come down stairs trembling all over and pretend nothing had happened, and Janey would slip out into the yard with her fists clenched whispering to herself, “I hate him… I hate him… I hate him.”

Once a drizzly Saturday night she stood against the fence in the dark looking up at the lighted window. She could hear Popper’s voice and Joe’s in an argument. She thought maybe she’d fall down dead at the first thwack of the razorstrop. She couldn’t hear what they were saying. Then suddenly it came, the leather sound of blows and Joe stifling a gasp. She was eleven years old. Something broke loose. She rushed into the kitchen with her hair all wet from the rain, “Mommer, he’s killing Joe. Stop it.” Her mother turned up a withered helpless drooping face from a pan she was scouring. “Oh, you can’t do anything.” Janey ran upstairs and started beating on the bathroom door. “Stop it, stop it,” her voice kept yelling. She was scared but something stronger than she was had hold of her. The door opened; there was Joe looking sheepish and Popper with his face all flushed and the razorstrop in his hand.

“Beat me… it’s me that’s bad… I won’t have you beating Joe like that.” She was scared. She didn’t know what to do, tears stung in her eyes.

Popper’s voice was unexpectedly kind:

“You go straight up to bed without any supper and remember that you have enough to do to fight your own battles, Janey.” She ran up to her room and lay on the bed shaking. When she’d gone to sleep Joe’s voice woke her up with a start.

He was standing in his nightgown in the door. “Say, Janey,” he whispered. “Don’t you do that again, see. I can take care of myself, see. A girl can’t butt in between men like that. When I get a job and make enough dough I’ll get me a gun and if Popper tries to beat me up I’ll shoot him dead.” Janey began to sniffle. “What you wanna cry for; this ain’t no Johnstown flood.”

She could hear him tiptoe down the stairs again in his bare feet.

At highschool she took the commercial course and learned stenography and typewriting. She was a plain thinfaced sandyhaired girl, quiet and popular with the teachers. Her fingers were quick and she picked up typing and shorthand easily. She liked to read and used to get books like The Inside of the Cup, The Battle of the Strong, The Winning of Barbara Worth out of the library. Her mother kept telling her that she’d spoil her eyes if she read so much. When she read she used to imagine she was the heroine, that the weak brother who went to the bad but was a gentleman at core and capable of every sacrifice, like Sidney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities , was Joe and that the hero was Alec.

She thought Alec was the bestlooking boy in Georgetown and the strongest. He had black closecropped hair and a very white skin with a few freckles and a strong squareshouldered way of walking. After him Joe was the bestlooking and the strongest and the best baseball player anyway. Everybody said he ought to go on through highschool on account of being such a good baseball player, but at the end of his first year Popper said he had three girls to support and that Joe would have to get to work; so he got a job as a Western Union messenger. Janey was pretty proud of him in his uniform until the girls at highschool kidded her about it. Alec’s folks had promised to put him through college if he made good in highschool, so Alec worked hard. He wasn’t tough and dirty-talking like most of the boys Joe knew. He was always nice to Janey though he never seemed to want to be left alone with her. She pretty well admitted to herself that she had a terrible crush on Alec.