Catherine
Chicago: 1919–1939
Every large city has a distinctive image, a personality that gives it its own special cachet. Chicago in the 1920’s was a restless, dynamic giant, crude and without manners, one booted foot still in the ruthless era of the tycoons who helped give birth to it: William B. Ogden and John Wentworth, Cyrus McCormick and George M. Pullman. It was a kingdom that belonged to the Philip Armours and Gustavus Swifts and Marshall Fields. It was the domain of cool professional gangsters like Hymie Weiss and Scarface Al Capone.
One of Catherine Alexander’s earliest memories was of her father taking her into a bar with a saw-dust-covered floor and swinging her up to the dizzyingly high stool. He ordered an enormous glass of beer for himself and a Green River for her. She was five years old, and she remembered how proud her father was as strangers crowded around to admire her. All the men ordered drinks and her father paid for them. She recalled how she had kept pressing her body against his arm to make sure he was still there. He had only returned to town the night before, and Catherine knew that he would soon leave again. He was a travelling salesman, and he had explained to her that his work took him to distant cities and he had to be away from her and her mother for months at a time so that he could bring back nice presents. Catherine had desperately tried to make a deal with him. If he would stay with her, she would give up the presents. Her father had laughed and said what a precocious child she was and then had left town, and it was six months before she saw him again. During those early years her mother whom she saw every day seemed a vague, shapeless personality, while her father, whom she saw only on brief occasions, was vivid and wonderfully clear. Catherine thought of him as a handsome, laughing man, full of sparkling humour and warm, generous gestures. The occasions when he came home were like holidays, full of treats and presents and surprises.
When Catherine was seven, her father was fired from his job, and their life took on a new pattern. They left Chicago and moved to Gary, Indiana, where he went to work as a salesman in a jewellery store. Catherine was enrolled in her first school. She had a wary, arms-length relationship with the other children and was terrified of her teachers, who misinterpreted her lonely standoffishness as conceit. Her father came home to dinner every night, and for the first time in her life Catherine felt that they were a real family, like other families. On Sunday the three of them would go to Miller Beach and rent horses and ride for an hour or two along the sand dunes. Catherine enjoyed living in Gary, but six months after they moved there, her father lost his job again and they moved to Harvey, a suburb of Chicago. School was already in session, and Catherine was the new girl, shut out from the friendships that had already been formed. She became known as a loner. The children, secure in the safety of their own groups, would come up to the gangly newcomer and ridicule her cruelly.
During the next few years Catherine donned an armour of indifference, which she wore as a shield against the attacks of the other children. When the armour was pierced, she struck back with a trenchant, caustic wit. Her intention was to alienate her tormentors so that they would leave her alone, but it had an unexpectedly different affect. She worked on the school paper, and in her first review about a musical that her classmates had staged, she wrote, ‘Tommy Belden had a trumpet solo in the second act, but he blew it.’ The line was widely quoted, and – surprise of surprises – Tommy Belden came up to her in the hall the next day and told Catherine that he thought it was funny.
In English the students were assigned Captain Horatio Hornblower to read. Catherine hated it. Her book report consisted of one sentence: ‘His barque was worse than his bight,’ and her teacher, who was a weekend sailor, gave her an ‘A.’ Her classmates began to quote her remarks and in a short time she was known as the school wit.
That year Catherine turned fourteen and her body was beginning to show the promise of a ripening woman. She would examine herself in the mirror for hours on end, brooding about how to change the disaster she saw reflected. Inside she was Myrna Loy, driving men mad with her beauty, but her mirror – which was her bitter enemy – showed hopelessly tangled black hair that was impossible to manage, solemn grey eyes, a mouth that seemed to grow wider by the hour and a nose that was slightly turned up. Maybe she wasn’t really ugly, she told herself cautiously, but on the other hand no one was going to knock down doors to sign her up as a movie star. Sucking in her cheeks and squinting her eyes sexily she tried to visualize herself as a model. It was depressing. She struck another pose. Eyes open wide, expression eager, a big friendly smile. No use. She wasn’t the All-American type either. She wasn’t anything. Her body was going to be all right, she dourly supposed, but nothing special. And that, of course, was what she wanted more than anything in the world: to be something special, to be Somebody, to be Remembered, and never, never, never, never, to die.
The summer she was fifteen, Catherine came across Science and Health by Mary Baker Eddy and for the next two weeks she spent an hour a day before her mirror, willing her reflection to become beautiful. At the end of that time the only change she could detect was a new patch of acne on her chin and a pimple on her forehead. She gave up sweets, Mary Baker Eddy and looking in the mirror.
Catherine and her family had moved back to Chicago and settled in a small, dreary apartment on the north side, in Rogers Park, where the rent was cheap. The country was moving deeper into an economic depression. Catherine’s father was working less and drinking more, and he and her mother were constantly yelling at each other in a never-ending series of recriminations that drove Catherine out of the house. She would go down to the beach half a dozen blocks away and walk along the shore, letting the brisk wind give wings to her thin body. She spent long hours staring at the restless grey lake, filled with some desperate longing to which she could not put a name. She wanted something so much that at times it would engulf her in a sudden wave of unbearable pain.
Catherine had discovered Thomas Wolfe, and his books were like a mirror image of the bittersweet nostalgia that filled her, but it was a nostalgia for a future that had not happened yet, as though somewhere, sometime, she had lived a wonderful life and was restless to live it again. She had begun to have her periods, and while she was physically changing into a woman, she knew that her needs, her longings, this aching-wanting was not physical and had nothing to do with sex. It was a fierce and urgent longing to be recognized, to lift herself above the billions of people who teemed the earth, so everyone would know who she was, so when she walked by, they would say, ‘There goes Catherine Alexander, the great –’ The great what? There was the problem. She did not know what she wanted, only that she ached desperately for it. On Saturday afternoons whenever she had enough money, she would go to the State and Lake Theatre or to the McVickers or the Chicago, and see movies. She would completely lose herself in the wonderful, sophisticated world of Cary Grant and Jean Arthur, laugh with Wallace Beery and Marie Dressler and agonize over Bette Davis’ romantic disasters. She felt closer to Irene Dunne than to her mother.
Catherine was in her senior year at Senn High School and her archenemy, the mirror, had finally become her friend. The girl in the mirror had a lively, interesting face. Her hair was raven black and her skin a soft, creamy white. Her features were regular and fine, with a generous, sensitive mouth and intelligent grey eyes. She had a good figure with firm, well-developed breasts, gently curving hips and shapely legs. There was an air of aloofness about her image, a hauteur that Catherine did not feel, as though her reflection possessed a characteristic that she did not. She supposed that it was part of the protective armour she had worn since her early school days.
The Depression had clutched the nation in a tighter and tighter vice, and Catherine’s father was incessantly involved in big deals that never seemed to materialize. He was constantly spinning dreams, inventing things that were going to bring in millions of dollars. He devised a set of jacks that fitted above the wheels of an automobile and could be lowered by the touch of a button on the dashboard. None of the automobile manufacturers was interested. He worked out a continuously rotating electric sign to carry advertisements inside stores. There
