LAST MAN AT THE DEPOT
Mayer, Milton
Last Man at the Depot BY MILTON MAYER She wrote Girls' Athletics for The E Weekly—E for Englewood High School—and I did "The Vertebral Column—The Backbone of the Paper." ("There's something in...
...Two-three hours, depending on the weather and the track and the traffic and the equipment...
...Chicago is a relatively young institution, established in 1892, and for many years there was room in the Class Notes at the back of the magazine for a little something about anybody who did anything (such as die...
...Manley's was Chicago...
...Eastern Time and, with a tail wind, reached Chicago at 3:10 p.m...
...And again...
...Never heard of it, myself," said Customer Information Service amiably, "but I've only been here six years...
...My mother was sedate...
...it will only be for a few weeks, until...
...I was bright, too, but not as bright as Susan and I didn't have to be...
...I wasn't a passionately four-eyed Jewish boy, but I was an intelligent Jewish boy with an intelligent Jewish disdain of the hairy-chested virtues and the whole corpore sano bit (another not-yet-coined...
...with her help with homework on the 'phone every night ("nickel, please") I was really Excellent, and the two of us, members both of something called the National Honor Society, were sent one Saturday morning at the end of our junior year to the magic campus of Mrs...
...She knew this or that about me, from the public prints...
...The whole Ben-necke family exuded physical competence...
...It was nothing more than a one-window ticket office, a vintage toilet, a no-account newsstand, and a miserable snack bar (another not-yet-coined expression...
...Their being gentiles...
...The New York Central to Cleveland and Buffalo and New York and Boston, the Pennsylvania to Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and Washington and New York, the Rock Island southwest to Oklahoma, Texas, and California, all from the outbound stop (no Arrive and Depart, just a stop) at Englewood...
...But their little sister wasn't the to-be-wronged type...
...The Broadway never achieved the cachet of the Century...
...It always runs late...
...They were big/older and, like their father, big/big...
...Miss Pierce, the faculty adviser of The E Weekly, never gave over trying to break up the Affair between us, on the ostensible ground, talking to my mother, who she'd asked me to have come to see her, that she thought that both families would object to the association, which was "becoming serious," because Of the difference in religion...
...When I was...
...The Century disappeared...
...We saw each other our first day on campus at the Freshman Mixer—do they still have mixers, at Chicago or anywhere else?—and we danced, my girl and I, and as the dance was winding up she said, boltish-from-the-blue, "I think we shouldn't see each other for a while...
...Awhile back I got on the 'phone between detestable planes at the detestable airport in Chicago and tried to find out something, anything, about Englewood...
...I never knew it to run late except once, when I was on board (on an expense account...
...The Benneckes, all of them, Susan, too, HENRIK DRESCHER seemed to me to be a bit beneath the Mayers, cut from some imperceptibly rougher stuff...
...Developing greater horsepower than steam, they made 100 miles per hour on the straightaway...
...But nobody's been there lately...
...the gentile clubs...
...I was still stringy and still (a whited pillar of the Religious Society of Friends) a Jew...
...Oh, but it was, it was, it was a real good part of town to go to, even in the daytime...
...Manley was something else again...
...Or a Toledo blade...
...The University of Chicago Magazine—alumni magazine—has followed me around and I've always gone through it, with progressively decreasing attention to the front and progressively increasing attention to the back: John Howe used to say that he opened The Times to the obits every morning to see if he was in them...
...Manley (but not about Miss Pierce, who tried to break up our Affair...
...Mine was an Apartment-Dwelling paper-box salesman with a turned white collar...
...unprepossessing, unpolished, and unswept (except by a gnarled old black man who followed, rather than pushed, his broom around, and that maybe once a week...
...if they see me going around...
...Like a diamond...
...In their dumb chestiness Hank and Fred might suspect me of Wronging their little sister, and in my intelligent Jewishness they might suspect me of Wronging her in some vulpine, vampiric fashion...
...I'd have nodded to her, or dipped my head a trifle—as if furtively, to mock her...
...No more...
...It almost always, except on an occasional Friday and Sunday, ran in one section, while the Century commonly ran in two or three, five minutes apart...
...I had not seen her likes before...
...All right: We are talking about, not fifty, but fifty-seven years ago...
...Her name was Susan, Susan Ben-necke...
...And then came the bankruptcies and the mergers and the mergers and the bankruptcies and the Central and the Pennsy became the Penn Central and the Penn Central became a part of the great new nationally financed Amtrak system...
...I called him back: "You're right," he said, "there was a station at 63rd Street, but they stopped using it years ago, nobody remembers just when...
...I was waiting, quite recently, at the Newark station, for the two-car rambling wreck to Princeton, and I discovered that the Broadway Limited was still running...
...When I was little Ma and Pa jabbered away many and many a summer evening in the breeze off the lake at the Iowa Pavilion in Jackson Park—a remnant of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893...
...Manley's University of Chicago, and to the magic mahogany banisters, come, come, balustrades, of Ida Noyes Hall to take the National Scholarship Examinations...
...Nor did we talk about our Affair, or the Freshman Mixer, or about college (and we were sitting right there) at all...
...And she said it again, and, without waiting for me to say "Why...
...Does it run late much...
...All I did was finish, after dark—and Englewood won the Meet by one point...
...The event was the City Meet in my senior year...
...Manley said, without saying that Johnson was the only Negro in the class, "When you've come as far as Johnson has, you'll get as good a grade as he gets...
...Central Time the next day—twenty-three hours and twenty-five minutes to make the Century's sixteen-hour run, stopping everywhere but Englewood...
...Go in there and pick up that point for us...
...The plane killed off the passenger business and the truck and the Interstate cut the freights by three-quarters...
...Not excepting the fabled Orient Express out of Paris for Istanbul—walnut car interiors as an elegant setting for factual and fictional murder, espionage, regal robbery, and royal jiggery-pokery—the Century and the Broadway were over all the two most splendidly appointed trains in all the red-carpet history of railroading, with their barbers and manicurists and stenographers, their shower-baths and their $1.50 Kansas City Sirloin Steak dinners and vintage wines and whiskies, and their telegraph and (some time later) telephone service en route...
...We "had" Mrs...
...Not on your tintype: A couple of years ago, this in the newspapers: "The Penn Central Corporation is divesting itself of the last of its rail properties...
...until you're initiated into a gentile club...
...I said, "But I'm a miler, Rosie," and Rosie said, "You're not a miler or a two-miler, but there are only two men entered in the two-mile and there's a point for third...
...We would sit there, swinging our legs and holding hands, until all the Limiteds, outbound for the East (and the Southwest) had come and gone and the Rock Island suburban trains to Morgan Park (where she lived) had got fewer and fewer and it had got to be six o'clock, 6:15, 6:30, and it had got dark and the spooky platform lights went on, and I'd say, "What will mother say...
...On the enchanted Water Level Route— "The Twentieth Century Limited Coming Down the Hudson," and I reading Rip Van Winkle to my enchanted children—there was likewise one train left, another mockery of one of the great Name Trains gone, this one the Lake Shore Limited...
...It was getting dark and late and the spooky platform lights came on and we had to go home—mother need know—and a switch engine came lumbering by and Amanda said, "It forgot its train...
...Bennecke to come to school...
...The Train of Trains limped humiliated into Grand Central in mid-afternoon, with the passengers having got (in addition to their $1.20 an hour) a wartime under-the-counter steak for lunch on the house...
...Why hadn't Susan gone to Morgan Park...
...We would finish our after-school stints around four o'clock and walk over to the Englewood Union Station, on 63rd Street west of State, in Chicago, and sit on the baggage wagon on the platform and swing our legs and hold hands...
...I was too skinny and stringy to do anything but tag along behind the track team as a spare miler...
...what spurred Miss Pierce, and kept her alive, was the tortured vision of what boys and girls of any religion, or none, might or might not be up to...
...Well...
...That was the first day of our freshman year in Latin and Susan and I didn't know each other...
...They sat and rocked in the big dark-green cane rockers and jabbered away with the Degens and the Bruck-ers and the Kaplanskys and the Doc Springers, the men smoking cigars, the women lighting punk, and Pa said: "If I had any money"—he hadn't—"I'd put it in the railroads...
...So we talked, without hesitation and with animation...
...The Broadway was second fiddle because the Pennsy, first of all a freight line, had to haul itself through the industrial Alleghenies and around the middle-of-the-night Horseshoe Curve outside Altoona, while the Central justifiably boasted its Water Level Route through Cleveland and Buffalo and down the storied Hudson...
...It was a seedy little brick overpass structure straddling the 63rd Street car line, with a narrow driveway curving up from the street...
...An icy curve going into Utica flattened a wheel and there wasn't an extra car available to replace it...
...Among the things I disbelieved in those days were my ears, and I said, "What...
...I talked to the dispatcher and learned that the Broadway wasn't For Boarding Only or for And Beyond but was scheduled for a Discharging and Boarding stop every fifty feet or so, twenty hours from New York to Chicago...
...There were dome cars and the brass-railed observation platforms were enclosed and streamlined...
...And then the name trains disappeared...
...Mrs...
...One after another the Name Trains pulling in, and then out—Limiteds all, the Rock Island's Golden State and Rocky Mountain, the Pennsy's Gotham, Golden Arrow, General, Liberty, the Central's Wolverine, Commodore Vanderbilt, Lake Shore, New England States, Motor City...
...Or doffed my freshman beanie elaborately, to see her blush...
...too many alumni—or, more exactly, too many alumni dying...
...Or about the Englewood Station...
...But no—it wasn't the company Susan kept, or this, or that: It was the trifling gap that doesn't quite separate and doesn't quite close and may some day mean trouble...
...I don't remember what her father did, or why they lived 'way out in Morgan Park in those pre-suburban days...
...There was no apparent anti-Semitism there, and, I think, no real...
...It was never as fashionable and never as crowded...
...Call me back...
...All you have to do is finish—I don't care when...
...Everybody Who Was Anybody took the Century, with its $9.60 extra fare (refundable at $1.20 an hour for every hour it ran late...
...I shall not see her likes again now...
...In long, long retrospect I'd say that I was likelier to be Wronged than she—she with her frisky self-possession ("Need mother know...
...And . . . well...
...It's not a real good part of town to go to, even in the daytime—you know what I mean...
...At seventeen, and without benefit of Freud, Jung, Hegelschlegel, or Dear Abby, even Susan and I knew that...
...Susan got a First and I got an Honorable Mention...
...The Name Trains that had raced each other out of Englewood when Susan and I sat there swinging our legs and holding hands got lightweight aluminum equipment, with bedrooms and roomettes in addition to the old-time compartments and drawing rooms and the upper-and-lowers...
...And disappeared...
...She was captain of the girls' swim team (gloriously) and I was a miler (barely...
...Maybe it was merely their lustiness that worried me about the Benneckes—-or about Hank and Fred...
...Susan was the best student in the class (and in any class...
...I told them about all the great Name Trains, and how it all (or almost all) was when I was...
...And then, as soon as the genteel porters could genteelly hustle the boarding gentry aboard, they pulled out side by side, their passengers waving and sedately hooting at the windows as the iron thoroughbreds ran firebox to firebox and picked up their transcontinental speed, now the Broadway, now the Century leading by never more than a locomotive length or two until, a few miles out of Englewood, in East Chicago, they curved away from one another for the twenty-hour hurtle to New York, with only enough stops for coaling and watering between Englewood and the cathedrals of Penn Station and Grand Central...
...And she went through college unsung and unsinging...
...Not that I didn't, in the eyent, justify Coach Rosie Rosenbaum's unenlarged faith in me...
...But it was truly a Union Station...
...I hitchhiked to California, where, on the Embarcadero in San Francisco, the man called the coppers when I tried to ship out to China and my father's cousin Morry showed up and said, "You're all right, kid," and, to the coppers, "The kid's all right," and gave me money to get home in time for college...
...yond...
...Manley was everything else again...
...Her rough skin was rougher, her yellow hair fading, but she could still smile her sassy smile and set her gray eyes dancing...
...Where the Broadway still served a small portion of the through traffic between New York and Chicago, reaching Chicago at 9:05 a.m...
...Whatever I exuded, it wasn't that...
...She was so chipper, so "fat and sassy" (my mother would say) in her cap and gown on the Englewood stage in June of 1925...
...And they believed him...
...There's something in that, too,' said the burglar as he stuck his hand in the cuspidor...
...The day I waited at Newark it and all other trains out of Penn Station were "indefinitely delayed" and the unbeautiful people of Newark with their unbeautiful luggage cussed out what one of them repeatedly referred to as damn Amtrak...
...her rough healthy skin, her coarse yellow hair, her roguish gray eyes that did a lot of dancing (as did she), her slightly protuberant lips...
...They paused huffing heavily, as if to catch their breath, while the beautiful people (not yet coined) boarded...
...Shoemaker, of, of all places, Morgan Park, was in linoleum, or widgets, or (no, not that) paper boxes...
...Manley was our Latin teacher and she was on the right side right down the line...
...It would only be for fifty, fifty-seven years, or (for all I know) forever...
...Her husband, Mr...
...I turned it again: ". . . with a Jew...
...They were air-conditioned now and in those that carried coaches the coaches had overnight lean-back seats...
...Then the crack trainman at the back gave the crack engineer the highball and the crack porters, not yet changed from their blue coats to their white jackets, scooped up their steps and the all-Pullman Pullman doors went shut and the monsters grunted their belly-bursting grunts and took majestically off for And Beyond...
...It's sort of a mess out there—seems they had a fire, maybe five, ten years ago and the ceiling caved in...
...It was 1943 and there was a war on...
...They were the (not yet coined) superstars of earth travel, collected as train cards and sun pictures by every kid who collected anything, hung on office and residential walls as paintings, photographs, calendars—"The Horseshoe Curve at Altoona, Pa.," "Coming Down the Hudson...
...Nothing stops there...
...Did I say running...
...With coaling, watering, and section-point servicing as good as eliminated, the New York-Chicago run was cut from twenty hours to sixteen (and with smoother acceleration and deceleration...
...I have not seen her likes since...
...In the late afternoon, one after another, the beautiful shiny all-Pullman monsters came hissing in with their air-brakes on, carrying their shiny all-Pullman corsage-chested cargo, and with pink roses in the bud vases on the dining car tables covered with, yes, sir, napery and set with, yes, ma'm, silver chased with the railroad's crest...
...Englewood was for Boarding Only—"Passengers for Toledo and beyond," "Detroit and beyond," "Har-risburg and beyond...
...For one thing, she was less choosy...
...Have I forgotten something...
...And there, under Class of '29, was Susan Bennecke Shoemaker...
...Along its long uncovered platforms— preternaturally long for a suburban station—the great trains of three great railroads converged on their way out of Chicago, twelve minutes after leaving their downtown terminals...
...Believe me—when the railroads go, the country will go...
...when I complained because Johnson got an S (for Superior) in Virgil and I got an E (for merely Excellent), Mrs...
...Something entrepreneurial, you may be sure, in conformity to the Mixed Economy: Whatever is profitable is private, whatever loses money (waging wars, carrying the mails, schooling the young) is communized...
...Mrs...
...The railroads began fading after the war, and Englewood faded with them...
...And doing what then...
...But she said hello to me always, affecting offhandedness...
...I don't remember what he, or anyone else, addressing teen-agers called them in 1925...
...Christmas Day was characteristically the Century's only single-section run of the year, and by 1929 its sixteen-wheeled Niagaras were pulling five or six twelve-, fourteen-, or sixteen-car sections daily, with an Advance Century besides (a half hour earlier...
...And we were both accepted at Chicago, and I ran away from home that summer, like Stendhal's hero who joined Napoleon in order to escape the sorrows that poisoned his life, especially on Sundays...
...I hadn't planted the dagger, but I turned it: "And...
...in 1925 high school teachers were real graduates of real universities (Mrs...
...Manley for the four years of Latin which, a lifetime after I'd forgotten it all, enabled me to stumble around in the dark in Italy, France, and Spain...
...But nothing helped...
...they must have been on the teams at (I suppose) Morgan Park High...
...For train buffs—the expression had not yet been coined in 1925—the Englewood Union Station was the One and Only Wonder of the World...
...The railroads went, but not altogether...
...I wouldn't have done that...
...Why was it...
...And beyond and beMilton Mayer is the Roving Editor of The Progressive...
...And then we said goodbye and I made a few autobiographical notes about Englewood, things I'd forgotten, like the time ponderous Mrs...
...The Century—the Century—carried coaches for the first time and was down to one section, combined with the Advance Century and then with the Commodore Vanderbilt...
...I have not forgotten the Century and the Broadway...
...Jews did not think too well of gentiles generally...
...So under each year's Class Notes, at the end, there is simply a section called Deaths, with the names...
...They rolled out of their Chicago stations at exactly the same time (just, it seemed, for the hell of it), sidled up to each other as they left the yards, and came steaming into crummy, comical little old Englewood (at, of course, the same time) on adjacent tracks...
...she said, saying something rehearsed, "Rushing for clubs"—Chicago had men's fraternities but women's clubs—"begins next week and," her rehearsal collapsing, "well . . . I'll be rushed by...
...I have not forgotten something...
...When Susan and I sat on the baggage wagon, watching the Rock Island suburban trains pull out, one after another, for Morgan Park ("Need mother know...
...the crack trains had ceiling vents similarly shielded and small fans in the berths and drawing rooms...
...I don't remember...
...The railroadsl The railroads gone...
...Susan was not what the lady novelists called common, but she was a little less ethereal than I, a little lacking in Finger -spitze gefuhl, fingertip-feeling...
...and she'd say, "Need mother know...
...Chicago was a small campus, and we passed each other frequently...
...Or a true love on the baggage wagon at Englewood, at the dances in the school gym, gray eyes dancing...
...going around...
...I didn't gaze reproachfully, ruefully, or regretfully at her, nor she at me...
...Swimmer Susan, though she wasn't heavy, was firm, firm and broad-shouldered...
...Nobody I could raise at Amtrak, the Chicago Union Station, or the Rock Island knew where it was or whether it still existed...
...Was it their physicality, their bodiliness...
...And she wasn't rushed by any of the big clubs and finally accepted Tri Sig, which wasn't the least craved club on campus, but almost...
...Not yet jacketed as streamliners, they had fins sticking out of the pre-air-conditioning windows of their passenger cars to keep the soot from coming in at eighty miles per hour even when the windows were (as they always were) closed...
...It was twenty years after the Freshman Mixer, twenty, or twenty-five, or thirty, and I, I was under contract, as always, to do my autobiography, and I dropped in at the Alumni Office and got Susan Bennecke's— Susan Bennecke Shoemaker's—address and 'phone number and 'phoned her and asked her to have tea with me on campus and we had tea...
...I moved away twenty-seven years ago and I've lived a lot of places...
...A puny affair nowadays, it lists Englewood as a Rock Island suburban stop, but the Rock Island doesn't stop there...
...And we were both in the cast of Seven Keys to Baldpate...
...nothing...
...from the dugout and said, "I want you to run the two-mile...
...I can't remember that I cut her completely...
...And then I got on to the Customer Information Service of Conrail, the consolidated rail freight line...
...The new Lake Shore was a lulu...
...And one day he was...
...maybe something to do with school work, or books, or notes, or maybe there was only a pretext—and met her mother and father and her two big brothers, Hank and Fred...
...Her closest friend at Englewood was a head-tossing redhead named Jean who may or may not have been up to monkeying around above the knee and who herself had a large round friend named Muriel who was widely, and, I think, fairly, suspected of being a really hot and scandalous number in my virgin world...
...I was still going to the Englewood Station, the Englewood Union Station, years and years after the Freshman Mixer, taking all four of my kids there of a late Sunday afternoon to see the Limiteds, always fewer, pulling out for And Beyond...
...How late...
...Miss Pierce didn't ask chunky, gentile Mrs...
...Streamliners were pulled by streamlined locomotives burning diesel oil...
...She was my girl, and the baggage wagon at Englewood was our trysting...
...Or about the Englewood Station...
...We talked about Englewood and Englewood people, and about Mrs...
...Manley walked ponderously down one of the classroom aisles carrying her wastebasket and held it in front of a classmate who was chewing gum...
...All this and more, more, more was the old Englewood Station, and the baggage wagon on the platform was warm and smoky in the springtime, hazy and smoky in the fall, and wind-whipping cold and smoky in the winter...
...And on Latin's, Latin's, Latin's...
...The Pennsy cut ruthlessly...
...Swimmer Susan was heftier at last, as the mother of two or three children should be...
...Once I was out there with Little Amanda, she was four, maybe, maybe three-going-on, and it was getting on for the end of the Englewood Station altogether, and there wasn't much to see any more...
...I'll ask some of the old-timers around the place...
...Manley was on the right side, she was on Susan's side and mine—and on love's...
...though it had to leave Penn Station in early afternoon to do it), the Lake Shore did not even pretend to provide long-distance service: It left Grand Central at 6:45 p.m...
...the Railway Guide was a massive volume of maybe a thousand pages...
...But it has been a long time...
...It was a grand grimy place to sit on the luggage wagon—there was only one, for passenger baggage—and swing your legs, with or without your girl...
...It wasn't in the 'phone book, and the 'phone company had no number for it...
...Since Mrs...
...B. was certainly chunky and Susan's father probably had some up-from-the-blue-collar occupation, head of a shipping room, maybe, the kind of man you thought of as an own-furnace-stoking Householder...
...And my girl and I sat there, sooting up, swinging our legs and holding hands and the majestic Name Trains pulled majestically in and out (and the no-name Rock Island suburban trains to Morgan Park sort of sneakily in between) and once in a great while the grizzled old station custodian-cum-redcap needed the baggage truck and we had to get off and he always said, "Sorry," but not, as I remember, "Sorry, kids...
...She was bright, was Susan, really Superior...
...Nothing helped...
...I went to their modest frame house once—I don't remember why...
...Toward the end of the afternoon Rosie summoned me ("Who...
...The Century and Broadway were the respective flagships of the New York Central and the Pennsylvania Railroads which (having long since euchred the B&O out of a New York terminus) competed for the passenger business that connected the country with New York via Chicago...
...And I, flinging roses, roses, wound up one of the Big Men, one of the Very Big Men, with a long list of roses flung and a long list of Incompletes (and a scattering of As and Fs) before I was given the snowbank treatment by Dolorosa Mater and pulling my 'coonskin coat around me got into my twenty-five-dollar Model T and swished off into the sunset, a Living Legend...
...Washington-Chicago service is temporarily suspended...
...if I ever so much as kissed her, I don't remember and don't want to...
...to maintain the Century's pace the Broadway had to provide a jerkier and altogether less than toothsome ride...
Vol. 47 • January 1983 • No. 1
