Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Titles by Irene Hunt
Across Five Aprils
The Lottery Rose
No Promises in the Wind
Up a Road Slowly
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
NO PROMISES IN THE WIND
A Berkley Jam Book/ published by arrangement with Modern Curriculum Press
PRINTING HISTORY
Follett Publishing Company edition published 1970
Sixteenth Tempo printing / August 1985
Berkley/Pacer edition / July 1986
Berkley edition / August 1993
Berkley Jam edition / January 2002
Copyright © 1970 by Irene Hunt.
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1
Joey stirred on his side of our bed when the alarm clock jangled at a quarter to four. “You want me to go with you, Josh?” he asked sleepily.
I reached out to the bedside table, stopped the alarm, snapped on the shaded study lamp, and lay back on my pillow. The chill of early October had sharpened during the night, and the discomfort of being cold together with too few hours of sleep made me irritable and moody. I didn’t even feel particularly grateful to Joey for offering to go with me. In the first place he wasn’t a lot of help, and anyway, three hours of delivering papers in the dark city streets was too hard for him though he’d never have admitted it. Joey had been frail since he was a baby, but he was tough. He’d have been up in a minute if I had said, yes, I needed his help.
As it was, I didn’t answer his question and he sighed deeply as he turned his face away from the light. I couldn’t tell whether that sigh was one of relief at being able to go back to sleep or one of hurt at my rudeness. Ashamed, I got up and found an extra blanket, which I threw over him and tucked around his shoulders. I could sense his feeling of comfort as he curled up into a tight little spiral and snuggled down under the extra warmth.
When I was dressed, I sat down in the big mohair chair beside the window, twisting my body to avoid the broken spring in the chair’s back. “Just five minutes,” I told myself, “just five minutes to rest and get used to being awake.”
I stared at the faded paper on the wall in front of me without really seeing it until I became conscious of the yellowed figures of cowboys riding their broncs in precise paths from baseboard to ceiling. My mother had allowed me to select that paper five years before when I was no older than Joey, and I had held out for cowboys and broncs, scorning Mom’s preference for pots of flowers or bright colored birds. I studied the horses and their daredevil riders for a long time as if they mattered. They didn’t, of course, but concentrating on them kept me awake.
Finally I roused myself. My paper route didn’t mean much money, but it was important. Dad had been out of work for eight months, and only the day before, my sister had received notice of a cut-back in personnel which cost her the clerking job she’d had for nearly a year. Every few pennies counted in our family; a job was a job, and to risk losing it by being late was out of the question.
It was dark in the kitchen when I went downstairs, but I could see the outline of my mother’s figure as she stood at the stove. “Why did you get up, Mom?” I asked gruffly. “I tell you over and over—”
She put her hand on my arm. “Hush, Josh, let’s not wake Dad. He couldn’t sleep until about two hours ago.” She poured out a cup of hot milk and handed it to me. “Here, drink this; I’ll have a little breakfast for you at seven.”
She was not as tall as I was; she had to lift her face when she kissed my cheek. “I’m so proud that Miss Crowne wants you to play for the school assembly next week. I’m very proud of you, Josh.”
“I wish you could come and hear us. Howie and I are going pretty good lately.”
“I know. I want to hear you so much—but, then, I can’t and there’s no use talking about it.” She turned back to the stove and moved some pans aimlessly. “You can stay after school and practice if you want to. There isn’t much for you to do around here.”
My mother ironed all day in the laundry a few blocks down the street. She shouldn’t have been doing work like that. She played piano beautifully, and for a long time she had given lessons to children in our neighborhood until recently when no one had money to pay for a luxury like music. She taught me for seven years, up until I was thirteen and we had to sell the piano at the time Dad’s work at the factory was cut to three days a week. She understood my love for music and she encouraged it—always there was encouragement from my mother.
Dad had mixed feelings about my playing. He loved music too, really; it was a common love of music that had drawn him and Mom together when she was a black-haired little Irish girl of eighteen and he was a Polish widower almost twice her age. Dad’s parents had been musicians in Poland, good ones too, but poor as far as money was concerned. There had been poverty in Dad’s childhood, and he placed the blame for it upon a father who had never been able to leave his music for the toil of farm or mine or factory. I had heard him talking to Mom about his feelings toward men making music a means of livelihood.
“These hands, Mary,” he had said, spreading his own hands in front of her, “these are a man’s hands. Th
ey’ve become calloused and they’ve been split sometimes, and bleeding. But they’ve never dawdled over a keyboard while you and the children suffered.”
Mom came quickly to my defense. “Josh is a worker too, Stefan. A boy who has gone out to deliver papers on bitter winter mornings since he was ten is no soft child. Your son is much like you. He respects hard work, but there’s no reason why work must deny him the gift he has inherited from both of us. He’s quick, Stefan, and he learns so naturally. We mustn’t deny him.”
He usually agreed with her in earlier years, sometimes grudgingly, but without rancor. As times grew harder, though, and work became a matter of the highest importance in the minds of most people, Dad’s impatience with my practicing became bitter. Sometimes it seemed to me that his impatience with my every act or word became bitter.
The year 1932 was not a good one in which to be fifteen years old and in close quarters with a hopeless father. I was not young and appealing to people as Joey was; I was not docile and quiet like Kitty. Dad and I clashed during the year, often and with greater anger as the hard times continued.
It hadn’t always been that way. In the early years of my life I had been the young prince in our home. I was Dad’s first son, and he was a man for whom sons were a symbol of his own strength and manhood. He was a very kind father to Kitty, who was the child of his first marriage, but he couldn’t help being a little cocky about his son. He used to take me everywhere—out to the ball parks, to the amusement park where I could try every ride and eat popcorn to my fill, down to the plant to meet his friends who thought my old-fashioned name and sober face were funny. I used to hear Dad bragging to them, “You should see this boy eat. It’s all Mary and I can do to keep him full of milk and potatoes. What we’ll do when he’s fifteen, I don’t know.”
And that was true—he didn’t know. By the time I was fifteen, the problem of a healthy appetite was no longer funny.
We went through some bad times beginning with the year I was five, the year Joey was born. My brother was a sickly baby, given only a slim chance of living. Mom and Dad wore themselves out that year, taking turns at sitting up all night to rescue Joey from strangling spasms that threatened to snuff his life out. There were huge doctor bills and anxiety over money as well as the puny child; there was great fatigue for both my parents, and Dad was not a man who took hardship or physical discomfort quietly. If I forgot that Joey was asleep and came into the house banging doors and yelling as I’d always done, Dad would turn on me in a way that soon convinced me he’d lost all the love for me he’d ever had. Kitty escaped much of his frustration, being older and gentler by nature. She used to play quiet games with me and take me for long walks to keep me away from the baby’s room. I loved Kitty very much, Kitty and Mom, but a harshness sprang up between Dad and me during the first years of Joey’s life. Somehow that harshness increased with time, intensified by the unyielding coldness I felt toward Dad, a stubborn unwillingness ever to respond to his attempts toward regaining my affection.
Those attempts grew more infrequent as times grew worse. In 1930 there were fewer and fewer hours of work each week for Dad; in 1932 he lost his job completely. With that loss, with the loss of his savings when the bank closed, maybe with the loss of being the proud man he’d once been, Dad’s attitude toward me grew less and less like that of a father who loves his son.
He was a man who had liked to talk about how he had pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, how he, a poor immigrant in 1910, had risen to be foreman at work, had a small, neat home with a mortgage gradually dwindling, was able to take his family for Sunday rides in his own automobile, could buy his wife an electric sewing machine for Christmas. And if he could do all this, was there any reason why others couldn’t? None whatever, except that those who hadn’t done as well were lazy, improvident, or stupid.
And then suddenly, his bootstraps, his industry, his shrewdness and thriftiness, were worth nothing. He was as powerless to save his home, to feed his family properly, to feel an ounce of pride or confidence in himself as any man he had scorned in former years.
It was hard for Dad, I knew, but his unreasonable rages in which I was usually the whipping boy bewildered me at first and then angered me deeply. Mom had talked with me many times about him.
“We must be patient with him, Josh. He’s a good man—just wrong in letting his desperation get the better of his reason. We mustn’t forget the goodness in him just because we can’t go along with some of the things—we are sorry about.” She never would actually come out and agree with me that Dad had done anything wrong. It was always, “I know, Josh. I know, dear. Let’s just be a little patient.”
That morning as we stood in the dark kitchen together I made a vow that I’d try to be patient with Dad if only for her sake. She was so little, so bent with weariness and worry that I felt a great tenderness for her. I patted her shoulder as I placed my empty cup on the table. “Get another hour of rest, Mom. You don’t have to be up before six.” She nodded, but I knew she wouldn’t go back to bed. She’d be afraid of oversleeping, of failing to have breakfast ready as each of her family made an appearance in the kitchen. She worked too hard, cared too much about the rest of us. It worried me. And to give Dad credit, I must admit it worried him too.
They were sitting together, Mom and Dad, at the kitchen table when I got back. He looked beaten and disheveled, but not angry as he so often did. He was holding Mom’s hand, and they were talking quietly when I came into the room.
Mom got up to fix the breakfast she had promised three hours before. “We have a few eggs this morning,” she said. Then she noticed that I shivered as I drew close to the stove. “Oh, Josh, you didn’t wear your sweater. Didn’t you see that I had it laid out on the chair for you? These mornings are too chilly for—”
Her words touched off Dad’s ready anger. He turned toward me furiously. “Must your mother dress you like you are three years old again? Must she be worried with all her other worries because you show no responsiblity—even for wearing the right clothes? It will be fine, won’t it, when you catch a cold and we have doctor’s bills on top of everything else?”
I started to say something that blazed up inside me, something about the fact that I was at least earning a little to buy food for us, but I caught the pleading in Mom’s face and I kept quiet. Dad sat for a moment, looking from one of us to the other. Then he got up and put his arms around Mom.
“Forgive, Mary. Please forgive. Why do I say things to the boy that hurt you? I think there is a meanness in me—”
“No, Stefan, there’s a tiredness in you—and hunger. Won’t you eat one of the eggs, please? I’ll scramble the other two for the children to divide amongst themselves.”
“No, I don’t want anything more. I’ll go now and meet the other men. We’re going to try a place out on Western Avenue.” He looked at me. I had a feeling that he wanted to say “Forgive” to me as he had to Mom, but for the life of me I couldn’t have accepted an apology at that moment. I turned away from him abruptly. He had lashed out at me too many times, too unreasonably. I didn’t feel the love for him that Mom did.
When he was gone, I turned to her. “Don’t fix any breakfast for me, Mom. It would choke me.”
She didn’t answer. She just walked to the window and stared outside. I went up to my room, finished some home-work, and got ready for school.
When I came down, she had a sandwich of bread and oleomargarine for me. “Buy a cup of hot cocoa and have this for lunch, Josh. You can’t play very well for Miss Crowne if you’re starved.”
She turned away quickly after she had spoken and hurried out of the kitchen as if she feared I might mention what had happened earlier. I stood at the kitchen table, looking at the sandwich she had made for me. I wanted to ask her if she had money for a cup of hot cocoa after a morning of ironing. But I heard the door of her room close sharply, and I knew the meaning of that sound. I’d heard it often at times when I was younger and she was fed up w
ith my childish demands for attention. It meant, “Keep your distance. I am not available for further conversation.”
I didn’t think she was angry with me this time, but I had an idea she didn’t want to hear me say anything against Dad. Slowly I put the sandwich into the pocket of my jacket and started out for school.
Penn High School had become a refuge for me. I was a good student, and that helped to make school attractive. I wasn’t one of the popular set, but that didn’t bother me because when classes were over, the piano up in Miss Crowne’s music room was mine, and Howie was with me.
I played better than most kids of my age, I guess. That was partly because I loved music better than anything on earth. I played by the hour, improvising upon the snatches of melody that ran through my mind, fumbling sometimes, faking at others, but finally finding something that sounded beautiful and right to me. When that happened, I rearranged and polished and worked at it until the notes went slipping under my fingers like water.
Howie shared my love of music, and he was one of those rare musicians. He seemed to have been born with an instinct for understanding music, for hearing it precisely and then reproducing it with a little something extra, all his own. Without being able to read a note, he could coax music out of a piano, a guitar, a mouth organ, a pocket comb. His favorite instrument, though, was the banjo. He had an old one which he once told me he had stolen, and that was very likely true. However he came by it, that banjo meant more to Howie than anything on earth. He knew how to make those strings sing, and we hadn’t practiced together very long until we were making music that sent splinters of delight all through me. With music like that I could forget the anxieties at home; I could forget Dad’s moods and the cheerless faces everywhere on Chicago’s grim west side. Day after day Howie and I closed the door of the music room and shut out the troubled times.