A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago — John Shaqi
A Thousand and One Afternoons in ChicagoHecht, Ben
General
A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago
Hecht, Ben
Chicago (Ill.) -- Literary collections; Hecht, Ben, 1893-1964 -- Homes and haunts -- Illinois -- Chicago
She will kneel in the wet grass and her pasty little face will blink its
dull eyes over a grave. Like a little clown in her curling cotton suit,
her lumpy shoes, her idiotic hat, she will offer her tears to the pitiless
silence of trees, wind, rain and white stones.
"Do you like them there?" She asks. She points to a cluster of fancy
headstones.
"Do you?" I ask.
She smiles.
"Oh yes," she says. And she stops. She is admiring the tombstones. We walk
on.
It is incredible. This blousy one, this dull-eyed one has come to the
cemetery on her day off--to admire the tombstones. Ah, here is drama of a
poignant kind. Let us pray God there is nothing pathologic here and that
this is an idyl of despair, that the lumpish little slavey sits on the
rain-washed bench dreaming of fine tombstones as a flapper might dream of
fine dresses.
Yes, at last we are on the track. We talk. These are very pretty, she
says. Life is dull. The days are drab. The place where she works is like
an oven. There is nothing pretty to look at--even in mirrors there is
nothing cool and pretty. Clothes grow lumpy when she puts them on. Boys
giggle and call names when she goes out. And so, outcast, she comes here
to the cemetery to dream of a day when something cool and pretty will
belong to her. A headstone, perhaps a stately one with a figure above it.
It will stand over her. She will be dead then and unable to enjoy it. But
now she is alive. Now she can think of how pretty the stone will look and
thus enjoy it in advance. This, after all, is the technique of all dreams.
We grow confidential. I have asked what sort she likes best, what sort it
pleases her most to think about as standing over her grave when she dies.
And she has pointed some out. It rains. The trees shake water and the wind
hurries past the white stones.
"I will tell you something," she says. "Here, look at this." From one of
her curled pockets she removes a piece of paper. It is crumpled. I open it
and read:
"In Case of Accident please notify Misses Burbley,--Sheridan Road, and
have body removed to Home of Parents who are residants of Corliss
Wisconsin where they have resided for twenty Years and the diseased is a
only Daughter named Clara. Age nineteen and educated in Corliss public
Schools where she Graduated as a girl but came to Chicago in serch of
employment and in case of accident funeral was held from Home of the
Parents, many Frends attending and please Omit flours...."
"I got lot of them writ out," said Clara, blinking. "You wanna read more?
Why I write them out? Oh, because, you can't tell, maybe you get run over
and in accident and how they going to know who you are or what to do with
the diseased if they don't find something?"
Her thick red hands grew excited. She produced further obituaries. From
her pocketbook, from her bosom, from her pockets and one from under her
hat. I read them. They were all alike, couched in vaguely bombastic terms.
We sat in the rain and I thought:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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