Touch and Go by Studs Terkel Read Free Book Online

room more than now and then. Some years later, just before we sold the rooming house, Ben picked up the newspaper. He was casually having a look-see at the sports page when a notice in the obituaries caught his attention. His mumbling suddenly stopped; his easy-come, easy-go manner vanished as his face assumed a bloodless pallor. He showed me the obit notice: Helena Turner had committed suicide. “Do you remember who she was?”

    â€œThe name rings a bell.” A pause; something of a sigh.
    â€œShe was someone I knew.” And he knew I knew.
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    SOME YEARS LATER, when I came across Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe, I associated Annie Terkel with Eliza Gant, the narrator’s mother: small, bony, swift, and murder on deadbeats. Eliza ran Dixieland, a boarding house in Altamont (Asheville). American Style was its generic name: meals along with rooms. Ours was European Style: rooms only. Now and then, a guest working in the city’s sanitation department, after the thankless job of keeping Chicago clean, was too weary to visit the all-night diner nearby. My mother, for two bits, would toss him a piece of lettuce, a thin slab of beef, and a boiled potato. On seeing the greenery, what little there was of it, an indignant howl was heard from the usually quiet man, “What am I, a rabbit?”
    â€œHetty Green”—Henrietta Howland Green, 1835–1916. My mother knew all about her when she took over the rooming house in 1921. I never could figure out how she came to know Hetty so much better than she knew Jane Addams, who founded Hull House only blocks away from us. How could this be, a matter of defying both geography and the calendar? I think I know. It was a sudden empathy my mother felt for a genius of her gender beating the male of the species at his own game.
    Hetty Green, at the age of six, was immersed in reading the financial section of the newspaper to her ailing father. Yes, Annie knew of Mme. Curie and Rosa Raisa, 5 but their giftedness is not what attracted Annie. Hetty became known as the richest woman in the world—her spheres were special: investment, real estate holdings, understanding of the market, free or free-fall. She also had a reputation for being the most miserly; that she was tight-fisted was obvious to anyone who had dealings with her. She never turned on
the heat, nor used hot water. She wore one old black dress and undergarments that she changed only after they’d been worn out. Yet in the panic of 1907, she bailed out New York City with a million-dollar loan. It was not a philanthropist’s gesture: she took it out in short-term bonds and picked up millions in repayment.
    In defense of Annie, though in all business dealings she simply assumed she was about to be cheated, my mother never reached Hetty’s level of parsimony. Though on occasion, Annie did try to save a penny or two in buying Octagon soap, a product quite abrasive and not meant for the human body. My father would sometimes sneak in a bar of Ivory soap: 99 and 44/100 percent pure. Annie could never have been indicted for undue philanthropy. She had a coin or two for the wayfaring mendicant, provided the unfortunate one was a woman. Males with outstretched hands were beggars and bums.
    Of course, she knew of the Triangle Fire in Manhattan where management had locked exits while working girls died after flying through the air. Of course, she was for labor unions. She, as a matter of rote, even expressed admiration for Gene Debs. But it was the saga of Hetty Green that most enthralled her. She would not have minded being called the “Witch of Wall Street.” Hetty caught the brass ring; my mother missed it, though she flew through the air. Luckily there was a net: the rooming house.
    In seeing William Bolcom’s opera McTeague , based upon the Frank Norris novel and Erich von Stroheim’s film Greed , I thought of my mother, Eliza Gant, and Hetty Green. Catherine