A Woman in Charge Read Online Free PDF Page A

the room.
    When the boys returned from school, he issued their orders for the rest of the day—chores, studying, then lights out early, the same that had been expected of him as a boy in Scranton. Rather than hire tradesmen for regular upkeep of the house, Tony and Hughie were conscripted to patch and paint as required. As a result, the house gradually sank into structural disrepair and headed toward deterioration, so much so that it was described as “a wreck” by the real estate saleswoman who eventually handled its sale—for about $200,000—when Dorothy and Hugh moved to Little Rock. At the time, it still had antiquated sixty-amp electrical wiring.
    Hugh Rodham did not pay his children on those weekends when they came downtown to “help work on a big order.” Often he’d drive them through Chicago’s aggregation of skid row neighborhoods to remind them of how fortunate they were. He freely expressed prejudices against blacks in the most denigrating terms. He never had a credit card, taught Hillary and her brothers to read the stock tables in the
Chicago Tribune,
and counseled the wisdom of thrift. The bitterness never left, despite the accoutrements of prosperity and his children’s devotion.
    Rodham had chosen to settle his family in a tranquil neighborhood of two-story, brick-and-frame houses painted in subtle hues, with copses of maples and elms shading the macadam, and small gardens and grassy curbsides lovingly tended. The house was on a corner, its front and side yards seeded green, its sizable front porch directly under the second-floor bedroom-and-sundeck that was Hillary’s.
    The house was not large. Downstairs there was a living room; a dining room with space sufficient for a table and eight chairs; a cramped kitchen with a breakfast nook; a TV den perhaps fifteen feet square; and a tiny powder room. Upstairs were three bedrooms—none large. The basement was unfinished and used for storage. Across the backyard was a garage, only slightly wider than Hugh’s Cadillac but with room for a few bicycles.
    In “town,” a single stoplight hung like a pendant from wires over the intersection of Main Street and South Prospect Avenue, Park Ridge’s commercial center—candy store, art deco theater, public library, wedding photography studio, pharmacy, coffee shop. Nearby, planes bound for new O’Hare Airport descended like buzzing drones in the twilight. Park Ridge, then as now, was an altogether different type of suburb from the communities along Chicago’s exclusive North Shore, the houses newer, built mostly in the 1930s and 1940s, without pretension of the grand manner. The breadwinners of Park Ridge in the 1950s and 1960s were mainly first-generation professionals or successful merchant-tradesmen like Hillary’s father. They were disposed to exhibiting the ripe fruits of their good fortune and hard work, which had lifted their generational climb from working-class wages: Cadillacs, golf handicaps, gadgets, leisure wear, and leisure time. Many had moved their families from Chicago to escape the incursion of Negroes from the South whose numbers were tipping the city school system. The high school Hillary would attend through eleventh grade, Maine East, was the largest all-white high school in the nation.
    To reach Park Ridge, you drove or took the Northwest Rail train past the synagogues of Skokie or the tract houses and little apartments in Niles and then, before you got to O’Hare, you turned and skirted some vegetable farms just outside town. Park Ridge had no Jews (at least none that Hillary knew of ), blacks, or Asians, or legal liquor sales, or, so far as Hillary was aware, divorce. Dorothy Rodham was one of the few women in the community who didn’t stay home all day, who could be found in the library’s reading room, or downtown at a museum. Almost all the Rodhams’ neighbors were Methodist, Catholic, or Lutheran, and