Memorial Bridge Read Online Free PDF Page A

The respectably dressed office workers and shop girls, in their refusal even to see the derelicts, seemed certain of their superiority, but she knew better than to feel that way. She knew how desolate those men were from the way they looked at her when she gave them coins. Her girlfriends chided Cassie for doing that, and more than once her mother had forbidden her to give money to men on the streets. Handouts, she said, were what enabled them to stay away from home. Which of course was the point. Cassie's mother wasn't stingy. Her bitter attitude came from the hurt of what had happened in
their
home.
    And not only theirs. By that phase of the Depression most of the girls Cassie knew had lost men to those alcoves and those alleys and those eerie circles around oil-drum fires. Cassie's loss—her mother's—had come early. She had had to go to work in the first place when her father disappeared way back in 1932. She hadn't finished high school and had had to lie about her age to get the switchboard job. When, after her first raise, she'd begun putting pennies into the chapped hands of beggars, it was to make them look at her. She wouldn't release her coin until the man looked up. Then she would stare carefully into his face, hoping it was familiar. Her green eyes had been her father's first.
    And she was still doing it. She always had her coins ready, to enact what by now was a ritual from which she expected nothing for herself. She was giving those men pennies and nickels because they needed them.
    "God bless
you,
Miss," one derelict said, raising his eyes to her.
    Cassie sensed that the man wasn't nearly as old as he looked. His face, what she saw of it beneath his lumpy felt hat, was etched with that familiar shame. But nothing else about him was familiar, and she hurried by.
    She hopped onto the first step of the stairway going up to the El. The iron structure shook with the weight of all the people. As she climbed with them, it seemed to Cassie she could feel the sadness of her fellow commuters.
    As if to change her mood, she swung her shoulder bag from her right side to her left as she took the last steps up to the platform. A man tipped his hat at her, and she smiled unselfconsciously. There was always more to be glad about than sad. God bless
you,
she said to herself, repeating the derelict's words, but as a prayer.
    Halfway down the crowded platform she found her usual waiting place by the cloudy, cracked window from which she could both watch for her train and look back down on the street. Her eyes went automatically to the beggar in the felt hat a few paces beyond the stairway. From there, seen through the hazy glass, he seemed a figure in a mournful side window at church. God bless
you,
she said again. And then she added with a sharp, unexpected pang, All of you.
    A few minutes later her train came. Cassie always welcomed the jolt of departure, the sensation at the base of her spine as the car began to accelerate. She thought that riding the El above Chicago was as close as she would ever come to flying. That was why, despite her weariness and the perennial crush of the other riders, the time it took to go from North La Salle to Canary ville seemed sometimes to be the best of her day. She never refused a gentleman's offer of his seat if it let her face the window, especially the window on the right side of the car from which she could stare out over the western stretches of the city as the sunset approached. Chicago was so flat and, once away from downtown, the buildings were so low that, even lifted above the rooftops only that much, it was possible to see for miles. The sight of the squared-off ribbons of roadway soothed her with its familiar uniformity. The dwellings of working people were all alike, and to look out above them was to see a checkered plain of tar paper and asphalt. Only the sharp upward thrust of church spires and factory chimneys broke the horizontal monotony, and those towers glowed in the