The Wild Girl Read Online Free PDF

responsibility to stay around and take care of us.
    My uncle Bill, Pop’s unmarried younger brother, came out from California to help with the funeral arrangements, and to settle Pop’s insurance. I really don’t know him very well, but he’s a nice enough guy. I didn’t want to go live with him out there, and I don’t think he wanted me, either. So I lied and told him I was going to live with my mother’s sister in Cincinnati. Uncle Bill seemed pretty relieved about that, even though my mother doesn’t have a sister in Cincinnati.
    “You just be sure to send me a card with your new address once you get there, kid,” he said. “You know if you ever need anything, anything at all, you can always count on your old uncle Bill.” He smiled as if he was kind of embarrassed about saying this, because, of course, we both knew that it was not so.
    I’m a year ahead of my age in school, already one semester into my first year of undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago. And I hold a part-time job, or at least I did until just recently, at the Chicago Racquet Club, a private men’s club downtown. I’ve worked there in the summertime for years. I started out as a ball boy for the tennis pro, and later I worked in the clubhouse. I’ve done a little bit of everything at the club over the years. I’ve washed dishes in the kitchen, cleaned the squash courts and locker room, waited tables in the dining room. I’ve always been popular with the members because I’ve been there since I was a kid, and I’m quiet and polite, so that eventually the rich men forget I’m even there and speak as freely as if I weren’t. I liked working at the club and I knew that I was lucky to have a job in these times when so many people are out of work. It’s a funny thing, but most of the members don’t even seem like they’ve been much affected by the Depression. All of Chicago’s old founding families belong to the club—the Swifts, the Armours, the Cudahys, the Meers, the McCormicks—and the place is kind of like a big kids’ fort for grown-ups, where the rich guys can hide out together and pretend that everything is okay, that nothing outside their walls really exists. Which I guess is the whole point of a private club. It’s a whole different world in there and I feel it every time I walk through the doors. Paintings of hunting dogs and jumping horses hang on dark wood-paneled walls. The furniture is all plush leather and velvet, polished oak and mahogany. Beautiful Oriental rugs cover gleaming hardwood floors. It’s hard to explain but there’s a kind of comforting hush about the place that seems to mingle in the air with the rich smells of fine whiskey and Cuban cigars and choice Chicago beef searing on the grill in the kitchen. And even the sweet aftershave sweat of squash players just coming off the court seems so different from the sour sweat of workingmen gathered for an illegal pint at the neighborhood speakeasies.
    If anything, the club members seem more gay than ever these days. They throw more private parties and drink more booze, and the drunker they get, the louder they defend the ruinous economic policies of their Republican hero, President Herbert Hoover. Our family is from a long line of working-class Democrats, but Pop always told me that it would probably be better if I didn’t mention this at the club. Not that those men would ever ask an employee about his politics.
    Some of the members had seen my father’s obituary in the
Chicago Tribune
(I wrote it myself), and ever since they’ve been especially solicitous of me. Some of the men even slipped me envelopes of cash. It was a strange feeling to accept their gifts, as if I was being tipped for my parents’ deaths. But it’s been even stranger to come home after work these past weeks to our dark, empty house. Of course, it’s still full of my parents’ possessions, I haven’t changed a thing, and it still holds their smells, as if they’re