The Ten-Dollar Bill

by RICHARD T. GILL

I LIVED through most of the Depression with the idea that we were really very well off. I knew, of course, that my father’s partnership had been dissolved early in '31, but he made such a great thing out of being “independent" that I always thought it had been a matter of choice. He was a commercial artist, and in the mid-twenties he went in with a Mr. Gregory to form an outdoor advertising firm. Within a matter of months the business was booming, and by the time of the “crash" they were employing upwards of a hundred men. Just when trade was beginning to grow slack, they received an order from a national soft-drink concern to do a network of signs over the entire mid-Atlantic area, and without so much as a second thought my father put all our past savings into extra equipment. Six months later the soft-drink concern went bankrupt, and a month after that the partnership, with all our savings, was dissolved.

For the next few weeks my father tried desperately to place himself with one of the large city outfits. When this failed and what was left of our money was gone, he set up a business of his own and began piecing together a bare living by doing posters for the A&P, “clearance” signs for furniture stores, and, in general, anything that came along.

I was eight when we lost everything; but, as I say, I had no inkling of our financial position. My father was in the habit of talking to me in a grownup way, even at that time, and we often “discussed” the disastrous state of the world, but somehow I always came away with the impression that our family, luckily, had escaped all this. In fact, I considered it my duty to feel sympathy for the poor, unemployed, undernourished people whose hardships he so frequently described to me. “Ah, it’s a crime,”he would say. “They want work and they’re willing to work and some of them have kids home needing food — but they can’t find a thing. Imagine, standing in line for a cup of soup! Ah, I tell you, it’s a crime!" When he talked about the Depression, he would stick out his chin in a stubborn, pugnacious way and look threateningly about him as though, if he found out who was the responsible party, he would certainly teach him a thing or two. “It isn’t the poverty so much,” he told me one day, “it’s the indignity of it . . . the humiliation. I say to you that when a man has to beg for honest work, things have come to a sorry state!” And I would shake my head gravely, as I always did when we were talking about large social issues, feeling grateful that no such terrible thing had happened to my father.

Of course, there were certain things that seemed rather odd in view of our apparent good fortune. He often took me along for company when he was downtown looking for jobs, and it was a very discouraging business for me. He would have me wait outside while he went in to carry on his transactions, and when he came out he was usually in an ugly temper, and he would stride down the street so rapidly that I had to run to keep up with him. As far as I could see, he never got any work on these rounds of his. As it turned out, he always had some other job under way and we could be thankful that he didn’t have to waste his time doing some stupid little paper signs that weren’t worth the bother in any event. He was a great one for proving to me that when you made allowance for the cost of his time — and it was a very impressive allowance that he made if — actually cost him money to do the odd work that merchants occasionally threw his way. I often wondered why, under these circumstances, we went out at all, but he had an explanation for that too. “When you’re in business on your own,” he told me, “sometimes you have to do this nuisance work just for the good will. At that, it’s better than taking orders from somebody else. No, I’m glad I didn’t go to work in the city. . . . What do you think, Jimmie?" And, of course, I agreed.

Another thing that required explanation was the fact that we never had any money in the house. I soon gathered, however, that my mother had no money sense. She and my father had it out about once a week, usually on Saturday morning just before she was off to the store on her weekend shopping. It seemed that he had given her some verylarge sum early in the week and that she had so mismanaged our affairs that we were left with nothing to show for it, and for this reason we would not have meat t hat Sunday.

I couldn’t understand why Mother wasn’t more careful. I knew she didn’t spend the money on herself — she had a pair of house dresses that she alternated wearing week by week and which got to be so faded that I was a little embarrassed when my friends came to the house but apparently she was reckless about small things. He was always insisting that she make out a list and she was always threatening that she would make out a list, but nothing ever came, of it. Each Saturday evening, he made up to her. I felt that, in view of this weakness of hers, he ought to be more firm with her, but before supper was over she would be on his lap and he would be telling me what a fine mother I had and how I ought to be especially nice to her. As if I’d been fighting with her!

2

IT’S really remarkable that I could have gone on so long without realizing how hard up we were. About six months after the business folded, for example, my father switched from Camels to rolling his own cigarettes. He had been talking about giving them up altogether for about two months, and finally he compromised by buying this Bugler. It came in a large blue package, costing only a dime, and you could roll any number of cigarettes out of it. He never really learned how to do it. He never seemed to be able to get enough tobacco in the paper, and when he lit it and half of it went up in flame he went almost purple and shouted out a stream of profanity that was a little shocking even to me. Still, I failed to see through his claim that he preferred Bugler to Camels, and even in that cruel year 1933, when I was a ripe ten years old and he had given up smoking completely, I somehow managed to preserve my illusion about our family’s good fortune. At that time, he was almost completely idle. lie went out on his rounds every morning as usual but often he would come back before lunch, haggard and tired, and lie down on the couch spend the rest of the afternoon sleeping or reading.

Execpt for the Saturday disagreements. Mother had been very patient through it all, but around this time she began getting after him about going “on relief.” I didn’t really know what “relief” was, except that I had a general impression that it was what all those poor, undernourished people that I was forever thinking charitable thoughts about were on. He got his back up when she raised this subject. “I’ll bring in the money all right,” he’d snap al her. “Don’t you worry about that! You just worry about how you spend it ! Then he would take me aside and tell me that he was damned if he was going to ask the Government for any favors and, in any event, it wouldn’t be legal for us to go on relief since we were earning far too much money. I agreed with him wholeheartedly and the two of us would sit there, shaking our heads gravely and thinking how little women understood of the ethical issues of accepting Government money unlawfully. But after he had exploded to me, he was always out into the kitchen after her, and before long she was in his lap again and it was being suggested that I ought to be nicer to Mother.

Of course, there was some work. He did the banner for the NRA parade and fixed the sign on the Rex theater. I remember that commission well because they paid him in passes and, for several weeks, we were at the movies almost every night. No one could convince me that we were among the unfortunates that summer! But, in the fall, even that ended, and, for about six weeks, my father didn’t do a day’s work.

It was at that lime that I realized what our position actually was. I had gone off one weekend in October to be with my aunt and uncle in Bayonne. They ran a clothing store and each fall I was sent to them for a few days, returning with a suitcase full of socks and underwear and a new suit or sweater. I was under the impression that they were even more well-to-do than we were, the way they gave things to me. Of course, the truth was that the store was losing money badly and they were looking, so far unsuccessfully, for someone to take it off their hands. In the meanwhile, they wanted to outfit their nearest of kin as well as they could.

My aunt was a warmhearted, misty-eyed woman who had no children of her own, who fussed over me from the moment I arrived until the moment I left and who was continually giving me odd nickels from the cash register and pretending that we mustn’t let my uncle know. If anything, however, he was more generous than she, and while we waited for the bus to take me home foe would always slip a bill into my jacket pocket. On this occasion, in fact, he gave me ten dollars— which is for a boy at any time, and particularly for a boy at that time, a simply fantastie amount. It was so shockingly large that, greedy as I fell at the sight of it, I realized I should not take it. But they would not listen to me, and the more I made myself protest the more misty-eyed my aunt became until, finally, she swept me up in her arms and kissed me over and over again, all of which struck me as being very undignified for a boy my age, particularly at a bus depot and in front of my uncle. So I stopped protesting, shook hands with both of them in a manly way, and boarded the bus with my hoard of clothing and my crisp, green fortune.

It was a delightful trip! The man across the aisle was eying me rather curiously and I had a distinct suspicion that he had seen the money pass into my hands. But I soon forgot about him and fell to dreaming of the future. I hadn’t much idea about what things cost in general but I soon calculated that, in terms of movies, at ten cents a throw, it came to a hundred movies; and not having pencil and paper handy, I wasn’t at all sure but that it was really a thousand movies. In any event, it was clear that, barring any interference from across the aisle, it was to be a life of luxury for me from that time on.

3

THE bus arrived at the stop in front of our house shortly before three that afternoon and I quickly unloaded my suitcases and dragged them up the path still in this most blissful state of mind. My mother and father, in the dining room, did not hear me coming up the front steps, and when I entered I heard her talking in that weary, complaining tone she used whenever she was speaking about money. He was sitting at the dining-room table, his head resting on one hand, a deep frown lengthening his face. When he saw me, he brightened up a bit. “ Well, by God, Jimmie boy!" he exclaimed. “ I low’s the traveler?”

She broke off what she was saying and smiled, although it struck me that she looked very tired. But she came over and kissed me and we all settled in the living room to look at my now clothes and talk about my trip. I started from the beginning and told them about the ride to Bayonne and how my aunt and uncle had met me at the depot and how, on the first night, they had taken me to a late movie; but I noticed that both of them, far from being engrossed as they usually were by the least details of my activities, were somehow abstracted. At times, they hardly seemed to be listening at all. Once when I was telling about an amusing thing my uncle had done, a frown descended over my father’s face and I thought he was angry with me. But then he snapped himself up and said “Now tell me, Jimmie, tell me again what your uncle said.”

After I had repeated it and they had hoth laughed, my mother rose, saying that she had a little headache. She made me promise that I would tell her everything she missed and then she went upstairs to her room. I continued with my story and my father kept nodding and smiling, but once again I felt I wasn’t engaging his full attention. So I decided to tell him my exciting news.

He began to take interest at that, and pleased by his reaction I went, on to recite the innumerable things I had in mind to purchase with my new money.

“Well, that’s quite a list, isn’t it?” he said when I was finished, but I could see by his expression that he was thinking of something else. In fact, my mention of the ten dollars appeared to have plunged him into some deep meditation. I tried to stir his interest again by describing, rather more vividly than I should have, the appearance of the man across the aisle, but in the middle of a sentence he leaned forward and interrupted me. “Look, Jimmie,”he said. “Ah . . . come over on the couch with me for a second, will you?”

I went over to him only reluctantly. When I was at his side, he glanced at me from the corner of his eye and then looked up at the ceiling.

“To tell you the truth . . . well, the fact is, we’re a little strapped right now,” he said at. length, his eyes still on the ceiling. “You know, some people don’t pay their bills on time and, of course, it leaves you temporarily in the hole . . .”He took a long, deep breath. “We’d get it back to you, of course,” he continued. “Oh, I should have it by Tuesday or Wednesday at the latest. It’s just that we need a little something to tide us over tomorrow. Otherwise, I’d never think of asking you.”

I understood what he was talking about but I said nothing, hoping he would change the subject.

“So if you wouldn’t mind letting me borrow it, I’ll be able to get straightened out tomorrow and then we’ll get squared away, well, by the end of the week at the very latest. You understand, don’t you ?”

I looked down at the crisp new bill in my hand. Ten dollars at the end of the week would be pleasant to look forward to, but there was something terribly substantial about that bill right there in my hand at that moment. When I looked up, he was watching me, his chin thrust out the way it was when he talked about the Depression.

“Of course, it’s your money . . .”

I hesitated for a moment, then shook my head and handed him the bill. He quickly put it out of sight in his pocket, then rose and patted me on the head. “Now you run along and play,” he said. “I’ll go up and see how your mother feels.”

I nodded and, without looking up, rose from the couch and started shuffling slowly out of the room. 1 had the feeling he was watching me go but I did not turn around. I jammed my hands into my empty pockets, gave a little twist of my shoulders to show him how I fell, and continued my slow, deliberate shuffle out of the living room and towards the rear of the house. Before I was out of sight, he called me back. I protended I hadn’t heard and went on into the back yard.

The truth was I was just a little irritated. I was irritated with the people who didn’t pay their bills on time. I was irritated with Mol her because she was former mismanaging our affairs so that we were always in one tight spot or another. I was oven a bit irritated with my father. It occurred to me that we couldn’t be too well off if he couldn’t piece together enough money to get by the first of the week. For a moment I wondered if we might not actually be quite poor. Then I remembered that he had said there would be money coming in later in the week. As I thought about it, it seemed to me that it would have been very simple for him to ask the person he was going to pay to wait for a few days. Apparently other people didn’t always pay their bills on time.

I walked slowly around the yard, my hands in my pockets, feeling generally miserable. As far as I was concerned, ten dollars later in the week was perfectly useless and I was not at all sure that I would accept it then. I thought, in fact, that I might not even accept it on Tuesday or Wednesday. There was a loose clump of grass in my path and I gave it a vicious kick. Just as I did so, I noticed that my father was standing on the back steps and watching me.

“Come, here, Jimmie,” he called sharply.

As soon as I heard his voice, I was ashamed of myself. I could tell that he knew what had been going on in my mind. I started walking rather fearfully towards him but before I’d taken three steps he was coming across the yard.

When he reached me, he took out the ten-dollar hill and thrust it into my jacket pocket. ‘“Keep your damn money,”he snapped. He lurried around immediately and started back for the house.

I was miserable with shame. I ran Inwards the house and caught up with him on the back steps.

“Here, I don’t want it!” I cried. “You keep it.!”

“ I don’t need your money.”

“ I don’t want it!”

“That’s up to you.”

“I won’t keep it. I’ll give it to Mother.”

“Do what you like. I won’t touch it.”

He wouldn’t even look at me. He was staring down at his feet, his hands clenched, his eyes narrowed and blazing. I was desperate. I look hold of his coat and tried to put the money in his pocket.

He pushed my hand away brusquely. “It hasn’t come to this yet, boy,” he exclaimed, staring right into me. “That’s one thing you can be sure of!”

“Why won’t you take it?” I cried out. I could feel the tears beginning to form around my eyes.

He looked at me intensely for a moment as though he were going to shout at me. Then, quile suddenly, ho put his hand on my head and began to ruffle my hair.

“Ah, Jimmie, Jimmie, Jimmie,”he said, sighing. “I can’t take your money. I wouldn’t have it next week. I don’t know when I’d have it . . .”

He rubbed his hand over his forehead and very slowly up through his hair, his eyes gazing distantly across the yard. He looked very old. His shoulders were slightly stooped and there were dark hollows around his eyes and a deep ridge between his brows that I had never noticed before.

He smiled haggardly. “No, you keep it and buy yourself something nice with it . . .”he said. And then, very slowly and mechanically, as if he had just enough energy to move, he opened the hack door and went into the house.

I knew then that we were poor. Everything that had happened during t he past months suddenly lit up. I understood exactly what he had been living through all that time. The tears were nowstreaming down my face.

I ran into the house and found him in the living room with Mother. He was sitting on the couch, his chin in his hands, and she was beside him stroking the back of his neck with her hand. I went over to them and told them I realized how poor we were and that I would never spend my money for anything and that immediately — on Monday morning—I would leave school and get a job. I talked on and on about the things I would do for them, and they both smiled at me and then my father got me up on his lap and got his arm around Mother at the same time. “The two of you,” he said squeezing her shoulder and mine, “the two of you . . and then he closed his eyes and did not finish.

And we sat there on the couch, the three of us, for the longest time, and none of us seemed to care that we were poor.