by Jim Hazard

The day started with a nose. The Chicago, South Bend, and South Shore station's scent was the greasy ozone and creosote of the track area just outside the door, then inside, stale tobacco and restrooms, and I swear you could smell the tickets the sourpuss chain smoker sold behind a barred window. An inky, cardboard-y smell almost as exciting as a whiff of those North Clark Street used bookstores my mother cursed.

"You're going to give us all a social disease with those damn things!" She meant the second-hand books I brought home from North Clark. She was a reader, so it wasn't the books themselves that bothered her, but that she preferred her copies of Dorothy Parker or Saroyan to come into the house brand new, free of contagion. I argued that she checked books out of the public library, but she had an answer for that one. Those books were handled by people she knew - she was certain she knew everyone in our Hoosier town, personally, who would check out F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the odds that they would have a social disease were not worth discussing.

I wasn't wearing one of those newspaper reporter felt fedoras, so I couldn't stick my ticket to Chicago in the hatband while I waited for the train. In those days, there were so many missing details, but I felt, when they make the movie of my life, we'll take care of that.

Along with the ticket, I had no hat for, I carried another ticket -- humming and almost wiggling like a minnow in my sport coat inner pocket. The sport coat was my one and only, actually a very sharp brown tweed, and I wore the very hip brown knit tie, also my one and only. My sport coat pocket ticket was for the first poetry reading of my life, the first ever Poetry Day of Poetry Magazine.

Robert Frost was the poet, l955 was the year. A month or so before I'd seen a notice in the Sunday Chicago Trib that Frost would be reading his poems in one of the downtown theatres, the Blackstone if I remember correctly. The next day I sent in my self-addressed stamped envelope with a postal money order and my written request for one ticket to hear the poet.

My father guided me through that process, including instruction on how to fold a stamped self-addressed envelope so it fit into the original mailing envelope. He was no reader of poetry himself, but was a believer in pursuing adventures tailored to your own soul. Not the customary father's advice in the lunch bucket town where I grew up.

I rode the train to Chicago, disembarked at Randolph Street, and walked back down Michigan Avenue from the train station feeling very much one of a kind. That may have been true back home, but when I reached the theatre the lobby was jammed and chatty - everyone there seemed to know someone. They all looked richer or more bohemian or more at ease than me. I knew this was the right place for me to be, the Indiana boy who wore out library cards before their expiration date, but I wished I was one of those fellows who smoothed his way through the crowd like Fred Astaire, making all sorts of arrangements for after the reading.

I sat in the balcony, behind a woman about my Aunt Marnie's age, sixtyish. She did not appear to have arrived on the interurban train from the steel mills and oil refineries of northern Indiana. "Do you come to these recitals often?" she asked. I didn't say "Who? Me?" but the words were written all over my map I'm sure. Her voice and delivery were pure Ethel Barrymore.

"Well, no. This is my first...recital." I'd seen enough movies to know you don't lie to Ethel Barrymore and get away with it.

"Oh! how I envy you..." You could tell she really did envy me - but for what? For being a steel-town hick? "To be making this great discovery, to be attending the first of a lifetime of recitals..." She was in the row in front of and slightly below mine, consequently she looked up at me with brown eyes so big and sincere I wanted to touch them. I wanted to, but I kept my hands to myself.

Out front of the big curtain there was a podium and, set behind it, an upholstered armchair. "I saw Edna St. Vincent Millay here you know. Yes, she was sitting right there on that very very spot where Mr. Frost's chair is..." We both looked at that very very spot for a few breaths, then my guide said melodramatically, as if this was just between the two of us and must never never never be told to anyone on earth, "She was drinking martinis, you know. Buckets of them. And she fell off the chair. Her friends called her Vincent, you know. She fell, bump, right there and then got up and read like an angel..."

Edna St. Vincent Millay's bottom had bumped right there, I thought, and not a trace of the event remained for posterity. I'd read what Edmund Wilson had written about Millay, about Vincent. I quoted or paraphrased what I recalled, while Ethel Barrymore listened so raptly, with such heart rending brown eyes, that I wished I were 40 years older.

Wilson had loved her - Millay - and had said when she was "excited by the blood or the spirit became almost supernaturally beautiful."

"Oh, dear dear Bunny," Miss Barrymore said.

I was a reader. I knew that Wilson was called Bunny, but I'd never actually heard his name pronounced out loud. Bunny did not figure large in my neighborhood - although the News Stand did sell both the New Yorker and The Saturday Review of Literature. Probably in the privacy of their homes certain citizens of Whiting called Edmund Wilson "Bunny," but I hadn't been in those houses, and there was no place in town to call him "Bunny."

"Bunny could be so right - when he was right," and she raised her eyebrows knowingly. I mirrored the lady's look as if to say, "How very true."

The house lights went down and I did not talk, ever again, to the woman who had seen Edna St. Vincent Millay. She sort of wiggled her gloved fingers at me when the reading was over and I waggled my fingers at her, wishing I had met her thirty years before, or wishing I were a different sort of fellow. Robert Frost had read beautifully that afternoon, but there was a distraction. All the while he read I wondered if he realized his sizeable feet were set on the very spot where Edna St. Vincent Millay's bottom had come to earth before it rose up and she read like an angel.

When I was back home I was expected to tell my parents the whole story. One beauty part about life in Whiting, Indiana, was the requirement that if anything happened to you, a story must come from it. The talk in the saloons, diners, mills, and refineries was stories. If you did it and had no story... you didn't do it. That was Whiting's credo.

My parents had roasted this new kind of chicken, Rock Cornish Game Hens. Victor Borge raised them, I was informed. I thought it must be wonderful to invent a new chicken, especially if large numbers of people ate it. You would seem to be making your mark in the world where it counted. My parents had had martinis while the hens were roasting, but hadn't finished the whole mix. The golden leftovers (those were the days when good gin was always golden) were in a Skippy peanut butter jar in the refrigerator. My dad took the Skippy jar out and divided the remainder equally with my mother. They were listening to a Teddy Wilson album, solo piano and all Gershwin songs. I told them every second of my Sunday, from the smell of the ticket to Mr. Frost's saying "Birches."

My mother suspected Ethel Barrymore was thinking about making a pass at me. I told her I should be so lucky, and she punched me in the arm. My mother had shades of punching, from tender to punishing. This one was half tender.

My parents remembered the time they'd seen Bing Crosby on Michigan Avenue, and how he looked more serious and chubby than they would have expected - serious and chubby like a businessman or a lawyer. My mother had actually seen Edna St. Vincent Millay once in Chicago, in the Windermere Hotel lobby. The poet wasn't drunk, but looked like she had a toothache. And my father had seen the legendary jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke during the Twenties when Bix was an unknown, playing at Miller Beach in Gary for a summer.

"What was he like?"

"Drunk," my father said and had nothing to add. My father was a little stiff from the martinis and probably had the impression he'd said more than he actually did.

It was Sunday evening. Tomorrow was work and school. We were up late drinking. We played piano bar records - classy, melodic and rhythmic piano players like Teddy Wilson, Joe Bushkin, Fats Waller. My parents were finding one another very attractive, which they were. And I was attractive, too, having come returned from Chicago with stories of Edna St. Vincent Millay and others, including Ethel Barrymore and Robert Frost. There was something sexy about putting off preparations for work and school, stretching out the weekend on a Sunday night, just the three of us behind closed doors, them a little drunk in their way, me in my way.

My dad blurted, "Actually," and I knew he was going to make up for shortchanging us earlier on the Bix story. "Actually, I was being kind of a smartie when I said he was drunk. Well, he was - but that wasn't the main thing. He was such a kid, slaphappy, carrying his horn and a bottle of gin around and wearing these droopy wool swimming trunks like they used to wear. He looked like he was six years old. Oh yeah - and he was a pretty softball player, a natural hitter. Later they had a bonfire on the beach and he played 'Good Night Sweetheart,' like at the end of a dance. You never heard it played like that." Often when your parents tell you something great they did years back, you promise yourself you'll do that too when you're older. But there was no going back to the Twenties, or to Bix Beiderbecke. Certain people my age, 20 years old in l955, considered themselves the last children of the Jazz Age, we were that close to it if our parents had had the right youth. We buy the records, read the books, and hoard the stories we heard when we were young.

We were having such a fine time telling stories we reached a point where we had to stop talking altogether. The stories were that good and there were so many songs and people to think about we just had to sit together and listen awhile. Teddy Wilson, playing "Embraceable You."

Then it was done. Nobody looked at the clock, but it was time. My dad mussed my hair, my mom rinsed the glasses and Skippy jar and they went upstairs. I heard them in a little while, soft familiar sounds that scared some kids or made them talk nasty, but were no threat to me. It belonged with everything else that fine day, Teddy Wilson, a train ride, the lady in the balcony, Bix's droopy swim trunks, the tall white haired man reading his boyish birch tree poem, and unforgettably, the late Edna St. Vincent Millay, who drank martinis and read like an angel.

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