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Street was a Chicago institution, the marketplace where the rich and the poor would go for a bargain; where awnings hung from storefronts to the very edge of the wooden stalls crowding the curb, the walkway between so dark a tunnellike effect was created, and lamps were strung up so bargain hunters could see what they were getting- but not
too
many lamps, and not
overly
bright, because it wasn't to the seller's advantage to let the buyer get
too
close a look at the toeless socks, used toothbrushes, factory-second shirts, and other wonders that were the soul of the street. Whether the street had a heart or not, I couldn't say, but it did have a smell: the smell of onions frying: even the smell of garbage burning in open trash drums couldn't drown
that
out. Accompanying the oniony air were the clouds of steam rising from the hot dogs; and when the onions met the hot dogs in a fresh bun. that was as close to heaven as Maxwell Street got.
    Pa and his bride moved into a one-room tenement flat at Twelfth and Jefferson, in a typical Maxwell Street-area building: a three-story clapboard with a pitched roof and exterior staircase. There were nine flats in the building and about eighty people; one three-room flat was home for an even dozen. The Hellers, alone in their one room, sharing an outhouse with twenty or thirty of their fellow residents (one outhouse per floor), had room to spare, and maybe that's what led to me.
    I would imagine Pa was living your typical quiet life of desperation: his union work, which meant so much to him, was in the past; taking its place was his stall, in an atmosphere more openly capitalistic than the banks he loathed (and Pa was a well-read, intellectual type, remember; irony didn't get past him).
    So all he had in life was his beloved Jeanette, and the promise of a family.
    But mother was still frail, and having me (in 1905) damn near killed her. A midwife/nurse from the Maxwell Street Dispensary, pulled her- and me- through; and, later, diplomatically suggested to them, separately and together, that Nathan Samuel Heller be an only child.
    Big families were the rule then, however, and a few years later, my mother died during a miscarriage; the midwife didn't even make it to the house before my mother died in my father's bloody arms. I think I remember standing nearby and seeing this. Or maybe my father's quiet, understated but photographically vivid retelling (and he told me this only once) made me
think
I remembered, made me think it came back to me from over the years. I would've been about three, I guess. She died in 1908.
    Pa didn't show his feelings, it wasn't his way. I don't remember ever seeing him weep. But losing mother hit him hard. Had there been relatives on either side of the family that Pa was close to, I might've ended up being raised by an aunt or something; there were overtures from Uncle Louis, I later learned, and from mother's sisters and a brother, but Pa resisted them all. I was all he had left, all that remained of her. That doesn't mean we were close, though, despite the fact that I was helping at the stall by age six; he and I didn't seem to have much in common, except perhaps an interest in reading, and mine was a casual one, hardly matching his. But I was reading Nick Carter by age ten and used hardbacks of Sherlock Holmes soon after. I wanted to be a detective when I grew up.
    Conditions in the neighborhood got worse and worse; shopping in the Maxwell Street Market could be an adventure, but living there was a disaster. It was a slum: there were 130 people crowded in our building now, and the father and son who shared one room were looked upon with envy by their neighbors. There were sweatshops which of course got my union-in-his-blood father's ire up- and diseases (mother had had influenza when the miscarriage took her. and Pa used to blame the flu for her death, perhaps because in some way it absolved him); and there was the stink of garbage and outhouses and stables. I