A Good Enough Daughter by Alix Kates Shulman

Author:Alix Kates Shulman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media

Soon an entire outlaw realm outside my family’s reach beckoned to me. In those postwar years, booming Cleveland sustained an underworld of after-hours spots and jazz dives, gambling casinos and racetracks, rumored drug rings and brothels, which struck me as more tantalizing and worldly than the dull familiar routines of Cleveland Heights High School with its undemanding classes and redundant social events. No wonder criminologists report the most crime-prone ages (albeit for boys) are fifteen to nineteen. Bored by the prudish, the feminine, the commonplace, I longed to burst out of that closed system where everything was predictable and known. With my boy’s name and my good grades why shouldn’t I sneak out of school to go to the races with the class tout, Dick Levinsky (whom I’d pulled through math), or the male-only pool hall on lunch hour, or the boys’ department of May’s, where I worked at Christmas, for accessories? Didn’t Dad himself spurn conventional opinion? The forbidden and infamous now tempted me.

Not that I wanted ever again to tangle with the law. Stealing had been sheer folly, as rash and disappointing as the equally forbidden sexual intercourse, whose vaunted bliss eluded me in the rash moment when I succumbed to a boyfriend’s entreaties. Still, I longed to escape that conventional world I saw closing in on me like fog and test myself against its mindless rules.

My underworld was like the movies. It inhabited just such nightclubs as the one portrayed in Gilda, which as a nubile adolescent I had watched a record number of eight times—and would have watched eight more had it not left our theater. “Put the blame on Mame, boys/Put the blame on Mame,” vamped Rita Hayworth playing Gilda, a nightclub performer, as she slowly stripped off one long glove and then the other, snapping them seductively at her audience. Her gown was practically falling off. I longed to be Mame—or Gilda. The Cleveland underworld, which, like Gilda, had crime as its premise, squired women nearly as sexy, who intrigued me nearly as much. That it was run by sleazy mobsters who maintained their hold by threat and force of death was as unreal to me as any movie.

For my voyeuristic purposes, entrée to this realm was easy. Not because of the sons and daughters (more accurately, nieces and nephews) of the underworld who were part of our high school crowd; one boy I briefly dated had lost his father to the mob, and a girl in my sorority, who was not particularly popular despite having more cashmere sweaters than anyone else, lived in a big Fairmont Boulevard mansion boasting a ballroom, a poolroom, and a wide Tara staircase, which we all knew had been purchased with dirty money. If anything, she and others I could mention tried to disclaim their shady connections. One classmate was so mortified when her uncle’s name appeared in the newspaper that she stayed out of school. No, entrée was assured me because the gangsters and their molls were

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