more than a quarter of a century later, “the most profound, psychologic
shake-up I ever received.” He experienced something mystical in her de-
parture, watching his mother’s “very weak and pale” look transformed into
a clear and healthy lightness “as though she were thinking or trying to say
something to me, but through her eyes alone.”33 If the debacle that sur-
rounded the publication of Sister Carrie ten years hence wasn’t the lowest
point in Dreiser’s lifetime, the loss of his mother surely was.
Sarah’s burial added bitterness to the memory etched in Dreiser’s mind.
Because she hadn’t been the best of Catholics (missing Mass while never-
theless urging her children to attend) and because Mame and Theresa had
purposely subverted the Catholic process of extreme unction through death-
bed confession in their mother’s case, the young clergyman John Paul sum-
moned allegedly refused to allow Sarah a Catholic burial. The parish priest,
whatever his sense of right and wrong, was probably within his doctrinal
rights, but Theodore—who along with the majority of his siblings by this
time had determined to put away Catholicism for good—was enraged and
never forgave the Church, even though the diocese soon reversed the ini-
tial decision and granted their father’s wish for Sarah to be buried in St.
Boniface’s Roman Catholic Cemetery on the North Side.
“You would have thought,” Dreiser wrote in Dawn, still seething from
the incident almost thirty years later, that the priest would have immedi-
ately taken pity on his church-ridden father for his “slavish and pleading
devotion” to the Church and dispensed with its technicalities, which also
included a refusal to bless the body because Sarah had possibly died in a
state of mortal sin. “But not so,” the ever-grieving son wrote. “This low-
browed, dogmatic little Bavarian, panoplied with the trashy authority of
his church, chose instead to come to our door, and disregarding the pleas
of my father, if not the rest of us, show how savagely Mother Church would
repay by stern denial of her hieratic pomp and meaningless formulas the
spiritual lapses which it condemned.”34
–
Rome returned to Chicago after the funeral. Informed of his mother’s death,
he told Theo that she had communicated with him in a dream, asking why
a v e r y b a r d o f a c i t y
4 2
he wasn’t there when she died. “That’s why I’m here,” he muttered in what
Dreiser remembered as his brother’s “heavy, guttural, Gargantuan weep-
ing,” which caused him to cry, too. For all her wiles and ambivalences, Sarah
had still managed to be the calm center of a storm of sibling rivalries and
general rebellion at the father’s strict rule. After she died, the family remained
together for only three or four months. John Paul now had little or no
influence over the way his children lived their lives, with the possible ex-
ception of Al, Theresa, and later Claire, when she fully outgrew her pro-
longed adolescence. He further annoyed them, or at least the religiously
disenchanted of them, by repeatedly making reference to Sarah’s religious
shortcomings and insisting that the family make weekly contributions to
light votive candles and have Masses said so that she might get out of pur-
gatory sooner. This was galling to them, especially on the heels of having
to pay installments towards the Church funeral that had been so reluctantly
authorized.35
Dreiser himself felt absolutely anchorless. Conklin’s real estate company
was failing, and he hadn’t been paid for weeks. It was Christmas time, but
there was little to cheer about in the family with Sarah gone from its midst.
He quit, and despite the grim prospect of tramping the streets of the city
in search of another job, he experienced a vision in which he conceived of
life as a living tableau. The “artistry of any passing scene—a boat, a sail, a
crowd, a tower, a flock of pigeons,” he recalled of this embryonic period in
his literary development, “was su‹cient to hold me for moments or hours.”
He marveled at the ordinary details of life, the way they charged the at-
mosphere with “such brilliant life-pictures.” As he returned home that day,
full of wonders but with no job, he imagined the beautiful women wait-
ing “with kisses” for those who were gainfully employed.36
In January or February of 1891 he found a job at eight dollars a week,
driving a wagon for a laundry on Madison Street on the West Side. It was
a well-established business whose success rested partly on the practice of
turning over its driver positions so that employees wouldn’t be around long
enough to steal customers away to a competing business when they quit
for higher wages. The Munger Laundry Company, therefore, preferred
younger drivers like Dreiser. He noticed and was attracted to the young
laundry girls. Smartly dressed young men waited outside for the prettier
ones, but Dreiser in his teamster uniform of old clothes and hat felt at a
disadvantage.
He worked for Munger for the next four months, in what he called, in
spite of his lowly status as a driver, “a kind of Adamless paradise.” How
a v e r y b a r d o f a c i t y
4 3
marvelous it would be, he sighed, to have the money and good clothes with
which to approach beautiful women. Some of them were so attractive, he
wondered why they had to work at all. One who did was Nellie Anderson
(Nellie MacPherson in Dawn), who came from a religious Scotch Presby-
terian family. She wasn’t the prettiest girl in the laundry but the one with
whom Dreiser with his poor resources thought he could easily win. As the
cashier for the company, Nellie collected from all the drivers, five or six of
them, at the end of each day. Usually Dreiser was one of the last to return
from his delivery rounds, occasionally after the other drivers had departed.
One night he and Nellie did inventory after hours, and he could scarcely
resist the urge to embrace her. On another evening soon afterward he kissed
her, she resisted nominally, and they became a couple. Yet when he later
met her parents and sister Lilly, he found himself equally attracted to the
sister.37
That spring he was recruited by three Jewish businessmen who owned
the Barnhardt Brothers’ Troy Laundry on Ogden Avenue, closer to where
Dreiser lived. Ordinarily, they sought older drivers who could deliver new
customers from their last place of employment, but for some reason they
made an exception in Dreiser’s case, oªering him ten dollars a week. He
enjoyed the job at first, driving a newer rig around Chicago, but the expe-
rience turned out poorly and either fueled or initiated Dreiser’s stereotyped
view of the greedy Jew. Evidently, the brothers expected Dreiser to recruit
more new business than he did. Moreover, their delivery and pick-up busi-
ness covered a wider city area than Munger’s and often took him down-
town where the heavy tra‹c made the driving hazardous and arduous. Af-
ter three months, in which his anti-Semitism smoldered, he was fired after
he collided with another wagon, even though that driver was at fault. “Jews,
for the moment at least, were anathema to me,” he wrote in Dawn. (He
was not then aware, as he insisted he was in 1931, when this volume of his
autobiography was published, “of the possible beauty of the individual soul
in any race, Jew as well as Gentile.”38 This realization, however, would not
save him from a very public imbroglio a few years after that.)
After his experience with the two laundries, he decided it was time to
find something with more future in it. He was hired as a bill collector at
the Lovell Manufacturing Company on Lake Street, at the increased salary
of fourteen dollars a week. The business was actually a front for or secret
branch of a larger Pennsylvania company that sold household items on time,
charging inflated prices for the cheap merchandise. Dreiser knew firsthand
of such companies because his mother’s furniture had been once repossessed
a v e r y b a r d o f a c i t y
4 4
for nonpayment. At the time Sarah left Chicago in 1883, it was illegal to
take furniture purchased on time across state lines until the bill was paid
in full. The family had had to forfeit hundreds of dollars and arrived to an
empty house in Warsaw.39
This bitter memory may have clouded Dreiser’s judgment in his new job.
One day he decided to withhold—with the intention of repaying—twenty-
five dollars from the rent receipts to buy himself a new overcoat and hat to
go with his other new clothes. No longer the shabbily dressed wagon driver,
he had become very conscious of his appearance, was dating Nellie rather
regularly now, and was always on the lookout for other romantic conquests.