Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [24]
When there weren’t any horse races or baseball games at Taylor’s Park, and no kids were swimming in the river, the storefront theaters along Stephenson Street offered the best respite from the heat. The Majestic was a favorite hangout when Spencer could cadge a nickel, as was the Superba across the street. When there wasn’t money he would stand and stare at the displays out on the sidewalk, sighing extravagantly, or fix the box office with a woeful gaze until the woman at the window, a friend of his Aunt Mame’s, would say, “Oh, Spencer, go on in!” His Aunt Emma once refused him the money to see a movie about Jesse James. “You’ve got enough wild ideas without going to see those things.” He thought hard a moment, then announced The Life of Christ was playing at the other theater. “You wouldn’t want to keep me from seeing that, would you?” He got the nickel, but Emma Brown had little doubt as to which film he saw.
John Tracy sent a dollar a week to be split between the boys. What Carroll did with his share was a mystery, but Spencer, noting the economic divide between the Tracy and Brown households, always seemed to be broke. “At that time you could buy a bag full of candy for ten cents,” said Frank Tracy, the son of Andrew and Mary Tracy. “My mother said that very often, Spence would come home with a loaf of bread and give it to his grandma. ‘That’s for us.’ Probably eight or nine cents a loaf at that time. Another time he was helping Grandma Tracy in the kitchen, and she had a paring knife and it was dull, wasn’t working right. So the next time he got his fifty cents, he went over to Woolworth’s and he bought a paring knife for his grandmother. My mother was telling me this and she said, ‘He was always very generous.’ He did other little things like that around the house, things Carroll would never think of doing.”
Spencer hated the tradition of the Saturday night bath, and the task of getting him to take one fell to his Aunt Mary. “She’d try to round him up and get him in the tub,” Frank said. “Spencer was always pretty hard to find. She’d literally have to push him to the bathroom, and then she wouldn’t hear anything. She’d ask Spencer, ‘Are you taking a bath in there?’ He’d say yes, but he’d be sitting on the floor fully clothed—even his hat still on his head—splashing the water with his hands.” Even when he actually got into the tub, he wouldn’t shampoo his hair, and his grandmother would invariably say, “Your hair stinks!” Finally, it was decided the boys would do better under the no-nonsense supervision of Grandmother Brown, and Spencer wore a collection of scapular medals for the occasion.
“What are all these things?” she demanded, yanking at them.
“Don’t take ’em off my neck!” he exclaimed. “You can’t take those off! They’re holy!” Her expression must have told him she thought he was crazy, for he took them out and started to explain: “Well, this is so you won’t get drowned … and this is so you won’t get killed … and this one is so you won’t commit a sin …”
“You certainly won’t drown in that bathtub!”
Thoroughly scrubbed, his hair washed and teeth brushed, Spencer and his brother would be returned to Grandma Tracy so that they could serve Mass at St. Mary’s the next morning. With her husband dead and her daughter Jenny now married, Mary Guhin Tracy sought the solace of the bottle (“a drop o’ th’ cratur”), and her son-in-law’s gift to her each Christmas was a case of beer and a jug of good Irish whiskey. “She would always specify that it be delivered after dark,” her granddaughter Jane remembered, “so the neighbors wouldn’t see.”
“From the time Spencer was a tiny lad,” recalled Carrie Tracy, “Carroll appointed himself as special guardian. He worried more about Spencer than the rest of the family put together.” Carroll had an almost pathological fixation on his brother, as if hovering over him and getting him out of scrapes was in some way compensation for their father’s absences. He had the