Chicago (13 page)

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Near the end of April the White Sox beat the Detroit Tigers and moved into first place by half a game, and the city, which had been cautiously optimistic about the South Siders but all too familiar with vernal promise and autumnal dismay, began to take notice, and trickle into shaggy old Comiskey Park, and turn on radios to catch the games. For the first time I could follow a game simply by walking down a street and catching snippets from radios in shops and apartments, balconies and porches, cars and trucks. Children carried transistor radios with them on their bicycles; bus drivers set their dashboard radios to WMAQ, 670 on your dial; and one generous cop put the game on his loudspeaker as he cruised along Halsted Street one night, the excited voices of Harry Caray and Jimmy Piersall bouncing off buildings like strange gods speaking from above.

I went to a game on the first day of May, a Sunday, with the Trinidadian cricket player in 2E and the Armenian librettist in 4D; the Sox were playing the Texas Rangers, and I wanted to see the Rangers' legendary Gaylord Perry, who threw all sorts of spitballs and balls covered with oil and jelly and hair gel and even, it was rumored, dabs of peanut butter that he kept in his baseball cap. The cricket player, curious about the best bowler in the sport descended from his beloved cricket, had never taken the train to the South Side, and was delighted by the burbling crowd of people in Sox hats and jerseys; it made him nostalgic for the famous Queen's Park Oval in Port of Spain, where he had watched many a match, and played in two regional “Tests,” as he said with quiet pride. The librettist I had found in the lobby that morning, as we retrieved our mail, and when I told him we were off to the game in the afternoon he asked if he could come along; he too had never been to a Sox game, in all his years in Chicago, and in fact had never crossed Madison Street, the dividing line between the north and south sides of the city.

The cricketer's name was Denesh, and though we lived in adjacent apartments we had never exchanged more than polite greetings and inquiries about health and weather. On the train, crowded together in a corner, he told me that he was actually from Tobago, the small island north of Trinidad, and that he had grown up on Turtle Beach there, playing cricket in the sand with his friends, using palm splits for bats. He had become so deft with the bat that he was chosen for his school's First Eleven, as he said, the equivalent of the varsity in American sport, and then for the national team. I was impressed at this, though he observed with a smile that his nation in toto comprised two islands which together were far smaller than our United State of Delaware. Still, though, he had played for his national team, and, as he explained, that team chose players not only from Trinidad and Tobago but from many other nearby islands. He had played only a few matches at the top level, he said, still smiling, but no one had worn the maroon kit of the West Indies cricket team with more pride, and also during his time he had the great fortune of seeing the future not only of his team but of the very sport itself—a boy from Antigua named Isaac Vivian Alexander Richards.

“I first saw him when he was fifteen or so,” said Denesh. “We played an exhibition match on Antigua, really a glorified training session, and several young Antiguans were invited to play. The atmosphere was loose and friendly, with players chatting with fans even during play. Then this boy came to bat. He was smiling but you could see that he was quite serious in attitude. He walked very slowly, stretching as he came, and our bowler said something teasing to him about wasting time. Instead of settling in to bat, the boy walked a few steps toward our bowler, just staring at him, not saying anything, but fixing him with something very like a glare. I had never seen a young player so self-possessed and sure of himself as this boy. And then his batting was superb, of course. But what I remember still is the joyous swagger of the boy that afternoon; he was completely at home in the game, already a master of its pleasures and intricacies, already confident enough to intimidate an older player just with a stern look. Most amazing. I have had many rich and memorable hours in cricket, but the immediate realization that day that here, in the flesh, just beginning his career, was one of the greatest players who would ever play the game I loved, growing into his manhood right before our eyes—that was wonderful.”

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At the Sox game itself the librettist sat between the cricketer and myself, and as I enjoyed the Sox absolutely hammering Gaylord Perry right from the start (they had eight hits and eight runs in the first inning, including two homers and a triple), I chatted with the librettist, another man I had not really spoken to in my eight months in the apartment building. He was a most dapper man, dressed in a suit and tie and even a vest, though it was a warm afternoon. His mustache was neatly trimmed, he carried his spectacles in a beautiful leather case, and even the pencil he used to write notes during the game was a lovely thing made of some sort of burnished wood, as far as I could tell. He had a small leather-bound notebook, in which he wrote occasionally in a meticulous hand; and it was this notebook that opened the conversational gates between us, for when I asked him what he was writing he explained that he was fascinated by the life and work of the Chicago novelist Harry Mark Petrakis, and that he was at last at work on a libretto about the South Side of Chicago where Harry was raised—a project he had dreamed about for many years, and in which he now found himself utterly absorbed.

“Much of what I need now,” he explained, “is actual sensory data, as it were—the sounds and smells and
feeling
of things, from Sunday-morning light on brick walls in his old neighborhood, to the cadence and rhythm of Greek slang, to the angle of sheen from mahogany tables in the library he haunted as a boy; I have many times been in the Blackstone branch of the public library, and handled for myself the same books he read as a child, to feel for myself the heft and zest of them in the hand. Thus the baseball game; Harry was here as a boy, and I do not think much has changed. This week I will be visiting steel mills like the ones where he worked, and Greek Orthodox churches like the one he attended as a boy, and tasting such savories as
koulouria,
which are pastries, and
koufeta,
which are almonds. You must absorb so many smells and tastes and sounds and hints and intimations if you wish to tell a story properly, because words can only catch some of the story, and you must also write the spaces between the words. It is the same with music. The two composers with whom I work agree with me and we soak up as much as we can both before and as we work. In this case we envision an oratorio in which there is such a braid and weave and web and mingle of voices and music and tones that he or she who listens attentively will hear
more
than the words and the music; if we have done our work well, you will hear pain and grace and courage and snow and fistfights and foods and bullets and prayers and laughter and love-making in the dark upstairs. You will hear the neighborhood in which Harry grew up, you will hear his yearning and dreaming, you will hear the fear and rage and joy of the immigrant in Chicago particularly but also to a degree in every city in the world ever since we began to wander into the dark beyond the fire.”

Something about his prim eloquence struck me forcibly, and by the fourth inning, by which time the Sox were up 12–2 and Chet Lemon had homered deep to center field, I had talked at length to him about Miss Elminides' travails. He was shocked and alarmed; he had for years admired Miss Elminides for her unfailing kindness during the awkward times when he and others in the building were facing financial difficulties. He sat silent for several innings, writing occasionally in his notebook, while I watched the Sox run out the game, but then just before we stood to leave he closed his notebook and turned to me and said quietly, “Something must be done. We must address this problem collectively. I have some ideas. I will visit Mr Pawlowsky tomorrow. Thank you for telling me about this.” On the way home on the train the librettist was again silent, but the Trinidadian cricketer was burbling and verbose about the many juncture points he saw between your American baseball, as he said, and the great and ancient game of cricket. At one stop two young men tried to make fun of him for saying the word
cricket
so often, but he paid no attention to them, and we walked back to the building talking of great cricket bowlers of the past who also used various substances to assist their delivery of the ball, among them chewing gum, mustache wax, lip balm, honey, beeswax, and lard. There was a recurrent story, he said, of an Australian bowler who had mastered the art of using rendered animal fats on his deliveries, but he personally believed this to be airy nonsense, and just the sort of wry tale that the Australians loved to have other cricketers believe, perhaps because it was distracting to their opponents, but perhaps simply because the Australians were a people given to humor and the tall tale, not unlike you Americans.

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It was that May, when Bucket pointed out an oriole's nest near the basketball court, that I grew interested in the wildlife of Chicago, and I spent many hours and many miles that month wandering the city and paying attention to residents of species other than mine. First I accounted birds, for this was the season of love and birth, and once you have begun noticing nests, I discovered, it is a habit hard to break. Even in my neighborhood, which was about as thoroughly urban as you could get, there were nests everywhere, from the tiny deftly hidden cups of hummingbirds to the big messy leafy condominium-size nests of crows in parks and in the huge old elm trees along the lakefront. I found the sculpted mud nests of swallows, the bedraggled nests of jays and starlings, the artfully camouflaged nests of sparrows in bushes and hedges; I began to notice the nests and bole-holes of woodpeckers; I began to notice hawks and herons and egrets by the lake; twice I saw what I was fairly sure was a falcon of some sort, whirring past so fast all I could clearly identify was speed and intent and a slate-blue color like a line of watercolor paint slashed on the sky.

I noticed rabbit tracks in muddy places after rain, and once found deer tracks near the lake; more than once I saw raccoons and opossums in alleys late at night, on my way home from the blues bars; and once spring was fully sprung the number of blackbirds and warblers and ducks and geese along the lake swelled past all accounting.

It was the ducks that led to my meeting our local beat cop, a burly young guy named Matthew, who turned out to be a wonderfully sharp-eyed observer of all sorts of life along the lake, from salmon and sturgeon, to osprey and owls, from the deer he had twice seen marooned on ice floes to the coyotes he was sure lived in a den somewhere near Dog Beach, to the endless number of riveting human beings with whom he had dealings in a “professional capacity,” as he said politely. I was sitting on a bench by the lake one afternoon, drawing flotillas of ducks so I could go to the library and pore over their markings, when Matthew, walking by, stopped to see what I was sketching.

“Those are pintails,” he said cheerfully. “See the extended tail feather? That's where the name comes from. Sometimes you can see a tiny bit of green on the back of the necks of the males, just a spot, not
all
green like the mallards. We have widgeon, teal, shovelers, black ducks, and, best of all, wood ducks. You got to keep your eyes peeled for the wood ducks. They are the most beautiful animals in the world. Fact. Also we have canvasbacks, redheads, goldeneyes, and buffleheads. Usually those are a little further out than the others. Also there are snowy owls along the lake if you look carefully. I saw one this winter up at Montrose Beach. Amazing bird. Came floating out of a snowstorm like the snow had made an animal and set it to fly.”

Matthew was maybe thirty and had been a street officer, as he said, for two years, mostly in our neighborhood, roughly from Belmont to Addison streets and from the lake to Halsted Street, and while he had ambitions to rise to detective or perhaps gang specialist, when that time came he would miss the intimacy of the street, where he had come to know very nearly all the residents in his area, both human and not, and heard some amazing stories. Some were legends, like the recurrent but debatable sightings of a sturgeon twenty feet long near Belmont Harbor (“there's a lot of people down there who see what they want to see,” he said, mysteriously), or the ghostly horse that was said to occasionally appear near the old Majestic Hotel, but others were stories of quiet courage or miracles that he would savor all the rest of his life. In the next few months, as summer simmered and I spent nearly all my time outside, I saw a lot of Matthew (summers were his busy season, he said, and he much preferred to cover his beat on foot rather than in the car), and one story of his above all others stays with me still.

There was a woman, he said, who lost her son when he was five months old. She lived near the Majestic, right by the lakefront. Everyone knew and liked her—she was one of those gentle engaging people with a great honest smile who when you saw her smile
you
couldn't help but smile, that sort of person. Everyone was thrilled when she had her baby, and everyone was crushed when the baby died in his crib. After he died she didn't emerge for a while, and then when she did emerge and walk slowly along the lake again, she was silent and dark, and no one could cut through to who she used to be, not Matthew or her friends or even Edward, for whom Matthew had the greatest respect.

One morning, though, said Matthew, as the woman was walking along the lake, she saw something struggling in the shallows, and she ran down to the beach, and found a baby wriggling and thrashing in the water. She wrapped it in her jacket and carried it back up to the seawall path, and luckily Matthew was driving by, so he drove her and the baby to the hospital. The baby was healthy, no one could find any trace of parents or identification, and the local alderman interceded quietly to allow the woman to adopt the child. During the process of adoption the child, a boy, was cared for by the woman, on the single condition that she check in with Matthew every day about problems, forms, insurance, and other stuff like that. By the time the adoption was officially approved and all forms filed, the boy was a year old, and the neighborhood celebrated his birthday with a picnic on the beach where he had been found. Matthew found a priest to baptize the child, using water from the lake. His mother named the boy Muirin, which means “born of the sea” in Gaelic, and Matthew told me that the boy, suitably enough, was totally absorbed by the lake, and was already a fine fisherman, young as he was.