Chicago (19 page)

We walked along the river as far as we could, on both banks; we made a game of sprinting through every park we could find; we cut through every alley that looked promising and mysterious, secure in the knowledge that I could outrun trouble and Edward could, if necessary, defeat it physically; we made a pact to walk atop any stone or brick wall with enough purchase for our feet. Edward got into the habit of checking with local dogs in neighborhoods he did not know, and their advice often led us to odd fascinating corners and sights—obscure fountains, remarkable trees, once a hidden aviary with more than a hundred parrots and parakeets of every color and species, tended by a tiny old man who could not have been more than four feet high.

There were many other riveting things like that, and the only reason we finally stopped is because it was becoming evident that Mr Pawlowsky needed Edward to help him court Miss Elminides. Still, though, even all these years later, I will suddenly remember something like the aviary, or the time a policeman let Edward ride his horse in Union Park, or the time a man selling drugs on a corner near Humboldt Park made a disparaging remark and Edward knocked him down and nosed his bag into a sewer. It seems to me that we did so many things at such a comic and headlong pace that if I tried to record every one of them there would be no room in this book for anything else to happen.

*   *   *

The young woman I had met on the train had given me her mailing address at college, after I confessed I did not own a phone, and used the telephone booth in the gyro shop to call my family for holidays and birthdays; and I had stayed in touch, writing a letter or a postcard here and there, intrigued by her for reasons I couldn't quite articulate, reasons that seemed deeper than her being attractive and witty. She wrote back, long handwritten letters, thoughtful and funny, and twice we had chatted on the phone (calls that cost me mountains of quarters, I remember), and once I had coffee with her briefly at her college cafeteria, and once we had gone for a walk downtown when she paused in the city between trains; that time she was on her way home to Wyoming for spring break, but took the latest train west so that we could wander around Chicago together for four hours—four hours that changed everything.

Her train from college arrived at Union Station, on Canal Street, and I immediately walked her over to the Picasso Something or Other, between Dearborn and Clark. We sat there contemplating it for a while as I explained how Mr Pawlowsky thought it was a horse, and Edward thought it was a comment on dogness, and other people thought it was a woman, or a cricket, or a huge steel joke. She leaned toward the joke explanation, being a student of Picasso's work, and we talked for a while about how mysterious it was that unbelievable idiots like Picasso, who beat up women and cheated and lied to everyone he knew, could make astonishing and deeply moving art. This line of talk led to a tremendous braided conversation about art, artists, idiots, money, grace, mercy, literature, dogs (she loved dogs, and very much wanted to meet Edward), cricket, the nature of value, basketball, the value of education, magazine journalism, finance (her dream was to work for an international bank or investment firm, and so travel the world, whereas my soaring dream was to be able to dribble and shoot better with my left hand, and write novels), the energy of cities, the stark beauty of wild country (like, for example, Wyoming), and much else—all conducted as we walked east to Grant Park, and then south along the lakefront, and then back up Michigan Avenue over the Chicago River (stopping in the Billy Goat for awful coffee), and then back west along the river to the train station.

I calculated later that we had walked about five miles, during which something happened that I still do not have words for, after thirty years as a journalist. We came to some understanding; we arrived at some mutual decision; we committed to an enterprise; we plighted a troth; we signed on for an adventure; we embarked on a voyage; we agreed to agree. We also kissed for the first time, as she boarded the train to Wyoming. I walked all the way home that night, up LaSalle to Lincoln Park and then north along the lake, probably four miles in all, and by the time I got to my apartment I was so weary I fell asleep instantly. The next morning when I woke I thought I had dreamed the whole thing, but then I saw, tumbled on the floor, pebbles from the lake she had given me as talismans by which to remember the first day of our voyage.

 

19.

ON THE LAST DAY
of July, a Sunday, the White Sox won the first game of a doubleheader against the Kansas City Royals to go into first place by five games. Chet Lemon homered twice for the Sox; the Royals' George Brett, the best hitter in baseball, went hitless; and Comiskey Park was crammed to the rafters—more than fifty thousand fans, according to the newspaper the next day. I caught the first game with Denesh and Ronald Donald, but missed the nightcap, which the Sox lost, as I had promised Edward to help with a certain project.

It had become painfully clear both to Edward and me, and to most of the rest of the building, that Mr Pawlowsky entertained feelings for Miss Elminides, and that Miss Elminides had feelings for Mr Pawlowsky, but the two of them were shy, and dignified, and reserved, and private, and cautious, and not given to sentimental gesture or unsupported speculation. Yet you could tell that there was some common feeling between them, a grave affection, an amused pleasure, almost a reverence—each very much admired and trusted the other, and turned to the other in moments of duress or strain, and each wore a certain small smile or used a certain tone when speaking of the other.

I think now that each of them was afraid that a romance might ruin their friendship; that if, for any number of good reasons, their romance did not flower or flourish, their deep affection and respect and attraction would be permanently injured or even lost—a thought neither could bear, even while both of them surely dreamed in private what it might be like to be lovers, partners, maybe even spouses. Certainly Mr Pawlowsky dreamed those dreams, as Edward had occasion to know; and perhaps Miss Elminides thought of Mr Pawlowsky's eyes and hands when she sat and played her instruments quietly in the blue hours of the night.

Finally it was Edward who decided, much against his usual predilection to discretion, to shove the situation gently toward a deeper possibility. His idea was a night repast on the roof, to which Miss Elminides and Mr Pawlowsky would be invited separately, and encounter each other with pleasant surprise, at which point the escorts would withdraw, leaving the two of them to contemplate the stars, and share an excellent bottle of wine, and enjoy some local savories provided by anonymous friends. I was recruited for this, to escort Miss Elminides to the roof; Denesh, resplendent in his cricket whites, was to serve briefly as wine steward; Mrs Manfredi provided the fare; and surprisingly Edward chose Eren, Azad's little sister, who was four years old, to escort Mr Pawlowsky to the roof, on the excuse that she wished to see the legendary Ring Nebula, and also maybe Sagittarius, the Archer, who invented the bow and arrow.

So it was that on a hot night in early August I knocked at Miss Elminides' door, and when she opened it (I smelled honey, and could hear what sounded like a cello) I asked if she would do me a favor and come up on the roof for a moment, that there was something Edward and I wanted to point out. I went up the roof stairs first and extended a hand for her as she stepped out, and I remember watching as four or five thoughts, or sensations, or emotions played across her face as she saw the table and chairs, and tall candles (donated by the librettist), and Denesh smiling as he held out the wine for inspection, and Mr Pawlowsky standing shyly, holding Eren's hand. Miss Elminides was startled, pleased, displeased, nervous, annoyed, thrilled, and discombobulated, all in the space of three seconds; but you never saw a more graceful and elegant soul under duress than Miss Elminides, and she smiled graciously and shook Eren's hand and accepted a glass of wine from Denesh, and that's the last I saw, for Eren and Denesh and I all went back downstairs, leaving them alone at the table. Edward delivered a basket filled with Mrs Manfredi's savories, and then he retired also, and he and I listened to the Sox play the Texas Rangers on the radio. Oscar Gamble hit a triple to the deepest part of center field, which hardly ever happens in baseball, and the Sox won 5–4.

*   *   *

Looking over what I have written so far, I think perhaps I have not spoken enough of the quiet hard difficult painful things I saw in Chicago. I saw scattered broken teeth in an alley. I saw plenty of men and more than one child sprawled out in battered old clothes huddled in sleeping bags wrapped in newspapers shoeless on heating grates and park benches. I saw a dead dog on the beach and a dead dog by the door of Saint Michael's Church in Old Town on the northwest side. I saw a policeman arrest a boy who could not have been more than ten years old; he was so short, this boy, that all you could see of him in the backseat of the police cruiser was the top of his head. I heard people crying as I walked along residential streets at night in summer when people leave their windows open. I saw a man punch a woman on Randolph Street, and when she staggered backward from the blow she slipped on the curb and fell into the street and her left shoe came off and sat there by itself for a moment while several men passing by grabbed the guy who punched her and a cabdriver helped the woman sit up; I went to get her shoe for her but a man got there first and held it politely for a moment until she was ready to stand up again. I saw a bar brawl, in a blues bar, on a Sunday night, when you would think the odds would be against a sudden crash of glass and a table overturning and guys picking up pool cues and the bartender punching a guy and one man swinging a pool cue and hitting another man in the head with the awful sound of a pumpkin smashing against cement.

I spoke to a policeman one night who told me he was weary weary weary of his profession, weary of the pain and sadness and brokenness, weary of the greed and violence, weary of the poor idiots he would arrest and book and testify against and then arrest again months later, weary of being weary, weary of the poor women and children who had to depend on thugs and snakes, or try to survive on their own when the snake was killed or incarcerated, weary of the sheer stupidity of criminals, their foolish schemes that came to nothing and caused wreckage along the way, weary of the ease of drugs, weary of the complicit authorities and enablers of the drug trade, weary of the arrogance of petty chieftains crowing that they owned a single block on which they strutted and preened like king rats, weary of the clogged elephantine lugubrious legal system with its endless cheating and cynicism and beautifully dressed liars, weary of the fear he saw in the eyes of children when his squad car turned a corner, weary of the way they scattered and ran like cockroaches into the dark alcoves of their project housing, weary of the screams and gunshots he heard every single night he ever cruised among those awful monumental jails where hope was incarcerated and despair was always on the menu.

“Weary weary weary,” he said. “Weary. That's the right word. It has the right sound, you know? Tired doesn't do it. Exhausted is normal. ‘Weary' has the right ragged sound to it, though. I am eighteen years in, and if I can make it two more I can quit. I'll be forty-one years old. Be a teacher maybe. Though God knows what I would teach. Criminal economics, maybe. Illegal entrepreneurship. I should be a lawyer. That would be a good joke on the suits at the court house who defend guys who sell cocaine to kids in grade school. Did I tell you about the one time I got suspended? I arrested a guy who was pimping his own niece. Age thirteen. Every weekend. He was the responsible uncle who took the niece on weekends while his sister worked long shifts as a nurse. This went on for almost a year. We caught the guy, but a bright young kid fresh out of law school finds a hole and the guy gets off with probation. Goes right back to pimping the niece. I couldn't take it. A friend of mine bumped into him on the street, and things got heated, and my friend made it clear that there was going to be a change of professions immediately or the guy would have a few accidents. I got suspended a week for that. No one ever said anything to me but they knew. I still think of the poor sister, you know, working her ass off every weekend, and her own brother a total snake. That kind of thing makes you weary, man. You fight the good fight but sometimes you just get weary. All you can do is figure you cut one snake at a time from the snake team, so that's good. You don't think about how many new snakes are coming up from the minor leagues. Two more years, man, two more years. Listen, I have to go. Pleasure to chat. Fight the good fight.”

*   *   *

The librettist had finished his oratorio about Harry Mark Petrakis in July, shepherded it through rehearsals, and enjoyed a moderately successful opening night, with brief but laudatory reviews in the newspapers; but the production did not pack in theatergoers until the city's beloved legendary
Sun-Times
columnist, of all people, wrote a glowing adulatory piece for the Sunday edition, which had a circulation of almost a million readers.

I still remember that review, partly because it was posted prominently by the mailboxes in our lobby for weeks, and partly because I loved that man's brusque honesty and rough humor and spitting fury at arrogance; many times I had bought a
Sun-Times
from a kiosk, read his column on page two, laughed out loud at how deftly and lewdly he had skewered some pompous ass like Jesse Jackson or the mayor, and then put the paper back in the kiosk, satisfied that I had gotten my thirty-five cents' worth of journalistic pleasure.

“I am not much for oratorios, as a general rule,” he wrote. “Me personally I thought oratorios were probably the expensive Italian version of Oreos, which upscale Polacks like my friend Slats Grobnik would buy when he was trying to impress a new girl at the Friday night bingo-and-polka soiree down at Saint Stanislaus. But I got lured into an oratorio last night, for reasons having to do with love and beer, and I am typing these words at four in the morning, absolutely amazed. Here's a sentence I never thought I would write in this lifetime: I have never been so proud of my city and its literature, and I have never been so startled and moved by the kind of music I have passionately hated all my life, as I was last night at the Ivanhoe Theater, listening to a new oratorio about the life of our great Chicago writer Harry Mark Petrakis; and if you love Chicago, and love hearing music that somehow makes you happy and gives you chills and makes you weep with sadness all at the same time, you will get your raggedy butt to the Ivanhoe as fast as your flat feet will carry you, and buy as many ridiculously expensive ducats as you can afford, and go every night until the singers lose their voices and have to go into ward politics as local muscle. It's that good. Trust me. Have I ever led you astray?”