Chicago (11 page)

Perhaps this is true of every city, but it was certainly true of mine then, that what the world saw—the throbbing commerce of downtown, the legendary professional sports teams, the beginning-to-be-famous comedy and theater troupes, the renowned restaurants, the notable universities, the glittering stars of music and literature—was not at all the real city, and was only the thinnest of gloss and sheen on a rough grace that was the actual bone and music of the place. I suppose that is what I try to talk about, when I sit by the fire and talk about swirling snow, and patient policemen, and tough small smiling nuns, and the smell of roasting lamb and garlic around the corner, and the rumble and thrum of the lake at night, and the grumble of buses, and Edward and Mr Pawlowsky, for those were the things and the souls I found and savored, when I was a young man long ago, in Chicago.

*   *   *

Edward recovered. It happened this way. On the day after the White Sox beat the Red Sox to open their home season, the sixth day of Edward's terrible illness, the alewife run began in the lake. It began before dawn on the thirteenth of April and continued all day and all the next day as countless thousands of small gleaming fish approached the shore from the deepest parts of the lake where they huddled in winter. Once they were in warmer shallow water the female alewives released their eggs beyond counting and the male alewives loosed their seed beyond numbering and some eggs were fertilized and many were not and many sank into the depths to be eaten by other beings or to huddle in protected spots on the bottom and grow unto maturity and also someday rise and spawn anew. So many alewives were thrashing in the shallows and spawning and dying that they attracted a tremendous army of predators among them gulls and crows and cormorants and jays and larger fish of every kind and human beings, and along the shore of the lake there was a surge and whirl of life and death beyond my capacity to tell. People ran down the street carrying clanking buckets and old nets and nets made out of window screens. One man ran down the street pushing a wheelbarrow with a snow shovel poking up out of the barrow like a strange sail. A woman ran down the street in a yellow rain slicker and yellow rain boots carrying a laundry bag on which was stenciled
PROPERTY OF COOK COUNTY JAIL.

It was the shrieking of gulls at dawn that caught Mr Pawlowsky's ear, he said later; he recognized the maniacal thrill, the call to arms, the summoning of the troops, the trumpeting of silvery meat beyond measure; and he leapt out of bed and dressed in his oldest raggiest clothes and ran downstairs to Miss Elminides' door, and tapped very gently, and when she opened the door, knowing his knock, he said the run! the run! He leapt back up the stairs and picked up Edward and wrapped him in a Navy blanket and went downstairs and when he got to the lobby Miss Elminides was there with two nets and two big white plastic buckets. “She was all in black, with a watch cap pulled down over her eyes,” Mr Pawlowsky said later, “and for a moment I thought I was back in the Navy on some sort of clandestine operation, and then for another moment I thought I was going to faint because she looked so beautiful and mysterious, but then I got a grip and we ran down the street. It was too early for real traffic so we got across Lake Shore easily and climbed over the seawall. Miss Elminides held Edward for a moment while I got the nets and buckets ready and then she handed him down to me and I carried him to the water. There was no one else there. It was just after dawn, you know, when the sun doesn't have any gas in it yet. There was no wind and the lake would have been still as a pond except for the incredible turmoil in the shallows. Maybe this was a regular run but I have never seen so many fish at once and I think this might have been a record run but who keeps records of that? I stood there with Edward in my arms and he heard the thrash of fish and he opened his left eye. Miss Elminides said something gentle to him and he opened his other eye. Then I just walked into the water with him. I didn't think about how cold the water would be or how I should have by God worn waders or anything like that. It just seemed like the right thing to do so I did it. I got about waist deep and the fish were everywhere around us paying no attention to us at all. I bent my knees a little and tried to hold Edward as close to the water as I could without him getting soaked and the fish were zooming and swirling right in front of his nose and then he moved his head. That was the first time he had moved a muscle in days. Then he opened his mouth and by God a fish jumped right into his mouth and he sort of shivered and then he started snapping left and right for them and Miss Elminides made a sound behind me on the beach and I don't know if she was laughing or crying. After that Edward was fine. I bet he ate fifty alewives in fifteen minutes and when I carried him back to the beach he felt a little bit heavier. We wrapped him up in another blanket and Miss Elminides sat with him while I harvested as many fish as we could carry and then we staggered back up to the building with the buckets. By then the sun had some heat in it and it turned out to be a really beautiful day and Edward was on his way back. He was thin and shaky for another week or so but after eating the rest of the fish he was pretty much himself again. Great day. Miss Elminides and I had two fish each that morning, with eggs and toast and cups of coffee, but we gave all the rest to Edward.
Great
day.”

*   *   *

I didn't spend
all
my time in the apartment building or at work downtown at the magazine or playing basketball with the Latin Kings and the Latin Eagles or rambling about the city chasing blues and jazz in dark cool small obscure shabby clubs; I did actually pursue romance, to a minimal degree, though I was shy and unprepossessing physically and generally penniless, and I suppose I should be honest about those misadventures, for one of them would eventually lead me away from Chicago, never to return as a resident, though the city has stayed resident in me.

I mooned ineffectually after two young women in the magazine office, one in circulation and one in the mail room, though to neither did I speak a word, content only to glance and dream, imagine and speculate; and now that I am older I think we do not celebrate silent mooning enough, or see it for the essentially healthy imaginative apprenticeship it is; for every young man, and I would guess every young woman too, lives many secret lives between the ages of fifteen and thirty, and only slightly fewer thereafter, no matter your age and stage; and maybe that is healthy and nutritious, that we savor and appreciate the idiosyncratic charm and unique energy of people we meet, while knowing full well we will never ask them out, or make love to them, or even speak to them, or do more than observe and savor and appreciate their charism, and admire its existence, much as you would celebrate the accomplishments of a fine athlete or superb musician from afar, though you will never have even the briefest of acquaintances; or maybe I am rationalizing furiously here, to fend off the all-too-accurate charge that a man with any shred of courage would have struck up a conversation with Maria in the mail room and Clarissa in circulation, and at the least afforded the young woman in question the small pleasure of knowing she was held in high esteem by even such a being as myself.

But I did not.

Also I mooned after the extraordinary creature who ran the register at the gyro shop on Broadway on weekend afternoons. Her name was Leah, although the old man slicing lamb for gyros called her Hypatia for some reason; she was the loveliest dark-haired dark-eyed lean gentle silent glorious female being I had ever seen then, but she was also seventeen years old, and I was five years older, and five years between ages when you are young is twenty years between ages when you are older; why is that, that a man of fifty might easily woo and wed a woman of thirty, but a man of twenty-two, gazing raptly at a stunning Greek girl of seventeen, soon finds himself being glared at by a stern man with a huge knife? Why is that?

Also I mooned after a young woman on the Sound Asleep Bus, the dawn bus driven by Donald B. Morris, although in all the time I rode the Sound Asleep Bus she never once was awake, but slept soundly in her long camel coat the color of fawns, with her brown cashmere scarf and her long brown boots and long brown hair and long brown eyelashes closed firmly over what I could only imagine were lovely liquid brown eyes; but she boarded the bus before me in the morning and I left before she did, and for some strange reason I never did wait there by the Picasso statue on Dearborn Street to see her disembark, let alone greet her with a smile, or offer to buy her a cup of coffee, or just walk alongside her, bantering wittily, as she walked to work in those beautiful brown boots.

I did not.

The occasional riveting woman in a jazz club, sitting alone and mysterious; the occasional woman on the train, glancing at me curiously just as I glanced at her; the woman who stopped to watch a basketball game in which I was playing; that sweet soul picked up a loose ball that had rolled to her feet, and held it for me as I jogged over, and handed it to me with the most brilliant shocking sudden sidelong smile, which rattled me so that I was terrible the rest of the game, and was roundly chastised for poor play by the captain of my team afterward, the quiet slip of a boy called Bucket with tattoos and earrings, who hardly ever spoke, although he did that time, to the amusement of the other players; and by the time I looked up, after apologizing to Bucket for being so distracted, she was gone.

But I did meet a woman that year, and a portentous meeting it turned out to be, for finally she was the reason I drove away from Chicago one crisp cold sunny morning, deeply excited and deeply saddened at once.

I met her on the train; she was returning to the college I had attended; I was on my way to visit my dear and headlong friends there, for an annual campus basketball tournament in which I would play as a ringer; we struck up a conversation, and exchanged addresses, and sat together for the last hour as the train wound south around the shore of the lake, past steel mills and cornfields; and so began a longer denser conversation that would lead eventually to me resigning from the magazine, and giving up my apartment, and trying not to weep as I sat one last night with Edward and Mr Pawlowsky on the roof, and packing my worn shiny basketball and sneakers and books and few clothes into a borrowed car at dawn, and driving slowly down the street, toward the lake, into the sun, and then south along the lake, and then east to Boston, because she had gone there, and she invited me to be there too.

That we did not last very long as a couple after that is immaterial here; what matters here is that during my time in Chicago I met the reason I would leave it. You cannot edit your life, and even if I was today offered the chance to never meet her, and so not leave the city I loved, I would decline, for life is a verb, life swerves and lurches no matter how cautious and careful your driving, and I would not be who I am, surrounded by those I love most in this world, had I not left Chicago when I did.

Still, though, whenever I remember driving down the street at dawn, toward the lake, into the sun, it makes me sad, for that was the last time I ever saw Edward and Mr Pawlowsky and Miss Elminides, and even then, even so young, even so muddled, I knew a great sweet deep thing was ending that would not come again, not in that way, with those beings; and as I turned south along the lake, the city reflecting the first glare of dawn, I cried. I tried not to cry; crying was uncool; but I could not stop, and I cried all the way through the South Side of the city to where the Calumet River empties into the lake, and Indiana begins.

 

13.

IT WAS THE DETECTIVE
who patiently worked back from the many dark greedy grasping fingers of the Third Awkwardness to its single root, a man named Giannis. It was Giannis whose last known mailing address was the boathouse in Greece, the one with a note pinned fluttering to the old wooden door. It was Giannis whose father had been the sole trustee named to watch over Miss Elminides' trust fund and its attendant titles and fees. It was Giannis whose father had for many years carefully paid every bill and fee and cost having to do with the apartment building and its operation. It was Giannis whose father, while never setting foot once in the United States of America, had paid city and county and state and federal taxes, electricity bills, heating bills, water bills, fees for inspections, and all bills having to do with all the repairs that Mr Pawlowsky had performed in the last six years as building manager. It was Giannis whose father paid Miss Elminides' health care premiums and fees, who established a healthy retirement fund, and who had bought and refurbished the boathouse, on a beach, on the chance that Miss Elminides would prefer ultimately to live in Greece and not in Chicago. It was Giannis whose father had died instantly when struck by a bus in the streets of Alexandroupoli, and Giannis who pawed though his father's papers greedily that night, before his father's attorney came in the morning to put his papers in order, and Giannis who found all the details of the trust, with its meticulously maintained account books and account numbers and codes, and Giannis who in the first few minutes the bank was open the next morning, drained the trust of every penny he could, forging his father's signature to every document possible, a signature he had forged many times before on many checks. It was Giannis who left Miss Elminides' address pinned to the door of the boathouse, right after he ransacked the boathouse for anything he could sell instantly as he made his way east and south across the Hellespont into Turkey. And it was Giannis who crossed the Hellespont by boat that evening just after dusk, not far from where Miss Elminides' grandfather had swum the passage, and once safely in the Turkish city of Çanakkale, found a man who sold him a chunk of hashish the size of a baby's fist. So it was that for the first time that money that was earned by Miss Elminides' grandfather, and saved for her in a form that he thought would be safe forever from predation, did not go to her, but instead went to a sergeant in the Turkish Land Forces, who bought a crib for his new granddaughter, whose name in Turkish was Radiance.