Chicago (12 page)

*   *   *

We heard all this while sitting on the roof. It was a warm late afternoon. Edward was asleep with a Navy blanket over him. Miss Elminides and Mr Pawlowsky were sitting together in folding lawn chairs. The detective was sitting on the copper coping Mr Pawlowsky had built around the chimney. I was sitting against the wall soaking up the sun. No one spoke for a while and then the detective said he was awfully sorry to be the bearer of such tidings and Miss Elminides stood and shook his hand and said thank you so much for your hard work, Horace. The detective asked after plans for legal redress and restitution, and Miss Elminides said she would have to contemplate things for a while, and the detective said he would be happy to do whatever was required as a gesture of thanks and respect, and Miss Elminides said thank you, Horace, that is most kindly of you, and I am honored. The detective bowed and went downstairs and Miss Elminides sat down in her lawn chair and no one spoke for a moment and then Miss Elminides began to cry quietly and I gathered up Edward and went downstairs. After I tucked him into his bed I thought about reading Lincoln to him for a while but sometimes you can just feel where being kindly slips over into being intrusive and I tucked him in tighter and went down to my apartment and got my basketball and dribbled up along the lakefront for miles. I ended up so far north that I had to catch a bus back home, borrowing the fare from a large man who was amused I was carrying my basketball and who told me he too had been a baller, long ago and far away now, son, but dear Lord your ball has seen some
service
, it's worth the fare to me just to see a ball so shiny with use, yes it is. You can pay me back by taking one hundred shots with your left hand next time you practice. I never did work on my left hand and I surely should have done so. We all be better in life did we use both hands equally, yes we would.

*   *   *

Near the end of April it snowed one more time for an hour, just to get the last word in the argument with spring, but it was just a thin scatter of fat flakes, and the snow melted as soon as it touched the ground. After that the weather was instantly summer, and given the warm dry days and lengthening light, I spent many early evenings on the basketball court up the street, the one on the dividing line between the territories of the Latin Kings and the Latin Eagles.

One evening we finished an intense game and there were a few minutes when guys sat around pondering whether to go one more or let it be, and I got to talking to Bucket and Monster. Monster was the muscular rebounding machine who hardly ever spoke and never ever took a play off and set picks firmly but fairly and never ever trash-talked or cursed. Bucket was the slim slight kid with tattoos and earrings who was as quick as a cougar and could score at will although he much preferred to pass and did so with flair and an uncanny knack for angles no one else could see. We were sitting on the asphalt leaning up against the school wall and I mentioned that a friend of mine was in some trouble and could I ask their advice on financial matters?

“We not the best counselors in money matters,” said Bucket. “Got to have money to talk money, and I have no money, and Monster have no money. None of us have money. Not My Fault
say
he have money and he wears
chain
like he have money but he have no money. He have
air
for lunch and dinner, that boy, but good luck getting him admit that. His
pride
taller than he is.”

I explained that my friend, or properly a friend of a friend, had been thoroughly robbed, and now she was in the hole for many debts.

“Who rob her?”

“A man in another country far away.”

“Who own the debt?”

“The City.”

They turned to look at each other and Monster shook his head sadly and Bucket said, “Oh man you screwed. City the biggest robber of them all. City reaches for everything it can think of and good luck dodging them bills. They charge you for the air you breathe and the color of your shoes. They charge you for being left-handed and sneezing too loud. Your friend up a creek, man. City never forget, either. And all uniforms work for the City, man. You have a fire in your house and the firemen come they
might
put out the fire if you pay your 'lectricity bill first and deposit down on your water bill. Cash too, with extra for processing charge, you know? Way it is. City is king and king don't play. You can
try
to dodge the City but good luck with that. We had a friend tried to dodge the City and pay no bills and ask no services, and he now in Joliet jail. City did
not
like him trying to duck the game. The City is the man and you must pay the man. You really be a friend to this friend you better find some serious money. Don't even
talk
about talking about it. You got to find
money
. Money is what the City eats and you better feed it or your friend be in Joliet jail too, man. You don't want that. Listen, one more game to fifteen, we got just enough light, us three against Not My Fault and his boys full court, what say, you in?”

*   *   *

Miss Elminides was able to hold off the City and the banks during the month of May by draining her own bank accounts and selling her instruments and maps; it turned out that they were far more valuable than anyone knew, some of the instruments made by famous luthiers or previously owned by famous musicians, and some of the maps of substantive historical or artistic value. I learned this from Mr Pawlowsky, who had the impression that the maps and instruments had also been gifts to Miss Elminides from her grandfather, perhaps as quiet hedges against just such a day. She also apparently sold some clothing and some or all of the lean wooden furniture I had noticed in my moment in her apartment; Mr Pawlowsky said her apartment now was filled pretty much with light and nothing else, although if anyone could make rooms of such sparse severity look inviting and graceful it was Miss Elminides.

Also in May another letter came from the City, accusing Mrs Manfredi of running an illicit commercial enterprise in a residential zone, but this effort backfired completely on the City, for Mrs Manfredi was furious, and not only did she storm City Hall with fire and brimstone and bags of redolent empanadas for her alderman and his aides and the new mayor and her aides and the secretaries and photographers and newspapermen covering her attack with great high glee, but she also, in a brilliant stroke, went to a famous
Daily News
columnist, who knew a glorious small-brave-soul-against-greedy-bureaucrats story when he saw one, and wrote a scathing hilarious column that so embarrassed the City that another letter came forthwith, not only withdrawing the charge of illicit commerce but enclosing a check as payment for “procedural errors.” Mrs Manfredi, knowing full well that Miss Elminides would not accept the check directly, gave it to Mr Pawlowsky, who would know how to apply it to the Third Awkwardness.

As Edward pointed out later, this episode might well have been the hinge upon which the defeat of the Third Awkwardness swung, for Mrs Manfredi, flush with success and grim in her pursuit of profit as vengeance against the City, then struck a deal with the owner of the gyro shop on Broadway to sell her empanadas daily rather than weekly, and she tripled her production; which elevated spirits in the apartment building, for now the extraordinary scent of her culinary genius wafted up from the basement six days a week, and elevated
my
spirits, for now I had an excuse to pop into the gyro shop religiously every Saturday and Sunday, ostensibly to buy bags of those magical empanadas but actually to gaze worshipfully upon Leah (or Hypatia), as she rang up purchases, and spoke tartly to her father in Greek, and laughed at sallies issuing from the invisible cook in the kitchen. I cannot remember now if she ever even looked at me, or said anything to me other than
thank you
when I turned to leave the shop, but at that age and stage I was not especially interested in actually getting to know the person, as much as I was interested in worshipping the idea of such grace and loveliness loose in the world, and incarnated in such an extraordinary vessel; it was enough and more than enough for me then to simply say
six empanadas please,
and watch happily as she turned to fill the bag, and then turned back and said
two dollars, sir,
and I would say
these are the greatest things ever baked in the history of food,
and she would smile and not say anything, and I would turn to leave, and she would say
thank you,
and I would say
no, thank you,
and I would walk out onto Broadway filled with joy, and pleased at the state of the world at present; a world which grew even better as I slowly ate the empanadas, savoring every bite, on my way home.

*   *   *

The month of May, then, was something of a respite or lull, and Edward, now wholly recovered and nearly manic with unspent energy, decided to show me every single obscure or little-known or essentially unknown cool place in the city of Chicago. We went to the house where Walt Disney was born, on the west side of the city between Blackhawk Park and Mozart Park. We went to the building on Cottage Grove Avenue on the South Side where Chess Records began. We went to DeKoven Street on the South Side, the street where a vast epic awful titanic fire in 1871 burned three square miles of the city and wiped out people and streets and churches and tenements and the Chicago Cubs' first ballpark. We went to the Krause Music Store on Lincoln Avenue, which Edward loved not for the products sold there but for the unbelievably ornate terracotta façade, which indeed was remarkable and something you could gaze at raptly for hours, which we did. We went to the old Peerless Films building on West Argyle Street, where the lady who had lived in 3C, Eugenia, had acted in the Broncho Billy Western movies, and we left a glove from one of her costumes there, as a sort of offering or prayer or memento. We went to the intersection of Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive, where old Fort Dearborn was, which is where the Potawatomi people who had lived there for thousands of years fought back against the new people who were taking all the land and animals. We went to the Navy Pier so Edward could show me the hut in which the teenage Mr Pawlowsky had clerked during the war. We did not go to any places famous because of criminals like John Dillinger and Al Capone. We did go to Ellis Avenue on the South Side where the first nuclear reaction on earth occurred in a secret chamber under a football field at 3:25 on the afternoon on an autumn day in 1942. We went to the streets where the great musicians Paul Butterfield (south side) and John Prine (west side) and Lee Loughnane (north side) were born; Edward just adored Loughnane's trumpet style. We went to the street where Shel Silverstein was born, on the west side, and to the street where Bob Newhart was born, on the south side, but not to the street where Ernest Hemingway was born, on the south side, because Edward considered Hemingway the sort of writer who was more famous for his escapades than for his work, which was a shame, because he was a very fine short-story writer, and ought to be remembered that way. And we did go to the street where Saul Bellow was raised, on the west side, even though he had been born in Montreal; but still, Edward considered him to be a Chicago man through and through, and so worthy of a visit, much as we journeyed all the way up into the north side to Waukegan to walk on the street where Ray Bradbury had run and laughed as a child; it was Edward's opinion that other than maybe Samuel Clemens of Missouri, there was no finer writer ever born in this country than Ray Douglas Bradbury, who said himself that his whole childhood was running to the library and the lake and the wooded ravine where anything could and did happen, and he learned to “live feverishly,” as he said. That trip way up to the north side to walk on Ray Bradbury's street, I remember, was the longest of our adventures, and by the time we got home that night it was long past dark, and Edward was sound asleep next to me on the bus, and I carried him up our street in my arms, marveling at the crystalline stars and the moon as thin as the blade of a knife in the sky.

 

14.

AT WORK I SPENT MORE
and more time with Mr Mahoney for various reasons—he and I were involved in a series of stories reporting on parish life by American regions, trying to piece out how much regional culture affected religious practice, and also he had become my de facto editor for the occasional “think pieces” I was trying to write—and I found myself more absorbed every day by how his exterior belied his interior; how his costume and manner, both austere and gravely polite, were some sort of disguise or jacket or vessel into which the wit and humor and riveting inner life of the man were poured, for reasons of his own; it was almost as if he was so bursting with stories and ideas and energy that he had to carry himself carefully in his dark suits and dark fedora hat and meticulously knotted dark tie and dark shoes, looking more like a funeral director than a journalist, although twice that year, when he had to penetrate cordons of policemen and officious priests and aides-de-camp at gatherings of cardinals and bishops and monsignors, he wore a press pass in his hatband, and suddenly looked as jaunty and confident and comfortable as Ring Lardner at a racetrack.

The more time I spent with him the more I caught the wry amusement and entertainment behind his gravitas, the exuberant youth still capering inside the gaunt pale courteous dignity of the older man; and one by one, as we shared sandwiches in his office, or walked to noon Mass at Assumption Church on Illinois Street, he told me remarkable stories of his adventures. At age twenty he had heard Hitler speak from an upper-storey window in Berlin, to a worshipful crowd in the street; that was the first time, said Mr Mahoney, that he saw how one person could sway others by mere cadence and rhythm. At age thirty-five he had somehow been involved in the war in Burma, although all he would say of that time was that it taught him why poetry mattered. He had been a close companion of Thomas Merton, had corresponded with Flannery O'Connor, and had twice filed lawsuits against the current Archbishop of Chicago, the powerful and vengeful John Patrick Cody, for theft of church property, to wit more than a million dollars of hard-earned donations from the penurious faithful, and for violation of his priestly vows, to wit taking as mistress one Helen Wilson, widow, and lavishing upon her and her children additional funds contributed by the penurious faithful, some of them so poor that they did not have enough food to eat and clothes to wear or money to pay the rent. Neither lawsuit had made it to trial, and both efforts had enraged the Cardinal, who had several times tried to have Mr Mahoney fired from the magazine; but the magazine was run by an independent order of priests who had been in Chicago far longer than the Cardinal, a mere native of Saint Louis, and the order's provincial superior not only ignored the Cardinal's furious commands, but issued Mr Mahoney a raise of two dollars a week, one for each lawsuit filed, to try to reclaim misspent monies that ought to have been spent on the real and crucial work of the church, not burnt to feed one man's towering ego.