Chicago (21 page)

For an hour or so we didn't speak much, and just enjoyed the hum of tires on the highway, and the world brightening slowly behind us, and the occasional deer or hawk, and once a coyote with the tail of something hanging from its mouth. Sister Maureen talked a little about Iowa, and the motherhouse, and the nuns there who were mostly great but two had illusions of grandeur, and how she was a student of the First Peoples in Iowa, and much enjoyed collecting and recording their stories, on the theory that, as she said, the best way to celebrate a people is to share their stories, because the best way to kill a people is to kill their stories, for example look at what the English tried to do to the Irish, although it didn't take, because we are too damned stubborn, as my grandfather said, and all too familiar with duress. He was from County Mayo, you see.

As we crossed the Rock River Sister Maureen said I think this is perhaps where you want to be, and she pulled over and let me out. We agreed to meet at this exact spot at sunset, and she drove off, leaving me her pear, and I spent the day wandering along the river, and climbing into the craggy rocky hills, and noticing deer tracks, and twice a thrash of wild turkeys, and what I thought might have been a fox or a bobcat, although it vanished as soon as it saw me, and left no prints on the rocks. I ate the pears slowly, savoring every bite. I lay in the grass watching hawks and swallows and swifts. I climbed a massive old maple and found a flying-squirrel nest. I found the biggest cottonwood tree I ever saw. I sat in the river and watched dragonflies and damselflies quarter the surface for insects. I found a pool under the bank that looked like it would be a great place for otters and catfish and I dove under and held on to rocks at the bottom of the pool as long as I could and twice fish nosed past curiously. I looked for turtles and frogs and toads and mussels and snails. I found the bones of a perch. I found the feathers and bones of a robin where a small hawk had torn it apart. I saw two different kinds of crayfish, brown and red, the red ones testy and argumentative. I did a lot of nothing. I napped in a honeysuckle thicket for a while and when I awoke I sat there slowly pulling the nectar-laden threads from the flowers and tasting a honey I had not eaten since I was a child on a gleaming summer morning long ago and far away. I heard a train somewhere in the distance. In more than ten hours in that forest by the Rock River I saw two members of my species, a man and a boy in a pickup truck in farmland to the west. Late in the afternoon the wind picked up and I sat on a hill and watched the cornfields sway and dust devils swirl in the soybean fields. Just before sunset, as I was walking back to the highway bridge, I saw a kestrel hover over a field like a tiny bronze helicopter, and suddenly drop like a bright stone into the dirt, and rise up again into the air with a snake.

*   *   *

September proved to be a tumultuous month. The nuns moved in, taking the whole west side of the third floor and 4E and 4F, next to the librettist. Azad, in 4A, began school, which reduced his little sister Eren to tears for weeks. The man who had invented propeller hats, in 2A, delivered an enormous check to Mr Pawlowsky to give to Miss Elminides; he did not want to hand it to her in person, being shy, and all he would say about where the money came from, according to Edward, was that it had something to do with where computing would eventually inevitably have to go. Miss Elminides received a letter from the authorities in Greece explaining that a Greek citizen named Giannis had been arrested in the Turkish city of Çanakkale, and that Greek authorities were pursuing repatriation with an eye toward indictment, but that Turkish authorities were at present recalcitrant and unhelpful, to say the least, and that the case would apparently have to be pursued at higher political levels, which promised to be a slow process, to say he least, and that they, the Greek authorities, would keep Miss Elminides posted, and that they wished her well, and would pray for her estimable grandfather, God rest his soul.

It was a tumultuous month for me also. I was asked to play in a men's league in Evanston which featured more than a few college football players using the league to stay in shape for spring practice, so it was all I could do to hold my own and not get hammered by guys twice my size; twice I was so tired after intense games up there that I fell asleep on the train home and woke up deep on the South Side, discombobulated and sore from head to toe. At work the Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago tightened the screws grimly, so that the office grew tense, and even Mr Burns lost his temper one day and threw a roaring stomping fit that ended with a typewriter being flung out the window onto Madison Street, narrowly missing an unemployed plumber. The gyro shop where Leah worked was the target of an attempted shakedown by the city tax assessor, and had to be rescued by Mr McGinty, who somehow knew everyone who worked for the city, and called in a favor. The man in 2D who had once raised cheetahs burned his left hand so badly while cooking that he had to be hospitalized for four days, during which Edward and I tended his birds—his apartment was filled with parakeets of every conceivable color, so many that we never did arrive at a final count, no matter how many times we tried. One elevated train crashed into another at rush hour in the Loop, tossing people like bread crumbs from the platform. Denesh lost his absolute favorite cricket bat, the one with which he had played his final match; it had been mounted over his couch, and had perhaps been stolen somehow, although none of us could figure how it had been done. Four horses were murdered one night at Arlington as part of an elaborate insurance scam, which unraveled because one of the stable boys attending the horses was so angry at the killings that he led investigators to the money trail. The White Sox, having fallen out of first place on August 19, lost two of three to the Orioles as September began, and fell five games behind the Kansas City Royals. Four inches of rain fell one day, a windstorm howled through the city another day with gusts of fifty miles an hour (small boats on the lake were overturned, and a baby carriage was blown clear across Lake Shore Drive, although the child in it reportedly held on with both hands, and was unharmed), and lightning on still another day hit the Board of Trade Building and partially melted the corn in the goddess Ceres' right hand.

Also I received a letter from the young woman I had met on the train. She had accepted a job with a bank in Boston, and she was moving there from Wyoming immediately, in fact flying to Boston an hour after she posted this letter, a flight which precluded a long train trip during which she should happily have paused in Chicago for a while. But, she wrote, she would be delighted if I thought I could find a way to live in Boston also. What with a year's experience on a renowned magazine, and the gleam of my diploma from Notre Dame, I would be, she thought, an excellent candidate for jobs in Boston, and if indeed I did move to Boston, perhaps we could pursue our mutual interest in each other, and see what fate had in store.

“Consider this an invitation,” she wrote, “and not pressure in any way or form, for I cannot make promises, nor can you, and perhaps I am being more forward than I should be. But it seems to me that there is certainly something between us, and I would very much like to see what that something can be. However I do not want to have a relationship with a thousand miles between us. As you know I did that twice already during my college years and it didn't work either time. Probably it didn't work because neither of the guys turned out to be such good guys, but I know myself well enough to know I don't want to try that with you. I will understand one hundred percent if you feel that this isn't the time for whatever reason for you to leave Chicago, and I know how much you love the city and your life there, but I have to be honest and say that I hope you
will
come to Boston. I hope that very much. Write me after you read this letter?”

 

21.

THE WHITE SOX WERE ON THE ROAD
though much of early September, out west against the Oakland Athletics and the California Angels, and I was terrifically busy at work anyway, trying to finish a series of articles about differences among religious practices in parishes around the city, and there were many days when I was hardly in the apartment building at all, rising before dawn to catch the Sound Asleep Bus and coming home around midnight. I looked at my notes from that time recently and counted more than fifty parishes I had visited, from Saint Adalbert to Saint Wenceslaus; and at each parish I made an effort to talk not only to the pastor and assistants, if any, but to teachers, janitors, parents, children, neighbors, detractors, and the local police and firemen, who I had discovered usually knew far more about the actual intricacies of community life than any official or activist. I also had learned to visit taverns, to chat with bartenders and the old guys at the end of the bar at two in the afternoon, and restaurants, to chat with the older waitresses; those professions were in the listening business, and often I found gifted storytellers with tremendous memories for local lore. For professional reasons I also stopped into the offices of whatever small neighborhood newspaper I could find, but in general those were not productive visits, as the editors and reporters I spoke to either wanted to sell me an idea or make me buy information of unverifiable accuracy and doubtful provenance.

I had thought, when I got the assignment from Mr Mahoney, that my series of articles would be somewhat pro forma, reporting on infinitesimal differences among parishes probably by cultural heritage—the Lithuanians at Saints Peter and Paul on the South Side would approach Easter in ways that the Poles at Holy Trinity on the north side would not easily recognize, something like that—but I was quickly and thoroughly disabused of this notion, and found myself entranced by the rich and colorful and myriad differences. Each parish, it seemed to me, was its own village of a sort, with its own cast of characters and its own welter of common myths and traditions and theatrical flourishes, some of which would have given the Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago a heart attack, had he known of them. Officially, for example, women were banned from the altar, and officially subservient to the pastor and assistant pastors if any, but in fact most parishes were cheerfully run by women, either under titles like religious education director or school principal, or sans title as members of the parish council, fund-raising coordinator, or parish secretary. At three parishes the women who ran the Altar Society essentially ran the whole business of the parish, from church maintenance funds to admission marketing for the school and even insurance coverage for the pastor's Chevy Impala; at another parish it was the Mothers' Club that quietly made sure the operation hummed smoothly, and at one parish I was sure a group of women called the Sodality of the Madonna had arranged things such that all orders and commands and instructions from the pastor, an arrogant buffoon, were quietly run past the Sodality for editing before issuance.

Like many other Catholics at that time, I was annoyed at what seemed the inarguable patriarchal mania of the church—a tendency with no validation except the weak excuse of hoary age and the fact that the founder was male; the latter also a silly excuse, as He was a Jewish man, and if we were to adhere to His example closely, we would all be Jewish and skinny and live in Judea and speak Aramaic and Hebrew and take up carpentry for spiritual reasons. So it was startling, and rather pleasant, to discover that in many parishes women quietly skippered the ship, sometimes amusing themselves and their fellow lay travelers by a certain ironically obsequious respect for the hierarchy. The many nuns who worked in the parishes in various capacities were most artful at this, and I saw some hilarious exchanges between wry and witty nuns and pastors who hadn't the faintest idea that they were being shepherded as easily as you might steer a turkey toward a scatter of corn.

It was also pleasant to discover that there were very few arrogant bloviators among the hierarchy, as far as I could tell—most of them were decent and hardworking men who understood full well that their work was to serve not only their congregations, but an idea at once so preposterous that it could never be proven or validated, yet so relentless that two millennia of evidence against had not yet managed to quash it. A difficult profession, theirs; and I came to much more respect and admiration, as I researched and wrote that series of articles, for the many men who by their own sworn vow led lives of sometimes terrible loneliness, even as they were incredibly busy and surrounded by hundreds of people who needed their help and attention and patience and open ear and open heart. I had never had even the tickle of an urge to be a priest, but after I finished that assignment my estimation of their general grace and courage went up several thousand percentage points.

*   *   *

All these years later, I think I was too young, when I was living in Chicago, for any number of things. I was too young to realize how cool and funny Azad and Eren were, and how much fun it would have been to hang around with two tiny fascinating people and laugh my head off. I was too young to pay much attention to the byzantine and incredible and revelatory machinations of politics and commerce and crime and punishment. I was too young to think at all in the least about the primacy of education and the incredible potential depth of family life. I was too young to pay attention to the unmistakably foul fingerprints of epic and criminal pollution and environmental degradation in the lake. I was too young to pay attention to the fact that of the three million people in the city maybe a million did not have quite enough to eat or lived in dangerous conditions or endured constant assault and battery or had no real hope or possibility of ever elevating their standards of living. I was too young to begin to discern the prevalence of rape in our culture, in every aspect of our lives, from families to churches to schools to clubs to the military, and too young to see the dense curtain of lies and shame and fear that muffles the screams of the women and boys and girls who suffer such insidious predation. I was too young to pay attention to the remarkable virtues and vices of religions, and the ways they elevated their adherents, and stole from them too. I was too young to understand the constant cheating and turning of blind eyes and bribery and deft corporate theft and eloquent complicated lies that in many ways defined business and politics and civic administration in Chicago then and probably now. I was too young to see how the city acted as a vast cold magnet for the young of the surrounding country, who were drawn to Oz with wide eyes and covetous impulse, leaving behind their small towns and villages and cities to wither by the year. I was too young to see the cold calculus of economics, by which the rural areas labored mightily to provide product, which was then shipped at small profit to the city, where great profit was made upon it by those who had nothing to do with it but take it with one hand and sell it with the other. I was too young to see the white gangs attack black ones attack brown ones attack white ones, and all colors of gangs attack children from Korea and Japan and China and Malaysia and Vietnam and Cambodia as their families also, just like the white and black and brown ones, flooded into the city looking for work and school and peace. I was too young to notice but a few of the thousand broken sodden homeless souls on steam grates and under bridges, and wonder why so many of them had been soldiers in our wars, or members of tribes and clans here many thousands of years before agriculture and settlements arrived. I was too young to realize what a time machine Mr McGinty was at age ninety-nine, and how a thousand hours of listening to his stories would have not only been a most amazing education in American history but would have easily afforded me stories enough for ten novels. I was too young to realize that Mr Pawlowsky was not merely shy about opening his heart to Miss Elminides, and not just leery of being bruised by possible rejection, but that he had also, at age fifty-three, built a life he loved, a life in which he was stimulated and comfortable and rich in his way, and perhaps it was frightening for him to contemplate a different sort of life, even with the undeniable attraction of having Miss Elminides at the center of it. I was too young to see that Miss Elminides too, for all her grace and ease and calm and dignity and aura of elegance, was also shy and lonely and perhaps bereft and adrift in a city and country she had not chosen for herself. I was too young to be utterly astounded and absorbed by Edward, whose intelligence and depth of character I took a little for granted; I could not know then that I would never meet another being like him, let alone a
dog
like him, and I have met many excellent beings, and dogs, since then.