Chicago (27 page)

I came home early one afternoon from work specifically to thank John for his work, and by happy chance I had not one but two packages waiting in his truck, so I rooted as slowly as I could and peppered him with questions about dragonflies. It was a cold afternoon, with the wind slicing in off the lake, and perhaps he wanted to warm up a little, for he came as close to relaxing and chatting as he ever did with me, and I remember his eloquent passion to this day.

“They are the most remarkable creatures,” he said. “We take them utterly for granted and hardly notice them but they are astonishing beings. They can fly at forty or fifty miles an hour, you know—twice as fast as the fastest man can run. They can catch and eat anything they want. They can fly instantly in any direction whatsoever, including backwards. As larvae in water they are big and quick enough to eat small fish, and when mature in the air they eat any and all insects. I suspect they can and have eaten shrews and newts and lizards also but that is subject to further study. A perfectly designed flying and eating machine, with some six thousand known variations. Isn't that amazing? And we hardly notice them. And there may be thousands more that we have not identified as yet. It makes you humble. The legion of things we see but do not see. They can eat their weight in an hour and then do it again an hour later, you know. You see a lot as a mailman. The hermits in your building, the woman who had been a film actress. The hermits have never received a single package in seven years and Eugenia received a certified check every week. I try to pay attention. And their names are euphonic and melodious, you know—the Migrant Hawker, the Scarce Chaser, the Great Pondhawk, the Keeled Skimmer, the Green Darner, the Downy Emerald. Who could fail to be entranced by this? We hardly notice them at all though they are everywhere. Also Edward receives mail, you know. Generally packets of stamps, but also surfing literature. Someday perhaps I will travel to the southern hemisphere and study Thorntails and Yellowjacks and Perchers and Dropwings. That will be a pleasure. Did you find your packages? One was a set of books, and the other I believe contains brownies or cookies. You get so you have a sense of what's in a package. The wrapping style generally gives it away more than the shape. Now
that
would be a fascinating study—what you can ascertain about senders from the way they wrap packages. I must be going. Check by the wheel-well for the books and by the windows for the cookies. I put packages with food closer to the windows. I wish you the best in your travels. Massachusetts, eh? A land of many ponds and wetlands. Keep your eyes open. I am particularly interested in Hawkers and there are at least eight species there, but I have long suspected there is a Skimmer called the Striped Glider in Massachusetts; if by chance you see one, send me a note in care of the post office. Bright orange tail with a black needle on the end. You can't miss it. Travel safely. Don't forget to send me a note if you see the Glider. I'm
sure
it's there. See you!”

*   *   *

I have wandered through and marveled at many cities since my years in Chicago—cities all over the world, from the ancient seethe of Rome to the glinting brio of Sydney; cities on the shoulders of mountains, cities by the lip of the sea; so very many cities astraddle rivers, or camped for centuries where two rivers meet; cities looming out of the flat plains like huge shards of light and glass, cities insisting on themselves amid inhospitable deserts, cities huddled defiant and disgruntled against endless ice and snow, cities wrapped like long urban shawls around the curving shores of bays; and each of these cities had a flavor and a character all its own, formed of more than merely locale and climate, and the accident of its original economic or military excuse. Each had been created, was constantly being created, by the people who lived there, the way they lived, their adamant dreams, the web and weave of their languages, the games their children played in streets and fields, the music issuing from their windows, the rustle of the trees, the burble of birds, even the way rain arose and swirled and flowed away; one way to savor a city, I have discovered, is to walk through it after a shower, and watch and listen as the water slips back to mother ocean, however far she is; you can almost hear the shape and skin of a city this way, its curves and rills and subtle hills.

Often I had to look hard for a city's particular smells and stories, and wander around neighborhoods and alleys and parks, before I began to catch its deeper salt and song. Often, I found, this deeper sense of the city was not at all where the shepherds of tourists claim it to be; in New York City, for example, the thrum of it, the actual city in which people live and love and fight and die, is not on Fifth Avenue or perhaps even in lower Manhattan, but in brave shaggy Harlem, and cacophonous burly Queens, and along the gull-shrieked crab-scuttled shores of Staten Island, and in old dank redolent taverns in Bushwick, where the Mets are always losing by a run in the bottom of the seventh on the murmuring television above the bar.

Many of those cities I came to love, often to my surprise; as lovely and welcoming and gleaming and harbor-profligate as Sydney is, for example, I came to like the rough sprawl of Melbourne more, a brisk muscular city that welcomes penguins to its beaches at dusk. I liked old blunt ragged Tacoma more than officious Seattle, grinning Vancouver more than dowager Montreal, windy wet saltshot San Francisco more than preening sultry Los Angeles. I liked cold gruff Edinburgh more than imperial London, wild Jakarta more than prim Tokyo, tumultuous Montevideo more than vaunted Buenos Aires, windwhipped Alexandria more than regal Cairo.

But never, among all the cities I have wandered over the years, cities all over the earth, did I feel and smell and sense anything quite like the verb that is Chicago; and always, no matter how many years passed, I could hear and see and touch something inside me that only Chicago has and is, some intricate combination of flat sharp light off the lake grappling with dense light from the plains to the west, the fields to the south, the forests to the north.

All cities are riven by the stutter of engines, all cities shine in the fitful sun and endure the whip of weather, all cities are filled with shouts and imprecations and the mosaic of music, the thunder of commerce, the clash of soldiery, the eternal war of feet against the earth; but sometimes I wonder if there is not one city for each of us, one city that is our own somehow, in ways having nothing to do with nativity or residence; indeed I suspect that for many people the city in which they were born and have lived their whole lives is not the city in their hearts, the city in which they would have lived most happily and comfortably, the city they probably will never know. I have lived in four cities, in my long lifetime, and I have savored them all, and very much liked three, and lived in them with pleasure, and happily explored their secret corners and subtle stories, but I loved the fourth, the one in which I lived the least, for five seasons, years ago when I was young.

*   *   *

My last day of work at the magazine was a Friday in the middle of December. Mr Mahoney took me to lunch at the Berghoff Cafe, on Adams Street; the ladies in the circulation department gave me a baseball signed by Richie Zisk; my colleagues in the editorial department gave me a beautifully bound copy of Walt Whitman's
Leaves of Grass
; and Mr Burns called me into his office late in the afternoon for an “exeunt interview,” as he said.

Again he was dressed in a glowing gray suit of the finest cut and cloth, and my attention was distracted by the way you could see a corner of the elevated train tracks in the window behind him; without warning there would be the roar of a train every twenty minutes or so. But once again, just as he had been on my first day, he was cheerful and blunt and memorable in his peroration. A most remarkable man; I can still close my eyes and see his round pink shining face blooming from his suit jacket like a rose.

For a moment I thought it actually was going to be an exit interview, for he asked me a few questions, which I tried to answer honestly and articulately—Had I enjoyed the work? Had I learned anything useful about professional journalism? Was there anything I could suggest about more effective operation of the office? Was I not a far better man for having worked with the fearless and sinewy Mr Mahoney? Did I need a reference for a journalism job in Boston, to which he understood I was headed, lovely old city, beware the Mafia, learn a smattering of Gaelic if you are living in South Boston, it will be helpful in the social ramble?—but then his natural ebullience and garrulity reasserted himself, and he delivered a soaring speech about journalism that I still recall with pleasure and awe. Over the years since I heard it, in his office on Madison Street, I have sometimes thought that perhaps those few moments marked the beginning of my life as a writer, for that was the first time I heard someone express, eloquently and passionately, what stories were actually for and about, at the deepest level.

“You think you have been working on a magazine,” he said. “You think you have been apprenticing in the legendary guild of ink-stained wretches who collect and report fact and opinion. You think you have been training to be a journalist, a profession long in the tooth, if not in the esteem of the rich and respectable. And some of this is true, in the same way a man
is
playing professional baseball if he plays for the A-League Appleton Foxes in the wilds of Wisconsin. But he is in the shallowest waters of the professional game, the puddles at the edge of the sea, and so have you been pittering in the waves like a child at the shore. At this magazine I hope you have learned the rudiments of our craft, the way that you must balance ego and humility, the way that the profession is finally one of service, not of heroic gratification of your urge to be important. We are
not
important. We are
crucial,
yes; without us there is naught but lies and thievery and souls easily led to the altar of Mammon, thereupon to be sacrificed to serious profit, which is our first and foremost deity and principle; but we are not important in the eyes of the world, and will never be. I hope you learned that here. Those among us who expose and uncover the most chicanery and greed will be soon found to have feet of clay, and hands of the stickiest glue, and the sexual proclivities of maddened weasels; those among us who ferret out the true facts of imbroglio and crime will be soon enough banished and exiled, doomed to flog useless products of one kind or another for the rest of their days; those of us who write most beautifully and gracefully and eloquently and powerfully will be suspected of plagiarism, rumored to be dope fiends, assumed to be self-absorbed egomaniacs, and eventually doomed to be forgotten, our books and articles turned to mold and mulch. That is the fate of all journalism.

“But we
are
crucial. That is what I hope you have learned. We listen for and collect and share stories. Without stories there is no nation and no religion and no culture. Without stories of bone and substance and comedy there is only a river of lies, and sweet and delicious ones they are, too. We are the gatherers, the shepherds, the farmers of stories. We wander widely and look for them and gather them and harvest them and share them as food. It is a craft as necessary and nutritious as any other, and if you are going to be good at it you must double your humility and triple your curiosity and quadruple your ability to listen. Mr Mahoney has the highest opinion of your promise as a journalist but I will advise you to savor his compliment today and forget it tomorrow. Always assume you can do better. It is a safe assumption. Always search for the deeper story. At this magazine, being absorbed by spirituality not as a talisman but as an implement of daily labor, we have searched for stories of spiritual substance; I hope you have learned that the best stories are most often not found where you think to look, but where you didn't. The heart of the Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago, for example, is a crumbled house where honesty and humility once lived; to look there for more than motes of grace is to waste the hours granted you by a merciful creator. But to look everywhere else—that is the journey that we will continue to make as long as we are able. We will do so without your assistance, which was more than passable, and always, as far as I can tell from reports, honest in intent, if raw in the execution. Do you have any questions?”

“About my work?”

“About your future.”

“No, sir.”

“Better get to Boston, then.”

“Yes, sir.”

And so I did. I went around the office one last time, shaking hands, and then Mr Mahoney accompanied me down the stairs to the street. We shook hands for a long minute, and then he smiled and gave me a worn pencil. “A better man would give you a more notable gift,” he said, “but I think a pencil is a glorious gift. Use it well. Drive safely. Be joyful. Be tender. Everything else is secondary to tenderness. Remember that.”

 

27.

I LEFT CHICAGO ON THE FIRST DAY
of winter. I borrowed an old Impala from a college friend and loaded it with everything I owned, which was once again mostly my worn shiny ball and crammed duffel bag; I had given away everything else but my grandmother's Bible and Robert Louis Stevenson's
Kidnapped
and my new copy of
Leaves of Grass,
and stuffed all my clothes and backup sneakers into the duffel.

This was before dawn. I wanted to be away at first light, for murky reasons. Edward carried the ball and the Bible downstairs and I carried the duffel. The car was parked right in front of the three stone steps I had walked up with such hope and trepidation five seasons before. Miss Elminides had made me a thermos of coffee and Mr Pawlowsky had made me a packet of ten ham sandwiches, which he calculated would sustain me to the border of Massachusetts. Denesh had given me a cricket ball from his playing days, which I still keep on my bureau at home. Mrs Manfredi made me a bag of empanadas for the road and Mr McGinty had given me a betting ticket for Arlington as a keepsake; months later a horseplayer friend of mine in Boston checked on it and discovered it was worth a hundred dollars.