Chicago (5 page)

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If I have given the impression that Mr Pawlowsky was frail or languorous I have done badly, for he was active as a bird around the building, fixing this and that, replacing worn and battered things, tinkering steadily with plumbing and electrical conundrums, spackling and grouting and plastering and washing and painting seemingly all day and often at night; many times when I came in late from work or from rambles in the city I would hear or see him quietly at work, usually accompanied by Edward, especially if the matter had to do with carpentry, at which Edward was gifted, according to Mr Pawlowsky; also Edward was deft at carrying boards and tools up and down stairs, and one of the first hilarious moments I had in the building was watching our youngest resident, a boy of six named Azad, gape in amazement as Edward managed two six-foot oak timbers, a red steel toolbox, and a bucket of lost-head nails all the way from the basement up to the roof.

Active as Mr Pawlowsky was in and around the building, however, I saw him more than a few feet away from the building very rarely. I had begun to be curious about how he and Edward procured food, and how he got all the necessary materials for building repair without a truck, and if Mr Pawlowsky ever went to the doctor, or church, or a ball game, or a pub, or Navy reunions down on the Pier, and had he ever been married, and did he have kids, or what?

In short I was curious, or rude, and I was awkward or honest enough then to simply knock on his door and ask, which I did one crisp lovely Saturday afternoon before Thanksgiving, when you could feel the first whip of winter in the air, and the sure prospect of snow. As I remember it was one of those Midwest autumn afternoons where you could faintly smell burning leaves somewhere, and hear various college football games from Illinois and Indiana and Wisconsin and Michigan and Iowa on various radios, and hear geese honking overhead, and trees were almost wholly naked, and even teenagers were wearing jackets, and that morning at the grocery store there had been a learned discussion at the meat counter about hunting permits and deer season and deer camps and what wines go best with venison.

Edward opened the door, and again I found Mr Pawlowsky shivering under his old faded blue Navy blankets. I apologized for intruding and made to withdraw, figuring he was suffering from his recurrent malady, but he was in a cheerful mood, pale as he was, and called me back over to sit and talk, while Edward went off to the grocery store for coffee beans.

Even though I was in my first few months as a professional journalist I was already experienced enough to approach a big question sideways, or sidelong, so instead of coming right out and asking him about love and marriage and children and family I asked him about his provenance and childhood and early chapters, figuring that would loosen him up enough and get him talking freely—appetizing talk before the main meal, as it were.

“‘I am an American, Chicago born, Chicago, that somber city, and go at things as I have taught myself,' as our great urban chronicler Saul Bellow wrote,” he said, smiling, “and to date I have departed the city just once in this life, to take the train to Iowa, to make sure it was there—this was when I was young, and not altogether sure there really was anything outside Chicago, despite persistent reports. I remember disembarking from the train and walking for hours, apples in my pockets, through endless forests of corn and rustling carpets of soybeans. I cannot remember that I saw a soul that day, although the birds were profuse, and I saw deer and raccoons, animals wholly new to me, and what I later ascertained was an otter, in a small river. In the evening I took the train back to the city, enlightened. This was long before I met Edward, and it remains the longest journey I have taken solo, to date.”

He told stories the rest of the afternoon, as the light slowly melted away on the street outside and dusk parked for a while and then night pitched camp; Edward came and went on various errands, carrying groceries and the mail and the afternoon edition of the newspaper; I made coffee for the three of us at one point, Edward showing me the necessary apparatus and its machinations; and all the while Mr Pawlowsky spoke of his childhood in the city, when horses and chickens were not uncommon in the streets and alleys, and fishmongers plied their trade in carts and wagons, and the city's throbbing engine was the stockyards, where cattle beyond number came and went, some to be slaughtered and sold piecemeal, others to be shipped farther on in every direction and across the oceans; the city swirled with smoke from mills and factories beyond number; the snap of gunfire in the streets was not unknown, as ruffians fought the police, themselves often worse ruffians; and the lake was alive with barges and steamers and ferries and workboats of every shape and description; “and the city was such a magnet for people from all over the world that there were thirteen different languages spoken in our neighborhood,” said Mr Pawlowsky; “I know the number exactly because my brother Paul and I counted them one day, measuring in four blocks in every direction from our apartment, and including our building, in which there were five languages, basically one per floor: Polish on the first floor, where we lived, Russian on two, Gaelic on three, Greek on four, and Scandinavian in general on the fifth floor, from Swedish and Finnish to an Icelandic family, the Peturssons, lovely people who made an extraordinary cured salmon dish that I can taste even now on particularly cold days. And there were hats and caps everywhere when I was a boy, and cars became more common. There were the years of great poverty, of course, during which people indeed did sell apples on corners, and line up by the hundreds in hopes of a single job, and line up for charitable soup, and families doubled up or even tripled up in apartments, as they lost their lodgings. I saw all that, yes, and I well remember walking in a crowd of thousands of children to the house of the city's school chief to ask for food, although I was just along for the fun of it—a friend ran by as Paul and I were on our front stoop and he called to us and we ran after him. But in general our childhoods were pleasant, if pinched, Paul and me; mostly, when I put my mind to it, I remember voices, and angles of sunshine and rain, and animals—the fishmonger had a mule I was especially fond of, as he was not at all recalcitrant or sour-tempered, as so many of his brethren seem to be.”

Thus spake Mr Pawlowsky at eloquent length, and by the time I stirred myself from my chair and rose to make my own small dinner it was full dark. Not until late that night, as I was falling asleep, did I realize that Mr Pawlowsky had never mentioned anything about his family other than his brother Paul, nor had he gotten the story of himself even into his teenage years. For a moment I was disgruntled, feeling as I did when I was outplayed at chess, but then I resolved to keep asking questions; even then, in the first flush of my career as a journalist, I sensed the irresistible lure of inquiry, the power of an invitation to fill an ear, the open arms of silence welcoming story. I fell asleep in the sure knowledge that there would be many moments to come in which I could tease Mr Pawlowsky's story out from behind his dignified reserve; and I could also, if necessary, resort to Edward, who knew much and forgot nothing.

 

6.

I WENT ALL THE WAY HOME
to New York City for Christmas, taking the Hoosier State train through Cincinnati and Indianapolis (I was crazy for trains then, and at one time or another took the Zephyr to Denver, and the Ethan Allen Express to Vermont, and the Hiawatha to Milwaukee), and it was a wonderful time, crammed with laughter and chaffing and intense basketball games with my many brothers, but when I got back to my apartment I was washed with loneliness for the first time since I had come to Chicago.

I tried to run it off, dribbling my smooth shining basketball ever farther and faster along the lake, along the slippery paths cleared through the snow, and extending my brisk alley explorations much deeper into the west side of the city, which seemed to stretch all the way to Iowa; I tried to walk it off, twice walking home the four miles from Madison Street to the apartment building; I tried, one night, to drink it away, getting all the way to a fourth whiskey at the pub around the corner until Raymond the barman stopped pouring and asked me what was wrong and sent me home with an off-duty policeman who told me jokes in Gaelic and smelled vaguely of rain.

I even, for once, accepted a social invitation, to a weekend barbecue on the Iowa border, but once there I found the desperately witty banter too much to bear, and drifted off into the cornfields, where I got so helplessly lost that I finally hitched a ride back to Chicago from a carload of burly muddy football players on their way back to school from a pig roast.

It was Edward finally who rousted me from my brown study, with another expedition to the South Side, this time to a tiny subterranean blues club named for its proprietress, a large calm woman named Theresa, who seemed to know Edward, and waved us into the murk without charge. It was more of a basement than a club, it seemed to me, but Edward led me to a corner where a young piano player was just finishing a meditative blues with a lovely trickling solo that had the patrons staring at him in amazement. “That was Otis Spann, you know,” said the pianist quietly into his microphone. “He died eight years ago not far from here and he buried under old oak trees not far from here and we going to play Otis all night long like praying. Otis was the best of us all. He a wonder of a man. God gave that man a heart unlike any heart ever was. He was a beautiful man. He died so very young. He only forty when he died. Anybody ever to hear Otis play, you different ever after. A piano player to hear Otis for the first time, that was the end of the piano player you used to be and the beginning of your new one. This happened to me. So tonight we going to play Otis as long as Theresa let us stay here. We maybe play 'til morning if she let us. We going to
pray
on the piano. We begin with ‘Someday' played slow and low so you feel the blues at the bottom of your bones,” and he closed his eyes and began to play again, and the music was so lean and sobbing and sweet and sad, so slow and haunted and resigned, with a hint of thorny endlessly patient weary bemused endurance in it, that I
did
feel it in the bottom of my bones; and I had the odd feeling that I had always known this music somehow without ever actually hearing it before, that it had been waiting patiently for me, so to speak, and now we were friends, and would always be so; we understood each other somehow, we thought and dreamed in the same language, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with skin color or gender or occupation or avocation, or any of the other things by which we define and categorize and wall ourselves off from other people. This music was bone music, music that you either felt very deeply, inarticulately deeply, or you did not. I had the sense that you could enjoy it on the surface, with its propulsive rhythm and repetitive pulse, its predilection to chant and litany and tides of chorus, without
loving
it, in the way that you could enjoy pop and folk and ethnic music here and there, usually married to an occasion or event; but even before the young piano player finished the song I was utterly and completely and forever absorbed by the blues, and have remained so ever since.

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Actually meeting Miss Elminides finally had piqued my curiosity about her, and between Edward and Mr Pawlowsky I learned a great deal. Edward was of the firm opinion that she had taken up residence ten years ago, not six, and even at that time she was in the habit of riding the bus, destination unknown, although Edward believed she was a teacher, from various mannerisms and accoutrements and habits, and even the way she carried herself. She had a firm but gentle mien, always willing to listen but brisk and impatient with her time being wasted; she had a preternatural sense of people lingering or waiting in the hall, about to knock on her door; she was apparently erudite in geography, topography, cartography, history, navigation, and music, if the maps and instruments we had seen on her wall were any indication; she took the bus south and west every morning, and returned to her bay apartment late every afternoon; she had the eerie teacherly ability to quell young Azad's exuberance with a look or a quiet word or even a slight decisive gesture of her hand; and occasionally, at the times that you would think matched the intense periods of a school calendar, she would lock herself in her room for days on end with large stacks of papers and folders, and subsist, apparently, on nothing but coffee and honey and olives, if Edward's sure sense of smell was to be believed.

“You see his line of thinking here, and there is a lot to be said for his calculations,” said Mr Pawlowsky, on a particularly starry night on the roof in early December. “But there are, of course, many other explanations for her habits. She could be, for example, a composer, or a novelist, or an accountant, or a deft and thorough robber of banks, for which she needs to carefully scout the premises and behavioral patterns of the employees, and scour over vast troves of architectural drawings and geological surveys and city plumbing and piping maps. That could be. Or she could be some sort of spiritual visionary, the leader of a small sect of some sort, devoted particularly to maps as forms of prayer, along with the usual predilection to music that most religions evince, playing on the natural rhythms of the heart. That could also be. Or indeed she could be working for the city in some capacity, or perhaps she is the bookkeeper for a business entity of some sort, from gyro shop to music store to the reading of palms and casting of horoscopes. The possibilities are as endless as Miss Elminides' range of skills and talents, which is remarkable for one so young.”

This line of talk led to a discussion of her age. Mr Pawlowsky put her in her late twenties, given the translucence of her skin and the way she walked with the effortless springing graceful step of a young deer, but Edward was sure she was in her late thirties, her youthful appearance and carriage being more a matter of admirable sleep patterns, balanced diet and living habits, and the luck of the draw in the matter of heritage and ancestry. I hadn't the slightest idea, having had no experience at all then in gauging the age of women; and later this was to prove a skill I never could acquire; in the years since my time in Chicago I have regularly embarrassed myself and others in underestimating advanced age and overestimating that which is less so; never to the point of mortification, thankfully, but occasionally to hilarity, and once to tears.