Chicago Page 2

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  While Edward and Mr Pawlowsky lived on the fourth floor west, Miss Elminides lived on the third floor east, in a sort of alcove or bay in the building; it took me a couple of weeks to notice that the building was asymmetrical, and there was no equivalent bay on the west side. Mr Pawlowsky was of the opinion that the original owner of the building, Miss Elminides’ grandfather, whom no living resident had ever met, had presciently designed the building for his granddaughter’s residence, though it must have been designed and built long before Miss Elminides was born. No one could remember anyone other than Miss Elminides ever living in the bay room, and even Mr Pawlowsky, who knew everything about the building and the neighborhood, could not remember exactly when Miss Elminides had arrived—six years ago, ten, twelve? Edward was sure it was ten, and that she had looked exactly the same as she looked now, and that her arrival had something to do with a change in her family fortunes at about that time. The grandfather had given or deeded the building to Miss Elminides, and she had taken up residence in the bay room, and there she had lived ever since, elegant and gracious. Neither Edward nor Mr Pawlowsky had the slightest idea how old she was, or if she was a Chicago native, or what she did during the day when she was away from the building; Edward was of the opinion that she was a teacher, based on her weekday attire and warm personality, but Mr Pawlowsky said he knew nothing whatsoever of her career other than that she took the Broadway bus, and had a seat of her own, right behind the driver; one time when she had been bedridden with pneumonia the bus driver and several of his passengers had actually come to the building to check on her—which, as Mr Pawlowsky said, tells you a great deal about the esteem with which she is rightly held by anyone who knows her at all in the least.

  * * *

  While no one had ever met Miss Elminides’ grandfather, he was, in a sense, very well known in the building, for Miss Elminides loved to tell stories about him: how he had a mustache as big as a large bird, and how he could play any instrument at all within minutes of cradling it reverently in his hands, and how he was a wonderful swimmer, and had once swum the Hellespont in Turkey, which is the body of water that separates Europe from Asia, and which was a mile wide where he chose to cross. The Hellespont, said her grandfather, had two competing currents, one flowing north and the other south; an apt and suitable metaphor for the sad history there, as he said. Even more amazing than once swimming across the Hellespont, said Miss Elminides, was the fact that her grandfather had swum right back across it, because he had left his pants in Asia, and did not wish to wander around pantless, like Lord Byron. Pants, said her grandfather, are important, and we take them for granted, and they do not get the respect and adulation they deserve. You never see a statue of the man who invented pants, for example, whereas there are endless statues of men brandishing swords and rifles and pistols, as if brandishing implements by which we steal the life from fellow holy beings is an admirable thing, more laudable than the genius of pants. By rights there ought to be a statue in every self-respecting sensible city of a man brandishing pants, or a frying pan, or a beer mug, to celebrate inventions that clearly and inarguably made life better. But no—civic statuary bristles with lions where there were never lions, rotund mountebanks who were once mayors, admirals who never sailed anywhere within a thousand miles of the city, senators and other thieves, and even writers, God help us all, as if scribbling with a pen was an act so admirable that we must devote civic funds and honest stone to its adulation. You would be better devoting a series of statues to dogs than to poets and playwrights and such; which is the more useful class of being, I ask you that? Which one could lead you out of a snowstorm, and which would be more likely to intelligently deal with you slipping and falling and snapping your ankle in the park? The one would write a sonnet; the other would go and get a policeman.

  * * *

  Indeed there were no statues of dogs in Chicago, that Edward knew about, although there were, to the city’s credit, four statues of Abraham Lincoln—the Young Lincoln, sitting on a tree stump reading, at the Chicago Public Library; the Standing Lincoln at Lincoln Park, by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who had actually seen the president alive, and later mourned bitterly as Lincoln’s casket trundled past him in the street; another seated Lincoln, also by Saint-Gaudens, in Grant Park; and the famous Rail-Splitter in Garfield Park, which depicted the young man Lincoln holding an ax. There were also all sorts of the usual motley historical, hagiographic, comical, and religious statues and sculptural representations in the city, as Mr Pawlowsky observed, most notably the famous Picasso Something or Other, between Dearborn and Clark streets.

  “Edward and I stop by that thing every time we are downtown on the social ramble,” said Mr Pawlowsky, “and it is either the sculptor’s genius or idiocy that you cannot tell exactly what it is supposed to represent or invoke, and to his eternal credit he never explained it. I believe it is a sort of a horse, and if you study the work of the sculptor you notice that he was obsessed by horses and women. You also notice that he was an unbelievable ass, a bully and a satyr of epic proportions, a self-absorbed little wizened pickle of a man, but this is another entire discussion, how great art can be made by unbelievable idiots, if indeed his statue downtown is great art. I believe it actually is great art, in part because it seems to mean something different every time you contemplate it, plus it has an airy angled soaring wit I rather enjoy. Edward believes it is about dogness, and on snowy days I can see what he is getting at there, but on sunny days I believe it to be a comment on the angular faces and heroic noses of horses, myself. But you will have to go see for yourself and come to your own conclusions. Some people think it is a large joke, and others think it is the sculptor thumbing his satyrical nose at the very people who paid him handsomely for his steel idea, and others think it is an immense grasshopper, and still others are absolutely sure it is a woman, or a wry comment on femininity, and I am sure there are people who get off the bus on Dearborn Street every blessed day and have never even noticed what appears to be a fifty-foot cricket a few feet away. It would be easy to sigh over the blinkered existence of such people, but as Edward has reminded me, the very fact that they have not noticed means that the possibility always exists that they will notice; and isn’t that a cheerful thought, that today or tomorrow might be the morning when one blessed sleepy soul steps off the bus, and something about the angle of the light makes her look up for once, and she sees the statue for the first time, as if it had been dropped from the starry heavens onto the square that very morning?”

  3.

  THAT AUTUMN WAS THE LOVELIEST crispest brightest clearest bracingest autumn I ever saw, and I used every brilliant minute I could find to explore my new neighborhood. I ran up and down the lakefront for miles in either direction, dribbling my shining old basketball with either hand, spinning around startled passersby and infuriating their dogs. I walked up and down Broadway for miles, poking into shops and stores and alleys to get a sense of the smells and sights and flavors and old brick music of the city. I walked west as far as I could, so far that I had to take buses home, so far that sometimes I would walk through Estonian and Lithuanian and Greek and Irish and Italian and Polish and Guatemalan neighborhoods one after another, changing languages and scents and music by crossing the street. I made a concerted effort to meet our neighborhood cop, on the theory that familiarity might breed an eventually necessary break. I wandered into the temple on the corner at the lake end of the street, and registered to vote as a Chicago resident, claiming to be six feet six inches tall when the rude woman registering new voters never bothered to look up from her mounds of paper. I did visit the fading convent a block south, and bought a bed and table and chair for fifty dollars all told, and wrestled them back to my building and up the stairs, with Edward’s assistance. I found a pitted basketball court three blocks north, in a school playground which turned out to be exactly on the borderline between the territories of the Latin Kings and the Latin Eagles, the dominant street g
angs on the north side of the city; because the border was clear and established, and because schools and playgrounds were apparently neutral ground for gangs, visitors like me were tolerated, after it became clear that I was a resident of the neighborhood.

  I tried to play there every afternoon, if I could, before the sun went down, if I could get home from work on time, and because it never rained that fall I got in hundreds of games with the Kings and Eagles, many of whom fancied themselves terrific ballplayers, and some of whom were. There was a young man called Monster, who was a silent efficient muscular rebounding machine, the kind of teammate you love for his work ethic and lack of running commentary. There was a quiet slip of a boy called Bucket with tattoos and earrings who was as quick as water and could slide through the lane and score any time he wanted to, although he much preferred to pass, and had to be coaxed to score in tense situations. There was a young man called Nemo, and another large youth called Bus, and a tall boy with an electric blue mohawk haircut and so many necklaces they jingled cheerfully when he ran; he could jump to the moon, that boy, and I learned to listen for him jingling behind me on fast breaks, and just flip the ball up over my shoulder for him to catch and dunk.

  There was also memorably an Eagle called Not My Fault, so named because whenever he made a mistake, which he did quite often, he would interrupt his usual burble of self-aggrandizing trash talk to shout “not my fault!” when it most certainly and inarguably was his fault. Not My Fault, despite being short and round, dearly loved to fly down the middle of the court with the ball, try a wild ridiculous shot in dense traffic, fail to make the slightest effort to claim the inevitable rebound, and then either claim he was making a visionary creative pass, or denigrate a teammate for not being in position to receive the supposed miracle pass. He never claimed he was fouled, though—the usual excuse for a silly shot—which I found fascinating. I suppose he didn’t want to put himself in a position where he would be laughed at. He had a most amazing concept of his skills and athletic ability, did Not My Fault, and even all these years later I am not sure if his overweening confidence was theatrical persona of sorts, or a confidence of such inviolable strength that it did not need reality as a foundation. Either way it seems to me that he was an early teacher of the art of fiction for me; he was so completely absorbed and convinced of his version of the world that his tart lectures to teammates who should have known he would be throwing a glorious pass that sure looked like a terrible selfish shot were believable, almost.

  * * *

  The roar and grumble and seethe of the city buses; the lash of the wind off the lake late in the afternoon when the wind changed compass points; the incredible shining silvery mounds of alewives washing against the beach in their millions, when the fish run was on; the crash of surf every once in a while, product of an unseen storm far out over the lake; the gulls drifting in from the beach and ghosting down Halsted Street and Addison Street; the eternal scent of roast lamb and garlic and olives from the Greek restaurant around the corner; the skulk and slink of cats who for some reason were frightened of our street, and were always looking over their shoulders for trouble; the occasional small brave smiling nun on her way to the fading convent in the next block, which could be accessed through the alley next to our apartment building; the occasional newspaper or umbrella or bus ticket or advertising flyer tumbling headlong down the street from the lake, and one time a tumbling headlong small boy in a yellow rain slicker far too large for him, so that it acted like a jib or topsail, and sent him careening from the bus stop all the way to our building. By happy chance Edward was just coming down the steps for his daily amble and he caught the boy without effort, escorting the child back to the bus stop and waiting there until he was safely aboard. The bus driver, I noticed, said something witty to Edward, who came back to our building amused. Mr Pawlowsky told me later that Edward and the bus driver had known each other for years, and that when Edward wanted to go downtown he generally rode that particular bus, which went along the lake rather than down Broadway through the city; this sort of subtle preference on his part, said Mr Pawlowsky, may well indicate a rural upbringing for Edward, or perhaps early years by water, as for example a river; but no man alive today knows anything about Edward’s earliest years, and he himself is not forthcoming about it. And believe me, I have asked.

  * * *

  Along about October I was stargazing on the roof one night with Mr Pawlowsky, while Edward was off on the social ramble, and I asked him how he and Edward had met.

  “He followed me home from work one day, and we became roommates without further ado or even much discussion,” said Mr Pawlowsky. “That was when I was working at Navy Pier, down where the Chicago River enters the lake. I was in the Navy, although my service against savage empires to the east and west was to be a clerk in Chicago. That does not sound very dramatic but you would be surprised how much paper and storage and shipping and training and logistics and transportation and things like that matter in times of war. We had ten thousand Navy men on the Pier during the war, and the ships Sable and Wolverine. That was a busy time. I was young and strong then and often I would walk all the way home if the evening was clear. It is exactly four miles from the river to here, a little longer if you go along the lake. One summer night, I remember, I walked home along the lake, taking my time and enjoying the way the fading sun shimmered on the water, when Edward fell in alongside me and accompanied me home. I was immediately taken with his calm personality. Other dogs would say rude and vulgar things in passing and Edward did not deign to answer. He seemed above any sort of tart or curt reply. The only timed he veered off from our perambulation was to investigate fish. He is very fond of fish. When the alewife run is in full cry he is gone for days and comes back smelling to high heaven and appears to have something of a silvery sheen about his fur. I have sometimes wondered if this predilection for fish reflects something of his past; was he raised on the shore of the lake, or by a river, or by the sea? Was he perhaps raised by a fishmonger family, or the owners of a fish shop? But this business of trying to piece out clues to his past is chancy. Consider these things about Edward, and you tell me if there is a discernible pattern. He is adamantly opposed to violence on television and will leave the room and sulk if a war movie or a cowboy movie or a gangster movie comes on. He really likes coming up here to look at stars, as you know, and he will come up here on his own sometimes, returning to tell me if something interesting is going on. He loves Django Reinhardt’s jazz guitar. He does not howl or bark or whimper, although he does sometimes issue a dark mutter which sounds just like grumbling. Also he makes a sound curiously like quiet laughter when he sees a hockey game or even hears the word ‘hockey,’ but if you accuse him directly of being a sports snob, or disrespecting our estimable neighbors to the north, he adopts a look of utter innocence. He adores Abraham Lincoln and loves to have Lincoln’s speeches and letters read aloud to him and there are times I suspect he may read Lincoln himself when I am not home; I have found the volumes out of order occasionally, or bookmarks moved from where I was quite sure I had left them last. Also more than once I have found Lincoln’s speeches and The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant open on the floor and I am quite sure I did not leave them there. Also Edward has several times done what you would call heroic things as regards lost children, and pretty much every species of being respects him except cats, who are afraid of him. He likes riding the bus but dislikes cars and trains, and I do not believe he has ever been in a boat, although he likes water and will sometimes swim in the lake, usually chasing fish. He likes stamps, especially pink ones and stamps having to do with Abraham Lincoln, and keeps a large collection in a box near his bed. I believe he once owned a rosary. He has been inebriated once that I know about, although that was not by his own volition. He has the highest esteem and affection for Miss Elminides, and has twice risen roaring to her defense when she was accosted by ruffians.

  “So what lessons can we draw from all this? I do not
see that we can do much more than speculate. And while speculation can be enjoyable, as a form of fiction, it is also finally frustrating, for there is no end to the arc of the narrative, no end to the book, in a manner of speaking. You know what I mean, as a journalist. In a sense the contemplation of Edward’s past is something of a detective story, and piecing out clues and patterns, and trying to draw from them some semblance of narrative, of cause and effect, is an interesting pastime, even riveting; but I find that it must be an occasional pleasure, for there can be no final answers; Edward is not forthcoming that way, and there is no documentation available of his journeys and voyages. Even his particular canine heritage and ancestry is a mystery. When people ask what kind of dog Edward is, meaning his breed, all I can say with confidence is that he is the kind of dog who contemplates the larger issues.”

  4.

  IT WASN’T ALL BEACHES AND DREAM, of course, those first few months in Chicago. I paid attention, in my ambling and wandering and jaunting, and I saw a lot of broken and sad and ragged and dark. There were rats in the alleys, some of them as big as cats and arrogant as aldermen. There was a beggar with no arms or legs on the corner of Addison and Halsted; one shop owner nearby sneeringly called him Second Base, although he also quietly sent him a blanket on cold mornings. There were prostitutes at night on every other block along Broadway from Belmont to Addison, on alternate sides of the street, and sometimes I could see how their faces were sad and weary until a car slowed down and then they donned a smile like a mask and walked briskly out of the shadows; sometimes they even ran awkwardly to the cars, their high heels clacking like castanets.

  Twice I saw blood on the street, and once a crime scene, cordoned off with yellow plastic tape and a police cruiser; once I saw a woman mugged, on a Sunday morning, on Broadway, although I also saw that thief get totally clocked, a block away, by an old man who stuck his arm out just as the sprinting thief had turned his head to see who was following him. Once I found jagged shards of human teeth in an alley; once I saw a man slap a boy of ten so hard the boy’s eyeglasses flew off into the grass along the lakefront walkway. The man stalked off but the boy knelt down in the grass and felt around, sobbing, for his glasses. I ran to help, knowing all too well the feeling of thrashing around desperately for your lost eyeglasses, but by the time I got there another man walking by had picked them up and handed them to the boy, who put them on and ran away without a word. By then I was close enough to see that his eyeglasses were held together in the center by a gob of duct tape as big as a knuckle, and that the left lens was chipped, and I wondered how many times they had flown off his face.