All Gone to Look for America (12 page)

But the wife has been to Chicago before and is keen to show me around and I’m off to take in another of the city’s towers, thankfully this time not to queue for an elevator to the top. There again, it’s hard to imagine catching an elevator to the top of a thing that looks like Ely’s eleventh-century cathedral on steroids. The Tribune Tower was always going to be interesting in an oblique sort of way if only because an old journalistic chum once worked for the paper and it has a reputation as an organ of probity. Newspaper buildings these days tend to be dull functional glass and steel office blocks, but I used to work for the
Daily Telegraph
in the days when it still occupied a baronial building on Fleet Street and had a little lawn outside the sixth-floor boardroom where the proprietor Lord Hartwell could be found watering his tulips.

But even that ill prepared me for a cross between a mediaeval French Gothic ecclesiastical masterpiece and a kleptomaniac’s castle. Especially in the middle of such an unabashedly twentieth-century city as Chicago. The Tribune Tower has more ornate flying buttresses than Notre Dame de Paris. Quirkily it has most of them where they serve no purpose at all, near the top of its great soaring tower. This American Gothic Gormenghast was actually completed in 1925, its design the result of a competition held by Col Robert McCormick, the
Tribune
’s publisher, who clearly wanted to find the loopiest architect in America. He not only succeeded; he added a few more plainly potty elements of his own, notably that the tower should include a rock from each of the 50 states of the union.

A nice idea, a gesture even towards the ambitions of the
Tribune
, amongst many other regional-based papers none of which have yet wholly succeeded in becoming a genuine national institution. You can even think it laudable that
the federal government contributed to this idea by including a stone from the White House during one of its many restorations. And a stone from Abraham Lincoln’s home in Springfield, Illinois, though perhaps a bit naughty, is still somehow homage to the nation’s history. The trouble is, that this tokenism caught on to the extent of becoming something of a craze among the
Tribune
’s far-flung correspondents.

So we have a piece of the Berlin Wall included too. Why not? If ever a
structure
deserved demolishing and spreading to the four winds, it was that one. I have a chunk in my desk drawer which I prised from the wall myself, and in any case these days there have probably been enough ‘certified genuine’ bits sold globally to rebuild the damn thing a dozen times over. Equally it is hard not to be moved by the touching expression of solidarity in including a six-inch blackened and twisted mesh of steel wire from the ruined framework of the World Trade Center.

But that’s not all. The stone from Flodden Field, I grant you, may not be missed, but how about the cannon ball from Pevensey Castle? It is possible that the fire-blackened piece of mediaeval pinnacle from Cologne Cathedral was discarded during the restoration process after the British-American
firebombing
and therefore has a legitimate place as a ‘scalp’. But does the same go for the carved ‘fleur de lys’ from Notre Dame in Paris, donated perhaps in recognition of the architectural homage? And what’s with this stone from Edinburgh Castle? Or the bit of Westminster Abbey? Surplus to requirements in restoration work? Maybe, but if they’re good enough to include here, why weren’t they good enough to be reused?

And what about the stone from Dublin Post Office? A token of Irish-
American
solidarity no doubt in sympathy for that building’s bombardment by the British during the 1916 rebellion? And does that make the chunk of balustrade from the Wawel Castle in Krakow, seat of Poland’s ancient kings, a celebration of Chicago’s huge Polish community? Maybe. And the stone from the Powder Tower in Riga? And what about the one from the Tainitzkaya Tower of the Kremlin? And the one from the Danish fortress of Helsingor (Hamlet’s
Elsinore
)? And the bits from Sydney Opera House, the Great Wall of China and the Taj Mahal? And then the piece of marble from the Roman ruins of Leptis Magna in Libya?

I suppose it’s just possible that Muammar Gaddafi is such a keen
Tribune
reader that he ordered a minion to hack off a lump of his country’s most famed ancient monument to an organ of Yankee imperialism. But my
recommendation
is: next time you find yourself interviewed at home by a correspondent
from the
Chicago Tribune
, frisk him or her on arrival for penknives, picks, jemmies and other easily concealed mason’s tools, do a full body search on leaving and check that that garden gnome wandering down the path holding his hand is leaving of his own free will. By the Tribune Tower’s front door there are two niches of the type that in European Catholic churches hold statues of saints, and I find it hard to believe there isn’t a wager running in the newsroom as to who can fill them first.

I’m just tempted to take my Swiss Army knife to see if I can remove one of the Tribune Tower’s trademark lanterns – hey, what’s wrong with a bit of
reciprocity
and it would look great in my study – when the wife grabs me by the arm and hauls me off. No souvenir-hunting for me, I’m off to see the
cousin-in-law’s
kitchen.

You’ll be as disappointed as I was to find that the kitchen is a bit of a letdown. Cousin Helen has driven in to pick us up from a bar that I’ve just located – and made a mental note to return to later – and take us home for dinner. Home is what most Americans imagine homes to be, which is basically what it looks like on all those TV shows from the
Simpsons
to just about any suburban sitcom you can imagine: a nice house, with a nice double garage, on a chunk of manicured green grass lawn – which they perversely call a ‘yard’ – in a nice part of town.

The nice part of town in this case is Forest Park which is very nice indeed, to the extent that it calls itself a village, which is what nice parts of suburban London do too, if they can get away with it. And Helen is a nice woman with a nice husband – who produces some very nice and very welcome cold beer on our arrival – and a couple of nice kids. In fact she is that phenomenon, largely unknown to us: the ‘soccer mom’, which means a housewife who takes her daughters to play football. In Britain, of course –
Bend it Like Beckham
notwithstanding
– this would be exceptional but over here it is normal. ‘Soccer’ is a girls’ game. Never mind, they’ll catch on one day. But don’t hold your breath.

The trouble is that the nice kitchen – which I had had described to me in intricate detail as an absolute design classic – wasn’t quite nice enough. It’s gone. What had astonished her cousin so much was that Helen had been the not-so-proud possessor of an American kitchen circa 1950. Whereas any British housewife would of course be rightly horrified to have a British kitchen circa 1950, an American one was something else altogether. Not only had it had a refrigerator large enough to stand in – at a time when most people in Britain kept things cool by leaving them on the outside windowsill – but it had a built-in oven, something that has only made a serious impact on the British
domestic scene in the past decade or so. Certainly not more than half a century ago. And it was pink! Bright puce pink. To die for.

Unfortunately the British, and wider European, craze for retro kitchenware that echoes classic American designs of the 1950s – we have just taken proud possession of a maroon 1950s-style American fridge freezer, made in 2007, in Slovenia – hasn’t quite caught on in America itself. As far as Helen was
concerned
, her classic kitchen was an antique eyesore, and just months before we arrived, blissfully unaware of our enthusiasm for her dated household fittings, she had had the whole lot ripped out and replaced. With the smartest modern technology. But we all have that nowadays: chalk up another victim of
globalisation
. America used to represent a vision of our future; now it’s just another flavour of today.

Next morning I have occasion to investigate another of those American icons that used to seem so futuristic and exotic until varieties of them opened next door to us: the drugstore. I first got acquainted with the concept in France, where they took to
‘le drugstore’
with some enthusiasm early on. I remember sitting in one on the Champs Elysées circa 1977 thinking what a very strange establishment it was that mixed chemist’s, tobacconist’s, corner shop and
ice-cream
parlour all in one.

Back then, of course, the French were still blissfully ignorant of what even they now call
‘l’allowine’
. Here in Chicago, the month-long run-up to Hallowe’en is already in full swing which is why going into a place that
supposedly
sells cures for ailments I find myself greeted by a death’s head and a dangling life-size skeleton the precise putrid pale green colour of the stuff I’m trying to stop dribbling from my nose. It is one of the drawbacks about long train journeys that the carriages take on some of the characteristics of aircraft: they become a great social rendezvous point for germs, and over the previous 24 hours I reckon I’ve picked up at least one or two joyriders. In other words I had come to a drugstore to pick up some drugs, in the purely pharmaceutical sense.

Even more annoying than my runny nose, however, is an incipient sore throat that in my personal experience can presage something worse. What I want is Strepsils, or Tyrozets. But those brands appear to be unknown over here and I have no idea what the equivalent might be. As a result I’m standing there scanning the vast array of things vaguely intended to do the necessary
job, but all of which seemed excessively medical, not to mention unnecessarily explicit in their discussion of symptoms.

‘Do you think you want a “demulcent”?’ the wife asks, with a note of humour in her voice which I’m not sure is inspired by the gruesomely
technical
name or just
Schadenfreude
at my predicament. I have absolutely no idea what a ‘demulcent’ might be or do, although I reluctantly admit the products advertised as combating ‘mucus build-up’ might be on my list, though I would rather not have been reminded of it in quite those words. What I really want is something vaguely medicinal-flavoured to suck that would have the same effect as in those old adverts where some bloke with a runny nose sucks a little square sweet and all of a sudden goes around demonstrating his wonderfully clear nasal passages by singing the brand name.

What I really did not want – just at this precise moment – is some of that good old, wholly genuine, completely spontaneous, endlessly irritating
American
enthusiasm for meeting strangers.

‘You from England?’ says the jovially smiling gent in blue blazer, red tie and slacks, the raised intonation implying a rhetorical question rather than a
statement
of the blindingly obvious after hearing me ask for cold remedies from an assistant.

‘Yes, indeed. London,’ I add, using the line of least resistance. It’s not
actually
true, but most Americans have heard of it. Quite a few have even been there, although this is not always an advantage.

‘I’ve been to London,’ says the jolly moon-shaped face beaming beneficence upon me, while preventing me from seeing if there were any nasal
decongestant
lozenges behind him.

‘Really,’ I don’t say. I have learnt that there is no point in encouraging them. But this bloke needs no encouragement.

‘Yes,’ he says, in response to the ‘really’ I hadn’t uttered. ‘Back in the late fifties,’ which confirms my estimate of his age. ‘I stayed just in front of
Buckingham
Palace.’

Now, it’s not impossible, but even in the days of post-war belt-tightening I doubt very much if they erected tent hostels in either Green Park or St James’s and if they did whether visiting Americans stayed in them.

‘That’s when I saw the queen,’ he says, with the air of a magician producing Kylie Minogue from a beret, as if he somehow expects me to prostrate myself on the floor of a Chicago drugstore facing in the direction of Big Ben at the merest mention of Her Majesty.

‘Oh, really,’ I venture, in a way intended to suggest that if he wants to
indulge his enthusiasm for the British monarchy in public I might not be the best audience.

‘Yes indeed,’ he continues, undismayed (unlike me). ‘She was making an impromptu appearance. We were standing outside the gates, just as her car pulled out,’ my genial, well-meaning Anglophile is drifting into happy memory mode, ‘and she waved,’ he says, displaying the pack of verucca pads clutched in his left hand, reinforcing my belief that other people’s personal complaints should be kept on a “need to know” only basis.

‘Not at me, well not directly,’ he adds modestly. ‘She was going,’ he informs me sombrely, ‘to lay flowers at the tomb of Winston Churchill in Westminster Abbey.’

Were I sadistic enough to scar an old man’s crystallised memory – and at this stage I was tempted – I might have pointed out that HM would have been getting it seriously wrong in that case, as old Winnie was in fact buried not in the abbey but in the village churchyard at Bladon in Oxfordshire. But even more particularly because in the late 1950s he was still alive and very much kicking and would have loudly objected to being buried anywhere at all for another half dozen years.