Chicago (25 page)

But I found that once the decision was made, I began to leave Chicago, piece by piece, somehow; and while I savored every hour of my last weeks, and felt a deeper appreciation of Mr Mahoney's sinewy courage against the blowhard Cardinal Archbishop, and Leah's alluring smile as she sliced roast lamb for gyros, and Donald B. Morris's abiding love for the Bears in the morning on the bus, and Mr Pawlowsky's calm wry wit, I could for the first time since my arrival see where I could
not
belong to this small unusual lively community; for community it was to me, and all these years later I think that
community
is the best word for all the riveting beings who remain somewhere inside me, and who prompted this account, and who come back to me sometimes, set in their places and stories in that riveting city, when I see a swirl of snow, or hear foghorns out on the water, or hear baseball games murmuring on the radio, or see a kid dribbling a basketball so shiny with wear that it seems to almost glow.

It was as if once I made the decision, then doors and windows opened to what was going to happen next; and it doesn't finally matter to this account that what
did
happen next was that the girl from Wyoming and I broke up a year later, though I came to love Boston, and spent ten years there, before eventually moving on again, this time west toward the sunset, toward the mother of all oceans, toward another girl who did entrance and overwhelm and utterly confuse me, and who said yes when I asked her to marry me one bright day by the sea, and who gave birth to our children, and who to this day rivets and puzzles and delights and astounds me in more ways than I could articulate in a dozen books. Sometimes now I think we will move one more time, even further west, out into the islands scattered deep in the bluest of oceans; but even if that comes to pass, and I end my days like Robert Louis Stevenson, bathed by sunlight through thickets of palm trees, under the eyes of albatrosses and frigatebirds, I will carry my Chicago with me, and think of Mr Pawlowsky when I see constellations, and of Miss Elminides when I hear a mandolin, and of Edward when I encounter an illuminated being of any size and species; for there are many more of those than we know, and perhaps we brush past them all day long, and would be wise to look for them, and ask, here and there, for their quiet blessings.

 

24.

EDWARD'S
OBSERVED
BIRTHDAY,
I discovered, was in November; this year, said Mr Pawlowsky, it would be November 19, the day that Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. Apparently not even Edward knew his actual birthday, let alone his true age, and over the years the tradition had grown up between Edward and Mr Pawlowsky that Edward's birthday be celebrated generally in November. In their first years as roommates it had occasionally been celebrated on November 6 (Lincoln elected president for the first time), November 8 (re-elected president), but for the past few years it had been celebrated on November 19, as Edward was lately more interested in brief piercing speeches than in the electoral process—thus his absorption in the speech Lincoln made from the train as he was leaving his beloved Springfield, Illinois, to go to Washington to assume the presidency in February of 1861: “My friends, no one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting. To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything.… I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return.…”

I had no idea what to give Edward as a present. For a while I thought of wheedling a bone from the butcher at the grocery store, or getting him a new blanket, or a radio of his own, or even a cassette player, perhaps, but none of these seemed quite dignified enough for Edward. Finally I settled on a beautiful sturdy copy of the collected poems of Walt Whitman, on the theory that anyone who so enjoyed Lincoln's writings would enjoy the sprawl and roar and tenderness of Whitman, the greatest of American poets, along with Emily Dickinson; but old Emily is a poet you have to pore over for years before you get the brilliance under the gnomic brevity and idiosyncratic capitalization; that poor woman never met a capital letter she didn't like, and threw them all over the page willy nilly, as if ink did not cost a penny.

Rather than a formal party for his birthday, Edward had something like a slow celebration all day long, with some visitors wandering into the apartment to convey their regards, and others making much of him on his social rambles through the neighborhood. It was a Saturday, and on Saturdays Edward ranged widely, as a rule, on errands for Mr Pawlowsky and on mysterious agendas of his own. Twice that day I saw him enter apartment buildings far from our own—once up on the north side, as I was dribbling up Broadway to play ball, and once on the west side, as I was coming back late that afternoon from a baptism at Our Lady of Good Counsel. When I popped in before dusk to convey my own regards and present the Walt Whitman, Mr Pawlowsky showed me the hilarious pile of gifts Edward had accumulated during the day—betting slips from Mr McGinty, honey from Miss Elminides, various bones of various hues and origins (including one from a cheetah), empanadas, a lovely winter vest from the dapper businessmen, a poster detailing all the edible fish found in the lake, two new brushes, and a set of four small waterproof boots, for ferocious days; these were from the two young women from Arkansas who had lived in 4E, who had much admired Edward. Also there was a bright new blanket with
ROYAL SCOTS NAVY
stenciled on it, and “In My Defence God Me Defend” printed in smaller letters below, a gift from the Scottish tailor and the detective in 2B.

There were also a startling number of postage stamps, both new and canceled, and Mr Pawlowsky explained, smiling, that Edward had a major serious yen for stamps, especially pink ones and those having to do with Lincoln; his single favorite of all was the pink Lincoln four-center, of which he had seven, so far, with negotiations in progress for an eighth, which was in the possession of a brilliant mathematics professor in Lisle, a town west of the city. For a while, in their early years together, Edward and Mr Pawlowsky had made an effort to organize the stamps into books and sheets, and there had been some talk of careful cataloguing, and the building of wooden bureaus with special sliding drawers for exhibits, but that talk had piddled away and now Edward just kept his stamps in a closet, “organized mostly by color, as far as I can tell,” said Mr Pawlowsky—brighter ones down low where Edward could reach them easily, and the darker colors on shelves above, to be brought down occasionally on request.

Edward was delighted with the Whitman, which was gratifying—it's hard to choose the right gift for a dog you admire, and when you get it right it's a good feeling—and I read aloud from it for a few moments, trying to catch the swing and roar and mercy and energy of the man; I still think that Walt is as close to distilled Americanness as you can find in print, along with Mark Twain and Willa Cather; and there was a time there, sitting by the window in 4B, as the sun slid into Iowa, with Edward and Mr Pawlowsky sitting quietly listening to me read old Walt, that I still remember with a startle in the heart. The memory comes to me sometimes at dusk, usually in the autumn, and sometimes I find myself moved to pull old Walt down from the shelves, and read a little, quietly, thinking of my friends in their apartment by the lake.

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear …

The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam

The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,

The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand

Singing on the steamboat deck,

The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,

The wood-cutter's song, the ploughboy's on his way in the morning …

The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work …

Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,

The day what belongs to the day …

*   *   *

The thought occurs to me that I have gotten all this way in this account of my life in Chicago without ever saying much about my actual apartment, 2F, which had a big front window facing the street, which was always fascinating theater, although my window faced north, which meant that I never did see the sun, although quite often I could see the sun slide along the windows of the brownstones across the street, which caused window-shades to come down and go up in a pattern much like a wave breaking on the beach.

Although perhaps I have not said much because there is not much to report. There was a bed and a table and a chair from the convent, the bed ancient beyond reckoning and overstuffed with straw, so that occasionally a stalk would wriggle free and do its level best to puncture me. There was a rickety arrangement of bookshelves built with bricks and planks I had borrowed from a construction site on Addison Street (to which I actually did return the materials finally, piling them neatly on the front steps of the condominium complex that had arisen somehow without my bricks and planks). There was a large cardboard box covered with a blanket that I used as a table for bills and mail. There was a pot and a pan and a spatula, gifts from my mother on my graduation from college. There was a stereo set, my first big purchase in Chicago, on which I played the same ten or so records incessantly (which must have annoyed Denesh, my neighbor in 2E, although he never complained), and on which I listened nightly to jazz (WDCB) and rock (WXRT, with Terry Hemmert, who had a classic relaxed gravelly radio voice and adored the Beatles). I had two spoons and two forks and one knife and I was lonelier sometimes than I have admitted heretofore. I had two plates and a salt shaker shaped like a hawk that my brother Tommy gave me and whenever I felt particularly lonely I grabbed my worn shiny ball and went out to play or dribble along the lake, working on my left hand. I had two pairs of sneakers and one black suit for all occasions, as I am of Irish descent and know how to dress correctly for weddings and wakes. I had twenty books, mostly Robert Louis Stevenson and Jack London and a Bible in which my grandmother had written with a shaky hand
On my wedding day 1911 town of Kildare county of Kildare to John my iordaltha love, iordaltha
being Gaelic for certain and constant and trustworthy. I had a photograph of Abraham Lincoln that Mr Pawlowsky gave me, the last photograph ever taken of him alive, in which he is grinning. I had three pairs of pants and three shirts suitable for office wear. I had two pairs of black socks which both wore out over the course of the year so that after April I no longer wore socks, figuring that no one noticed socks anyway, which turned out to be true of men but not of women, interestingly; why would women be looking at men's ankles? I did have seven pairs of white basketball socks which I washed and rotated religiously and repaired meticulously whenever they seemed to be growing weary. These hung on a string pinned across the room and on the rare occasions when anyone else entered my apartment and asked about them I explained that they were an art installation by my sister who was an avant-garde artist in São Paolo, which was a whopping lie. I thought about buying a second basketball during the year but I could not abide the thought of not playing with my worn shiny ball which sometimes when in my doldrums I thought was my best and truest and most constant friend. In the first few weeks I was in Chicago, as it got darker and colder by the day, I was sometimes overcome by loneliness, and would dribble my ball as quietly as I could, close to the floor, working alternately with both hands; but even I knew that this was rude to my neighbors, and I stopped dribbling in the apartment, although once or twice I did have to go out to the lake quite early in the morning and dribble for a while until calm was restored.

*   *   *

And yet I sit here years and years after leaving Chicago and I still can hear the wind sliding off the lake, and the faint sound of grinding ice on the shore in the basement of winter, and piano music trickling out of the window of the man behind the temple (who was a composer who never titled his songs but only numbered them and was up to 332, the rabbi told me once), and the stories of the two sturgeon ten feet long and a thousand pounds each who once haunted Dog Beach and picked off cats and squirrels and once a poodle, and the boy who stole a motorboat from the marina and went out into the lake and for some reason having to do with ritual or madness cut off his pinkie fingers and nearly bled to death. So many stories that are now just scraps and tatters of fading stories to be forgotten unless I tell them now even in their truncated staccato versions. The old woman on Cornelia Street who reportedly rose into the sky from the roof of her apartment building and was not seen again by mortal eyes. The great war between rats and crows that raged up and down Pine Grove Avenue so savagely for weeks one summer that people were afraid to walk alone in the street and traveled only in tight armed phalanxes. The blue snow that fell all day one day in the years before there were such things as cameras. The healer who lived on Roscoe Street across from the convent and would never accept money for touching people and accepting their ills. The family with nineteen children whose habit was to adopt a new baby every time the oldest child left. The soldier who came back from secret service in the tunnels of Cambodia and never spoke another word the rest of his life although he was by all accounts the nicest most tender smiling man you ever met. The rabbi who ran off with both his director of lifelong learning (female) and the cantor (male), supposedly to what was once called the Northwest Territories in Canada and is now called Nunavut, which is Inuktitut for Our Land. The boy who was by many accounts the best football player in the state of Illinois until he cut so sharply one way in a game on a muddy field that his defender's knee tore completely apart with a terrifying ragged sound and the great football player walked off the field and never played again, although in another version of that story (told to me by the dairy manager at the grocery store on Broadway) he switched sports to tennis on the theory that he would never be directly responsible for an opponent's injury again.