Chicago (26 page)

And so many more stories—about the days before there were any office buildings or large commercial concerns at all in the neighborhood, and the north side of the city along the lake was a sort of large village, where everything was tenements and shops and the streets were not quite paved; about the man who claimed to be the last of the original Potawatomi Indians who had lived in Chicago before white people came to build forts and take all the fish and furs, and who gave erudite talks about his people and their culture and history and legends, but who turned out to be a man named Saul from Beaver Crossing, Nebraska; about the nun who left her hour-old infant in a shoebox at dawn at Our Lady of Mount Carmel on Belmont Avenue and a man bicycling past stole the box and so found his son whom he named Samuel, which means God has heard me. And so many more stories that, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. Amen.

 

25.

MR PAWLOWSKY TOLD ME
enough stories about Edward to fill a dozen books, and while many of them have slipped my mind over the years, and slipped through my fingers too because I did not know enough then to jot notes to serve as spurs to memory, some of them remain adamant and resistant to erosion; the story of the boy left on second base, for example, which would be a story sufficient in itself to say something piercing about Edward, if you could only tell one chapter of his character.

The boy was eight or nine years old, as Mr Pawlowsky told the tale. His family lived in a mossy old wooden tenement behind which there was one of those tiny neighborhood playing fields you often see in old cities—unnamed, not officially a city park, probably essentially an accident of motley development over the years, a sort of asymmetrical space that no one claimed to own and everyone used as playground, baseball and football field, dog run, picnic ground, and refuge for new or illicit romance. The grass grew in uneven patches, most of the field was dirt, and the backstop, which had been built by neighborhood dads years ago, sagged.

The boy was small for his age and no great athlete, and was picked only reluctantly for teams by the other boys, and even then only when they were so short-handed that they had no choice but to let him play. He had rarely caught the ball and never even been on base; he was such an easy out that he was never walked.

Mr Pawlowsky said that Edward just happened to be strolling past the field when the boy came up to bat, and something about the game, or the angle of light that evening, or the boy's strained face, made Edward stop and watch for a while—“he's like that, you know, alert to things, and patient enough to wait for them to arrive,” said Mr Pawlowsky. The boy missed one pitch badly, waited out two pitches below his knees, and then gauged a slow pitch perfectly and lined it down the right-field line. The outfielder, shocked, got a terrible start on the ball, and by the time he got to the ball the boy was standing on second base.

“According to Edward there was the usual derision and shouting from the other boys, and overmuch congratulatory blather, so that everyone knew it was false in character and intent, but the boy at second base never said a word. The next batter popped up and that was the end of the inning, but then what Edward was waiting for happened: the boy wouldn't leave second base. The other kids yelled at him and ragged him and shoved him and all of that but he wouldn't budge, and after a lot more yelling the game broke up and the other boys went home, probably because it was by then too dark to see. The boy stayed at second base, though. Edward stayed where he was, sitting along the left-field line. The boy never sat down on the base or fidgeted or anything, according to Edward. He just stood there and Edward just sat quietly, waiting. It was a lovely late-summer night and there were a remarkable number of swifts and then nighthawks loose in the ocean of the air. Along about midnight Edward approached the boy and they came to an understanding and Edward walked the boy home. Edward did
not
give the boy a ride home, as some versions of the story have it. Now somehow that story says a great deal about Edward, although I am not sure it's easy to articulate just
what
it says about Edward. But it's one of those stories where the teller and the listener know what it's about, even if the words don't, quite.”

*   *   *

One Saturday morning in November I woke early and went down to the basement for Mrs Manfredi's empanadas, and something about the line of grinning sleepy residents, and the patience and courtesy with which they waited on a line that went halfway up the stairs, struck me forcibly, and I was filled with regret and remorse about my decision to leave. This was made worse a moment later when Azad and his sister Eren showed up, holding hands; their parents had let them come downstairs alone for the first time to get their own empanadas, and some for their mom and dad. I was third from the front when word filtered down that the children had shyly joined the end of the line, and I knew what would happen: they would be passed up the line until they got to the front, each resident tousling their hair, and this is exactly what happened. A moment later I got my empanadas and went back to my room and ate them and then packed a small bag and took the bus down to Union Station and got on the Empire Builder train from Chicago west, rattled. I had no plan except just get on the train, and think for a while; something about trains then and now seemed to focus and sharpen my mind—maybe the sliding scenery, or the rhythmic regularity of the ride, in which you could lean back and dream rather than have to concentrate on the conduct of the car.

I watched the Illinois farmland roll by. I thought about the girl from Wyoming but everything that seemed so right and alluring about going to be with her now seemed foolish and callow. What if there were no jobs? What if none of the college friends I knew in Boston wanted to get a cheap apartment with me? What if what felt like a magical mutual attraction wasn't at all, as usual, and I was once again fooling myself? And most of all, waiting patiently at the end of the line of questions, was the one I had hesitated to ask myself forthrightly: Why was I leaving friends and a job and a city and a life I enjoyed immensely, for what seemed the airiest of pipe dreams? In the year since I had arrived I had met friends I savored, friends who were startling and generous and riveting; and foremost among those friends were the man and the dog in 4B.

It was two hours from Chicago to Milwaukee, and for most of those two hours I thought of Edward. I had never known a dog as a child; our family beagle, Cleo, was banished to life on a farm before I was born, as penalty for serial romantic assaults on other dogs (including a neighboring wolfhound, which led my dad to speculate Cleo must have used a ladder), and the arrival of four small boys in five years after his banishment precluded the possibility of another dog in the house; as my father said, why get a dog when you had perfectly good badly behaved messy roaring beings already in hand? I had some casual acquaintances among the neighborhood dogs, but no real companion, and certainly no close friend, as Edward had proven to be. Indeed Edward had opened my eyes about the whole idea of relationships with beings of other species than mine; like many people I had casually assumed such relationships were matters mostly of property, affectionate at best, but Edward had made me see that the much deeper play had something to do with real admiration and genuine reverence, a lesson I have not forgotten in the years since I first met him on the steps of the building, the day I moved in with my basketball and my duffel bag. He and I had nodded gravely to each other that day, and I had thought that here was a fine example of a dog of indeterminate species; but he had turned out to be my closest friend in Chicago.

I got all the way to Red Wing, Minnesota, on the Mississippi River, some six hours from Chicago, before I turned around and took the train home again. There were a few hours to wait in Red Wing and I sat in the lovely old stone station and thought about how someday I would stay on that train all the way west, through North Dakota and Montana and Idaho and Oregon to Washington, finishing up by the vast Salish Sea, where I would wander Seattle and eat oysters and listen to the piercing screams of gulls; and I thought too about how sometimes in life you just take leaps and hope for the best, and don't hedge your bets and make sensible decisions based on what you know, but deliberately make decisions based on what you don't know, but might find out. On the way back to Chicago I slept so deeply that the conductor had to wake me up when we got to Union Station, and I was so groggy that I walked to my office, only realizing it was Sunday when I finally heard the absence of commuter trains overhead on the elevated tracks.

*   *   *

Just before Thanksgiving that year I deliberately took a sick day on a Thursday to watch Edward's office hours in the alley. This I did with Mr McGinty, the two of us standing by his kitchen sink in the morning and silently watching the line slowly shuffle forward. Again there was a remarkable variety of beings, and again there was apparently a sort of truce or détente between animals who would usually be predator and prey, or combatants; there was a sharp-shinned hawk behind two mice, and near the end of the line there were several crows standing patiently behind a red-tailed hawk, perhaps the same hawk I had seen last time. Mr McGinty declined to open the kitchen window, on account of the cold and from respect for Edward's privacy, so we didn't hear any snatches of conversation, but it was fascinating enough to watch the quiet advance of the line, and the way animals turned from their time with Edward and walked or flew thoughtfully back to their regular lives. Again there were a number of dogs of various kinds, including a wolfhound the size of a pony, though no cats. Just as we thought the line was drawing to an end a small deer trotted up and joined the queue, behind a gaggle of squirrels. Mr McGinty made a note about the deer; it turned out he kept a list of species, just from curiosity, and at this point, he said, he would not be totally surprised if a sturgeon appeared one day, or a brace of salmon, or a mountain lion. He
had
seen coyotes, eagles, geese, ducks, and once what sure looked like a lynx, although probably that was a large bobcat—the two cats are hard to tell apart unless you are fairly close to them, and he wasn't about to go out to get a better look, mostly from respect for Edward but also because a lynx could tear your face off in a second, and he liked his face where it was, personally.

By the time the line was finished and Edward had gone upstairs it was lunchtime, and Mr McGinty made sandwiches, and we talked about the Chicago of his youth for a while. Old saloons and straw-boater hats, and society ladies wearing long skirts that brushed the ground. Horse trams and cable cars. Wooden sidewalks and gas-lit lamps on the streets. Bicycles everywhere, and not the lean balanced machines of today, said Mr McGinty, but the frail tall old things of yesteryear, which could be ridden only by madmen and acrobats. The first cars and the last horses. Restaurants where the only thing on the menu was beefsteak and beer. Hot dogs sold from carts in alleys for two cents each. Candy made from molasses. Penny arcades and kinescopes and gramophones. The summer circus on Ashland Avenue. The old
Chicago American
newspaper, “which started publishing when I was eleven years old,” he said. “Paddle-steamers on the lake. The time the Chicago River burst into flames because it was so foul and filled with flammable jetsam; that was in 1899, when I was young, and I remember my father telling me about it, for he had seen it happen as he was walking home from work.

“Magicians and vaudeville on theater stages all up and down Lincoln Avenue as far as you could see.… There might have been fifty theaters on that street alone, and sometimes when I was a teenager I would wait in the shadows to watch all the actors and magicians flood out onto the street at two in the morning after their last shows; it seemed to me sometimes they all stepped out of their doors at the exact same moment, laughing and greeting each other all cheerful and familiar and calling nicknames and insults; it seemed like the most wonderful thing in the world to me, to be an actor or a magician like them, and join their guild, but my life went in a different direction.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to ask him about the shape of the rest of his life, for all I really knew of him was that he was a genius horseplayer, but by then it was early afternoon and as he said a man who is near one hundred years old had best take a nap every afternoon or else, so we shook hands and parted. Before I went upstairs to my apartment, though, I stepped out the back door into the alley, just to gaze for a moment at the place where Edward held office hours, and there was a big barred feather caught in the fence—a hawk or an owl feather, I think. I still have it here by my desk all these years later, and it gives me a deep pleasure to see it every morning.

 

26.

ONE OF THE LAST THINGS
I had to do as I prepared to leave was to alert John the Mailman that I would be leaving, and ask him to file a forwarding address for me, and thank him for his quiet hard work, which had been a boon to me, for I loved letters and postcards and magazines and newspapers, and received gobs of such things, and sent more, all of which John had to carry to and from his truck. In my time in Chicago John had carried, by my estimate, thousands of pieces of my mail alone in and out of the building, as well as the rest of the residents' mail, and I much admired his steady work ethic. He appeared every afternoon just after three o'clock, and while he was cheery and friendly he never actually paused in his work; conversations with him were conducted on the move. The only time he was still was when you were rooting through his truck for a package (in my case mostly brownies from my mom, and packets of periodicals from my dad and brothers), and I had learned to seize those moments to ask him about his dragonfly studies. He was quite serious about this work and had made several notable discoveries about their predation patterns, about which he was apparently something of an expert.