Chicago (6 page)

What I remember best about that December night on the roof, though, was not the interesting and essentially detective discussion about Miss Elminides, but my first intimation that she loomed large in Mr Pawlowsky's affections, more than he was willing to admit, and more, perhaps, than he knew. As that night wore on, and Edward made sure to draw our attention to the wonderfully clear outlines of the constellations Andromeda and Pegasus (they share the star Alpheratz, as he noted), Mr Pawlowsky, perhaps unbuttoned somewhat by the astonishing clarity of the stars, spoke ever more warmly about Miss Elminides, about her grace and kindness, her unassuming but attentive authority with the building, her meticulously honest handling of taxes and city inspectors, her lack of false or tinny morality about the businessmen who lived two by two on the second floor or the tailor and the detective who lived together in 2B, her quiet extension of credit occasionally to trustworthy residents who were caught short for one reason or another, her adamant refusal to pay nominal protection fees to local ruffians despite the very real possibility of material or physical assault, her smiling willingness to allow Mrs Manfredi's weekly bakery to operate illegally in the basement once a week, her careful management of her apartment (he had never had to repair or replace anything in her rooms, in the six or ten years she had lived there), and various other adulatory remarks. Finally, along about midnight, he stopped, perhaps having sensed that he was revealing more than he wanted to, and we went off to our rooms. The next day, though, Edward pointed out that Andromeda, the loveliest of young women in ancient Greek lore, was saved from a monster's maw by Perseus, a man of the sea.

*   *   *

A week later it snowed for the first time, a light dusting on a Saturday and then a solid couple of inches the next day, and it was exactly the sort of gentle drifting opening snowfall that everyone enjoys and runs out into and spends the whole day savoring—snowball fights, tiny snowmen laboriously built by children and their puffing dads, kids making snow angels in fields and lots, people taking endless lovely photographs of snow sifting into the lake, dogs whirling and snapping at snowflakes, shopkeepers grinning as they sweep snow away from their front doors with brooms; they wouldn't be smiling later, when they had to wield snow shovels against wet heavy onerous tons of grimy grainy snow, but for the moment they stood smoking cigars and laughing and calling insults all up and down Broadway and Halsted Street, brandishing their old brooms like staves or wands.

Then there was a last gasp of autumn, a brief flicker of wavering light, a few days when it was almost warm in the thin sunshine, and I noticed a flurry of old folks, wrapped in overcoats and scarves and mufflers and baboushkas, basking on benches along the lake all the way from Dog Beach to Oak Street Beach; it was like they were storing up as much heat and light as they could before they battened down for the winter in their tiny apartments, drinking tea and listening to the radio and reading newspapers in the tongues of old countries, or the labor union newsletter, or the shipping news, or the racing form, or the police log. Some of them I recognized, as I ran past dribbling my gleaming basketball, their heads turning slowly like turtles as they heard the ball approaching, their eyes glued to its glow as I went by, their heads turning slowly to watch me fade into the distance, their faces faintly disapproving except for some dim sweet memory of the days when they ran too, through woods or fields or streets; but most of them I had never seen before, and I wondered if they were like cicadas, emerging from their burrows once a year at a set time, or like alewives, compelled once a year to gather on the shore of the lake.

But then it
really
snowed—all through Christmas week and past New Year's Eve and into January, when it finally slowed and then stopped just before the Feast of the Epiphany. By then there was so much snow on the street that parked cars were completely buried and people put pink rubber balls on the tips of their radio antennas to mark where their cars were. The city plows never came at all, the buses stopped running, I couldn't dribble my basketball
anywhere,
and people walking to and from the grocery store and the pub had worn a narrow trail down the middle of the street, maybe five feet above the asphalt. The pink balls marking parked cars were about at knee height, most of them new but a few the loveliest faded pink, the color of shyness.

The radio and television and newspapers roared with indignation over the stalled plows and poor planning and corrupt machinations of oleaginous politicians, and that epic snowstorm, it turned out, was a hinge point for Chicago politics, because the mayor at the time, the Machine's chosen man, heir to the gruff blunt Richard Joseph Daley of sainted memory and criminal record, was so damaged by his failure to plow the streets and collect garbage during the storm that he was soundly defeated in the spring Democratic primary elections, the first time the Machine had been defeated in a century in Chicago, and the new mayor was, gasp,
female,
the first time the city had ever had a person with a bra running City Hall, that anyone knew.

But the image I retain from the storm has to do with Edward. The first sunny day after the storm ended I was walking atop the snow to the gyro shop around the corner when I noticed Edward inspecting each of the pink balls on car antennas along the street. He went up and down the street, inspecting each one, until he found the one he wanted. I watched as he removed it deftly with his teeth and buried it a few feet away, digging a couple of feet down into the snow to be sure it would not be found for weeks. I wondered if there was some quiet enmity at work there—if the owner of the car had in some way bruised or insulted Mr Pawlowsky or Edward or Miss Elminides—but when I asked Edward about it, a week later when the snow had receded somewhat, he stared at me blankly as if he hadn't the slightest idea what I was talking about.

 

7.

INCREDIBLY, A FEW DAYS
after the tremendous snowstorm that lasted for nine days and was the biggest snowstorm in Chicago for fifty years, it snowed
again
for several days, even harder, and this time the city pretty much shut down altogether. Not only were streets unplowed and garbage uncollected, the
Tribune
and the
Sun-Times
undelivered, the benches along the lake unpopulated by old folks in baboushkas, dogs unwalked and crows unable to collect their usual tribute of smashed squirrel parts, buses canceled or so crowded with people in immense parkas that some passengers were never able to disembark at all and had to live in the back of the bus for days at a time making coffee over small brushfires, but this time the older residents in our building were essentially screwed, as they could not make their way to the grocery store or the bank or the doctor. The rest of us worked in rotations to cut a narrow path high in the snow over the street again, but two days passed before I even thought of people like Mr McGinty, who was ninety-nine years old and had fought in the American war against the Filipino people when he was brave and stupid and twenty, as he said. Mr McGinty lived in the first floor near the alley, and in good weather he could shuffle out into the alley where he had a battered table and chairs for chess, but with something like eight feet of snow drifted up against the back door, egress even for someone pliable like young Ovious was out of the question.

But here too I learned a lesson from Edward; it turned out he had quietly been shuttling back and forth to the grocery store with loads of food on his back for the older residents. He was not the biggest dog, but he was relentless, and according to Mr Pawlowsky if Edward was properly balanced he could carry not only bread and milk but two bottles of beer on his back. Oddly enough, tall things like milk or beer bottles were apparently not a problem but broad things like steaks and crabs were, for reasons that eluded me; Mr Pawlowsky thought it had something to do with Edward's center of gravity. I did see Edward once returning from the store, where he must have had a line of credit payable after the melt; he was completely submerged in the snow, through which he moved like a dogged submarine, and all I could see of him was the tip of his tail, and the upper halves of two bottles of red wine. For a moment I had the feeling I was watching a tiny steamer on the lake with its two funnels, but then Edward came up for air for a moment, and saw me in the window. I waved and he smiled and then he submerged again and the bottles slowly approached, looking for all the world like they were walking hesitantly through the snow themselves.

*   *   *

It was when this vast and epic snowstorm finally melted away that what Mr Pawlowsky came to call the Awkwardnesses began. There were three Awkwardnesses that winter and spring, and they were not all resolved until August, as if the roaring heat and searing light of a full high Midwest summer by the tremendous lake was necessary to turn them finally to ash and memory.

The first was the Affliction—every single being in the building got terribly sick, essentially one by one, and while official diagnoses ranged from influenza to pneumonia to bronchitis to sinusitis to rhinitis (or “whinitis,” as Mr McGinty said of Ovious, who was the sort of patient who moaned loudly all day and night), everyone had roughly the same symptoms, and took the same long weeks to return shakily to a semblance of health, and lost the same amount of weight because he or she lost all appetite and subsisted on water and music and Bulls games on the radio, and looked as wan and emaciated when he or she walked to the lake for the first time since he or she had been felled, and breathed in the sharp stinging restorative air that sometimes held a zest of spruce in it if the wind was from the northeast, where the great deep dark brooding forests of Michigan's fabled upper peninsula had held their ground since the glaciers retreated ten thousand years ago.

The Second Awkwardness also began in January, with a visit from two members of the Gaylords gang. This was the same organization that had sent a scout to the building before, inquiring as to our desire to purchase fire insurance; in that instance the lone Gaylord had lost the top half of his left pinky finger, and had not returned. But on the last very cold day of January there he was again on the porch, nine-and-a-half-fingered, this time accompanied by another burly Gaylord, and Edward pointed out an idling car with two more scowling Gaylords in it parked up the street.

There were many street gangs in Chicago in those years, of course; every city of size has its human vermin, loudly asserting neighborhood pride and defense of helpless women and children and old folks against the depredations of other gangs, even as they rape and steal and murder and terrify and drug and assault and batter the innocent; every culture hatches its rapacious young warriors, and either bends them to the larger plunder and the greater maw of international war, or leaves them to knife each other in dim alleys until such time as they are dead or imprisoned or beaten in their turn by the forces of the law; and on the north side of the city alone in those years there were the Popes and the Imperials, the Royals and the Jousters, the Latin Kings and the Latin Eagles, the Playboys and the Ventures, the Deuces and the Cobras, and many more. All jostled for territory, all were entrepreneurial in nature, all raised money in sundry and various ways. The Gaylords, while trafficking in the usual squirm of drugs and guns and sex, had developed a thriving side business in insurance, as they called it, or protection-racketeering, as the police called it; and here they were again on the front steps of the building, on an afternoon
grimacing with snow,
as Mr Pawlowsky said later.

But here again I learned a lesson about Edward, who had not forgotten his previous conflict with the Gaylords, and who had planned carefully for their return. Even before the Gaylords knocked on the door, the street began to fill with dogs. They came from both ends of the street, and emerged from the alleys north and south, and they were utterly silent; not one barked or growled or snarled, though they all looked grim. A dozen or so surrounded the idling Gaylord car, pressing so close that the doors could not be opened; the rest—and there were at least sixty or seventy of them, of every shape and species, from bulldogs to the tremendous wolfhound who lived with the rabbi at the temple—pressed close to the front steps of the building.

I had been watching all this from my window, from which I could see the front steps, and I turned to say something in amazement to Edward, but he had vanished; and just then the front door opened and Mr Pawlowsky stepped out and said something quietly to the two Gaylords, who looked around and then walked carefully down the steps and back to their car, the sea of dogs parting silently to let them pass. The car moved slowly into the street and started west toward Broadway but then stopped because again the dogs had massed around it, again without the slightest sound; it was this silence that was most frightening, somehow, and for all the oddity of the scene itself it is that eerie dangerous silence I remember to this day. After a moment the dogs fell back and let the car leave. A minute later every dog was gone and the street was as empty as before.

I had strained to see if any of the dogs in the street conducted or commanded the others, or if signals were communicated from Edward to them in some ascertainable way, but I had seen nothing I could understand as a message, and Edward, when I appealed to him for an explanation, declined to clarify the matter. Mr Pawlowsky was only slightly more forthcoming, saying only that ruffians were a regular and unfortunate aspect of life in the city, and that while he understood the urge to cohere in small bands of like-minded companions, he did not see any reason to accept what amounted to an invitation to violence, especially since he had himself been in a violent organization; and though he was now retired from the Navy, he could at need, as he had explained gently to the Gaylords, summon former professional companions to defend the building and the street, and his advice to the Gaylords, and to any other entrepreneurial bands they might be in contact with along these lines, was to consider the area between Broadway and the lake, from Belmont to Addison, as territory protected by the United States Navy, as well as other shadowy but formidable entities whose identities he was not at liberty to divulge, but whose agents took many forms, as perhaps they had noticed today.