Falls the Shadow (28 page)

The shoreline of Chicago is one of the great sights to behold from behind the window of a passenger jet. The smooth surface of the great lake seems to glisten with endless promise, and then, there in the distance, at the very edge of the water, rises a fabulous assortment of idiosyncratic towers, all shapes and sizes and colors, all shining majestically in the sun. You feel, while still over the expanse of Lake Michigan, that you are soaring toward Oz.

Which I found somewhat appropriate, because just then I was flying into Chicago to discover the man behind the curtain.

You must never underestimate the effect of childhood trauma,
had said Dr. Bob.
It often explains everything. Look in the past, and the present becomes clear.
He was talking about Tanya Rose, and I believe he was trying to explain, in his roundabout way, what was actually going on with Beth. But as a species we are relentlessly self-referential. If Dr. Bob was giving me advice on finding the root of Beth’s character, maybe he was inadvertently giving me advice on finding the root of his own. After our meeting in the bar, with the bizarre fistfight and the blood on the floor, I figured it was time to peek into my dentist’s childhood.

But where had that childhood even been?

To his patients, Dr. Pfeffer’s boyhood home seemed to be as mysterious as the rest of his life. Carol had listed the possibilities with a sense of wonder: Albuquerque, Seattle, Burma. Burma? Is there even a Burma anymore? I decided to forget about the rumors and think it through on my own. It wasn’t as if Dr. Bob hadn’t given me enough clues. There was the fishing he did as a boy, yellow perch, he’d said, using fathead minnows as bait. There was the way he referred to soda as pop and the way he said he was used to cold weather. All this indicated that he spent his formative years somewhere in the upper Midwest. But what narrowed it down for me, I suppose, more than anything, was his antipathy for the New York Mets.

Now, I could relate to his loathing. I grew up a Phillies fan, and we feel about the Mets the way Pakistan feels about India; the nuclear option is never off the table. But I know they don’t feel the same way in Albuquerque or Seattle or Rangoon. In those far-off places, the Mets are just another bad baseball team with ugly uniforms. But that’s not all they were to Dr. Bob.

Our plane headed north along the coast of Lake Michigan before leaning to the left and slipping inland, toward O’Hare. Even though the seat-belt sign was on, I climbed to the other side of the plane, to a vacant window seat. From there I could see the coastline as it fled north, as if trying to outrun the fancy apartment buildings that ran along its length into the suburbs. I was looking for something specific, trying to follow the converging lines of the avenues as they made their way toward a singular shrine. And then I spotted it, smaller than I imagined, stuck smack in the middle of its urban neighborhood, without the seas of parking lots that ring most of its kind. A dark boomerang of a building surrounding a wedge of jade.

Wrigley Field.

The ballpark was why I had come to Chicago.
One person’s miracle,
Dr. Bob had said,
is another person’s disaster.
What did that mean, or the strange invocation of a name that seemed still to haunt him?
And don’t get me started,
he had said,
on Don Young.
Who the heck was Don Young?

The story is sad and all too familiar. It is 1969, in the heat of summer, and the Chicago Cubs are solidly ensconced in first place. This is a great Cub team, managed by Leo the Lip, with Ernie Banks, Ferguson Jenkins, sweet-swinging Billy Williams, Hall of Famers all, and the legendary Ron Santo, who should be in there with them. On a July night, the Cubs arrive at Shea Stadium, ready to put away the fading Mets. The Cubbies are up three to one in the ninth, when the Met second baseman hits an easy liner to center field. Inexplicably, the Chicago center fielder, a raw rookie, breaks back, allowing the ball to fall in front of him for a double. One out later, the mighty Donn Clendenon hits a shot deep to center. The rookie gets a jump on it and snags it just as he hits the wall, but the blow knocks the ball loose. Another double. Jones and Kranepool do the rest, knocking in three, giving the Mets the game. The next night, Tom Seaver pitches a one-hitter. The Cubs are reeling, the Mets, the eventual World Series champion “Miracle Mets,” are rising, the season has turned.

And the rookie center fielder’s name? Well, of course it was.

And who else would remember it but a native, a kid who was living and dying with his hometown team the way only hometown kids can? Once that was figured out, it wasn’t so hard to narrow the location down even further.
I could hear the groaning from my backyard,
he had said. Which explained why, after I arrived, I rented a car and headed down the parking lot that was I-90, looking for the exit that would take me to the part of Chicago on the North Side known, for obvious reasons, as Wrigleyville.

There weren’t that many Pfeffers listed in Chicago. The one who lived in Wrigleyville had moved there three years before, after living for years in New Jersey. Of the others, there were a few who knew a Bob Pfeffer here or there of the approximate right age, but none that matched closely enough the description of my dentist.

“Does Dr. Bob have relatives that you know of?” I had asked Carol Kingsly after my Pfeffer search came up blank.

“He never mentioned any,” she said. “How does that fit?”

“It’s a little tight.”

“That’s good. Tight is good.”

“It’s not very comfortable.”

“Honey, it’s a shoe. Try wearing these for a day.” She exhibited her shapely leg, showing off a red patent leather pump with a narrow spike. I got her point. It wasn’t so much that her shoes were uncomfortable, rather that if I wanted to take them off her feet again with my teeth, it was time I changed my footwear.

“But there are no laces,” I said.

“Isn’t that wonderful? Buckles are fabulous.”

“I feel like Buster Brown.” I looked at the salesclerk who had shaken his head with such despair at my thick-soled black wingtips. “What is this again?”

“It’s a Compton,” he said, “from Crockett & Jones.”

“Weren’t they the cops on
Miami Vice
?”

He sniffed. “It’s a British manufacturer, sir.”

“How much?”

“Four hundred forty dollars, and a steal at that.”

“I suppose it is, for Mr. Crockett. Do you have anything else, maybe something on sale?”

“Daffy’s is just down the street.”

“Then how about something just a little less buckle-ish, maybe.”

“I understand,” he said. “I’ll check the synthetic leathers.”

“You sure do know how to impress the help,” said Carol after the clerk left to return the Comptons to the back room.

“What is a Pfeffer anyway?” I said. “It sounds like a smoker’s cough. Pfeffer. Pfeffer.”

“I think it’s German.”

“For what, pain?”

“Don’t be silly.
Pfeffer
is German for pepper.”

Driving around Chicago is a little like looking for drinks in Salt Lake City, you pretty much need to be a local to get where you want to go. And it didn’t help that I had the usual rental-car sense of dislocation; how could I find the right street if I couldn’t even find my turn signal? But I had a map and a plan. I left the highway at Belmont, followed Belmont down to Clark, and then Clark up until I eventually arrived at the marker I was looking for. The Cubbies were out of town, so traffic was light and the corner of Addison and Clark was empty except for the massive white structure with its great red sign.
WRIGLEY FIELD
/
HOME OF
/
CHICAGO CUBS
. As if we didn’t know. I looked at the map, and from there it was a breeze. Up a bit, over a bit, just about three blocks west of third base, and there it was.

It was an old shambling two-story house on a block of old shambling houses, with only narrow walkways between them. But this house was smaller, darker, meaner than the rest. Some of the homes had been freshly painted, some had lovely lawns, new windows, a nice car parked out front, but not this one. It was owned by a Virgil Pepper. It had been owned by Virgil Pepper for forty years. Three Peppers were listed at the address: Virgil, James, and Fran.

The door was opened by Fran. “What do you want?” she said. She was short and heavy, wearing the sort of well-worn housedress that indicated she wasn’t planning to go out that day. Based on the state of her hair, the paleness of her face, the way she squinted into the sunlight, she wasn’t planning to go out tomorrow either.

“I called,” I said. “My name is Victor Carl.”

“You’re that lawyer fellow, right?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“What is it you wanted to talk about again?”

“I wanted to talk about your brother,” I said. “Your brother Bob.”

“We thought he was dead,” said Jim Pepper, leaning back on his recliner, wincing as he shifted his position.

“We hoped he wasn’t,” said Fran.

“Of course we hoped he wasn’t,” snapped Jim. “What kind of fool wants his little brother dead?”

“I was just saying,” said Fran.

Fran sat on a sagging, mud-colored couch. I was sitting stiffly on a stiff fold-up chair. Both Jim and Fran spoke with a slightly southern accent, more a West Virginia twang than the flat prairie accent of Chicago.

“When was the last time you saw your brother?” I said.

“Let’s see, now,” said Jim, talking over the television that remained on, a daytime drama with perfect teeth and concerned faces. “He was seventeen, I think. A real hippie-dippie, hair down to his ass, into the drugs and the causes.”

“Bobby was a hippie?”

“Sure. Grapes. Something about grapes, I remember, and a Mexican feller he was all up in arms about. Times was tough around here, what with our mother gone and our father away and our father’s sister trying to take care of us. She was a bitter old witch, less than useless, with a mouth on her.” Jim raised his chin to the ceiling, raised his voice to a shout. “Did you hear that? Less than useless.”

There was a bang from upstairs, as if a wall had been slammed in response.

“No one ever accused Bobby of being quiet,” continued Jim calmly. “One day the two of them, they got into a fight, and things was said. That night he just took his guitar and left. This was like 1975 or so.”

“It was 1978,” said Fran.

“Something,” said Jim, shooting his sister an impatient glare. “We got a couple cards, something from Albuquerque, but then nothing.”

“You would expect that he’d keep in touch,” said Fran. “Visit for Christmas or the anniversary, but no.”

“We thought he was dead,” said Jim.

“Why wouldn’t he come back to say hello?” said Fran. “Tell us he’s alive, at least? Daddy would have liked to hear from him.”

“When did your father die?” I said.

“He ain’t dead,” said Jim with a snort. “He’s upstairs.” Jim raised his voice again. “Nothing but a useless bag of bones anymore.”

An angry grunt came from above, and then another, more plaintive.

“Hold your horses,” shouted out Fran. “We got a guest.”

Another grunt, and then a bang.

“You want some tea, mister?” she said, smiling sweetly.

“That would be nice,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Bobby just disappeared off the face of the earth,” said Fran, without making any effort to rise up and boil some water. “No letters, no calls. But that was always like him, so concerned for the world, without no care for his own family. Couldn’t he at least a done something to let us know he was still alive?”

I shook my head in agreement, even as I wondered that he had stayed as long as he had.

However dark and forbidding the Pepper house was outside, the inside was worse. Greasy wallpaper, collapsing furniture, lights dim, shades drawn. Jim was puffy and pale, about fifty-five years old but already a physical wreck, wincing in his chair, fiddling with his cigarette. Wearing sweatpants, a flannel shirt, dingy socks, he lay stiffly on his recliner as if he had been screwed in place. When he died, forget a coffin, just set the chair on full recline and lower them both into the hole. His sister leaned back on the couch, her bare, venous legs crossed so that one pilling slipper was hoisted in the air, bouncing back and forth to some twitchy rhythm. And everything smelled of smoke and cabbage, of mice urine and green beans, of the browning scent of decay and death.

“What is it exactly you’re doing here again?” said Jim.

“Your brother is involved in a very delicate mission,” I said, somewhat truthfully.

“What kind of mission?” said Jim.

“Oh, I can’t disclose anything more. You both understand, I’m sure, what with the current climate.”

“He’s into something, isn’t he?” said Jim. “Bobby was always into something. He liked to play with knives, poking and prodding. Does he still do that?”

“In his way, yes,” I said. “But in order to allow him to handle the sensitive matters which I’ve already described, we are required to do a customary background check. It’s quite usual. I just wanted to come to his boyhood home and find out if his childhood was normal.”

“Normal?” said Jim. “What the hell’s that?”

“You know, baseball, birthday parties, that sort of thing.”

“There’s never been nothing normal here,” said Jim.

“But Bobby did like baseball, Jim, you remember,” said Fran. “In the afternoons he used to sit in the backyard listening to the games on his transistor radio. He said, with the play-by-play and the cheers from the ballpark, it was like sitting in the bleachers.”

“I ain’t cared much for baseball,” said Jim, “not since they kicked away the pennant that year.”

“Don Young,” I said, nodding.

“Don’t get me started on Don Young,” he said.

“What we’re especially curious about,” I said, “is whether or not there were any childhood traumas that might affect Bobby’s performance on his mission.”

Jim squinted at me for a moment before looking at his sister, who gazed back with tenderness.

Just then another grunt from upstairs.

“You feed him yet?” said Jim softly.

“He spit up most of the oatmeal,” said Fran, “but enough stayed in to keep him till supper.”

“What are you giving him for supper?”

“Oatmeal.”

Jim laughed. He didn’t look so much like his brother, but they had the same laugh. Fran, on the other hand, was Dr. Bob in drag.

“You said you wanted some tea?” Fran said to me.

“That’s right, ma’am,” I said.

“How do you take it?”

“Just a little sugar.”

“That’s nice,” she said, remaining solidly on the couch, her raised slipper still twitching back and forth. “I like a little sugar, too.”

“So you want to know about childhood traumas?” said Jim, taking out another cigarette, lighting it with his Bic. “Well, let me tell you, mister. You come to the right place.”

It was the father, Virgil, at the center of the story. With his own father and mother and spinster sister, he had come up to Chitown from the hills of Appalachia as part of a famous migration north from coal country. There was a whole community in a part of the city called Uptown, mostly poor and struggling, but Virgil didn’t come up north to live the same life he had fled. He found a good job, ventured out into the city, met a pretty Polish girl on the elevated line one afternoon. Her name was Magda, Maggie, and she fell for his tricky accent and rawboned good looks. When he popped the question a month later, she was only too thrilled to get out of the stifling atmosphere of her father’s house with her seven brothers. Virgil’s factory job paid enough so that eventually he could buy a house south of Uptown, just a few blocks from the baseball field, and he and Maggie started a family. First Jim, then Franny, and finally, almost as an afterthought, little Bobby.

“It’s like the American Dream made real,” I said.

“Maybe,” said Fran, “except Daddy never was the dreamy type.”

He was a hard man, he worked hard, drank hard, was hard on his family. If the children misbehaved, they got the back of his hand. If they spilled their milk, they got the back of his hand. If they breathed wrong after he had been drinking, they got worse than that. And he was harder on Maggie.

“It wasn’t really his fault,” said Fran. “He was just born in a different place. He didn’t know no better. He used to tell us that was the way his daddy treated his mommy, too.”

“But his mommy lived till she was eighty-nine,” said Jim.

“True,” said Fran. “Got to give her that.”

It might have been easier if Maggie just took it, like Jim and Franny took it, but that wasn’t her way. She had a temper, too, and she liked her drink, too, and as she got older, she turned more than sturdy. Sometimes they would go at it for hours, the fight ranging over the whole of the house, pots flying, vases, invective screamed in two languages. In the middle of it all, the children would hide in the darkness of a closet, peeking out the crack of a barely opened door, helpless as their world imploded in on itself. Jim had learned that if he got in the middle, he would get hell, not just from his father but from his mother also, so he kept out of it, and he kept the others out of it, too.

“It wasn’t so hard keeping Franny in that closet,” said Jim, “but Bobby, he was a troublemaker.”

Little Bobby was more like his mother. He wouldn’t simply accept getting hit by his father as would Jim and Franny. Instead he would reflexively strike back whenever his father smacked him, and even though his blows had no real effect, they only made his father hit back harder. He was the youngest, but of the three children, he was the most battered. And when the three were hiding in the closet, with the cage match going on throughout the house, he was the one who wanted to run out and defend his mama.

“The little fool was small for his age,” said Jim. “An eight-year-old midget thinking he was going to stop them two. You know, when they got like that, they weren’t aware of nothing but each other. They would of killed him, he tried to get in the middle. So I held him back best I could. Sometimes he struggled so much I had to tie a rope around him to keep him from running out and doing something stupid.”

“How long did this go on?” I said.

“Until it stopped,” said Jim.

A groan from upstairs, a banging on the wall.

“Shut up, you,” yelled Franny. “I’ll change your pan when I’m good and ready. Didn’t I tell you we got a guest?”

“He still can be demanding,” said Jim cheerfully. “But he ain’t forty no more.”

“Wouldn’t matter much even if he was,” said Fran, “the way half his body don’t work and he lost his speech.”

“Thank God for that,” said Jim.

“Why did it stop, the fighting?” I said.

“He killed her, that’s why,” said Jim. “Stuck a knife in her neck.”

“Sad,” said Fran. “It was Bobby who found her.”

Came home from fishing. To find his mother. Dead. On the floor. He was ten. This was just after the Cubs collapse in ’69, the last baseball season any of them cared about. He rode his bike home from the lake, pulled up to the porch, left it there as he pushed open the front door. And saw the blood.

“Daddy got out after twenty years,” said Fran. “Parole, on account of his condition. We was still here, still in the house. He moved right back in, thought it would be the same. But it wasn’t.”

A groan, a bang, and then a thump as if a sack of sand had landed on the floor.

“Sometimes he thrashes about so much,” said Fran, “he falls right out of his bed.”

“You going to go haul him back up?” said Jim

“I will eventually. But first I’d like some tea. Would you like some tea, mister?”

“No, thank you,” I said. “I’m really not thirsty, and I do have to be going.”

“You got what you needed?” said Jim.

“Pretty much,” I said, standing.

“Our Bobby passed the test?”

“Oh, yes.”

A groan from upstairs, a single fist pounding the floor.

“You’ll tell Bobby to visit, won’t you?” said Fran.

“Sure I will.”

“We’d love to see him. And I’m certain he’d like to see his daddy. It’s been a long time since he’s seen his daddy.”

“You tell him we think of Mama every day,” said Jim.

“I will.”

When I got to the doorway, I stopped and turned around. There they sat, brother and sister, watching the actors pretend to have lives on the television. I thought of their mother, dead and bloody on the floor, and I flashed on a photograph that had become all too familiar, a photograph of another woman lying dead and bloody on another floor.

“Can I ask one more question?” I said.

“Go ahead,” said Jim.

“Where was she when Bobby found her?”

“Upstairs,” said Jim, “in the bedroom.”

“On the same floor where Daddy’s lying now,” said Fran.

“There was blood all over everything,” said Jim. “The couch, the rug”—he indicated toward the parlor couch and rug as if they were the very same—“and then there was a trail of blood up the stairs. Bobby followed it up, followed it into the bedroom. That’s where he found her, sprawled dead on the floor. The knife was in her neck up to the hilt.”

“It wasn’t no mystery who done it,” said Fran. “They found blood on his clothes and his shoes. Daddy even admitted it. Almost like he was proud of it. She had it coming, he said.”

“But still, what Bobby found in her hand was pretty damn interesting,” said Jim. “Like she had climbed up them stairs just to fetch it.”

“A photograph of her husband,” I said.

“That’s right,” said Jim. “How’d you know that?”

Just then there was a groan from upstairs and a strange swishy sound.

“Oh, my,” said Fran. “Daddy wet the floor again.”