Chicago (4 page)

So it was that Edward and I traveled together in the city for the first time—first by bus along the lake, and then on foot through the wilderness of the South Side, along streets I did not know but Edward apparently did, and quite well too, it seemed, for he was brisk and sure, and twice led me through alleys that seemed dead-ends to me but turned out to save us several blocks of walking. Only once did he stop to get his bearings, at what seemed to be a shop selling baseball paraphernalia; he scratched at the window, the proprietor came out, they conferred quietly, the proprietor handed me a baseball card (White Sox pitcher Billy Pierce, 1959, the year he won fourteen games and lost fifteen), and then Edward led me though another alley to a church. Again Edward scratched at the door, and to my surprise a lovely young woman came out, wearing a beautiful blue cloak. I gaped for a moment, until Edward nudged me to show her the card, which I did.

All these years later I can still see the look that came over her face, and the way she knelt down to stare Edward in the eye. When she stood up again I handed her Miss Elminides' message, which instantly vanished inside her cloak as if by sleight of hand, and a moment later she too vanished, back into the church, with a swirl of her cloak; but she must have conveyed some silent warning to Edward, for we did not retrace our steps back through the alleys and streets, but instead hustled directly east to the lake, and then home by another bus, on which we huddled in the two rearmost seats, on the lake side, away from the street. On the bus he seemed distracted, but by the time we were back in our building he was himself again, bemused and attentive, and when we reported our progress to Miss Elminides, in the lobby, he was as wry and engaged as usual. In some manner I could not see he delivered a message to Miss Elminides, who sighed and said it could not be helped, and expressed her most sincere thanks for our assistance in a delicate personal matter.

*   *   *

Of course there were many other residents in our apartment building: the units went from A through F on each of the three upper floors, for a total of eighteen apartments, in which lived something like fifty people, all told, and during my time there I met nearly all of them, although there were a couple of legendary hermits, and I had to trust Edward that they actually did reside in the building, in apartments 3C and 3D, respectively; according to Edward they were brothers who hardly ever emerged, and had not spoken to each other in thirty years, despite being separated only by a thin wooden wall, through which they must have heard each other conducting a life of eerie similarity. I once said to Edward that this seemed sad to me, such proximity without intimacy, and his response was something like as far as he could tell there was an awful lot of exactly this sort of thing among human beings, more than any other kind of being; a sad thing to have to admit is true.

I did meet the other residents, at least casually, mostly while we were getting our mail in the lobby, or in transit on the stairs, or waiting sleepily on line in the basement for Mrs Manfredi's empanadas on Saturday mornings, and after a few weeks I was able to put stories to some of them, with Mr Pawlowsky's quiet assistance. The Armenian librettist on the third floor, for example, was a man intent on succeeding in opera, despite the fact that his father and uncles were barons of industry, specializing particularly in classic cars, which perhaps explained the Hudson or Packard chassis in the basement. On the second floor was a tiny vibrant woman who must have been past eighty years old but had the most brilliant sizzling orange hair I had ever seen; in some way she was associated with the tremendous stuffed bronze horse in the storage area. Edward thought she had been a propmaster or animal-wrangler for a movie studio, while Mr Pawlowsky thought she had actually been an actress in old Westerns; there had been a film company shooting Westerns in Chicago in the old days, he said, over to the west side, on Argyle Street, and he was almost sure she had been an actress in the old Broncho Billy films; didn't she look awfully like the girl who was always Billy's wife or daughter or love interest or being rescued at the last second from a hurtling train?

There was a man who had been a sailor, though not in the Navy, said Mr Pawlowsky; there were four quiet thin dapper businessmen, who lived two by two on the second floor, and sometimes left for work in the morning all at the same time, all dressed beautifully; there were two young women from rural Arkansas, fresh out of college and just beginning advertising careers in the city, one in perfumes and the other in shoes and boots; there was a tailor of Scottish extraction, a department-store detective, a man who had once raised cheetahs, the inventor of children's propeller hats, and a tall man who had been a cricket star in Trinidad but who now taught remedial mathematics at a high school twenty blocks west; Edward showed me one morning how this man deftly carried a cricket bat in his overcoat, in a special pocket designed to accommodate it, in case of untoward incidents.

One time I said to Mr Pawlowsky that you could say of the building's residents that we were motley, by which I meant from all walks of life, but he said politely that he himself might choose another word, given the chance: “‘Motley' having the intimation of incongruous, or mismatched,” he noted, “whereas I would say that we are utterly normal in our variety; such is the American way, that everyone is welcome, generally, if civil and reasonably behaved and able to foot their bills, or have them footed by someone else. The one thing we really miss here, I think, is children; we have only the three, and one of those a teenager, who doesn't count as a child, but as the larval stage of the uneasy adult, especially in his case; he is an
uncomfortable
young man, although Edward is of the opinion that he will end well, and Edward is usually right about such things.” This was a boy named Ovious, who despite his orotund name was amazingly thin, and who conducted himself in public with a series of sighs and grunts, the former for his parents and the latter for everyone else; supposedly he attended the technical high school nearby, apprenticing to be an electrician, but since he used the back alley for his peregrinations I hardly saw him; even when I did spot him, furtively slipping through the alley, he seemed obscure around the edges, as if he wasn't fully formed yet, or had not been completely transported to this world from another one, where people were incredibly thin and didn't speak much.

 

5.

THE FIRST TIME
I set foot in Miss Elminides' apartment was that month—she had been on a sea-voyage, as she said, and I had been absorbed in grappling with the opening weeks of my job at the magazine downtown, where it seemed to me I was utterly useless to begin with, and then slowly grew slightly less useless by the week—and it was mid-November before I found myself in her bay apartment, accompanied by Mr Pawlowsky and Edward. The proximate event was a contretemps with keys; I had misplaced mine, Mr Pawlowsky was sure he had left the master keys with Miss Elminides, and Edward came along to convey his regards to Miss Elminides, whom he much admired.

We did not knock, when we arrived at her door—it wasn't necessary, Mr Pawlowsky said, she knows when visitors are imminent—and indeed just as we arrived the door swung open and we stepped into her apartment, which was flooded with light and seemed immense, though I learned later it was only slightly bigger than the other apartments. It was furnished with austere grace: lean wooden tables and chairs, a modest marble fireplace, and large arches through which I could see a small kitchen to one side and a sort of studio to the other, with tables stacked with books and papers, and a wall hung with maps and musical instruments, among which I thought I saw the gleam of a flügelhorn. There was no hint of a bedroom or necessary room, and given the dimensions of the building I couldn't imagine where such spaces would be in Miss Elminides' apartment; when I asked Edward about this later he had to confess that this had always been a puzzle to him as well, and that he had wondered if she slept in her studio, or in a daybed under her bay windows, or perhaps did not sleep at all; she certainly had the translucent complexion of someone who regularly bathed in moonlight.

She was tall, but not gangly; slender, but not weightless like poor Ovious; and she seemed to be that wonderfully indeterminate age that some women achieve after thirty or so, anywhere between thirty and sixty. Her hair was black and long; her eyes and eyebrows and earrings were also black; and her voice was murmurous as she stepped forward to say hello. I cannot remember to this day what she wore, and it afterward proved that I never could remember what she wore; oddly Mr Pawlowsky said the same thing, although Edward maintained that she was one of the few people he knew who could wear loose clothes like robes and shawls and never appear to be lost or hiding inside them.

The matter of the keys was quickly addressed, and our discussion of rent and terms and deposits, long dreaded by me because of my pitiful bank account, was also quickly settled, slightly to my advantage, and a moment later we were out in the hallway again. Mr Pawlowsky bustled off to fix a broken window upstairs, but Edward and I lingered in the hallway, trying to identify what we had smelled in Miss Elminides' apartment: honey, nutmeg, and what Edward thought was indisputably crushed or diced olives. He also thought that he could smell owls and books printed in Aramaic, but there he lost me. I was willing to believe him on the olives, until he claimed that he could smell the difference between crushed and diced olives, which seemed fanciful to me; but later Mr Pawlowsky said that Edward could indeed make such distinctions, and there were many stories to be told of his exquisite sense of smell.

“Some things,” said Mr Pawlowsky, “you can easily imagine he is able to smell from either vast distance or from the faintest evidence, like fish runs in the lake or forest fires in the deep northern woods, but the other things are startling. He can actually smell a rising tide in the lake, for example. How can he possibly do that? Yet he does. He can tell which of the two standard morning lake-run buses are in operation, without even leaving the room; all he needs is the window to be cracked open an inch. He can smell imminent asteroid showers. He can indeed smell owls, although you would not think that was possible. He can smell snow a day and sometimes two before it happens. Both of the times Miss Elminides was confronted by ruffians he smelled trouble and was out and away faster than you can blink your eyes. He is a lot quicker than he seems to be when he needs to be. The one time that his superb sense of smell deserts him is during the alewife run in the lake, when they wash up by the uncountable thousands and Edward disappears for days at a time and comes back sleek and redolent and moaning gently with surfeit. You never saw a dog who liked fish more than Edward. At those times his nose is useless for a couple of days and I also have to give him a bath. He is not much for bathing, although he does like swimming in the lake, but if I didn't give him a bath then we would smell the alewife run for the rest of the year. I have the greatest respect for alewives but I do not want to live with their aura every day. I think he not only eats them but rolls in them for reasons that elude me. There is a lot to be said for the alewife, but the smell gets to be a little much. You'll see, come spring. Edward believes the run will be early this year, probably late April, and if he thinks it's so, it's so. You'll see.”

*   *   *

My job with the magazine downtown, I should say, grew more entertaining by the week, or perhaps it was me becoming less obtuse by the week, for by Thanksgiving I was enjoying it so much that I happily volunteered to fill in for several colleagues who wished to be off in various directions for various tribal feasts and ritual slayings of native fowl with gun and bow. In general my duties were so various that I did not have time to be bored, and in the course of business I got to meet reporters, editors, printers, deliverymen, truck drivers, priests, nuns, monks, postmen, writers, teachers, photographers, painters, typesetters, a sculptor, a woman who painted holy icons, and a man who had spent his career running a linotype machine, who in turn introduced me to a man who had spent his career setting hot-lead type for small-town newspapers; suffice it to say that in my time with that magazine in Chicago I may well have met every riveting unfamous person in the city, including water mystics, street preachers, a quiet woman who fed a thousand people a day, beggars, all sorts of men and women in law enforcement, political operatives of every sort and stripe, barmen and barmaids, cooks and boxers, all sorts of people having to do with the operation of trains, and a slew of people who quietly do the work of Catholic parishes in America, the vast majority of them women, who for the most part grinned when I said tart things about male dominance in the faith—“that's what we want the poor dears to think, as we run things from behind their voluminous robes,” as one woman said to me, smiling broadly.

The magazine's offices were also a source of stimulation and pleasure to me, for they were on Madison Street where it met Wells Street, which was named for a soldier who died fighting the people who lived in Chicago before there was a Chicago. (His killers, impressed with his courage, immediately cut out and ate his heart, hoping for some of his valor.) Wells Street carried elevated trains, and the combination of roaring rattling trains above, and the intricate steel and iron latticework of the tracks and their pillars, and the swoop and flutter of pigeons and starlings, and the hustle of taxis and bustle of pedestrians below, and the moan of car horns and rumble of trucks, along with the endlessly changing patterns of swirling sun and fog and rain and snow, absorbed me so thoroughly that I sometimes paused for many minutes at a time on the corner of Madison and Wells, fascinated by yet another new combination of sight and sound.

Also the then-hapless Chicago Bulls played just down the street a few blocks, in the cavernous echoing Chicago Stadium, where so few patrons paid to watch them lose that the ticket-taker waved us in for free; and the famous Billy Goat Tavern was a few blocks north, and always filled to bursting with besotted reporters and commuters gulping beer before their long train ride home; and Grant Park was a few blocks south, where almost always there was a protest or a ringing speech or a peripatetic madman or a busker of startling skill; and Union Station was a few blocks west, with its vast marble Great Hall, bigger and lovelier than any cathedral I had ever seen; and the Chicago River was just west too, a river never without surprise, for I saw boats and people and animals and many other things floating or swimming in that slow dark green murk, on their placid way into the lake; one time even a policeman, who dove from the Clark Street Bridge to save what he thought was a child, but which turned out to be a small dog wearing a tartan sweater.