An Unfinished Season (16 page)

So I said that sometimes adolescents grew out of their problems.

He said his son was twenty-five.

I said I knew a doctor who might be able to help.

He said he knew the same doctor. But the boy was very difficult.

So there we are, Charlie said.

Sometimes, he went on, whatever you do, it isn't enough.

Nice talking with you, Aurora. Say hello to your dad for me.

 

Aurora managed to put herself on the same footing as older people, I don't know how. She had a manner older than her years, but it wasn't only that. She had a talent for listening and understanding what was between the lines, like a musician with perfect pitch. And what she heard, she remembered. Whenever I thought about our future, which was often, I thought of us in this serious grown-up world, people telling Aurora their secrets. Meanwhile, I went to the newspaper office downtown as if I were attending classes at a progressive trade school. I had no intention of becoming a newspaper reporter, then or later. The work was repetitive and easily grasped and didn't lead anywhere I wanted to go. I was in it for something else, I wasn't sure what. I suppose I wanted to observe the down-and-out—the vulgar and the sordid, as Mrs. Stockbroker would have it—to see how their lives were lived actually, the terms of the deal; and who was shuffling the cards. Yet I discovered soon enough that you necessarily observed from the outside and the glass was opaque, unless you were someone like Aurora Brule in whom people confided as a matter of course. What I had was secondhand stuff, vital statistics on a police blotter or the phoned-in report from the firehouse. Actual life as it was lived actually was missing in action.

I worked as a copy boy for an afternoon paper, the one that would die a few years later, victim of its own excess. Readers were loyal but advertisers were not, the State Street merchants worried that the paper's enthusiastic coverage of the interminable Red Scare and the city's nightly mayhem—the crushed skull in the garbage pail, the Norway rat in the infant's crib—compromised the hoped-for sobriety and civic equilibrium promised by the new Republican regimes in Washington and Springfield. Who saw progress and prosperity in a Norway rat? Did the page one photograph of the rat baring its teeth from a bloodstained layette encourage the Winnetka housewife to visit Marshall Field's for a new bedroom suite? The paper seemed mired in Chicago's criminal past, refusing to recognize that the Republican landslide signaled a new optimism, progressive, forward-looking, constructive, and good for business. So the paper was on the skids and the response in the newsroom was to uncover ever more revolting examples of municipal disorder and enemies within. The Norway rat in the spring and Judge Greenslat in the summer were but grace notes to the continuing search for the colored woman who had vanished so mysteriously from Cook County General.

When I remarked to one of the reporters that the case was fascinating, romantic almost, a woman with no identity, who had left no trace upon the face of the earth, who had managed to elude the posses of police and newspapermen sent to run her to ground, he looked at me sourly and said, She has an identity, son. She knows who she is. She knows where she is. It's only us who don't. And there's not the least thing romantic about her.

She's a down-and-out, Henry Laschbrook said. We'll never find her. He hesitated a moment, looking at me, I thought, with something approaching interest. He said, Do they like this story up where you live?

They do, I said. And they don't.

Well, he said. Which is it?

They read it. But they don't want to be seen reading it.

Like a girlie book, he said.

Like that, I said.

They don't read our paper up there, do they?

Not much, I said.

We're a little too raw for them, I suppose.

The Norway rat, I began.

You ever see a bigger god damned rat?

Never, I said.

They lead sheltered lives up there on the North Shore, he said.

They don't have rats in the bed, if that's what you mean.

And they don't want to read about people who do, he replied.

It upsets them, I said.

But not enough for them to do anything about it.

That's why they live on the North Shore. So they don't have to.

Henry laughed unpleasantly and said that was certainly one way to look at it, though not necessarily the best way.

It was suddenly important to me that Henry Laschbrook get one thing straight. I said, I don't live on the North Shore.

You don't?

I live in Quarterday, I said. Farther west.

Quarterday, Henry said. That's not the North Shore?

No, I said. Quarterday's another place altogether.

Well, Henry said. I'll be damned. You could have fooled me.

 

I led an appealing double life, bon vivant by night, workingman by day. I owned two uniforms, the tuxedo and a seersucker jacket and khakis, and most mornings only a few hours separated the one from the other, when I hurried to my car for the long drive to Chicago, anticipating the day's unruly events. I strolled into the newsroom to report to Ozias Tilleman, the city editor. Tilleman: fiftyish, saturnine, surly, always badly shaven, nursing a wildfire of a hangover. He had a wife somewhere and children, too, but no one had ever seen them. I handed him the paper bag with a Boston coffee and a jelly doughnut, took his money, and waited for whatever assignment he had for me, usually research on an obituary or some oblique angle on the night's bloodletting. Tilleman had been in the navy during the war, so his language was sprinkled with maritime expressions, loudly delivered. A story was either running at flank speed or in dry dock, and if you missed something important you were aground, at anchor, lying to windward, up shit's creek without a paddle. I was happy enough working away in the morgue, scouring the clips for tempting facts, all the while eavesdropping on the ribald conversations at the water cooler, office romances and after-hours escapades, and rumor upon rumor of the paper's probable demise. In the afternoon, when the reporters wandered back from their assignments, I hustled copy from their desks to the pencil editors on the rim, fanatical grammarians who, when they discovered a split infinitive or a misplaced comma, chirped like canaries in a mineshaft, whispering the offender's name or nickname, Moron, Idiot. No one at the paper knew of my nighttime life on the North Shore, though Tilleman guessed, and, when the time came, cashed the chit.

What the devil are those? he asked one morning, pointing at my feet. God damned bedroom slippers in my newsroom. Take 'em off. Wear 'em again, you're in the brig.

You look like a fairy, Tilleman said.

Tinker Bel Air, he added.

In my haste and confusion that morning I had mistakenly slipped into my dancing pumps, the ones with the little bows, and when I discovered what I had done I was already halfway to Chicago. I was always on thin ice at the paper, and careful to do nothing that would cause Tilleman to fire me. I seemed to know instinctively where the line was, and while I often walked up to it, I never crossed it. I loved my job—grace and favor from the publisher, who was a golfing friend of my father's—and the atmosphere of the newsroom, never quite real, as if the people we wrote about were characters in a play or a novel who did not exist outside the narrow columns of type. Its atmosphere was as special and specific as the locker room or infantry bivouac with its own language and code of conduct, as disheveled as life itself, a man's cruel world where the odds were eternally six-to-five against. The paper was a carnival of love nests, revenge killings, slumlords, machine graft, and Communists deep in the apparatus of state and national government. The city itself was thankfully Red-free except for the degenerate intellectuals at the University of Chicago, rootless cosmopolitans whose primary allegiance was to Europe. It was easy enough for me to believe that the world of the newsroom was the real world, wised-up and unforgiving, brutal as a matter of course, life's mediator, but always with a reassuring insinuation of the indomitable American spirit asserting itself in countless miniature acts of selflessness, the fireman who climbed all fifty-one rungs of the ladder to rescue the cat in the tree or the nun who spent her weekends praying with unwed mothers or the hero doc who discovered the faintest of heartbeats in a body frozen solid. Surely it was a public service to present this wholesome world to the readers, poor saps, in order, to—the word would be “console.”

The stories translated wonderfully at the parties I went to in the evening. North Shore girls knew nothing of the ambiance of a big-city newspaper devoted to sexual mischief, crime, life's terrors, a chronic melancholy among the city's down-and-out. It was a netherworld to them, a sinister murk invisible from Lake Forest or Winnetka, and many light-years away from their boarding schools in Connecticut or Massachusetts except for the insights gained from the assigned reading,
Tess of the D'Urbervilles,
for example. Of course they were fascinated, being invited backstage at the burlesque. The reporter's telephone call (“Deputy coroner calling”) to the distraught mother whose children had “perished” in a tenement “blaze.” The businessman who—the word was not “fell” or “jumped” but the immaculate “plunged” from his tenth-floor office on Division Street following a visit from the friends of Sam Giancana.

Gosh, really?

Who's Sam Giancana?

Perhaps their fathers were a little less impressed, and now and again one of them would interrupt my aria with a gruff comment, correcting a newsroom rumor related to municipal corruption, favors given and favors received in the matter of a tax break, a zoning variation, a property assessment, a favorable ruling on an ambiguous section of the city building code—all the grease for the great wheels of commerce. I assumed they did not like the idea of a nineteen-year-old instructing their daughters on the way of the world as observed by newspaper reporters, and once I heard myself referred to as “that wiseacre Ravan kid, Teddy's boy, what he doesn't know about Chicago would fill Soldier Field...”

This hinted at another level of reality in Chicago, a parallel world more sinister even than the one I had discovered, but I didn't take the hint. If I was wised up, the bankers were necessarily naïve; the naïveté of the American ruling class was an appealing idea, a cohort of dimwitted La Salle Street financiers jumping through hoops held by aldermen and Mob muscle. I believed I represented a threat to their vision of civic order, my arias hitting a little too close to the mark, the corrupters believing they were victims of a process whereby an honest businessman couldn't stay honest and also stay in business, owing to the genius of the Democratic machine and the Mob, whereas perhaps the reverse was true. I specialized in stories that were better left untold, or at least not told to their young and impressionable daughters just now embarking on life's great journey and whose very expensive educations were designed to shield them from life in the city, and specifically how things worked. That part was true enough. But that part wasn't the half of it.

 

Aurora listened to my stories, too, but tended to drift away when my audience of debs was at its most attentive. Gosh, really? she would say later, batting her eyelashes after listening to yet another description of one reporter who kept a pint of whiskey in his desk and another who was having a love affair with an alderman's daughter, this one a male Mata Hari who came back to the newsroom with stories of how the alderman conducted his business from the corner saloon and was never known to pay for a drink, though there was always money on the table. She did not find my newsroom yarns enthralling but conceded that was no doubt because she did not attend a boarding school in Connecticut or Massachusetts but a private day school in Lincoln Park, a city school where aldermen's daughters were her classmates. There were bankers' daughters as well, she said, and lawyers' daughters, and she often had difficulty telling them apart. There were loud ones and shy ones in each group.

Bankers' daughters often wore pearls, Aurora added thoughtfully, and the others gold. The pearls tended to come off more quickly than the gold but that was surely because the aldermen's daughters tended to be strict Polish or Irish Catholics and the bankers' daughters amorphously Protestant. The lawyers' daughters were often Jewish and somewhat mysterious, unclassifiable. There were exceptions in all categories, as any conversation in the locker room after gym would demonstrate. All that sweat, she said, loosened inhibitions. When I said, Gosh, really?, Aurora smiled and said, Really. But I was imagining the after-gym conversations, girls sprawled on benches and in chairs in their underwear, disclosing the secrets of the deep.

Sometimes I think the Midwest is a nation apart, Aurora said, and the North Shore is a hidden valley inside that nation, protected on all sides. It's undisturbed. They have all the stuff that everyone else has, radios and movies and newspapers, and the books are the same coast to coast. But we do not listen or read in the same way.

We listen and read defensively, she said.

I don't know why I say “we,” she added. I don't live in the hidden valley.

They hold on to what they have, believing that it can't be improved upon.

I have affection for the South, she said. What they aren't up to down there! Probably it's the heat and humidity, like the locker room sweats. She had a cousin who lived in Texas, went to the local high school, changed boyfriends every week, loved being a cheerleader. What a time she has. Full of life, that southern cousin. The only thing she wants is that thing just out of reach and absolutely forbidden, except down there the forbidden sign comes with a wink attached. Her father owns the bank, as a matter of fact, Aurora said, and laughed and laughed.

She did listen carefully when I told her about Henry Laschbrook, star reporter, who began his day at the pool hall on Wabash, down a flight of stairs to a large basement room, quiet and cool as a library, taking the high chair in front of table number six, requesting a cup of black coffee, lighting a cigar and sitting quietly for a little while in order to contemplate the green baize field and mahogany rails of the table, as full of mystery and potential as a waiting chessboard and as violent as Antietam.