Chicago (10 page)

But this time Edward did not recover quickly, and his breathing grew ragged and desperate, and by the third day he could not rise from his bed, or eat, or drink tea, or even open his eyes. Miss Elminides came up and sat by him and read to him, as did Azad and his sister Eren from next door in 4A, and one by one most of the rest of the residents came too, some shyly standing in the doorway and murmuring their respects and best wishes, and others coming in and kneeling down and whispering or even singing to Edward; but he did not respond, and Mr Pawlowsky began to grow quietly frantic.

Miss Elminides summoned an animal doctor, a tall cadaverous man who conducted tests and took blood and stool samples and left small jars of bright elixirs that Edward could not swallow. The four natty businessmen in 3A and 3B sent a friend of theirs who was a nondenominational healer, a gentle gaunt man who spent a whole afternoon with Edward and then withdrew silently with a face of terrible sadness.

On the fourth day I was at a conference of editors and printers and such deep in the country, and got back to the apartment building quite late; I ran up the stairs to 4B, taking them two and three at a time, and knocked very gently; there was no answer, but the door was slightly ajar, and I poked my head in and found Mr Pawlowsky sitting in the dark, under his Navy blanket. Edward was motionless in his bed. I knelt down as quietly as I could to feel Edward's chest and he was still breathing but very slowly, like each breath was being excavated from some deep ancient cave inside him where he refused to die.

Mr Pawlowsky had not said a word as I knelt there but I could see his huddled face in the moonlight and I stood to say something but he raised his hand and said quietly, “I have been reading Lincoln to him. I think it helps. I think he hears me. I think he knows the words so well that perhaps it gives him pleasure or hope. The speech from the train at Springfield, when he left everything he knew and loved. ‘Friends, no one who has never been placed in a like position can understand my feelings at this hour, nor the oppressive sadness I feel at this parting,' he said. Probably he had removed his hat and was holding it in his hand. ‘For more than a quarter of a century I have lived among you, and during all that time I have received nothing but kindness at your hands.' Some say he spoke from the last car on the train and others say he was standing on the platform before boarding the train, which was waiting for him, but to me this is an immaterial detail. ‘Here I have lived from my youth until now I am an old man.' He was fifty-two years old, my age. ‘Here the most cherished ties of earth were assumed. Here all my children were born and here one of them lies buried.' That was Eddie, who was four years old when he died, although his son Willie was also born and died in Springfield, only three months old; it is interesting that he does not say two of them, you wonder if he and Mary just did not talk about Willie because he didn't live very long. ‘To you, dear friends, I owe all that I have, all that I am. All the strange checkered past seems to crowd now upon my mind. Today I leave you … for how long I know not.…'”

 

11.

THE WHITE SOX OPENED
their home season at Comiskey Park in April that year, against the Boston Red Sox, after three games in Toronto against the Blue Jays. I had planned to go to the home opener with Edward and possibly Mr Pawlowsky, and there had been talk in the lobby about a few other residents coming with us, even though it was a Wednesday—the cricket player from Trinidad was particularly interested, as he had never seen a baseball game, and was curious about “cricket's spawn,” as he said. With Edward so very ill, all plans were canceled, but as several of us had taken the day off from work for the game, we drifted up to 4B to sit with Edward and listen to the game on the radio.

It was a sunny day but windy, I remember, and Edward was covered with two Navy blankets. Mr Pawlowsky made tea for everyone, and we got to talking about Edward and all the gracious things he had done for people in the building and the neighborhood (he had several times saved crows and jays from being hit by cars, and more than once edged a child away from traffic “with the most insouciant grace,” as the detective said), and we lost track of the time. It was the man who had once raised cheetahs who looked up late in the afternoon and said “the game!” at which point we realized that not one of us had thought to bring a radio. I stood up to go get a transistor radio, but then something happened that I have never forgotten; and indeed I still think of it sometimes, on late spring afternoons, at the hour when baseball games are in their penultimate innings, inching toward dusk and empty outfields, across which ticket stubs and popcorn boxes skitter in the wind, and the last vendors are locking up their food carts, and the gates to the park are being padlocked until tomorrow, when there is a doubleheader, with music between games, possibly a barbershop quartet, or a boys' choir from deep in the farmlands, winners of a competition for choruses specializing in music having to do with America's oldest game.

Before I could take a step to get a radio, the detective said, “Wait,” and we all looked at him, partly because he was a quiet man, somewhat shy, and this was the first firm declarative statement we had ever heard come from his lips. No one knew him well; he had lived with the Scottish tailor in 2B for two years, they were quiet and retiring men, and no one knew the nature of their relationship, or even the nature of the detective's business, other than what he said of himself, that he was a private detective; whether past or present we did not know. Neither tall nor short, fat nor thin, shabby nor well-dressed, handsome nor awkward, he was something of a cipher; but it was the unspoken ethic of the building that no one pried or speculated overmuch on occupation or avocation, relationship or politics, religion or money. For my own part I had wondered about him and the tailor, as I wondered about the four businessmen in two rooms and the two adjacent hermit brothers on the third floor, and Ovious's mother on the fourth floor, a woman no one had ever seen except Miss Elminides; but something held my tongue, when I wanted very much to ask Mr Pawlowsky; and I already knew, after only a few months in the building, that asking Edward about any other resident would only earn me that silent half-smile I knew too well.

“Wait,” said the detective again. “I'll tell you the game. Open the window about four inches. That will be enough for me but not enough to give Edward a chill.” The man who had raised cheetahs was closest to the window and he opened the window. No one spoke for a moment. I remember that I heard a gull screech by the lake, and that Edward twitched when the gull screeched.

“Ken Brett on the mound for us,” said the detective, who was staring at the ceiling. “Lefty. He's not nervous. He's surprisingly confident, even facing a lineup like Boston's, with Jim Rice and Carl Yastrzemski and Dwight Evans. The leadoff batter for Boston singles to right, but the next guy hits into a double play, and Brett gets Rice to ground out. His confidence rises even more. Big crowd. There are kids from Indiana sitting in our seats. The usher just glanced casually at their tickets and they are over the moon feeling like they put one over on authority. They are cutting school today. I think they are from Mishawaka. One of them just secretly ate a bright blue pill without telling his friends.

“Ralph Garr leads off for us. He's in left, Chet Lemon in center, Richie Zisk in right. This is the best outfield we have had in years. They all might hit twenty homers this year. Decent infield, decent pitching, but this might be the best outfield in the league. Garr singles and scores on a double. Oscar Gamble is the designated hitter today but they will have to make room for him in the outfield. We have four all-star outfielders this year!

“The Red Sox get a run back when Yaz doubles but we score four more in the bottom of the second behind solid shots from Lemon and Garr and superb baserunning from Oscar Gamble. You should see the Afro on Oscar this year! It must be a foot tall easy and his hat flies off at the slightest movement! A run for Boston in the sixth, but otherwise it's groundballs and flyouts the rest of the way. Lovely day, warmer than you would expect, but blustery. Richie Zisk hits the ball hard all day but gets caught stealing and grounds into a double play. The kid who ate the pill throws up in the bathroom and faints and his friends come and find him and clean him up and walk him out to the parking lot and miss the last two innings. For one of his friends this is the very last straw and he never speaks to the kid again. Two hits apiece for Lemon and Garr, three hits including a triple for Jorge Orta at second base, Brett goes seven innings for the win. Much of the talk in the press box after the game is the two terrific throws from the outfield to nail Boston runners at third; Zisk threw out George Scott from right field, but of course George is the slowest guy in baseball. He might weigh three hundred pounds, although Boston says he weighs two hundred. If he weighs two hundred I am the mayor of the City of Chicago. Little-known fact: George actually did grow up picking cotton in Mississippi, and wanted desperately to play pro baseball so he could take care of his mother. Also in the stands today, and hanging around the field afterwards, is a kid named LaMarr Hoyt. We just got him in a trade and he's headed to the minors to pitch but there's something about this kid that feels like he's going to be great. If we could get a real true honest to God ace on the mound we could take the pennant. I don't think this kid is going to be ready for another year but you remember that name, LaMarr Hoyt. Big friendly kid who will pitch like hell, I think. You should see him staring at the field like he is hungry for it. Another big old Southern boy like old George Scott. Finally a clubhouse boy comes to get LaMarr because he is going to miss the bus to the minors and that will wrap up today's broadcast, gentlemen. I am sure I speak for all of us when I say Edward is in our prayers,” and we all got up quietly. Mr Pawlowsky was asleep under his blanket. The detective gently closed the window and I knelt down and made sure Edward was still breathing and then we all left, quiet as altar boys.

The next day on my way to work I got a copy of the
Sun-Times
newspaper and indeed the White Sox had beaten the Red Sox 5–2, before a packed house, with Richie Zisk throwing out a lumbering George Scott at third base. I never did figure out how the detective did what he did. Months later the man who had raised cheetahs said to me that he thought the detective had heard a radio or television broadcasting the game faintly through the walls or the window, maybe that's why he wanted the window open so he could hear it better, but neither Mrs Manfredi in 4C or Azad and Eren and their parents in 4A had a television, and I had been sitting closest to the window and never heard a radio. To this day it is a mystery. LaMarr Hoyt, by the way, threw his first pitches for the White Sox two years later, and went on to become the best pitcher in the league for two years. For years every time I saw his name in the box score, or Oscar Gamble's, or Richie Zisk's, I would suddenly be back in Mr Pawlowsky's apartment, staring at Edward deathly ill and terribly still under his blankets, listening to the quiet detective tell us the opening game of the season.

 

12.

SOMETIMES, EVEN NOW,
years later and far away, on steel-gray days when the wind whips and I am near large waters, I feel a bolt of what I can only call Chicagoness, and I remember, I remember … what? A certain Chicago of the mind, I suppose. And sometimes then I sit by a fire and remember aloud—to an understanding friend in a pub, maybe, or to my children, when they were young and liked to hear stories of my unimaginable past, or to the woman who married me, who knows that we are made of many moments, some fleeting and some scraps and shards and tatters of dreams.

So I talk about the way buildings crowded the streets in Chicago, and the sidewalks were narrow and buckled in the oldest parts of the city, and how stores and shops leaned in eagerly toward the street, almost reaching for their customers. And the swirl of snow along the lake, eddying and whirling and composing drifts deep enough to hide a horse. And the way the cops and the hookers and the gangsters and the shadow-men, as Mr Pawlowsky called the denizens of the alleys selling drugs and lust, all knew each other and communicated in nods and codes and gestures and the deft signals of their vocations and avocations. And the bone-chilling cold, and shuffle of boots leery and weary of ice, and the groan and sigh of buses coming to a stop, and the whir and whine of evening traffic along Lake Shore Drive, and the roar of the bitter frozen crowd at a Bears game, and the smell of sausages and kielbasa and onions and beer at games and carnivals and festivals and street fairs, and the growl of the blues in the murk of the clubs, and the rattle of padlocks on whole streets of fenced-off abandoned houses on the South Side, and the sight of whole huddles of morning commuters in vast parkas at train stations, looking like so many brightly colored bears clustered for warmth on the merciless tundra. The vault and soar of skyscrapers downtown in the Loop, and the smell of urine and asphalt in the alleys among them; the shriek of trains leaning into the curves of elevated tracks near Wabash and Wacker; the red kiosks for the
Sun-Times
and blue for the
Tribune
; the infinitesimal sneer of elderly white waiters in the oldest hotels as black couples arrived for their dinner reservations; the relentless river of corruption and payola, bribes and payoffs, quid pro quo and secret deals, hush money and baksheesh, zoning amazements and construction chaos, union violence and aldermanic greed, mayoral games and senatorial sin, filling the air everywhere you turned; and one thing I remember with amazement about Chicago is that everyone knew everything
before
it was splayed lurid and naked in public; you never saw a city so filled with knowing as Chicago then and probably now; but for all the sure knowledge that the mayor was a thief of epic proportion and the state senator on the take, the police commissioner a thug and the cardinal a man with a mistress, I do not remember that anyone was in the least resigned or cowed; it was more like you knew the score and worked around it, you assumed the worst but sought out and esteemed the best where you found it; and that was, as far as I could tell, on your street, in your neighborhood, among the shopkeepers and cops and nuns and bus drivers and carpenters and teachers who composed the small vibrant villages that collectively were the real Chicago.