The Houseguest (12 page)

9.

M
AX ARRIVED MIDDAY
to find Union Station exactly as he'd left it, a temple where people came to worship not God, not goodness, not even the wonder of the machines that moved them but movement itself, the ability of people to hurry, to push past and stand aside and forge ahead and get the hell out of each other's way. He'd hardly planted both feet on the platform when bodies shoved him from behind, elbowing and angling their way toward the main concourse, the wide staircase, the relief of open space. His knees and neck loosened as he walked toward the arrival hall, shaking off the stiffness of eighteen hours in a seat. What a blessing it was just to stretch the knees and straighten the elbows. His joints crunched and creaked as he pushed forward, let himself be pulled along by the current of bodies, the steam and noise and heat, all the while trying to master the idea that he was really here, home, back again to the pinpoint center from which he'd fled fifteen years before.

In the arrival hall, he crossed the marble floor with a slow gait, a feeling of heaviness, a sense of his life's own gravity. The rail lines radiated out from a central hall. The hall was more air and light and dust than steel. The great steel girding was nothing more than a shell. The pigeons perched above, balancing on rafters; they plucked and skittered and didn't seem to realize they were trapped. Dust rose beneath
them, suspended in drifting light. Outside, it might be raining or snowing or arid as the Sahara. The station was a world contained; it made its own weather.

Max moved through it, through the crowds of fellow-passengers hurrying in a hundred directions: left, right, cross-wise in loops and diagonal arcs. They moved with the randomness of marbles dropped on glass. For just a moment, Max saw himself as the pigeons would have seen him, one of these marbles sliding far below with no logical direction or destination. But then the clock at the hall's center came into view. A half-dozen figures surrounded, waiting, checking watches, setting suitcases at feet. In the middle, a woman more poised than all the others. It didn't matter that her back was turned; he would have known her by the part in her hair or the way she clutched her purse. He slowed as he approached, felt himself flooded with fondness and relief. As though sensing his approach, she turned around before he spoke her name, held out her arms.

“Well hello there, stranger. You've done it. You're truly here.”

“But I'm a stranger now?”

“Two years, Max. Two long years.”

Their embrace was warm and unrestrained. She smelled the way she always smelled, a mix of violet and Wrigley's spearmint and talcum. “Two years,” he repeated. “Really? That long?”

“Don't pull that on me. You know exactly how long it's been.”

“It's good to see you.”

He leaned in and kissed her on the cheek, laughing a little.

Max's sister hadn't changed much in the years since he'd seen her—in truth, she never changed much: there was something generous and good at her core that made its way out to the surface and defied decay. She was, she had always been, a decent girl: agreeable and without pretension, intelligent without the hollow dressing he'd seen so much of back east, pretty in a practical, unfussy way with brown hair that fell in brambly brown strands and warm brown eyes and a smattering
of freckles on her nose that had faded in adulthood but never disappeared entirely.

Their mother died from flu when he was six and she was ten, and while materially provided for (indulged, many would say), they were emotionally orphaned by their father, a successful but stubborn businessman who'd opened a small department store forty years earlier that was now the fourth largest in the city. That was how Max came to be cared for by a series of tidy, efficient spinsters in an airy house on Goethe Street, near the lake, who could keep house and speak unaccented English. But Elsie was the one who had loved and protected him. He lived in near constant fear of roving hoodlums, Slovaks, Ukrainians, other empire throwaways who seemed to hone in on him, instantly aware of some weakness in himself he could not even name. When he was eight, a classmate was cornered coming home from school by a group of Irish boys who called him a “Christ-killing bastard” and bloodied his nose and tore off his shirt and painted a cross on his chest that had to be scrubbed off with turpentine. While Max had never faced any attack that dramatic, he lived in steady fear of it and faced down quieter taunting on a near daily basis. Elsie said, “When you can, ignore them. But if someone's really going to pick a fight, and they won't have it any other way, look them right in the eye, then do something crazy. Slam your fist into a wall. Stick your tongue out to your chin and scream. Kick something. Curse like you're possessed. Or just hit them, as hard and as fast as you can.”

Elsie was also his companion, his partner in petty crime. Together, they had experienced the city as few children do, with freedom from parental meddling but without poverty. They dressed well enough to gain access to the nicest doorman buildings—the Standard Club (on whose board their father sat), but also the Knickerbocker, the Palmer House, the Edgewater Beach Hotel, places where they could pretend to be the children of socialites or foreign diplomats and order steaks with béarnaise sauce and French-fried potatoes, where they could play
games of hide and seek inside the stairwells and smoke stolen cigarettes on the rooftops with the whole city twinkling around them.

Growing up, his worst fear had been that she would someday leave him, because then he would have no one. It was worse than his fear of falling from an elevated train or drowning in the lake. “I'll never leave you,” she must have told him a hundred times. And she never did. It was he who left, tentatively, first, only a few miles south for the University of Chicago, then for New York and rabbinical school, then Germany, then back to New York, then finally, inexplicably, Utica. And through all of this leaving she kept her word and stayed put, built her career as a high-school English teacher and her marriage to John Harris, a chemistry teacher and amateur musician around the city of their birth, so that she was always there, waiting, consistent as a compass's fixed foot.

More than ever it was a pleasure and relief to see her and hug her amid the tumult of Union Station.

“Come on,” she said, “it's a cauldron in here. Outside at least there's a little breeze coming in off the lake. Well, more like a draft than a breeze. Should we go swimming while you're here like the old days? John is teaching himself to swim great distances. He can go all the way from Montrose Harbor to Navy Pier and he has it in his head that he's going to cross the English Channel when the war is over, if the British win, of course.”

“If they don't win, he'll have bigger things to worry about than his breast stroke.”

“I keep telling him. I also keep telling him that Lake Michigan is not the English Channel. Channels have currents and sharks and riptides and God knows what else. But you know how he is. An odd man I married.”

Outside, the crowd swelled around them. They pushed their way down the platform, up the stairs and out of the grand hall of Union Station and onto Madison Street. “How was the train ride?” she asked
along the way. “It must be a beautiful ride. I don't care what anyone says about Indiana—America's breadbasket and the heart and soul of Klan country. What's not to love? If you hadn't become such an Easterner snob, you'd know as much.”

“Upstate is not the East Coast. It's a region unto itself.”

Now that they had cleared the station's crowd, the breeze of which she'd spoken delighted his skin and cooled his head when he lifted his hat. It smelled of summer, of the greasy meat sold by street vendors and the perfume of passing women and car exhaust and sewer steam. He'd forgotten the pleasure of feeling the lake air rubbing up against the mammoth towers of commerce; he'd forgotten summer in Chicago, which came between the last week of June and the third week of July and revived the city's inhabitants like an unexpected pardon. He'd forgotten the stark contrast of light and shadow amidst the skyscrapers, the hum of a million human lives crowding in, how it made a man feel small and big at once.

They boarded a northbound Ravenswood car toward his sister's home, a place he could picture well from her letters but had never seen. It was a rambling Uptown three-flat, a north side enclave of old money and young bohemians, another world from the Gold Coast they'd known as children, their father's world. They'd both left that behind, but each in their own way. Max's flight was physical, intellectual, demarcated by distance and great passages of time. When he left Hyde Park, he did so with the intention of never returning. He'd imagined the whole city going black behind him as his train rolled out, imagined that if he pushed the memories down deeply, they'd eventually shrivel and fade. Elsie, on the other hand, required neither time nor distance to make herself anew. A few months after her marriage to John (the marriage took place before a magistrate at City Hall), the new couple had purchased the drafty Victorian with plenty of space for letting at low rent to former students, local artists, writers, agitators, aimless types who they hoped would contribute to the character of
the place or to their own amusement. This was the quality he admired most in his sister; she did as she pleased and never questioned her right to do it; she was fearless and open to the world.

IT WAS MID-AFTERNOON
by the time they arrived at her house. The door to the flat was open, the living room flooded with light. It was the type of house she and Max imagined for themselves when they played make-believe as children—a grand piano in the corner, stacks of sheet music and towers of books. All the windows thrown open. And beside one window a birdhouse with a blue canary perched on a swing. Closer to the kitchen, the smell of lemons and clover. Beyond the windows and the lines of poplars, the throb of the city's north side, close enough to feel but out of sight. As he followed Elsie up the stairs he couldn't help but wonder how his life might be different if he lived in a house like this, a neighborhood like this. Would he crave less meaning? Would he want different things? The guest room was as welcoming as the rest of the house, a small square room with a tidy bed draped in yellow linen, a bureau, and lamp and daisies on the nightstand.

“Take your time and unpack,” his sister said. “I suppose I should throw something together for supper.”

Upstairs, he emptied his suitcase and washed his hands and face, then sat before the window and watched two boys pass on bikes below. In the yard across the street, a woman was gardening. The mailman was hurrying up the stoop.

“Are you coming, Max?” his sister called. “John's home early. I'm making a pitcher of Tom Collins and no one can stop me. What do you say to that? Come down and drink with us and tell us all about your life.”

He did as instructed, came downstairs, shook his brother-in-law's hand, accepted a drink. They sat on the porch, sipped their cocktails, and made small talk until Elsie announced her stomach was growling. Then they returned to the dining room where the table was set.

“How's Utica treating you?” John said. “They have a good amateur orchestra?”

“Couldn't say. I suppose they might.”

“A small town needs three things to make it bearable. A good amateur orchestra. A good diner. And a bookstore. Everything else you can do without.”

“Easy for us to say,” said Elsie.

“You're very lucky,” Max said. “I've always loved this part of the city.”

“You going to stay and visit a few weeks?” John asked.

“Wish I could, but no. I'm only here for a conference. A friend of mine asked me to go, and I couldn't get around it.”

“Yes, tell us about this conference. Is it only for rabbis?” Elsie asked. She was coming back from the kitchen with a plate of chicken. John put his arm around her waist, held her there until she swatted him on the back.

“It's not for rabbis, in particular. It's a rescue conference. A conference for the leaders of different organizations, a chance to put heads together, figure out how we can help with the crisis in Europe.”

“That doesn't sound like much fun at all, Max,” his sister said. “That sounds terribly depressing. Will it be helpful, though? Is there anything to be done?”

“Sure. There's always something to be done. The question is whether or not we do it. It's a matter of will, not ability.”

“I don't know,” John said, passing Max the plate of meat. “I have to think if there were any reasonable thing to be done, FDR would be doing it.”

“John adores our president,” Elsie said. “He writes the man love letters.”

“Make fun. Fine. I'm not ashamed. I happen to think that when a man saves a country from economic collapse, he deserves a bit of respect.”

”He has a shrine erected near the radio for his evening talks. It's John's temple, over there.”

“The man's sensible, that's all. A sensible, intelligent human being in the Oval Office. He's been there eight years, and I still can't quite believe it. He explains. He doesn't condescend. He presents things as they are and then says what needs to be done in a calm, well-reasoned fashion. How does such a man rise to the highest office in a country full of crazies, of idiots and bigots and loons? You read the papers. You've heard what's going on in Boston with the Coughlinites. And New York, too. Washington Heights. Synagogues vandalized. Jewish kids beaten up for no reason. Of course, the anti-Semites, they always give a reason. When it comes to picking on Jews, the gentiles have a million reasons: Those Jews, they keep to themselves too much or not enough; they're too frugal or they spend too much money; they're overly cultured or hopelessly crass. So they break windows and beat up kids. All this happening while we've got a man like Gerald L.K. Smith well on his way to becoming the next US Senator from Michigan. Anti-Semitic, anti-Roosevelt, anti-refugee, anti-Europe, anti–New Deal, anti-everything. And the Christians, they love him. They eat the stuff up.”