An Unfinished Season (22 page)

You said you liked Chicago, I persisted.

I do. Chicago's where I'm from. It's not where I'm going. Chicago's large, Wils. It's just not large enough.

I was at a loss. Greenwich Village had come from nowhere. Probably Aurora had a friend who lived there or she had read something, a novel or a biography, that had mentioned Greenwich Village in an attractive way, an unbuttoned neighborhood where a young woman could go about her life unsupervised. Greenwich Village was often in the news, usually something to do with outrageous bohemian conduct. Maybe Brando had said something amusing about Greenwich Village, making it seem as exotic as a foreign capital—though it did not appear that Aurora had found Chicago especially confining. How large, exactly, did a city need to be? But I could see the appeal of Greenwich Village, a cosmopolitan appeal reaching across class divisions; no doubt Brando would have had something to say about that as well. When you came down to it, Chicago was still the Midwest, the landlocked heartland—and suddenly the University of Chicago looked drab, a provincial backwater no more than an hour's drive from Quarterday. Henry Laschbrook had told me that even the Reds came from small towns like Hibbing and Ely, wintry Norwegian and German boys heavy with grievance owing to the industrial struggles of the Iron Range. There would also be a contingent from Chicago itself, earnest high school valedictorians who did not wish to study physics too far from home. Meanwhile, my Aurora would be in Morningside Heights, the edge of the continent.

I said, Who told you about Greenwich Village?

Nobody, she said. I've always liked the idea of it.

What, particularly—

It's not-here, she said briskly. That's the first thing. And the second thing and the third thing. When I did not reply, she tugged at my arm. Time to go.

I said, That skull's a bad omen.

It can't be a bad omen for you. It doesn't belong to you.

It doesn't belong to your father, either. It belongs to whoever lived inside it.

Whatever you say, she said.

It could be anybody, I said.

I don't believe in omens, she said.

We dressed in her bedroom. I finished first, happy to be rid of Jack Brule's robe, and wandered again into the corridor and stood looking into the consulting room once more. What could you know of a human being from the room where he did his work, listening hard to the deepest fears and the most private secrets and struggling to find coherence and, from coherence, a remedy; and out of sight on the bottom shelf of a glassed-in bookcase, a memento mori. An outsider could only guess at the contours of his life, the hills and the valleys and the caverns beneath them. I had known him only as an aloof presence at North Shore dances, a slender figure in a well-cut tuxedo who refused to dance. Now I knew that he had found himself in the occasion of danger and survived. He had not sought it but had not excused himself, either; and the event stayed with him. He carried it around like a wallet. How much of him was passed down to his daughter, other than the wide-set eyes, the pride, and the refusal to let things go? I knew that the training of psychiatrists included their own psychoanalysis and I wondered if that had been, for him, a success. And what, in his terms, would constitute “success”?

I'll only be a minute, Aurora called from the bedroom.

At any moment I expected the front door to fly open and a French farce to ensue, a hasty retreat, shouts, threats, mistaken identities, and finally a rowdy exit from her bedroom window.

Take your time, I said.

I felt as if I had been in this apartment half my lifetime, and knew it as well as I knew my family's house in Quarterday. I realized I was making too much of too little, but that was my habit. Loving Aurora, patrolling her father's rooms without his knowledge or permission, searching for his past—what of it I would gather through the photographs and framed documents and souvenirs, and what he had said to me and how he had said it, and what Consuela had disclosed—I knew I was trespassing, but suspected also that Jack Brule had invited me in. I had been staring at Aurora's photograph, a candid made when she was little, perhaps six years old, her fists at her side, hair wet from a bathing pool, an expression of utmost truculence, cheeks ballooning in disappointment. Something had been withheld, or a promise broken; and if I had asked her about it, I had no doubt she would remember what it was. I felt like an astronomer at a telescope watching the birth of a star changing shape before my eyes. She in no way resembled what she became, except for the truculence.

I heard a door slam in the street and Consuela's complaint delivered in a throaty contralto:
Jackie, I think we should get up there right now.
I turned unwillingly from the consulting room and went in search of Aurora. She appeared from her room wearing a skirt and a shortsleeve sweater, running a comb through her hair. Her glasses were perched on the end of her nose. When we heard the whine of the elevator, she turned and pointed down the corridor, the private entrance for the doctor's patients. We hurried through it and waited, then rushed down the stairs to the lobby. We fled the apartment like thieves in the night except we were laughing, pausing in the street long enough to look up at the third-floor windows. Jack Brule and Consuela stood in the half-light of the living room in their formal clothes looking like any well-to-do couple home from an evening out, the theater and dinner later, and only moments before bedtime. Consuela said something and Aurora's father seemed to shake his head in disgust; and then his hands went to his temples and his shoulders sagged as if from a great burden. Aurora had told me of his headaches and I supposed this was one. Then the lights abruptly went out and Jack and Consuela were visible no more. Aurora and I hurried off down the street in the direction of the all-night restaurant on Clark Street. I could not erase the sight of Jack Brule's fingers on his temples and the sway of his body. I was in awe of him, yes; but I was afraid of him also.

A
WEEK LATER
, my last day at the paper, Tilleman instructed me to be at the state's attorney's office at ten o'clock sharp to pick up two copies of a grand jury indictment and return at once to the newsroom, flank speed. Word was that the grand jury had charged one of Chicago's leading Mafiosi with racketeering, loansharking, extortion, and intimidation of witnesses. This is news, Tilleman said. It's been a long while since anyone thought to enforce the law on our local hoods. Our readers will want to know the particulars. It'll be chaos at the state's attorney's office, so arrive early, and here's fare for the taxi back.

And then you can have the rest of the day off, in recognition of your valuable assistance this summer.

Tilleman gave me a worn dollar bill from his own wallet, a kind of ceremony signaling the importance of the assignment. The paper rarely gave cab fare for anything except a four-alarm schoolhouse fire or a love-nest slaying.

Thank you, I said.

We've never had anyone in the office quite like you, Tilleman said. You're a North Shore kid, one of a kind, hard to figure out. Tell me this. Did you enjoy yourself in my newsroom, Ravan?

I did, I said.

Like the atmosphere, do you?

I do, I said. I've learned a lot.

What? he said. What have you learned?

I hesitated, uncertain exactly what it was that I had learned except how to place a bet with a bookie and how to hold a telephone tucked between my shoulder and my ear and speak so that I could not be heard five feet away. Then I remembered the colored woman found frozen in an alley on the South Side, the woman without a name or an address, now a missing person. I said, I learned there are some stories you'll never get to the bottom of. You'll try and try and come up empty. And those are the most interesting stories of all, and the ones that people remember because the question remains unanswered. Years later, they'll say, What do you suppose ever happened to that woman, found frozen solid?

Tilleman said, Horseshit. Those are the stories that people forget. You'll never be a reporter. He pronounced the word ruh-
porter.
Tilleman smiled thinly, and thought a long moment while he tapped his pencil against the paste pot. He said, You're the oldest god damned nineteen-year-old I've ever met. I think you were born middle-aged, and that's your trouble. Curiosity is child-like. My best reporters never grew up. I don't think you enjoy
finding things out.
Finding things out is for the proles. Find something out, you do away with guess work. You do away with romance. You like guess work because you think everything's a mystery. You like mystery. You don't care much for the truth. But that's not what reporters do. When reporters find things out, they demystify. They don't have to like what they find. In most cases, they don't care what they find. Liking and caring don't come into it, the reporter's trade. When you're on the job, you dig; and what you dig up goes into the newspaper. If it's gold, it goes on page one. If it's brass, it goes inside. That's the incentive, you see. Page one. But you're not interested in digging, one crisp fact after another until you have a story that people will buy the newspaper to read, because the story's satisfying. It's nourishing. It's scrambled eggs and bacon. It's well told. But you don't care what satisfies people, what makes them buy the paper day after day. You don't want to be below decks, doing the digging, shoveling coal into the hotbox, making the engines run. I think you're interested in topside. You're interested in navigation. You want to be on deck with the sextant, charting the course. You want clean hands. And you want the wheel.

The skipper, I said.

Tilleman waved his arms in great arcs, his face red with anger. Skipper! he shouted. You couldn't skipper a rowboat. Hell no, the hurricane's blowing force nine but you don't notice it because you're trying to find the stars with a fucking sextant. There aren't any stars, Ravan. It's a hurricane and you can't see the stars. They might as well not exist.

Maybe they exist on the North Shore, he added.

So you better go back to Lake Forest, or wherever you come from.

Help that daddy of yours break the union.

Goodbye, Ravan. Good luck.

Good luck to you, I said, a reply that in the circumstances was just this side of insolent. I decided to fire two last shots.

You're wrong, you know, about the colored woman. And wrong about my father.

But the city editor had already turned away to say something to one of the reporters standing patiently at his elbow, feigning indifference to the tirade just concluded—and I noticed now for the first time that Tilleman's desk gave no hint of his private life. Instead, it was an inventory of the tools of his trade, a Royal typewriter with copy paper next to it, a paste pot, a box of paper clips, a Swingline stapler, number one pencils points-up in a plain white coffee mug, Scotch tape, a gum eraser, a Webster's dictionary, Fowler's
Modern English Usage,
Lennart's street guide to Chicago, a railroad schedule, and a telephone directory. There was nothing personal on the surface of his desk, no mementos, no pictures of the family or of himself with local celebrities, a saloonkeeper, alderman, or sports hero, unless you counted the ashtray with a faded logo of the Chicago White Sox. The same was true of the reporters' desks, strictly anonymous, some desks messier than others but otherwise interchangeable. It was as if the occupants of the newsroom had no life beyond it, certainly no life worth being reminded of, and nothing therefore to compromise their professional objectivity. A photograph of a wife or sweetheart or parents or children would be considered unforgivably sentimental—and then I wondered if the reverse was also true, that their homes would contain no hint of their daytime life, and somehow I doubted that. The pull of the newsroom was a twenty-four-hour affair.

I left at once for the state's attorney's office, thinking all the while of Tilleman's animus and wondering how much of it was personal and how much related to my father's business and deciding to have a final word with him; but when I returned to the newsroom, Tilleman was nowhere in sight. I put copies of the indictment on his desk and headed to the cashier's office to collect my last week's wages, thirty-five dollars and seventy cents. Along the way I stopped to say goodbye to the reporters I'd come to know, Henry Laschbrook and Ed Hoskins. I knew in my bones that we would never meet again, and so did they. For me, it was the last day of summer camp. I was leaving but the counselors were staying on, and as we talked I got the idea that this newsroom world would soon expire like a dying star. The rattle of the wire service machines in the corner, the pop of the pneumatic tubes that rushed copy to the composing room, the eyeshades and Tilleman's paste pot and gum eraser, had the antique look of a silent movie. Windows were thrown open to the heavy August air, and you could hear horns and sirens and the clank of the El and all the notes of Chicago's industrial hum.

Henry and Ed had heard the exchange between Tilleman and me—in the newsroom, no conversation was ever private, except telephone conversations—and said I shouldn't worry about it. Not everyone was cut out to be a newspaper reporter, a specific craft requiring a specific outlook on life, low pay, long hours, deadlines, anxiety, with nothing to show for it at the end nf the day but a piece in the paper, edited by cranks, read by straphangers, here today, gone tomorrow. Most reporters were burned out at fifty, no good for anything but the obit desk, and the only thing to be said for the job was that it was—just a hell of a lot of fun, being in the know. In any case, the city editor's bite was worse than his bark, ha-ha, but he wasn't such a bad guy really, underneath. He was worried about his job, same as they all were. Ozias Tilleman had a reputation to maintain, “that of prick.”

But we were all a little surprised, Henry said.