Chicago (15 page)

His voice trailed off and again he sat silently. Edward got up and ambled over to him, bringing the blanket, and they sat together for a while. I offered to go get some tea but they declined and I got the hint and went downstairs and went to bed.

*   *   *

All through May the White Sox battled to stay near the top of the American League West, and slowly the attendance rose as wary fans, long inured to early-season fireworks followed by mid-season collapses, began to cautiously trust the South Side Hit Men, as they were now being called, for their unearthly slugging—Jim Spencer drove in eight runs in one game, and Richie Zisk hit a ball deep into the center-field bleachers on May 22, the longest home run anyone could remember at Comiskey. I was at that game with Denesh and little Azad, who had never seen a baseball game before, and who was intimidated by the press of the crowd until the boy next to him, a boy of nine or ten who had come all the way up from southern Illinois for the game, made a concerted effort to be friendly and explain things. I was much impressed with this child's empathy, and for some reason remember his name: Jeffrey Tweedy, who later became a musician, I understand. Azad was crushed when the Sox lost to the Tigers, although Denesh was thrilled at watching Sox pitcher Wilbur Wood, who threw soft knuckleballs that Denesh said would be called “googlies” in cricket—a word Azad and I repeated with high glee all the way home.

The apartment building was also curiously filled with energy and anticipation that month, and Edward and I began to chart the various projects and ideas and conspiracies being hatched to assist Miss Elminides with finishing off the Third Awkwardness once and for all. Mrs Manfredi continued to inch up her production of empanadas, and expand her distribution network, helped greatly by a glowing review in the
Chicago Reader
newspaper. The dapper businessmen in 3A and 3B, predicting a tremendous rise in the neighborhood's gay and lesbian population in the years to come, opened a curious store that sold clothing, scents and spices, lovely tiny silver earrings, tasteful tattoos done by a slender man from Liberia, and dashing shoes and boots. The Scottish tailor who lived across the hall from me with the detective donated every Wednesday's profits from his work to Mr Pawlowsky, “
Adhbhar,
for the cause,” as he said. The hermit brother in 3D, delighted by his winnings on Kentucky Derby day, began to play the horses steadily and successfully, with Mr McGinty's guidance, and even once went out to Arlington Park with his brother in 3E, although they took separate trains there and back. The two young women from Arkansas in 4E arranged and conducted a ten-kilometer charity run along the lake, advertising it in support of Greek independence from tyranny, which was technically accurate, said the former sailor in the basement, who worked the event as security. The man who once had raised cheetahs, about whom I never discovered anything else, despite the fact that he lived two doors down from me in 2D for more than a year, walked into Mr Pawlowsky's apartment one evening, and handed him a roll of hundred-dollar bills—two thousand dollars in all. According to Edward the money had come from the sale of “assets,” the cheetah man had said, which Edward found fascinating—did that mean he owned cheetahs elsewhere, or had percentages in racing cheetahs, or leased cheetahs to zoos, or had some relationship with cheetahs in the wild such that he could draw on a standing account? That which we do not know will always outweigh that which we do know or think we know, as Mr Pawlowsky once said, while discussing religions.

It was inconceivable that Miss Elminides was unaware of the burble of activity in the building, but if anything she became even more remote, and I saw her only once in the month of May—a meeting I remember vividly to this day, for it was the first time we spoke at some length, and the first time I got a sense of her past and personality. Curiously our conversation was not in the building but out by the lake, where I found her sitting on the seawall staring out at the darkening water late one afternoon. I ran right past her, dribbling my basketball, intent on working on my weak (left) hand, and it was another minute or so before I registered that the quiet dark-haired woman with her knees drawn up under her chin was my landlady.

Most of me instantly wanted to keep going, and dribble faster, and avoid the moment, for I was shy and uncertain with women in general, and not at all confident that I could be discreet and not mention the seethe of projects among the building's residents, but I was also as curious then as I am now about people—my greatest virtue, I suppose, except when it is a vice. Anyway I spun around and walked back to her, not dribbling, and asked if I might sit a moment and chat, and she said yes of course please do, and I joined her on the wall.

She said that she liked to watch the lake especially in the evening, as it reminded her powerfully of the sea. Even when she was young, she said, she was convinced that what people called the Aegean and Ionian and Mediterranean seas were all fingers of the great ocean, and that there was in the end one vast ocean that was the true earth, with islands small and huge as its guests, or passengers, or interlopers; maybe landforms are merely suffered temporarily by the ocean, which will eventually whelm them, she said. Even the lake before us, she thought, was in truth an extended finger of this great ocean, which is why it had tides, as it rose and fell in rhythms originating with the ocean, which itself yearned for the moon.

Even then, in my first year as a journalist, I had already learned the cardinal rules of my profession, which are to ask questions and then listen intently without interrupting; people will talk freely and surprisingly honestly if you give them a chance, an opening, a window, a genuinely interested ear, and I was
very
interested, partly because Miss Elminides was such a mystery to us all, and partly because I had such respect for Mr Pawlowsky, and admired him and wished him well, and knew of his feelings for Miss Elminides; and I suppose I thought that perhaps, if I listened carefully, I might glean something that would somehow inch them closer together. Not that I was any kind of matchmaker, but I was even then beginning to sense that stories were the true seeds of relationships, and that romance and friendship were as much a matter of shared stories as pheromones, or overlapping interests.

So she talked, and I listened, and here and there when she paused overlong I asked a question, and she relaxed, and talked about growing up on a beach in Greece, with her grandparents (she never did mention her parents), and the foods she loved as a child, and the pet fox she had for years, and her grandmother's stories of spirits and angels everywhere around them, and her grandfather's stories of Chicago, the greatest city in the greatest country in the world, the city where someday she could live if all went well and she did well in school, and the little fishing boat her grandfather used, and the songs the neighbors sang every Thursday, a holy day for them (she did not know their religion, but it had something to do with Thursday being a holy day, on which they fasted until dark, and then feasted). She talked about the school she attended, and the other children of all sorts and shapes and predilections, including one boy who thought he was an owl, and was later institutionalized; and her first suitor, a boy who taught her to read maps and charts; and a girl who fell in love with her, and on finding her love unreciprocated, shaved off all her hair and locked herself in a church for two days. She talked a lot about her grandfather, who had sheaves of poems given to him by his friend the poet Konstantinos Kavafis, and her grandmother, whose death, when Miss Elminides had just turned twenty, was the proximate cause of her granddaughter coming to America.

I think I will remember that story all the rest of my life, in part because night had fallen and I could hardly see Miss Elminides' face, so that her voice came gently out of the dark, disembodied; and because I think she had almost forgotten that I was there, and was telling the story to herself, in a sense, perhaps to better understand it.

The grandmother had failed slowly, eaten by some secret interior disease, so that she shrank day by day; she never seemed in any pain, said Miss Elminides, but she did seem mournful, for there was never anyone who loved being alive and talking to spirits and angels and laughing and cooking and eating and singing more than Grandmother did. When she died I was on one side of the bed and Grandfather was on the other. We each held a hand. When she died you could see the spirit go out of her body. My grandfather left a window open so her spirit could go home to the ocean. A few days later we packed up my things and he took me to the ship and I came to America. He said it would be wrong to fly in an airplane and I had to come by sea. He said that Grandmother's death was the end of the first part of my life and now it was time for me to begin the second part, in Chicago, and that once I knew what the second part would be, I would also know the third and final part. He said that all lives are lived in three parts like that. He said that the best part of his life, the second part, was his twenty years with me and Grandmother in the little house on the beach, and that now he had to go live his own third part. He said that he personally would love to live the third part of his life with me, as I lived my second part, but that this would be wrong, and he and Grandmother had talked about it and come to an agreement, and he would honor that agreement, although his sadness at our parting was greater than the great ocean itself. He said that he and Grandmother had provided for me such that I would be able to live safely in Chicago, and that once I was established there, in lodgings he had arranged and secured, I would be able to find the work I was to do, and grow into the woman I was to be, and he knew in his heart, as he and Grandmother had discussed, that I would be an extraordinary person, famous not for the things of small accomplishment like money or beauty, but for generosity of spirit, which would be as a sun to those around me, and provide light and hope to those who were in darkness, and lift many hearts that were heavy.

I remember the lapping of small waves in the lake, and the whistle and boom of nighthawks diving for insects, and the swirl and splash of a large fish in the shallows, as we sat there silent for a while, after she finished; I knew enough not to ask any more questions, and finally she said that she must be getting back to the building, as she had to be up quite early the next morning; I mumbled something like thanks and she said thank you for listening, heaven alone knows why all
that
came tumbling out, and she walked back home. I waited a couple of minutes to give her some privacy and then followed, not dribbling; somehow it didn't seem right to dribble in the street at night, even under the dim streetlamps. When I got home I thought about going up to see Edward and Mr Pawlowsky but somehow I didn't feel like talking, and later when I went to bed I remember dreaming about beaches and owls and rustling sheaves of poems.

 

16.

LATE THAT MAY I WENT OUT
on the lake for the first time, and it happened like this. It turned out that Mr Pawlowsky and the former sailor in the basement had long talked about going into business together as a salvage concern, to locate and reclaim various treasures at the bottom of the lake; what with Mr Pawlowsky's naval experience and connections, and the sailor's knowledge of the lake's weathers and currents, they were convinced they could choose a few wrecks, locate and raise them without fanfare, and sell what was recoverable to collectors and museums and historical societies. The law allowed any licensed concern to salvage and sell what it could of long-lost shipping, and while the sailor, a student of lost Lake Michigan ferryboats and steamers, had a couple of legendary vessels in mind, Mr Pawlowsky was set on recovering an airplane that the Navy had lost in the lake in 1943—a Wildcat, a fighter jet that had crashed on a training flight and sunk without a trace. The pilot had escaped, but the location of the plane had never been recorded, and the Navy, desperately trying to win two wars abroad, had never taken the time to find or recover the craft. Mr Pawlowsky, however, had known both the pilot and the men who fished him out of the lake, and he had never forgotten their estimates of where the plane went down, and where it might yet be found.

He explained all this to me one glorious sunny morning as we walked down to Belmont Harbor, a little south along the lakefront, where the sailor was waiting in what looked exactly like a whaleboat, “because it
is
a whaleboat,” explained the sailor, who had borrowed it from a friend who ran a school for building wooden boats. I had never been farther into the lake than my knees before, and as we slid out of the little hooked harbor and into the lake proper I saw that Miss Elminides was right to be reminded of the sea; the lake stretched away endlessly in every direction, and the city shrank so quickly behind us that in minutes it looked like a tiny tourist's postcard, and then it vanished altogether, and we were alone on an immensity of deep blue-gray water.

All that morning, as the sailor fished for whitefish, which he called humpbacks and which he said were absolutely the best eating especially if you caught a big one of five pounds or so, Mr Pawlowsky explained about ships and shipwrecks in the lake, craft of every kind from huge freighters to tiny sloops, and those were just the ships that were
known
to be at the bottom of the lake, which was almost three hundred feet deep on average and almost a thousand feet down at its deepest point, at the northern end of the lake; up there was where he thought the truly huge lake sturgeon lived, beyond the reach of any fishery, and as no one knew how long sturgeon lived, there might well be sturgeon there who were old when Lincoln was alive, and who might well have heard him speak in Chicago, in 1858, when he said that the Declaration of Independence “will link patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.” It was just possible, said Mr Pawlowsky, that one of these sturgeon who were now ancient among their species, respected elders probably, were young bucks then, and adventurous, and had come down to Chicago to see the town, and sport in the shallows with their Illinois counterparts, committing foolery and horseplay, but perhaps also catching a voice ringing in the city, a voice they remembered to this day, and perhaps discussed in their mysterious councils in the murky depths of the lake.