Chicago (2 page)

I was then only a couple of years removed from my teenage years, and so quite used to sleeping late on the weekends, but after sleeping in late on my first Saturday in Chicago, and waking at noon to the scent of those extraordinary pastries filling the whole building, and rushing downstairs to find her stall still redolent but long empty, I never again missed a chance to get on line, sleepy and rumpled, outside Mrs Manfredi's storage stall, and for one dollar buy three warm glowing holy amazing empanadas, which she served in a tiny brown paper bag. On average I would guess that easily half the empanadas made in the basement were eaten on the spot, and most of the rest were gone minutes after Mrs Manfredi sold them to shops along Broadway, where customers waited for her to trundle in, smelling of garlic and spinach; and more than once, according to Edward, a resident or customer also quietly ate the tiny brown paper bag, to get the very last drop of Mrs Manfredi's genius. This sounds hard to believe, but in all the time I lived in that building I never knew Edward to stretch a fact; not even in service to what I soon discovered to be a wry and capricious sense of humor.

 

2.

EDWARD AND MR PAWLOWSKY
lived in 4B, the windows of which faced west “for the last sad fading light of afternoon,” said Mr Pawlowsky; 4B was also closest to the narrow staircase that led to the roof, and it was up on the roof that I saw him most in the beginning, before the snows arrived in December. He was a serious student of astronomy and of the guitarist Wes Montgomery, and he and Edward would go up on the roof on clear nights and gaze at the stars while playing Wes Montgomery quietly on an ancient record player that actually had, no kidding, a crank-handle. One of the first amazing things I saw in Chicago was Edward diligently cranking the record player; when I remarked on this to Mr Pawlowsky, however, he smiled and said it would be a significantly cooler feat for Edward to select and play the records, which Edward did not like to do because he worried his claws would score the grooves.

“A legitimate worry on his part,” said Mr Pawlowsky, “and not one I can easily dispel, not having claws myself, but it leaves the choice of music entirely to me, which means it is poor old Wes all the time. I sometimes wonder if Edward loves poor old Wes as much as I do, but he is not much for complaint. Although who could complain about poor old Wes? You never heard such lovely music in all your life. Worked all day making radios in a factory and then played the guitar at night, which is maybe why he died young. We play his music at night because Wes played at night. He was not even fifty when he died, poor old Wes. A man of the middle of America, born and lived in Indianapolis most of his life, and died there too. He had seven children. Imagine your dad coming home from the radio factory and sitting to dinner and smiling and listening to each child explain his or her day and then getting them all started on their chores and homework and kissing his wife Serene with the deepest affection and reverence and then he carries his miraculous guitar to the club for a show and then to another club for some jamming after hours with other men who are absorbed by the magic of the music. Edward believes you can hear the weary grace and courage of the man in his music, and something of the thrum of his children at the table, and the gentle tumult of his life, in his unusual harmonics. I am not so sure about this but Edward knows more about music than I do. He is for example a serious student of the music of the great guitarist Django Reinhardt, who of course influenced Wes Montgomery, but we do not play Django up here at night, partly because when we did so once Edward got excited and started dancing and nearly fell off the roof, and partly because someone who used to live in 3E complained bitterly about the
noise,
as he said. He moved very soon thereafter, and his name has never been mentioned since in the building. Can you imagine someone calling the music of Django Reinhardt
noise
? And yet that actually happened, as Edward can attest.”

*   *   *

This was how Mr Pawlowsky talked, gently and thoroughly, ranging freely from past to present to past, often on the roof, that burnished autumn, but also in his apartment, which I visited occasionally, initially because of imbroglios with keys and window putty and plumbing fixtures, but later just because I enjoyed his company, and Edward's.

I remember the first time I went up to 4B that it was Edward who opened the door when I knocked, and I found Mr Pawlowsky huddled in a chair by the window, under several faded blue blankets adorned with the fouled-anchor logo of the United States Navy. He was smiling but clearly worn and weary, and that day it was Edward who dealt with my small problem; I discovered later from Edward that Mr Pawlowsky was subject to fits of illness or weariness that sometimes lasted two or three days, and left him huddled in his chair reading the letters and speeches of Abraham Lincoln while shivering under his Navy blankets. Because of these spells of illness, Edward gave me to understand, Mr Pawlowsky patched together a living from several part-time jobs as a jack-of-all-trades (plumbing, electricity, carpentry, general repair, and some custodial labor) for the temple on the corner, for the local grocery store, for a grade school three blocks north, and for several shops of various kinds on Broadway, including the gyro shop with the greatest lamb gyros in the history of the world, on Broadway near Roscoe Street. I believe his labor and Edward's also paid the rent in our apartment building, but I never asked the details.

Their apartment, I noticed that day, was what you would call spare, or spartan: there were two beds, two reading chairs, a small wooden table with two spindly wooden chairs, a record player that seemed to be made completely of brass, and very little else except a whole wall of books and records and maps and maritime instruments and implements—“the ephemera of the sea, the detritus of mother ocean, the poor bits and pieces by which we try to navigate the oldest and largest wilderness,” as Mr Pawlowsky once said, in a lyrical mood. Their tiny kitchen was as sparse and neat as the rest of the apartment, with two pots and two pans and a few utensils hanging in rows along the wall, arranged exactly like a ship's galley. Over the sink was the only artwork I noticed in the apartment, other than the maps: a small photograph of Abraham Lincoln, positioned so that the person washing dishes would be looking directly into the president's eyes.

“A certain communion with Mr Lincoln, I find, restores the spirit of endurance when courage quivers and quails,” said Mr Pawlowsky from under his blankets, when I asked about the photograph, “and his effect is even more pronounced on Edward; when he is dim and weary I bring the photograph down to where he can contemplate it at length, and it seems to cheer him up wonderfully.”

*   *   *

While Edward and Mr Pawlowsky lived on the fourth floor west, Miss Elminides lived on the third floor east, in a sort of alcove or bay in the building; it took me a couple of weeks to notice that the building was asymmetrical, and there was no equivalent bay on the west side. Mr Pawlowsky was of the opinion that the original owner of the building, Miss Elminides' grandfather, whom no living resident had ever met, had presciently designed the building for his granddaughter's residence, though it must have been designed and built long before Miss Elminides was born. No one could remember anyone other than Miss Elminides ever living in the bay room, and even Mr Pawlowsky, who knew everything about the building and the neighborhood, could not remember exactly when Miss Elminides had arrived—six years ago, ten, twelve? Edward was sure it was ten, and that she had looked exactly the same as she looked now, and that her arrival had something to do with a change in her family fortunes at about that time. The grandfather had given or deeded the building to Miss Elminides, and she had taken up residence in the bay room, and there she had lived ever since, elegant and gracious. Neither Edward nor Mr Pawlowsky had the slightest idea how old she was, or if she was a Chicago native, or what she did during the day when she was away from the building; Edward was of the opinion that she was a teacher, based on her weekday attire and warm personality, but Mr Pawlowsky said he knew nothing whatsoever of her career other than that she took the Broadway bus, and had a seat of her own, right behind the driver; one time when she had been bedridden with pneumonia the bus driver and several of his passengers had actually come to the building to check on her—which, as Mr Pawlowsky said, tells you a great deal about the esteem with which she is rightly held by anyone who knows her at all in the least.

*   *   *

While no one had ever met Miss Elminides' grandfather, he was, in a sense, very well known in the building, for Miss Elminides loved to tell stories about him: how he had a mustache as big as a large bird, and how he could play any instrument at all within minutes of cradling it reverently in his hands, and how he was a wonderful swimmer, and had once swum the Hellespont in Turkey, which is the body of water that separates Europe from Asia, and which was a mile wide where he chose to cross. The Hellespont, said her grandfather, had two competing currents, one flowing north and the other south; an apt and suitable metaphor for the sad history there, as he said. Even more amazing than once swimming across the Hellespont, said Miss Elminides, was the fact that her grandfather had swum right
back
across it, because he had left his pants in Asia, and did not wish to wander around pantless, like Lord Byron. Pants, said her grandfather, are
important,
and we take them for granted, and they do not get the respect and adulation they deserve. You never see a statue of the man who invented pants, for example, whereas there are endless statues of men brandishing swords and rifles and pistols, as if brandishing implements by which we steal the life from fellow holy beings is an admirable thing, more laudable than the genius of pants. By rights there ought to be a statue in every self-respecting sensible city of a man brandishing pants, or a frying pan, or a beer mug, to celebrate inventions that clearly and inarguably made life better. But no—civic statuary bristles with lions where there were never lions, rotund mountebanks who were once mayors, admirals who never sailed anywhere within a thousand miles of the city, senators and other thieves, and even
writers,
God help us all, as if scribbling with a pen was an act so admirable that we must devote civic funds and honest stone to its adulation. You would be better devoting a series of statues to dogs than to poets and playwrights and such; which is the more useful class of being, I ask you that? Which one could lead you out of a snowstorm, and which would be more likely to intelligently deal with you slipping and falling and snapping your ankle in the park? The one would write a sonnet; the other would go and get a policeman.

*   *   *

Indeed there were no statues of dogs in Chicago, that Edward knew about, although there were, to the city's credit,
four
statues of Abraham Lincoln—the Young Lincoln, sitting on a tree stump reading, at the Chicago Public Library; the Standing Lincoln at Lincoln Park, by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who had actually seen the president alive, and later mourned bitterly as Lincoln's casket trundled past him in the street; another seated Lincoln, also by Saint-Gaudens, in Grant Park; and the famous Rail-Splitter in Garfield Park, which depicted the young man Lincoln holding an ax. There were also all sorts of the usual motley historical, hagiographic, comical, and religious statues and sculptural representations in the city, as Mr Pawlowsky observed, most notably the famous Picasso Something or Other, between Dearborn and Clark streets.

“Edward and I stop by that thing every time we are downtown on the social ramble,” said Mr Pawlowsky, “and it is either the sculptor's genius or idiocy that you cannot tell exactly what it is supposed to represent or invoke, and to his eternal credit he never explained it. I believe it is a sort of a horse, and if you study the work of the sculptor you notice that he was obsessed by horses and women. You also notice that he was an unbelievable ass, a bully and a satyr of epic proportions, a self-absorbed little wizened pickle of a man, but this is another entire discussion, how great art can be made by unbelievable idiots, if indeed his statue downtown is great art. I believe it actually
is
great art, in part because it seems to mean something different every time you contemplate it, plus it has an airy angled soaring wit I rather enjoy. Edward believes it is about dogness, and on snowy days I can see what he is getting at there, but on sunny days I believe it to be a comment on the angular faces and heroic noses of horses, myself. But you will have to go see for yourself and come to your own conclusions. Some people think it is a large joke, and others think it is the sculptor thumbing his satyrical nose at the very people who paid him handsomely for his steel idea, and others think it is an immense grasshopper, and still others are absolutely sure it is a woman, or a wry comment on femininity, and I am sure there are people who get off the bus on Dearborn Street every blessed day and have never even noticed what appears to be a fifty-foot cricket a few feet away. It would be easy to sigh over the blinkered existence of such people, but as Edward has reminded me, the very fact that they have
not
noticed means that the possibility always exists that they
will
notice; and isn't that a cheerful thought, that today or tomorrow might be the morning when one blessed sleepy soul steps off the bus, and something about the angle of the light makes her look up for once, and she
sees
the statue for the first time, as if it had been dropped from the starry heavens onto the square that very morning?”

 

3.

THAT AUTUMN WAS THE LOVELIEST
crispest brightest clearest bracingest autumn I ever saw, and I used every brilliant minute I could find to explore my new neighborhood. I ran up and down the lakefront for miles in either direction, dribbling my shining old basketball with either hand, spinning around startled passersby and infuriating their dogs. I walked up and down Broadway for miles, poking into shops and stores and alleys to get a sense of the smells and sights and flavors and old brick music of the city. I walked west as far as I could, so far that I had to take buses home, so far that sometimes I would walk through Estonian and Lithuanian and Greek and Irish and Italian and Polish and Guatemalan neighborhoods one after another, changing languages and scents and music by crossing the street. I made a concerted effort to meet our neighborhood cop, on the theory that familiarity might breed an eventually necessary break. I wandered into the temple on the corner at the lake end of the street, and registered to vote as a Chicago resident, claiming to be six feet six inches tall when the rude woman registering new voters never bothered to look up from her mounds of paper. I did visit the fading convent a block south, and bought a bed and table and chair for fifty dollars all told, and wrestled them back to my building and up the stairs, with Edward's assistance. I found a pitted basketball court three blocks north, in a school playground which turned out to be exactly on the borderline between the territories of the Latin Kings and the Latin Eagles, the dominant street gangs on the north side of the city; because the border was clear and established, and because schools and playgrounds were apparently neutral ground for gangs, visitors like me were tolerated, after it became clear that I was a resident of the neighborhood.