Chicago (28 page)

I had gone around the building the night before and knocked on every door, even the nuns', to say goodbye. The librettist and I shook hands for a long time and talked about the White Sox and he said maybe someday he would come to Boston and work on an oratorio about the famous mayor James Michael Curley and we could go to a Red Sox game although it wouldn't be the same as this wild sweet hilarious amazing season with the South Side Hit Men. The two hermit brothers didn't answer their doors when I knocked, although the television volume was turned up when I knocked on the door of 3E, which I think was the hermit who had served as bookmaker with Edward on Kentucky Derby Day.

Ronald Donald the Scottish tailor also shook hands with me for a long time and said how he and the detective really should have made more of an effort to be better neighbors, being right across the hall and all, and he regretted not making more time for that, but he had enjoyed what time we did spend together, and wished me well, and sometimes the way to be a good neighbor was to just be friendly in small doses. The detective came out of the kitchen and shook hands briefly and said he had a baking emergency for which he hoped I would excuse him, which I did.

Little Eren was asleep by the time I got to their apartment but Azad was allowed to get up from bed and come out and shake hands with me in the hallway, sleepily, in his pajamas. His pajamas were covered with horses in all different colors. He said he would send me a baseball card of Richie Zisk as a surprise sometime and that would be funny. About five months later, just as the baseball season opened, I did get a Richie Zisk card in the mail, with a note from Mr Pawlowsky that Azad wanted me to know that Richie had gone over to the Texas Rangers.

I knew Mr McGinty was asleep by the time I got to his door, so I left him a note saying that I had really enjoyed his company and his kindness to me, and that I hoped he would think of me on Kentucky Derby Day, because I certainly would be thinking of him, the greatest horseplayer ever, no other candidates need apply. The man who raised cheetahs was not in his apartment or perhaps was asleep when I knocked. Sister Maureen answered right away when I knocked on her door (she was in 3B, with sisters flanking her on either side and four more upstairs in 4E and 4F) and she took me around to the other nuns' doors to shake hands, and then they presented me with six pears, one for every state I would pass through on my way to Boston. For some reason this was the one thing that made me cry that night.

I even went down in the basement to say goodbye to the sailor, who was swinging in a hammock in his stall. He climbed down and shook my hand and wished me well and said that he had always wanted to go to Boston, a city of undeniable maritime history and legend, and that if ever he made it there he would look me up and we could go out into Boston Harbor and see what there was to see, maybe even set foot on Old Ironsides, the famous American warship. On my way back upstairs I stopped for a moment to stare at Azad's horse and remember Eugenia the actress who had been in the Broncho Billy movies, and I stood by Mrs Manfredi's stall and inhaled the aroma of thousands of empanadas, and then I went upstairs to say goodbye to Mr Pawlowsky and Edward and Miss Elminides.

I found the three of them together in 4B, Edward making coffee and Miss Elminides and Mr Pawlowsky sitting together by the window. Miss Elminides was wrapped in the Navy blanket because she said she had a slight chill. It was odd to see Miss Elminides in the room, but refreshing to me that she fit so easily, and didn't seem at all out of place. I presented Edward and Mr Pawlowsky with a transistor radio, so that they could listen to Sox games on WMAQ, 670 on your AM dial, and they smiled, and I presented Miss Elminides with a copy of selected poems by the wonderful Greek poet Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis, and she was delighted, and Mr Pawlowsky presented me with an eleventh ham sandwich, in case of sandwich emergencies along the road. Edward presented me with a drawing of an alewife, framed with what appeared to be paint-stirring sticks. I still have the painting, which hangs above me as I write.

I remember still that we all sat there quietly for a while, Edward sitting by Miss Elminides, and Mr Pawlowsky fiddling with the radio; he found a Chicago Bulls basketball game, but he and Edward exchanged looks, and Mr Pawlowsky announced that in my honor they would wait until the White Sox started spring training to use the radio for anything other than the music Miss Elminides loved, which was generally on WNIB, 97.1 on your FM dial. Miss Elminides laughed at the orotund way he pronounced the call letters, and something about the way she looked at him and he looked at her and Edward looked at them thrilled me and made me sad and I waved goodnight and went downstairs to bed.

*   *   *

That next morning, before dawn, Edward put my duffel and my worn shiny basketball in the backseat (I wasn't carrying enough luggage to bother unlocking the trunk), and I arranged the thermos of coffee and ham sandwiches and pears and empanadas on the passenger seat where I could reach them easily while driving. Mrs Manfredi had wrapped the empanadas in such a way that a tiny wriggle of redolent steam emerged from the bag and instantly filled the car. It was a cold morning and I got the engine going to let the car warm up and then I just stood there in front of the apartment building with Edward for a few moments.

When I was a kid I thought that the biggest moments in life would be trumpeted and highlighted and italicized somehow, that you would know when they were coming and could get your feet set to brace for them, and you would know they were upon you, and make a satisfactory effort to memorialize and celebrate them, but it turns out that's not at all how it works, and the biggest moments of your life just amble up behind you and suddenly are just there without fanfare. You fall into and out of love without much drama, you stammer like an idiot as you propose to your girlfriend, your brother just stops breathing quietly without any notice that death has come, your daughter just slides out of your wife suddenly like an otter emerging from a burrow. It turns out that the biggest moments are a lot like the smallest moments, just trundling and shuffling along one after another, each one utterly normal and absolutely the most amazing moment ever. So we just stood there, Edward and me, that morning. We were looking at each other but not staring intently and meaningfully and emotionally like in the movies. I think now that we were maybe drinking in a long last look, each of us making sure we had the other one locked in good in memory, the shape and substance and carriage of body and rumple of hair and ripple of fur in the breeze off the lake. I suppose we stood there for five or six minutes and then I said I better go, and I went. Years later someone asked me why I did not reach out a hand to scratch his ears, and why he didn't sidle up against my legs like dogs do, and I tried to explain that Edward wasn't like that, and I wasn't like that with him, and that you would no sooner scratch his ears than you would rub Mr Pawlowsky's nose, or chuck Miss Elminides under the chin. It wasn't like that with Edward, not at all, which says something important about Edward, it seems to me.

*   *   *

I drove down our street. As I turned south the sun slid over the edge of the lake and the whole long line of buildings to my right lit up gently. I slowed down to savor the light splashing against the buildings like surf against cliffs. At Belmont Avenue I saw a bus that looked like the Sound Asleep Bus but the way it was angled I couldn't see the number or the driver. I wanted to honk in case it was Donald B. Morris, but then I thought he would be startled, and I didn't want to startle him, so I drove on, trying not to cry.

Down along the lake, past Diversey Harbor, past Abraham Lincoln Park, past the Navy Pier, past Ulysses Grant Park; past the ragged glories of the South Side, the curved seawall of 31st Street Harbor, past Andrew Jackson Park and Rainbow Beach; and then over the Calumet River, and onto the interstate highway, and then a moment later over the Illinois border into Indiana. I thought about stopping there by the
WELCOME TO INDIANA
sign, and meditating about exits and exiles and narrative closure and the endings of stories, and things like that, but there was too much hurtling traffic around me to stop safely, and what good would it have done, to weep by the side of the road over some arbitrary and ephemeral line of demarcation and departure?

To me crossing the Calumet River was the moment I left Chicago for good; somehow water was important and defining and crucial to the city, and it is bound and riven and defined by waters, from the lake bigger than many seas, to the pounding rain that fell in fall, to the little dirty rivers long ago imprisoned by concrete and steel. Years later I overheard someone disparage Chicago as a rare American city not built on a serious river, and instantly I saw the lake, cold and vast and wild, stretching so far in every direction that it had no end, water bigger than any river could imagine.

I drove through Indiana, state of the great journalist Ernie Pyle, state of cornfields and copses of oaks. Through Ohio, state of the great journalist Ambrose Bierce, state of soybeans and buckeyes. Through Pennsylvania, state of the great journalist Rachel Carson, state of mushrooms and beech trees. Almost to New York, state of the great journalist E. B. White, state of apples and maples …

It was near the east end of Pennsylvania, somewhere near the border with New York, somewhere near dusk, just about the time that even now reminds me of reading Walt Whitman aloud to Edward and Mr Pawlowsky, that I pulled over to stretch for a while by the side of the road. I remember there were beech trees as far as I could see up into a straddle of mountains, and I remember thinking that I had not seen a forest like that for a long time. I riffled through my duffel bag for a pear and a Springsteen cassette that was in there somewhere, and found a small package carefully wrapped in rough brown paper cut from a grocery store bag. For a moment I thought I should wait to open it until I got somewhere with more light, but my curiosity got the best of me, and I tore it open, and found seven pink Abraham Lincoln four-cent stamps, beautifully set between two narrow panes of glass, and framed with wood cut from paint-stirring sticks. There wasn't any note, but it wasn't like a note was necessary.

 

NOTES AND THANKS

To my amused bemused wise wry dad Jim Doyle, who quietly said to me one sunny Florida morning, “You know, those little stories and drawings you do about your years in Chicago, you ought to walk them out into a novel,” which was the proximate spark of the book in your hand; to my friend and former Chicago-journalism colleague Cathy O'Connell-Cahill at
U.S. Catholic
magazine in Chicago, whose appreciation of my stories and silly drawings, and pinning of them on her cubicle wall until the whole place was papered with Edward and Mr Pawlowsky, was an engine of all this; to my friend the masterful Boston businessman Christopher Conkey, for assistance in financial arcana; to the glorious two-volume set
Lincoln: Speeches and Writings 1832–1858
(volume one) and
1859–1865
(volume two), in which I swim all the time, always to my benefit; to the works of Harry Mark Petrakis and Saul Bellow and Robert Casey and Mike Royko, which told me piercing true stories about the city of Chicago; to Carl Sandburg, whose biography of Lincoln remains the best by an American (I think), and to the wonderful Welsh brilliance Jan Morris, whose
Lincoln
:
A Foreigner's Quest
is the best by an un-American (I know); to John Feister, editor of
St. Anthony Messenger
magazine, published by the Franciscan Friars of Ohio, who printed a version of the Muirin chapter of this book as the story “Born of the Sea”; to Leslee Goodman, editor of
Moon
magazine, who published a version of the Het chapter in her absorbing periodical; to my friend Karen Randolph, who found me an apartment in Chicago many years ago, and to my friend Christopher Doherty, who lived there with me for one hilarious summer of basketball and baked potatoes; and to my friend Eric Freeze, now a professor at Wabash College, in Indiana, who, while teaching at Eureka College, in Illinois, brought me to that loamy campus, where I sat, deeply moved, in the chapel where Abraham Lincoln had walked and spoken in 1856, and I felt some electric awe and pride and sadness and thrill for which even now I struggle to find words. I kid you not when I say you could almost
see
Lincoln walking through the crowd, a head taller than everyone else, his face filled with gaunt pride and sadness and humor and pain.

He spoke there in the fall, when he was weary of politicking, and according to legend he spoke his mind without notes or text, so there is no written record, but I like to think that he spoke ringingly of grace and justice and courage and humility, and that when he was finished there was a long silence, as listeners mulled his clear unadorned words and the passionate honesty and humility of the man who had spoken them, and then there was a roar of applause through which Abraham Lincoln walked like Moses walking through the walls of the sea.

 

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