Chicago

by Brian Doyle

  Now Luis was apoplectic, and I had calmed down enough to realize there was real danger in the air; this could well end with me losing an ear, or worse. For a moment my mind grappled with the oddity of such rage in such a bucolic spot; you never saw a more typical beautiful summer Saturday city schoolyard playground, with the slightly bent rims, and the battered backboards tattooed by thousands of dusty balls, and the worn endlines and sidelines, and the scraggly tufts of grass along the fences, and the beginning-to-rust poles holding up the backboards, and the baking brick school walls, sprayed with graffiti of every sort of color, especially the black-and-yellow spoor of the Latin Kings. There was even, I had time to notice, a little spray-painted strike zone, where little kids played stickball.

  Monster, to his eternal credit, made a judgment call then that I have thought about ever since; it must have been a remarkably brave act on his part, to essentially challenge the leader of his tribe in public, though he did it with a subtle brilliance that took me a while to appreciate.

  “One shot and be done,” he said to Luis, and there arose a howl of appreciation and shrill debate, and then Bucket said to me, “He going to hit you hard, man, be ready, better give me them glasses.” I started to object and Bucket said “No, man, he get one shot, be ready. When you go down stay down.” I gave him my glasses and dimly I saw Luis lunge at me and then my nose exploded, is as close as I can get to explaining it. I went down and stayed down. A few minutes later Bucket helped me up. Everybody else was gone. Bucket said, “You nose is broken, man, better get that fix right away. He have to win, you see. Way it is. Maybe wait a week before you ball up here again, okay?”

  Bucket walked with me through the schoolyard and down two blocks—later I realized he must have escorted me to the boundary of his territory—and then he left and I walked home holding my bloody shirt against my nose. At the apartment building Mr Pawlowsky led me into the alley and washed off the blood with a hose—I remember there was a lot of blood, and the water in the hose was so hot I gasped—and then set the two pieces of my nose back together with a quick wrench of his wrists, saying he had set many a man’s nose in the Navy. It was possible and indeed probable that most men who had ever served in the United States Navy had broken their noses while in service, although probably most of those breaks were not incurred in direct service, you understand, but in extracurricular activity.

  So it is that even all these years later I can look in the mirror and see Chicago; there’s a hook or bend in my nose that looks exactly how Broadway bends between Roscoe and Aldine streets, near Belmont Harbor. I don’t notice it much anymore, but little kids see it right away, and ask about it forthrightly, in their relentlessly curious way. I tell them a sailor in Shanghai did it, or a plummeting falcon in Ireland, depending on whim, but sometimes then I think of that blazing day.

  Years later a detective friend of mine in Chicago told me that he heard Luis and Monster were dead but Bucket became some kind of social worker in the projects on the west side of the city, which could be true. I would like it to be true; he was a gentle soul underneath his rough veneer, I thought, and I bet he would be a superb social worker, all too knowledgeable about darkness and light.

  17.

  ONE DAY ABOUT A WEEK later I was home sick when I saw a most amazing thing. This was on a Thursday. I had staggered down the street to the grocery store for orange juice, the only thing that would stay in my stomach, and when I dragged myself back into the building I remembered to check my mailbox; but as I shuffled down the hall I noticed the back alley filled with animals of all sorts, from dogs to squirrels to what appeared to be a black-crowned night heron perched on the fence by Mr McGinty’s bathroom window.

  Not for the first time in my life I doubted my eyes, and thought I was hallucinating, and decided that the shadow-line between this world and the dream world had been breached without my knowledge, and concluded that I was a lot sicker than I thought I was, and had better shuffle upstairs and go back to bed until Monday, but just then Mr McGinty came out of his apartment to get his mail. He saw me staring into the alley and laughed.

  “You think you’re hallucinating, don’t you? So did I, the first time I saw it. But this is Thursday morning, and on Thursday morning Edward holds what you might call office hours in the alley. It used to be on the front steps but it got too crowded there and people stared. The alley’s private and there’s a lot more room. He sits at my chess table and they come up to him one by one for some sort of consultation. I think it’s probably more spiritual than medical but I have never asked. Not my place. The first couple times I saw it I stared too. I mean, who wouldn’t? But I think it makes everyone uncomfortable if you stand and stare and I wouldn’t want to be disrespectful to Edward. You might take a good long look and then wander away, is what I would suggest. Not that I am telling you what to do. But we wouldn’t want to be disrespectful to Edward.”

  I got the message and stood at the back door for a moment and looked out at the line. You wouldn’t believe the number and shape and size and variety of animals there were. I saw dogs of every sort, and all sorts of birds from sparrows to the heron (it was a night heron, I confirmed later in a bird identification guide), including what surely was a red-tailed hawk, standing patiently about halfway down the line. There were two raccoons, and an opossum, and rabbits, and three rodents of some sort, and what looked like an otter, although I had not known that there were otters in our neighborhood. In all I estimated that there were more than twenty animals on the line. As I watched a boxer dog turned away from Edward and walked quietly down the line and around the corner, and everyone on line moved up a space without jostling. At that point I thought I had been there long enough and the last thing I wanted was for someone on line to see me gaping, so I got my mail and went back upstairs to bed.

  * * *

  It turned out that Eugenia, the woman in 3C who had been an actress in the Broncho Billy films, had left a startling sum of money in her will to Miss Elminides, and a lesser but still very substantive sum to Mr Pawlowsky—the first for “kindness and generosity,” and the second for “generosity and kindness,” according to the letter from her lawyers. There was no explanation of how she had come by such sums—investments from her earnings? her husband’s estate? some inheritance?—but the money was real, as Miss Elminides and Mr Pawlowsky discovered when they went to the bank and were handed bits of paper proving that the slip of a woman with the brightest orange hair you ever saw, the tiny old lady who loved to wear her costumes from the movies, the slight cheerful old lady who left the enormous stuffed horse in the basement, had indeed left a lot of money to her landlord and to the building manager.

  She had also, according to the provisions of her will, left gifts and mementos to several other residents: all her costumes from the Broncho Billy films to her hallmates, the dapper businessmen in 3A and 3B; a beautiful engraved King James Bible to the hermit brother in 3E, and a lovely old Book of Common Prayer to the hermit brother in 3D; a complete set of the works of Willa Cather to the two young women from Arkansas in 4E; and a hundred dollars in twenty-dollar bills to Ovious and his mother in 4F, and to Eren and her parents in 4A. She had also left the stuffed horse in the basement to Azad, in 4A, with instructions that he could either keep it or sell it to a collector or museum, but the choice must be his, not his parents’; and should he wish to keep it, it would remain in her storage stall in the basement, subject to supervision by Mr Pawlowsky. Azad, after much consultation with his parents and with Edward, elected to keep the horse for at least as long as it took for his father to carefully research and weigh offers for its purchase from collectors and museums; and the dapper businessmen, to their credit, offered to handle this project, inasmuch as they were already researching the market value of Eugenia’s Broncho Billy costumes. They were careful and thorough men, the dapper businessmen, and it was September before they felt prepared to present suitable offers to Azad and his parents; which is why one of my sweetest memories fr
om that summer is shuffling down to the basement on Saturdays for Mrs Manfredi’s empanadas, and seeing Azad and his sister proudly astride their own tremendous horse. In the years since then I have seen many a child atop many a horse, but I have never seen children happier about it than those two.

  * * *

  At work Mr Mahoney pressed his attack on Cardinal Cody, and while the Cardinal responded with the usual strong-arm tactics of astute city politicians, Mr Mahoney was unmoved, knowing he had the unswerving support of the magazine’s publisher (a priest of towering height who was seen in our offices once a year, on the feast day of the saint who had founded his order) and the order’s superior, who had grappled with bishops and cardinals beyond counting, said Mr Mahoney.

  “Tin-pot dictators who think that the color of their robes confers authority over the mind and hearts and allegiances of the faithful, whereas the first principle of canon law is that an informed conscience is the first and last moral arbiter,” he said. “Why exactly it is the case that generally the higher a man rises in the hierarchy of the church the bigger a pompous idiot he becomes is a mystery to me and many others. This is not always so, and we celebrate the few who understand that humility is the final frontier, like the late Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli for example, but the current Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago is not among those men, I am sad to say. I have lived in Chicago all my life, and the city’s civic and religious life has often been overseen by men of almost unimaginable pomposity, men who believe that money or weaponry affords them authority over the lives of their fellow citizens. Sometimes I veer dangerously close to despair about the predilection to pomposity in this great city but then I remember that despair is technically a sin, although here too you can only too easily picture the poor pompous ass who decreed that a state all too normal and well-known among human beings would be categorized as sinful. It is nothing of the sort, of course. It is sad, unfortunate, wearisome, an affliction, something to be endured, something you endeavor to lift from the shoulders of your fellow travelers. Speaking of travelers, you are one day late in turning in your piece about parish life on the high plains of these United States, and I will hope to receive your sterling copy by the end of business today so that I can take it home and read it tonight. I am sure your sentences will be clean and orderly so that I do not have to make editorial comments by the light of the elderly lamps Mrs Mahoney and I have procured over the years.”

  Mrs Mahoney, I should note, was a legend of surpassing proportions in the office, for not one of us had ever laid eyes on her, although she telephoned for Mr Mahoney fairly often, late in the afternoon; I had spoken with her many times, and she had the most lovely soothing voice, slightly deeper than you would expect in a woman. She always asked for “John,” and he would answer his office phone every time with the same courtly line: “Do I have the pleasure of addressing Miss Halloran, of Schaumburg?” Schaumburg was a town north and west of Chicago, and Mr Mahoney liked to say that he had been there once, to carry away the few hereditary possessions of his beloved in a rickety old truck, along with his beloved herself, and he did not see that there would ever be an occasion for him to be there again, if God was merciful.

  I realize now that I have never properly accounted the rest of the men and women in the magazine offices, beyond Mr Mahoney, and our ruddy-faced Irish executive editor Mr Burns, and the towering publisher whom we saw once a year, and Maria in the mail room and Clarice in circulation, over whom I swooned but said nary a word all year long. There was Ms Cahill, who was small and hilarious and freckled and brilliant, and who was not taken seriously for a while until she wrote a series of searing articles about prisons that made readers weep. There was Ms Tuohy, a lean stern knife of a woman who had briefly been a nun and then left her order and married a man who had once been a priest; their young son was appointed an altar boy during my first months with the magazine, a scenario that somehow seemed circular and funny to me, although I could not find the words to explain why it seemed so suitable and sweet that a nun and a priest would be the parents of an altar boy. There was Eudora the receptionist, whose swooping rising soaring voice as she answered the phone was so attractive to callers that often they would call back again just to hear her cheerful operatic aria as she announced the magazine and inquired as to how she might be of service. There were several small intense people in Circulation and Accounting whose names I never did catch; they were mostly male and always wearing suits and ties, although the colors of their suits in summer were sometimes colors I had never imagined cloth would be—teal and puce and lime, for example. There was My Man George, as he called himself and everyone called him, who was technically the janitor, I think, but was actually one of those invaluable souls who did carpentry, electrical work, plumbing, and general repair, all with deft easy grace and speed, and all without hardly a word. I admired My Man George a great deal, having no repair skills of my own whatsoever, and I spent a lot of time asking him questions to draw him out, but about all I ever got out of him was that he had been a pig farmer in the South at one point, an occupation he had enjoyed, and that he had very much enjoyed hosting epic pig roasts at harvest time. He was the most cheerful courteous man I had ever met, I think, but he was also a past master at listening to questions, and murmuring such things as well now and that is a fine question, while focusing on his work and not actually answering the question, and then saying, as soon as he was done with his task, “Now I must be back to work, this has been a pleasure to talk,” and he would vanish, smiling. The first few times he vanished like this, leaving his smile hanging behind him, I was nagged by a feeling I had seen this before somehow; finally I remembered Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat, who vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone.

  * * *

  Beginning on June 16, when they beat the Red Sox and their magical pitcher Luis Tiant, the White Sox went on an epic tear, winning eighteen of their next twenty-three games, including eight in a row at one point, defeating some of the best pitchers in baseball along the way: Oakland’s Vida Blue, the Angels’ Nolan Ryan, and Mark Fidrych of the Detroit Tigers, who was famous for talking to the ball before he threw it, and for kneeling down and grooming the pitchers’ mound by hand to get it just right. The Sox beat Fidrych on July 8, a Friday night, before a standing-room-only crowd of 45,993 fans, among them Edward and me and Ronald Donald, the Scottish tailor who lived across the hall from me in 2B, with the detective.

  Ronald Donald, like Denesh the cricket player, had never seen a baseball game, and much like Denesh he watched silently and intently for the first few innings, trying to get the pace and rhythm and “geometry” of the game, as he said, before asking questions about rules and specifics of play. He did ask, early on, why the tall young man with the long hair who was throwing to the Chicago players seemed to be murmuring to the ball before he let it out of his possession, and he laughed loud and long when Edward came back from McCuddy’s Tavern across the street balancing a pitcher of beer on his back, but otherwise he sat transfixed as the Sox racked up ten runs and won the game 10–7, putting them in first by three games over the Kansas City Royals.

  On the way home on the train Edward got Ronald Donald talking about how he got to America, and how he came to Chicago, and how he learned to be a tailor, and what he thought of baseball, and how he came to live with the detective, and about fish. It turned out that Ronald Donald had grown up thirty feet from the sea on an island in far northern Scotland, and his father and grandfather were fishermen, and he was a fisherman too for his first twenty years, after which he fled fishing and Scotland and went as far away as he could go; he got a job as a crewman on a freighter that went all the way from Dumbarton to Nova Scotia, and then crewed on a boat all the way to Chicago, where he liked the look of the city, “mostly because it was July when I got off the boat, and there was fireworks over the lake, and your wee American flags everywhere, so I stayed. It seemed a
delighted place, you know? Not stern. I think now I stayed because it was a ferocious hot day and I was cold to my bones after twenty years in Scotland. A sensible man would have continued on to Brazil, but not me.”

  I asked him how he managed the icy winters since, and he answered that by the time his first winter rolled around he had met Vincent, which was the first time any of us had heard the name of the detective.

  The train was delayed at Clark Street for a while and most people got off to catch buses or walk up to the next stop but we stayed on the train, because the tailor was now well and truly launched in telling stories. Part of his openness, I thought later, was that he was slightly beered up, but more of it was that he liked and trusted Edward, as everyone did, and I think now too that maybe he was one of those men who seem staid and private and closed but who are actually shy, and live behind walls of their own making, walls which they would do anything sometimes to breach, but hardly ever do they get the chance.

  He talked about his family, his father the fisherman (“a hard man, a cold man, a frigid man, a man I hated when I left, but now I feel bad for not seeing how unhappy he was, what pretense he lived by”), and his mother, who was always sick, and died when he was sixteen (“only the forty years old, poor girl, worked herself to the bone every day since she was four years old, she was from Glasgow and grew up in hell”), and his two sisters, whom he corresponded with steadily and had twice been back to visit, the one now in Belfast and the other on the coast of Spain. He talked about their neighbors, in a village too small to have a post box or a policeman, and about the weather (“cold and wet, with spells of wet and cold”), and about his grandfather, who lost his mind in his last months of his life and went through the motions of his life without any of the substance: “Eating soup without any soup in the bowl, and pulling on boots that weren’t there, and fishing without any lines, and combing the hair he used to have, and talking to his wife, who was long dead and buried, and calling in his dogs at night that were long gone too, poor old fella. He was good to me, and he knew I would be going long before I did. He told me when I was twelve years old that I could leave when I was twenty and the sisters were in school. Which is what happened. He was a grand old man, the old man. He had fought her brothers for his wife, one by one, with his fists alone, just for the right to ask her to tea. They were set against him for some reason and he challenged them one by one like the old warrior days. Four brothers there were too. He told me once he used his left hand mostly in the fights because he knew one hand or the other would be damaged permanent and he preferred to keep his strong hand for the fishing and the children he was sure they would have.”