by Brian Doyle
I had thought, when I got the assignment from Mr Mahoney, that my series of articles would be somewhat pro forma, reporting on infinitesimal differences among parishes probably by cultural heritage—the Lithuanians at Saints Peter and Paul on the South Side would approach Easter in ways that the Poles at Holy Trinity on the north side would not easily recognize, something like that—but I was quickly and thoroughly disabused of this notion, and found myself entranced by the rich and colorful and myriad differences. Each parish, it seemed to me, was its own village of a sort, with its own cast of characters and its own welter of common myths and traditions and theatrical flourishes, some of which would have given the Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago a heart attack, had he known of them. Officially, for example, women were banned from the altar, and officially subservient to the pastor and assistant pastors if any, but in fact most parishes were cheerfully run by women, either under titles like religious education director or school principal, or sans title as members of the parish council, fund-raising coordinator, or parish secretary. At three parishes the women who ran the Altar Society essentially ran the whole business of the parish, from church maintenance funds to admission marketing for the school and even insurance coverage for the pastor’s Chevy Impala; at another parish it was the Mothers’ Club that quietly made sure the operation hummed smoothly, and at one parish I was sure a group of women called the Sodality of the Madonna had arranged things such that all orders and commands and instructions from the pastor, an arrogant buffoon, were quietly run past the Sodality for editing before issuance.
Like many other Catholics at that time, I was annoyed at what seemed the inarguable patriarchal mania of the church—a tendency with no validation except the weak excuse of hoary age and the fact that the founder was male; the latter also a silly excuse, as He was a Jewish man, and if we were to adhere to His example closely, we would all be Jewish and skinny and live in Judea and speak Aramaic and Hebrew and take up carpentry for spiritual reasons. So it was startling, and rather pleasant, to discover that in many parishes women quietly skippered the ship, sometimes amusing themselves and their fellow lay travelers by a certain ironically obsequious respect for the hierarchy. The many nuns who worked in the parishes in various capacities were most artful at this, and I saw some hilarious exchanges between wry and witty nuns and pastors who hadn’t the faintest idea that they were being shepherded as easily as you might steer a turkey toward a scatter of corn.
It was also pleasant to discover that there were very few arrogant bloviators among the hierarchy, as far as I could tell—most of them were decent and hardworking men who understood full well that their work was to serve not only their congregations, but an idea at once so preposterous that it could never be proven or validated, yet so relentless that two millennia of evidence against had not yet managed to quash it. A difficult profession, theirs; and I came to much more respect and admiration, as I researched and wrote that series of articles, for the many men who by their own sworn vow led lives of sometimes terrible loneliness, even as they were incredibly busy and surrounded by hundreds of people who needed their help and attention and patience and open ear and open heart. I had never had even the tickle of an urge to be a priest, but after I finished that assignment my estimation of their general grace and courage went up several thousand percentage points.
* * *
All these years later, I think I was too young, when I was living in Chicago, for any number of things. I was too young to realize how cool and funny Azad and Eren were, and how much fun it would have been to hang around with two tiny fascinating people and laugh my head off. I was too young to pay much attention to the byzantine and incredible and revelatory machinations of politics and commerce and crime and punishment. I was too young to think at all in the least about the primacy of education and the incredible potential depth of family life. I was too young to pay attention to the unmistakably foul fingerprints of epic and criminal pollution and environmental degradation in the lake. I was too young to pay attention to the fact that of the three million people in the city maybe a million did not have quite enough to eat or lived in dangerous conditions or endured constant assault and battery or had no real hope or possibility of ever elevating their standards of living. I was too young to begin to discern the prevalence of rape in our culture, in every aspect of our lives, from families to churches to schools to clubs to the military, and too young to see the dense curtain of lies and shame and fear that muffles the screams of the women and boys and girls who suffer such insidious predation. I was too young to pay attention to the remarkable virtues and vices of religions, and the ways they elevated their adherents, and stole from them too. I was too young to understand the constant cheating and turning of blind eyes and bribery and deft corporate theft and eloquent complicated lies that in many ways defined business and politics and civic administration in Chicago then and probably now. I was too young to see how the city acted as a vast cold magnet for the young of the surrounding country, who were drawn to Oz with wide eyes and covetous impulse, leaving behind their small towns and villages and cities to wither by the year. I was too young to see the cold calculus of economics, by which the rural areas labored mightily to provide product, which was then shipped at small profit to the city, where great profit was made upon it by those who had nothing to do with it but take it with one hand and sell it with the other. I was too young to see the white gangs attack black ones attack brown ones attack white ones, and all colors of gangs attack children from Korea and Japan and China and Malaysia and Vietnam and Cambodia as their families also, just like the white and black and brown ones, flooded into the city looking for work and school and peace. I was too young to notice but a few of the thousand broken sodden homeless souls on steam grates and under bridges, and wonder why so many of them had been soldiers in our wars, or members of tribes and clans here many thousands of years before agriculture and settlements arrived. I was too young to realize what a time machine Mr McGinty was at age ninety-nine, and how a thousand hours of listening to his stories would have not only been a most amazing education in American history but would have easily afforded me stories enough for ten novels. I was too young to realize that Mr Pawlowsky was not merely shy about opening his heart to Miss Elminides, and not just leery of being bruised by possible rejection, but that he had also, at age fifty-three, built a life he loved, a life in which he was stimulated and comfortable and rich in his way, and perhaps it was frightening for him to contemplate a different sort of life, even with the undeniable attraction of having Miss Elminides at the center of it. I was too young to see that Miss Elminides too, for all her grace and ease and calm and dignity and aura of elegance, was also shy and lonely and perhaps bereft and adrift in a city and country she had not chosen for herself. I was too young to be utterly astounded and absorbed by Edward, whose intelligence and depth of character I took a little for granted; I could not know then that I would never meet another being like him, let alone a dog like him, and I have met many excellent beings, and dogs, since then.
* * *
The White Sox, having after going 62–38 from April through July, and leading the league by five games at one point, went 27–32 the rest of the way, and slid to third behind the Kansas City Royals and the Texas Rangers. They finished the season at home with three games against the Seattle Mariners, first with a Saturday doubleheader at which the announced attendance was something like five thousand (although the librettist, who was there, told me later that the actual attendance was half that, and there were so few fans in the park you could clearly hear the players chatting on the field), and then with a final Sunday afternoon game, on October 2.
Five of us from the building went to the game, feeling that we ought to salute the great season, and the end of summer: me, Edward, Denesh, the librettist, and Azad, who was allowed to accompany us if he finished his chores beforehand, which he did. We took the train down to the park, expecting to find another sparse crowd, but to our pleased surp
rise there were a lot of people streaming through the gates, smiling and laughing; even the beer vendors, usually taciturn and suspicious, were smiling and chatty, and Edward pointed out to me that the ticket-takers and security guards were deliberately ignoring small boys hopping the stiles and teenagers crowding in suddenly behind ticketholders before the gate could click shut. You had the distinct feeling that no one there that day particularly cared if the Sox beat the Mariners, or even felt bad about how the season had slipped away in August and September; certainly I didn’t hear anyone say swoon or slump or choke that day, or afterward, come to think of it. Maybe it says something about the low expectations of seasoned White Sox fans, but the overall mood among the fans (and the players too, it seemed) was delight in a terrific year, and in a colorful and engaging team that for most of the season had been the best in the west—an alluring phrase that certainly had not been spoken much by Sox fans over the years.
I’d guess there were twenty thousand fans there that day, and the Sox lost 3–2, and Richie Zisk and Oscar Gamble both went hitless, and Chet Lemon didn’t even get to bat, entering the game only as a pinch runner, but still it was one of the best games ever. The ushers let you sit anywhere you wanted, on this last day, and we went all the way down to the third-base box seats, using Azad’s wide-eyed joy as an excuse to claim great seats right on the railing. It was clear and cold and the Sox third-baseman Eric Soderholm hit a home run (his twenty-fifth of the year) and everyone had a ball. When the game ended there was a sweet moment when everyone in the park stood up and applauded for what seemed like ten minutes but probably was two or three. Usually when a game ends the players trot off the field briskly with their heads down, probably thinking of girls or beer, but this time the Sox players all came back out of the dugout and applauded the fans, and then a dozen or so walked around the edges of the field shaking hands with fans and chatting and signing autographs. Oscar Gamble signed an autograph for Azad, which I would bet he still has, probably carefully framed, and Richie Zisk shook hands with the librettist, who said something to him that made Richie laugh.
I watched all this with pleasure, feeling some swirl of affection for my friends and the fans and the players and the team and the park and the city and the terrific fading summer; and then I noticed that Edward was missing. Before I could even mention it to my companions, though, Edward jumped the railing from the field, holding, of all things, a baseball bat, which he presented to Denesh as a replacement for his beloved cricket bat. On the way home on the train I asked Edward how exactly he obtained the bat, but he pretended that the crowd of happy fans in the car was making too much noise for him to hear properly, which made me grin and stop asking questions. All the way home little kids on the train came over to Denesh and asked if they could touch the bat, just like kids ask if they can pet your dog. He said yes of course and almost every kid touched it like it was holy or loaded with sunlight or something like that.
* * *
After that terrific unforgettable White Sox season ended on October 2, the papers were immediately filled with stories about the Bears; one day I measured the coverage in the Sun-Times alone and counted six full pages about the Bears, one page total about the hockey Blackhawks and the basketball Bulls, one page total about horse racing at Arlington, half a page about other sports in toto, and a guest column by the legendary sportswriter Irv Kupcinet, buried in the opinion pages, about the White Sox, who had drawn more than a million fans to the South Side for the first time in many years—a feat that Irv, a veteran conspiracist, thought had been overlooked because of the fascist nature of “the professional gladiatorial assault and battery now miscalled ‘football,’ as if a word coined to describe the autumnal American version of rugby, traditionally played by boys on chilly oak-lined fields until they achieve the age of reason, could be applied to the deliberate and premeditated acts of militaristic ferocity, without even the excuse of national defense or international policing,” and indeed “the only excuse for ‘pro football,’ the sole motivating force for such untrammeled violence and mayhem, the be-all-and-end-all, is money, cold and impersonal and hauled to the bank through the sea of mud and blood on the gridiron, regardless of the damaged bodies and minds of the men who years from now will not even be able to remember that once they played a boys’ game gone terribly bad.”
I was vaguely curious about the Bears, and interested to see their great running back Walter Payton, the best player in the game that year, and I thought it might be a classic Chicago experience to attend a game at Soldier Field, but Edward refused point-blank to accompany me, no one else in our building or at work seemed interested, and I found that going alone was not an appetizing prospect—somehow it seemed that you could go alone to a baseball game, and fit in, but going alone to a football game seemed odd—football games were for going in packs and gangs, and apparently heavy drinking was required. Finally I even asked Mr Pawlowsky if he wanted to go.
“I do not,” he said, “and I can tell you, if you have not already asked, that Edward almost certainly will not go. We are not much for football, at any level, and you have seen him laughing over hockey. Both of those sports entail much armor and smashing, although there is of course grace and creativity evident occasionally. I suppose that is what interests some of their fans, the ones who are not watching to see if indeed there will be blood or possibly someone losing an arm. Did I tell you that Miss Elminides received letters from the bank and the city that all is well? The Third Awkwardness is over, I think. The point of sport is grace and creativity, isn’t it? Against obstacles—opponents playing defense, weather, weariness. Much of what is said about the value of sport is nonsense but some things are deeply true. Probably being on a team teaches you something about humility and camaraderie. At least you hope so. Being in the Navy taught me about camaraderie, among other things, like organized foolishness. But also a sort of grim courage. I never saw a Nazi but I understood why we took up arms against them. Someone has to stand up when the time comes. Edward teaches me that also. You remember the incident with the Gaylords. There are many more stories like that. I think I should ask Miss Elminides on a date. Perhaps to dinner at a restaurant. We cannot always dine on the roof. Myself I was never much for sports but I understand people enjoying them as theater—the narrative of a game, the moments of tension and release, the communal energy. My brother Paul loved sports for that reason. He never cared about the score but only how well the game was played. Edward believes there are moments in life when you must take chances that seem mad and that one of those moments is approaching for me with Miss Elminides. He suggests sooner than later. Yet I am old and she is young. What if she says no? Then we would never be friends again the same way. What if she says yes because she feels indebted or sorry for me? Where would we live? What about Edward? I am more than fifty years old and set in my ways and have nearly nothing in the way of bank accounts and pension funds. What would we live on? A man cannot ask a woman to share his life if there is nothing to live on. That would be selfish. That sort of thing is for the movies and not for Miss Elminides. And what if she says no? What then? Would I have to leave the building so as not to make her uncomfortable? God forbid she would be uncomfortable. I would never in a million years make her uncomfortable. The very question would make her uncomfortable, wouldn’t it? So then why would I ask such a question? The last thing I wish to do is make her uncomfortable. She has had enough discomfort this year to last a lifetime. I have the utmost faith in Edward’s judgment, but for the first time in our relationship I am moved to question it. Or is it the case that he is right and I am cutting things too fine? You cannot be a clerk all your life, as my commanding officer in the Navy said to me once. I think he meant that I was too careful, too cautious, too meticulous. But how can you be too meticulous? Things break down and need to be repaired. Things are always declining toward decay and someone has to be sensible and fix them. Who will fix things if I don’t? You have no advice for me whatsoever? I have come to trust
your judgment also, you know, young as you are. But you have not leapt into love either, have you? Not that I know about. Haven’t you wanted to? Have you not had the opportunity? The subject hasn’t come up in our conversations but you are young and strong, your whole career opening as we watch with pleasure—haven’t you thought about asking a question for which you have no idea of her answer? Haven’t you?”
* * *
I spent a lot of time on the roof that night, I can tell you. Edward came up at one point to see if I was okay but after a while he went back down, as he saw that I was wrestling with a private matter. He must have communicated my unrest to Mr Pawlowsky, for he came up at about midnight, draped in his Navy blanket, and set up a lawn chair next to where I was sprawled out staring at the sky.
“Note the constellation Horologium,” he said after a while. “The pendulum clock. Like many constellations, hard to discern and puzzlingly named, in this case by a Frenchman named Nicolas Louis de Lacaille, who identified some ten thousand stars and named fourteen constellations. I think he did not see so well and often I am at a bit of a loss to see the shapes he saw. Still and all, a remarkable man. Traveled all the way from France to southern Africa to see stars better. You have to admire the courage to do something that everyone else would think silly. He spent one solid year there charting what he saw every night, including what he called nebulous objects. You and I are both charting nebulous subjects, are we not?”
