by Dave Reidy
“I don’t think I’ll be back,” I said.
Mrs. Landry smiled patiently and nodded, then returned her head to a resting position that aimed her gaze at the limestone base of her building.
Thomas pushed the front door open and offered Mrs. Landry his elbow. “Here we go,” he said.
Mrs. Landry removed her hand from my arm and placed the other on her doorman’s.
“Thank you,” she said to Thomas.
“Of course.” Then, glancing over his shoulder at me, Thomas said, “Thank you, sir.”
I waved to Mrs. Landry as I backed away, but she didn’t see the gesture. She went inside without saying goodbye.
I started the short walk back to my apartment, walking quickly because I finally could. Without Mrs. Landry on my arm, none of the women dining on the sidewalk looked up at me as I passed.
Only when I was standing inside my living room again, wondering what the hell to do next, did I realize that Mrs. Landry had extended—and I’d refused—an open-hearted welcome of the kind my mother would have offered me if she were still alive.
7
Catherine Ferrán
“TEN CUIDADO CON los ricos.”
Be careful around the rich.
This was my father’s warning to me, a caveat passed down to Eduardo Ferrán by generations of campesinos, his ancestors and mine. Coming of age in Franco’s Spain only confirmed my father’s suspicions of the wealthy. He carried these suspicions with him when, as a twenty-four- year-old man with a university education in engineering but very little English, he immigrated to the States in 1964.
When my father told me to take care around the rich, he meant that I should stay away from them. It is no accident, then, that the services I provide as an interior designer are available only to people my father would have considered rich. Every American-born daughter of an immigrant father resents and opposes his advice. My concerns are not your concerns, I recall thinking to myself as I rode to junior high school in the taxi my father drove to make our living. Your problems are not my problems. But my father’s words about the wealthy have stayed with me. They have saved my one-woman business who-knows-how-many times. A daughter of an immigrant father lives in this kind of tension: even as she dismisses it, she worries that some of her father’s advice might be wise and never really lets it go. She holds his might-be wisdom in a dark corner of heart, just in case.
My father’s advice about the rich rises to my attention when, on a Thursday evening in June 2009, Daniel Shadid introduces himself to me at a charity gala in the cavernous Navy Pier ballroom. I’ve never met him before but already know all about him. Like me, he’s a first-generation American on his father’s side. Unlike me, he is of Lebanese descent and has made a fortune as an investment banker. He poured much of that fortune into Shadid.com, a suite of online number-crunching tools for day traders. After selling the site and its algorithms in late 2000, he retired with a net worth in the nine figures. He was thirty-nine.
Since then, Shadid has applied his substantial energy and influence to the protection of human rights and the pursuit of famous friends. He visited Burmese refugees in Thailand with Angelina Jolie and her retinue and accompanied George Clooney on a trip to Darfur. Shadid seems to want to be Clooney—he’s always in a suit but rarely wears a tie, his olive skin is perpetually tanned, and he’s allowed his hair to go salt-and-pepper. Shadid has never married, but his serial romances last for months, rather than days. My theory on that: Shadid stays with a woman long enough to look more like the serious philanthropist than the multi-millionaire playboy.
Why do I know so much about Daniel Shadid? Interior designers who make their living in Chicago cannot help but absorb every detail of his life. Shadid’s equivalent of Clooney’s Lake Como retreat (where Shadid has spent several long weekends) is the ever-growing number of luxury condominiums he owns in Chicago. Shadid serves elaborate dinners at his North Michigan Avenue penthouse and then, for their privacy and his, sees that each of his guests and his or her date is taken by town car to one of his properties. In the pictorials published in the trades each time one of his new living spaces is unveiled, I’ve noticed a few consistent elements. His taste leans toward the modern, as if each room were styled not for George Clooney, but for Hitchcock’s Cary Grant. To better impress guests who pack light and don’t stay long, Shadid and his architects plan for wet bars and saunas where anyone else would put closets. And while the rest of us search one-of-a-kind shows and foreign bazaars for pieces that fit our clients’ limited budgets, Shadid’s designers ponder the problem of how to feature—or, in some cases, employ as mere accents—fine and modern art from Shadid’s personal collection. My clients who know him—or know people who know him—tell me that Shadid never boards a guest in the same condo twice, preferring to give Hollywood’s most famous do-gooders a progressive tour of the guesthouse-cum-museum he has built out across the most luxurious buildings in Chicago.
In the course of our conversation, which begins as I wait for a glass of cava at the ballroom bar, Shadid extracts three pieces of information from me: that my profession is interior design, that I know of his ongoing guesthouse project, and that I’m attending the gala not with a date, but a friend. I suppose he also notices that I’m not wearing a wedding band. I removed it a little more than a month ago, the night I discovered from our April 2009 mobile-phone bill that Richard, my husband of more than eight years, had been sleeping with both his paralegal and his personal trainer. (“Ten cuidado con los ricos”—Ay, papá, tenías razón acerca de Ricardo.) Even as I answer Shadid’s question about how I like my River North neighborhood, my thumb swabs the underside of my naked ring finger.
The tickets to this gala were a last-minute gift from my best client, who was called to Copenhagen on business and did not want the two twenty-five hundred dollar meals she purchased with her donation going to waste. I do not have big money, like the people who bought their own way into this party, but any interior designer making a living in this city knows how to converse with rich people. This is the reason I offered the second gala ticket to my friend Nicola Hayes. Nicola runs her own interior-design firm, which, like mine, is small and successful in the sense that it employs only its owner but employs her well. Though we’re both intent on making something big of our respective businesses, Nicola and I never compete for work.
“There’s no need to compete,” Nicola said to me once while we shared tapas and a pitcher of white sangria. “We’ll divide the city. Half for you, half for me.”
“How much of my half do I have right now?” I asked her.
“About one half of one percent.”
And we laughed as we clinked our glasses.
While Shadid tries to place me in his extensive network by naming interior designers and asking if and how I know them, I see Nicola over his shoulder. Hiding the gesture with the sleight of hand of a person practiced in the art of sipping cocktails, Nicola opens her eyes wide, as if to ask, “Do you believe what is happening to you right now?”
“I’m close to closing on a penthouse space at Roosevelt and McCormick,” Shadid says, reclaiming my visual attention.
“I know the building,” I say.
“Have you seen the penthouse?” he asks.
“I haven’t, no.”
“It’s stunning,” he says. “Thirty-eight hundred square feet. Lake views in three directions.”
“All but a few of the building’s units have lake views, I think.”
Shadid ignores my attempt to bring him back down to earth.
“I’m having the unit stripped and the walls knocked down,” he says. “I want a designer to help me reconceive the space. Perhaps you’d join me for the walkthrough?”
Shadid is the greatest patron of interior design in Chicago, but he almost never works with local designers. The pose he strikes—an elbow on the bar, one leg crossed in front of the other at the shin, the lip of his glass just inches from my own—reminds me that, at thirty-six y
ears old, I am what passes for an age-appropriate object of the forty-eight-year-old Shadid’s affections.
Ten cuidado con los ricos.
“Mr. Shadid—”
“Daniel.”
“Daniel, I’ve read enough about you to know that you don’t book your designers yourself. Whoever joins you on that walkthrough will be vetted by Claire Weber.”
Claire Weber was one of the most successful independent interior designers in the city until she went in-house, full-time, with Shadid. Two of my best clients are former clients of Claire’s.
“Who says you haven’t been vetted already?”
“Well,” I say, smiling politely, “I haven’t had a call from Claire or one of her people.”
“Don’t be so sure that proves anything.”
He thinks he is being clever and mysterious, but the idea that this entire conversation has been some kind of charade, that Shadid already knew the answer to every question he has asked me, is more alarming than anything else. Regardless, I give him my card and tell him that I’d be pleased to talk more about how I can help him as a designer. He puts the card in the pocket of his tuxedo jacket and tells me to expect a call.
The call does not come. Nine months later, the March 2010 issue of Chicago magazine runs a photo spread of Daniel Shadid’s Roosevelt Road penthouse, which features panoramic views of the skyline and Lake Michigan, unobstructed sightlines into the bowl of Soldier Field and, on the wall of an otherwise unremarkable anteroom, a Willem de Kooning canvas only recently discovered by the artist’s estate and purchased at auction by Shadid himself.
•••
TO MARK THE beginning of my post-divorce life, I’ll spend the month of June 2010 in Morocco: three weeks purchasing decorative pieces for clients in the open-air souks of Marrakech, Tangier and Casablanca, and a week of rest and relaxation at a spa in Essaouira. The truth, though, is that my new life is already underway. It started on May 1, 2009, the day I moved out of the condo I’d shared with Richard. About a week later, on a Sunday I was determined not to spend moping around my new apartment, my life began to take a shape I would never have expected for it.
In Chicago, a person with any interest in Catholicism can curate her experience of it by shopping around for a community of like-minded people. My decision to attend a Catholic mass for the first time in ten years had nothing to do with community. When I met Richard back in 1998, I decided to stop going through the motions at mass on Sunday mornings just to honor my father, who had been dead for four years by then. Instead, I’d spend Sundays doing things I actually wanted to do, like reading and working out and going to brunch with the man I was already imagining I would marry. With Richard out of my life, what I wanted was some reminder of my life before I met him, so the idea of going through the motions of the mass felt comforting. And as those motions would be basically the same at any Catholic church, I saw no reason why the parish nearest my apartment would not do.
When I walked through the doors of St. Asella’s for the first time, I very nearly turned and walked out. The church was dark and humid, like the inside of a mausoleum, and the stained glass was covered in a dull film. There were only a few people in the church, sitting far apart from one another, as if they had reserved multiple rows for themselves. Worried that I might have misread the mass schedule, I looked for an usher, but no one was standing near the church doors. I decided that, having already made the short walk from my apartment, I’d try to say a few prayers.
I found a place in a pew near the back and knelt on the threadbare padded platform in front of me. But I didn’t pray. I watched. Over the next ten minutes, about fifteen people came through the church doors. I guess I was half-expecting to see someone like me—a professional who lives in the neighborhood and happens to go to church, someone with some wounds in need of tending, maybe, or a nostalgia for tradition, but a life I would recognize. So far as I could tell from the messages they sent, consciously or not, with their dated hairstyles and ill-fitting clothes, none of the people in that church were anything like me. I recalled another lesson that my father had tried to teach me: “God sees differently,” he’d say, the words drowning in the thickness of his accent. “Talent, money, nice clothes, a beautiful face—these things don’t matter after all.”
Kneeling in that depressing church, surrounded by strange, tasteless churchgoers, I decided that God and my father had been wrong about that one.
At noon, an organ started up in the choir loft and a heavy priest waddled down the center aisle. I remembered the opening song from childhood, but no one else was singing, so I didn’t sing, either. On the altar, the priest started the mass with a blessing. The people in the pews mumbled their responses or made no response at all, and the priest went ahead with the prayer, expecting nothing of them and nothing of me. And as I settled into the ritual rhythms of sitting, standing, and sitting again, I began to enjoy the isolation, the sense of knowing no one there and no one knowing me. I enjoyed it so much that I came back to St. Asella’s the following Sunday, and the Sunday after that, to enjoy it again. At the very beginning, my return to Catholicism was less of a move toward something than a weekly, hour-long retreat from the heartache and obligations of life as I knew it.
But after a few weeks, I began to feel like a scavenger feeding on the decay of what, according to the parish history published in the weekly bulletin I’d picked up, had once been an authentic community. St. Asella’s was built by working people—immigrants, like my father, Italians, like my mother’s parents—and I couldn’t get past the sense that, by showing up on Sundays to stand, sit, kneel, and leave without saying a word to anyone, I dishonored the immigrants who’d poured their sweat and treasure into the construction of this church. Even if I could do no more than go through the motions, there were other motions to perform.
After the fourth Sunday mass I attended at St. Asella’s, I climbed up the dark spiral stair case to the choir loft and asked the startled organist, a nerdy little man who squinted to keep the frames of his glasses from slipping off of his nose, if there had ever been a cantor at this church.
“Oh boy,” he said, shaking his head. “Not for some time. Not for years!”
“I see,” I said. “Well, I just thought I’d ask.”
“Are you a singer?”
“No,” I said. “But I can sing these songs. Church songs. It’s possible I would be just slightly better than no singing at all.”
“Well,” he said, “you should talk to Helen.”
“Helen?”
“She’s the—I want to say scheduler, but that’s not it.” The organist looked away and lowered his head, searching his memory for Helen’s title. He snapped his fingers. “Liturgical coordinator.”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”
“She’s probably on the altar, cleaning up. That’s where she usually is after mass.”
Stepping gingerly down the worn cement stairs of the choir loft, I considered trying to satisfy my sense of obligation to long-dead immigrants by dropping a few more dollars into the collection basket. But I kept walking, down the stairs and up a side aisle to the sanctuary, where I found Helen. She’d clothed her pear-shaped figure in a bulky wool sweater, hopelessly unfashionable jeans and white sneakers. She stood awkwardly on her toes as she extinguished a beeswax taper with a brass bell.
I introduced myself and offered to volunteer as a cantor.
“Are you willing to sign a six-month commitment?”
Commitment. Hadn’t I been coming here to enjoy an hour with no commitments?
“I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head with confusion. “A commitment to what?”
“To cantor at the noon mass and give me three days’ notice if you can’t make it.”
It was a moment before I was certain she wasn’t kidding. I figured the commitment could be dissolved whenever I liked by my leaving St. Asella’s and never coming back, so I agreed to sign it.
Helen led me into the sacristy and pulled a
piece of paper from a drawer at the top of a freestanding maple cupboard. “What was your name again?”
“Catherine,” I said. “With a C.”
“Last name?”
“Ferrán.” I spelled the name without waiting to be asked.
She slid the paper across the top of the cupboard and handed me the pen she had used to write my name. I scanned the paragraph-long, boilerplate commitment statement and signed the blank line beneath it. Helen added the date next to my signature.
Then Helen pulled out another copy of the commitment from the drawer, turned it over to the blank side, and wrote “Cantor Schedule.”
“You’ll be here next Sunday?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She wrote the following Sunday’s date, reprinted my name next to it, and, with two pushpins, posted the sheet on a bulletin board above the cupboard.
“Try to be here fifteen minutes before noon,” she said. “I’ll get the song list from Paul”—the organist’s name, I would learn later—“and I’ll put it on the lectern on the left side of the sanctuary. Take a book from any of the pews and bring it to the back. You’ll process in just ahead of Fr. Dunne.”
Helen picked up a purse by its shoulder strap and held it at her side. “You’re welcome to leave your purse back here during mass. I do. Nobody has ever taken anything.”
“Okay,” I said.
Then, having trained me well enough, Helen left.
I had expected that the people of St. Asella’s would not take much notice of the woman singing up near the altar. But they did. After the first mass I served as cantor, ten people—probably a quarter of the people in attendance—stopped me on the sidewalk in front of the church to shake my hand and thank me. The next week, people who thanked me asked my name and gave me theirs.
This is how it all started. If I had not volunteered to sing, I might never have met anyone from St. Asella’s. I might have gotten whatever fix I needed and left after just a few more Sundays. I will recall this moment and wish that I had kept my silence and my seat near the back.
