An Unfinished Season

by Ward Just

  You know more than you’re telling, Aurora said. You have that look, the Wils look. It’s a wiseguy look, and it’s unbecoming. She was grinning and went on about my look, furtive, sly, a smile that was becoming a smirk, signals of a guilty conscience. I wasn’t listening to her. My hands were around her neck, then slid to her waist, and for now all else was forgotten in a full avalanche of desire. I knew so little of women, and that little I knew now seemed illusory. It had never occurred to me that seduction could be cooperative.

  We remained in her father’s study for a while, until Aurora went away on some unspecified errand, gliding from the room on her toes with a knowing glance over her shoulder. I watched her go, then rose lightheaded from the couch and turned off the table lamp. I stood in the darkness a moment longer, wishing I had a cigarette and remembering then that I had tucked a pack and lighter in her father’s robe, and as I fished for them I noticed his scent, an old man’s sour smell mingled with bay rum. The robe looked to be many years old, as worn and frayed as any favorite item of clothing was bound to be. I stepped to the window and looked out, Lincoln Park mostly dark but through the trees I could see headlights on the Outer Drive and, close in on the surface of the lake, the running lights of sailboats and yachts out for an evening cruise. I lit a cigarette and blew smoke rings into the darkness, still thinking about Jack Brule’s secret that had become my secret, and the guilty conscience that went with it. I wondered if I would always associate a guilty conscience with bay rum and an old man’s sweat. Well, it was his business. The choice was his, not mine. I had only gone along, as I had every right to do. But my God, Chicago was beautiful at night. The breeze from the lake was soft, a sickle moon rising in the east. The city seemed as tranquil as a country village. All that was missing were church bells and a town crier. I heard the purr of an airplane far away but I could not hold it and the sound disappeared into the silence.

  I was thinking of the life we would make together. I wanted to live in an apartment like hers, elevated from the street, a private place in the city where you could live as you pleased. Standing now at the window, watching smoke from my cigarette drift away on the breeze, I felt like the king of Chicago, looking down on my private park with the silver sliver of lake beyond, a line of sight all the way to Canada. I saw Aurora and me in an apartment like this one, smaller naturally, but well situated and comfortably furnished to our own taste. The bedroom would have the lake view. We would have exciting jobs, Aurora too, but we would have a life away from the jobs. Her father and I would become friends and I would keep his every confidence. He and Consuela would come to us for Sunday lunch or drinks on a Friday evening, the apartment alive with laughter; and one day he would bring Brando or even Adlai Stevenson and we would all tell riotous secrets, cocktail glasses filled and refilled, even Jack’s. Our apartment, Aurora’s and mine, would be the plac to come for Sunday lunch, and when we tired of the routine we would drive to Wisconsin, somewhere around Fish Creek, for a long weekend. We would own a cabin in the woods and a runabout and the cabin would be for us alone, no guests. The cabin would not have a telephone, only a phonograph. Aurora’s Toulouse-Lautrec drawing would go in the bedroom. I thought this was a grand idea, living and working in Chicago and avoiding the North Shore and Quarterday. Away on Lake Shore Drive, whirling red lights sped north, the sirens faint and rhythmic in the distance.

  I heard Aurora in the corridor and turned from the window, pitching my cigarette into the street. The telephone rang and she answered it, her voice curt; and then I heard her say, Oh, no, everything’s just fine and We’re leaving in a few minutes to get a bite to eat. We didn’t realize the time was so late because we were playing backgammon and listening to music, your Goldberg variations. No, don’t hurry. Take your time, you and Con-su-e-laaaa. We’re having a fine time, don’t worry about us. We’ve been delayed but we’re leaving now. Poor Wils is tired and hungry. He’s had a long day at the office.

  When she rang off, I said, What are the Goldberg variations?

  She said, Private joke. He didn’t believe a word of it. He heard something in my voice. And what he heard was insincerity. He’s good at that, you know. He’s an expert. It’s what he does for a living, listen to lies. Probably I shouldn’t’ve mentioned the Goldberg variations but I couldn’t resist.

  She looked into the study and asked what I was doing in the dark.

  I turned on the desk lamp and said I had been thinking about an apartment in Chicago and a cabin in Fish Creek as the venues for our future life together. The bedroom gets the water view.

  Fish Creek, she said, making a face. Black flies and mosquitoes.

  And Indians, I said. Don’t forget the Indians.

  There are no Indians in Fish Creek, she said.

  I was misinformed, I replied.

  She laughed at that and said, What makes you think I’d live in Chicago?

  I looked at her blankly. Where, then?

  I intend to live in Greenwich Village, she said.

  I suppose Greenwich Village would be all right, I said.

  Glad you approve, she said. She smiled wickedly and pulled on my arm. Come here, she said. I want to show you the skull.

  In the consulting room once again, we peered into the bookcase. The skull rested on the bottom shelf. It was well formed and well cared for, as slick and polished as ivory, a small ragged hole just above the right eye. Of course I wondered whose skull it was, and the identity of the killer, and the circumstances of the death, time and place and cause. I wondered if Jack Brule knew, or whether his skull was an anonymous casualty, an unknown soldier of an undetermined war. Or a commonplace neighbors’ dispute, an argument over a fence post or water rights or an insult to someone’s wife or daughter. Or the wife or daughter.

  Aurora closed the bookcase and said it was time to go.

  Get something to eat, get our clothes on.

  They’ll be home soon, she went on. They were just finishing up at the Pump Room and unless I miss my guess, they’re in a cab at this very moment. He’s complaining about the Goldberg variations and she’s in a snit because he wouldn’t give her time to finish her peach flambé. It wouldn’t be a good idea if they found us here undressed.

  Stripped, I said.

  Yes, stripped. And he doesn’t like strangers in his consulting room.

  I think I know why, I said.

  What does that mean?

  But I did not answer directly. I said instead, Were you serious about Greenwich Village?

  Yes, I was.

  You never mentioned it before.

  You never asked me. What did you mean about knowing why?

  Everybody has a place they don’t want people going into. Your father’s study is private. I put my arm around her, her skin damp to the touch. Her hair was damp and I felt a sudden chill in the room. Aurora tugged gently and I stepped back from her father’s glassed-in bookcase with its grinning memento mori that had nothing to do with an Indian mound near Galena or, I was convinced, anywhere else on the American continent. In the lower jaw was a molar with a gold filling, twentieth-century dentistry. I wondered if the skull belonged to a comrade or an enemy and if it was there to remind him of the war or to help him forget. Familiarity, the object present every day, bred absent-mindedness.

  You said you liked Chicago, I persisted.

  I do. Chicago’s where I’m from. It’s not where I’m going. Chicago’s large, Wils. It’s just not large enough.

  I was at a loss. Greenwich Village had come from nowhere. Probably Aurora had a friend who lived there or she had read something, a novel or a biography, that had mentioned Greenwich Village in an attractive way, an unbuttoned neighborhood where a young woman could go about her life unsupervised. Greenwich Village was often in the news, usually something to do with outrageous bohemian conduct. Maybe Brando had said something amusing about Greenwich Village, making it seem as exotic as a foreign capital—though it did not appear that Aurora had found Chicago especially confining. Ho
w large, exactly, did a city need to be? But I could see the appeal of Greenwich Village, a cosmopolitan appeal reaching across class divisions; no doubt Brando would have had something to say about that as well. When you came down to it, Chicago was still the Midwest, the landlocked heartland—and suddenly the University of Chicago looked drab, a provincial backwater no more than an hour’s drive from Quarterday. Henry Laschbrook had told me that even the Reds came from small towns like Hibbing and Ely, wintry Norwegian and German boys heavy with grievance owing to the industrial struggles of the Iron Range. There would also be a contingent from Chicago itself, earnest high school valedictorians who did not wish to study physics too far from home. Meanwhile, my Aurora would be in Morningside Heights, the edge of the continent.

  I said, Who told you about Greenwich Village?

  Nobody, she said. I’ve always liked the idea of it.

  What, particularly—

  It’s not-here, she said briskly. That’s the first thing. And the second thing and the third thing. When I did not reply, she tugged at my arm. Time to go.

  I said, That skull’s a bad omen.

  It can’t be a bad omen for you. It doesn’t belong to you.

  It doesn’t belong to your father, either. It belongs to whoever lived inside it.

  Whatever you say, she said.

  It could be anybody, I said.

  I don’t believe in omens, she said.

  We dressed in her bedroom. I finished first, happy to be rid of Jack Brule’s robe, and wandered again into the corridor and stood looking into the consulting room once more. What could you know of a human being from the room where he did his work, listening hard to the deepest fears and the most private secrets and struggling to find coherence and, from coherence, a remedy; and out of sight on the bottom shelf of a glassed-in bookcase, a memento mori. An outsider could only guess at the contours of his life, the hills and the valleys and the caverns beneath them. I had known him only as an aloof presence at North Shore dances, a slender figure in a well-cut tuxedo who refused to dance. Now I knew that he had found himself in the occasion of danger and survived. He had not sought it but had not excused himself, either; and the event stayed with him. He carried it around like a wallet. How much of him was passed down to his daughter, other than the wide-set eyes, the pride, and the refusal to let things go? I knew that the training of psychiatrists included their own psychoanalysis and I wondered if that had been, for him, a success. And what, in his terms, would constitute “success”?

  I’ll only be a minute, Aurora called from the bedroom.

  At any moment I expected the front door to fly open and a French farce to ensue, a hasty retreat, shouts, threats, mistaken identities, and finally a rowdy exit from her bedroom window.

  Take your time, I said.

  I felt as if I had been in this apartment half my lifetime, and knew it as well as I knew my family’s house in Quarterday. I realized I was making too much of too little, but that was my habit. Loving Aurora, patrolling her father’s rooms without his knowledge or permission, searching for his past—what of it I would gather through the photographs and framed documents and souvenirs, and what he had said to me and how he had said it, and what Consuela had disclosed—I knew I was trespassing, but suspected also that Jack Brule had invited me in. I had been staring at Aurora’s photograph, a candid made when she was little, perhaps six years old, her fists at her side, hair wet from a bathing pool, an expression of utmost truculence, cheeks ballooning in disappointment. Something had been withheld, or a promise broken; and if I had asked her about it, I had no doubt she would remember what it was. I felt like an astronomer at a telescope watching the birth of a star changing shape before my eyes. She in no way resembled what she became, except for the truculence.

  I heard a door slam in the street and Consuela’s complaint delivered in a throaty contralto: Jackie, I think we should get up there right now. I turned unwillingly from the consulting room and went in search of Aurora. She appeared from her room wearing a skirt and a shortsleeve sweater, running a comb through her hair. Her glasses were perched on the end of her nose. When we heard the whine of the elevator, she turned and pointed down the corridor, the private entrance for the doctor’s patients. We hurried through it and waited, then rushed down the stairs to the lobby. We fled the apartment like thieves in the night except we were laughing, pausing in the street long enough to look up at the third-floor windows. Jack Brule and Consuela stood in the half-light of the living room in their formal clothes looking like any well-to-do couple home from an evening out, the theater and dinner later, and only moments before bedtime. Consuela said something and Aurora’s father seemed to shake his head in disgust; and then his hands went to his temples and his shoulders sagged as if from a great burden. Aurora had told me of his headaches and I supposed this was one. Then the lights abruptly went out and Jack and Consuela were visible no more. Aurora and I hurried off down the street in the direction of the all-night restaurant on Clark Street. I could not erase the sight of Jack Brule’s fingers on his temples and the sway of his body. I was in awe of him, yes; but I was afraid of him also.

  9

  A WEEK LATER, my last day at the paper, Tilleman instructed me to be at the state’s attorney’s office at ten o’clock sharp to pick up two copies of a grand jury indictment and return at once to the newsroom, flank speed. Word was that the grand jury had charged one of Chicago’s leading Mafiosi with racketeering, loansharking, extortion, and intimidation of witnesses. This is news, Tilleman said. It’s been a long while since anyone thought to enforce the law on our local hoods. Our readers will want to know the particulars. It’ll be chaos at the state’s attorney’s office, so arrive early, and here’s fare for the taxi back.

  And then you can have the rest of the day off, in recognition of your valuable assistance this summer.

  Tilleman gave me a worn dollar bill from his own wallet, a kind of ceremony signaling the importance of the assignment. The paper rarely gave cab fare for anything except a four-alarm schoolhouse fire or a love-nest slaying.

  Thank you, I said.

  We’ve never had anyone in the office quite like you, Tilleman said. You’re a North Shore kid, one of a kind, hard to figure out. Tell me this. Did you enjoy yourself in my newsroom, Ravan?

  I did, I said.

  Like the atmosphere, do you?

  I do, I said. I’ve learned a lot.

  What? he said. What have you learned?

  I hesitated, uncertain exactly what it was that I had learned except how to place a bet with a bookie and how to hold a telephone tucked between my shoulder and my ear and speak so that I could not be heard five feet away. Then I remembered the colored woman found frozen in an alley on the South Side, the woman without a name or an address, now a missing person. I said, I learned there are some stories you’ll never get to the bottom of. You’ll try and try and come up empty. And those are the most interesting stories of all, and the ones that people remember because the question remains unanswered. Years later, they’ll say, What do you suppose ever happened to that woman, found frozen solid?

  Tilleman said, Horseshit. Those are the stories that people forget. You’ll never be a reporter. He pronounced the word ruh-porter. Tilleman smiled thinly, and thought a long moment while he tapped his pencil against the paste pot. He said, You’re the oldest god damned nineteen-year-old I’ve ever met. I think you were born middle-aged, and that’s your trouble. Curiosity is child-like. My best reporters never grew up. I don’t think you enjoy finding things out. Finding things out is for the proles. Find something out, you do away with guess work. You do away with romance. You like guess work because you think everything’s a mystery. You like mystery. You don’t care much for the truth. But that’s not what reporters do. When reporters find things out, they demystify. They don’t have to like what they find. In most cases, they don’t care what they find. Liking and caring don’t come into it, the reporter’s trade. When you’re on the job, you dig; and
what you dig up goes into the newspaper. If it’s gold, it goes on page one. If it’s brass, it goes inside. That’s the incentive, you see. Page one. But you’re not interested in digging, one crisp fact after another until you have a story that people will buy the newspaper to read, because the story’s satisfying. It’s nourishing. It’s scrambled eggs and bacon. It’s well told. But you don’t care what satisfies people, what makes them buy the paper day after day. You don’t want to be below decks, doing the digging, shoveling coal into the hotbox, making the engines run. I think you’re interested in topside. You’re interested in navigation. You want to be on deck with the sextant, charting the course. You want clean hands. And you want the wheel.

  The skipper, I said.

  Tilleman waved his arms in great arcs, his face red with anger. Skipper! he shouted. You couldn’t skipper a rowboat. Hell no, the hurricane’s blowing force nine but you don’t notice it because you’re trying to find the stars with a fucking sextant. There aren’t any stars, Ravan. It’s a hurricane and you can’t see the stars. They might as well not exist.

  Maybe they exist on the North Shore, he added.

  So you better go back to Lake Forest, or wherever you come from.

  Help that daddy of yours break the union.

  Goodbye, Ravan. Good luck.

  Good luck to you, I said, a reply that in the circumstances was just this side of insolent. I decided to fire two last shots.