IT WASN’T ALL BEACHES AND DREAM, of course, those first few months in Chicago. I paid attention, in my ambling and wandering and jaunting, and I saw a lot of broken and sad and ragged and dark. There were rats in the alleys, some of them as big as cats and arrogant as aldermen. There was a beggar with no arms or legs on the corner of Addison and Halsted; one shop owner nearby sneeringly called him Second Base, although he also quietly sent him a blanket on cold mornings. There were prostitutes at night on every other block along Broadway from Belmont to Addison, on alternate sides of the street, and sometimes I could see how their faces were sad and weary until a car slowed down and then they donned a smile like a mask and walked briskly out of the shadows; sometimes they even ran awkwardly to the cars, their high heels clacking like castanets.
Twice I saw blood on the street, and once a crime scene, cordoned off with yellow plastic tape and a police cruiser; once I saw a woman mugged, on a Sunday morning, on Broadway, although I also saw that thief get totally clocked, a block away, by an old man who stuck his arm out just as the sprinting thief had turned his head to see who was following him. Once I found jagged shards of human teeth in an alley; once I saw a man slap a boy of ten so hard the boy’s eyeglasses flew off into the grass along the lakefront walkway. The man stalked off but the boy knelt down in the grass and felt around, sobbing, for his glasses. I ran to help, knowing all too well the feeling of thrashing around desperately for your lost eyeglasses, but by the time I got there another man walking by had picked them up and handed them to the boy, who put them on and ran away without a word. By then I was close enough to see that his eyeglasses were held together in the center by a gob of duct tape as big as a knuckle, and that the left lens was chipped, and I wondered how many times they had flown off his face.
Even the nuns in the fading convent nearby, sweet and gentle and generous as they were, were infinitesimally shabby around the edges, and maybe even taut with hunger, it seemed to me; the three times I was in their convent that autumn, twice to haul furniture out and once to haul it in (someone had donated six plush reading chairs, and Edward and I went to help), their kitchen was bare of food except for an apple by the toaster; and it seemed like the same apple the third time as the first, as if it was there for show, or as a talisman of some sort.
Most of all, worst of all, were the rattled kids I saw. It took me a while to notice them, but once I knew where to look I saw far too many. I’d see them on buses, especially, or waiting for buses: kids without socks on the coldest days, kids with mismatched shoes, kids with ragged coats that clearly had been donated to churches and shelters, little kids scrounging for bus fare and then not getting on the bus. I started noticing the kids who checked public telephones for forgotten change, and searched alleys behind restaurants for good garbage, and slipped thin packets of meat and cheese into their pants at the grocery store. Everyone sees the kids who do dramatic things like purse-snatching but I grew absorbed by the kids you hardly notice at all at the edges and fringes of stores and bus stops; it was like they were not altogether there, and just drifted around in their battered green parkas and old sneakers, scattering like sparrows as soon as someone stopped to look closely at their strained faces.
* * *
By November, when it began to get seriously cold, I had thoroughly explored the ten blocks or so in every direction from our building, ranging all the way west to Lincoln Avenue, north past Addison, south past Belmont, and for miles up and down the lakefront, and I began to make voyages farther afield, taking buses and even trains; and curiously it was in this expeditionary phase that I got to know Miss Elminides better, for she knew the city thoroughly, and dearly loved the many secrets of the South Side.
It was Miss Elminides who taught me how to take the train to Chicago White Sox games, and who whispered the name of an usher who would let me hop the turnstile and get in free after the first half of the first inning. It was Miss Elminides who drew me a secret map of two tiny dark shadowy extraordinary half-lit smoky obscure astounding jazz clubs on the South Side, one of them in a dilapidated garage behind a seedy automobile chop-shop. It was Miss Elminides who wrote a note in Greek and told me to deliver it to a man named Panagiotakis, who would then take me to the greatest Greek cook in the world, who lived on the second floor of a building that supposedly was a hotel but was really a sort of hermitage for Greek mystics, several of whom were unbelievable chefs and cooks.
And it was Miss Elminides who one day asked Edward and me to deliver a message to a friend of a friend, as she said, deep on the South Side—a slightly awkward message, she said, which is why she thought Edward should accompany me, in case of misunderstanding. I said I would be happy to do so but with total respect Edward did not seem exactly physically prepossessing, and if a hint of intimidating burl was part of the package maybe I should bring my friend Tommy who had played football for Notre Dame; but Miss Elminides smiled and told me about the two times she had been accosted by ruffians and Edward had appeared out of nowhere to forcibly dissuade them, and the time a huge wolfhound a block away had gone rabid and Edward took care of things, and the time Edward had pursued and downed a purse-snatcher along the lake, and the time a representative of a northside gang called the Gaylords offered what he called a reasonably priced fire insurance policy to Mr Pawlowsky and Edward removed the top half of the man’s left pinky finger so swiftly and deftly that there was hardly any blood, as the responding policeman observed, impressed with Edward’s skill.
So it was that Edward and I traveled together in the city for the first time—first by bus along the lake, and then on foot through the wilderness of the South Side, along streets I did not know but Edward apparently did, and quite well too, it seemed, for he was brisk and sure, and twice led me through alleys that seemed dead-ends to me but turned out to save us several blocks of walking. Only once did he stop to get his bearings, at what seemed to be a shop selling baseball paraphernalia; he scratched at the window, the proprietor came out, they conferred quietly, the proprietor handed me a baseball card (White Sox pitcher Billy Pierce, 1959, the year he won fourteen games and lost fifteen), and then Edward led me though another alley to a church. Again Edward scratched at the door, and to my surprise a lovely young woman came out, wearing a beautiful blue cloak. I gaped for a moment, until Edward nudged me to show her the card, which I did.
All these years later I can still see the look that came over her face, and the way she knelt down to stare Edward in the eye. When she stood up again I handed her Miss Elminides’ message, which instantly vanished inside her cloak as if by sleight of hand, and a moment later she too vanished, back into the church, with a swirl of her cloak; but she must have conveyed some silent warning to Edward, for we did not retrace our steps back through the alleys and streets, but instead hustled directly east to the lake, and then home by another bus, on which we huddled in the two rearmost seats, on the lake side, away from the street. On the bus he seemed distracted, but by the time we were back in our building he was himself again, bemused and attentive, and when we reported our progress to Miss Elminides, in the lobby, he was as wry and engaged as usual. In some manner I could not see he delivered a message to Miss Elminides, who sighed and said it could not be helped, and expressed her most sincere thanks for our assistance in a delicate personal matter.
* * *
Of course there were many other residents in our apartment building: the units went from A through F on each of the three upper floors, for a total of eighteen apartments, in which lived something like fifty people, all told, and during my time there I met nearly all of them, although there were a couple of legendary hermits, and I had to trust Edward that they actually did reside in the building, in apartments 3C and 3D, respectively; according to Edward they were brothers who hardly ever emerged, and had not spoken to each other in thirty years, despite being separated only by a thin wooden wall, through which they must have heard each other conducting a life of eerie similarity. I once said to Edward that this seemed sad to me, such proximity without intimacy, and his response was something like as far as he could tell there was an awful lot of exactly this sort of thing among human beings, more than any other kind of being; a sad thing to have to admit is true.
I did meet the other residents, at least casually, mostly while we were getting our mail in the lobby, or in transit on the stairs, or waiting sleepily on line in the basement for Mrs Manfredi’s empanadas on Saturday mornings, and after a few weeks I was able to put stories to some of them, with Mr Pawlowsky’s quiet assistance. The Armenian librettist on the third floor, for example, was a man intent on succeeding in opera, despite the fact that his father and uncles were barons of industry, specializing particularly in classic cars, which perhaps explained the Hudson or Packard chassis in the basement. On the second floor was a tiny vibrant woman who must have been past eighty years old but had the most brilliant sizzling orange hair I had ever seen; in some way she was associated with the tremendous stuffed bronze horse in the storage area. Edward thought she had been a propmaster or animal-wrangler for a movie studio, while Mr Pawlowsky thought she had actually been an actress in old Westerns; there had been a film company shooting Westerns in Chicago in the old days, he said, over to the west side, on Argyle Street, and he was almost sure she had been an actress in the old Broncho Billy films; didn’t she look awfully like the girl who was always Billy’s wife or daughter or love interest or being rescued at the last second from a hurtling train?
There was a man who had been a sailor, though not in the Navy, said Mr Pawlowsky; there were four quiet thin dapper businessmen, who lived two by two on the second floor, and sometimes left for work in the morning all at the same time, all dressed beautifully; there were two young women from rural Arkansas, fresh out of college and just beginning advertising careers in the city, one in perfumes and the other in shoes and boots; there was a tailor of Scottish extraction, a department-store detective, a man who had once raised cheetahs, the inventor of children’s propeller hats, and a tall man who had been a cricket star in Trinidad but who now taught remedial mathematics at a high school twenty blocks west; Edward showed me one morning how this man deftly carried a cricket bat in his overcoat, in a special pocket designed to accommodate it, in case of untoward incidents.
One time I said to Mr Pawlowsky that you could say of the building’s residents that we were motley, by which I meant from all walks of life, but he said politely that he himself might choose another word, given the chance: “‘Motley’ having the intimation of incongruous, or mismatched,” he noted, “whereas I would say that we are utterly normal in our variety; such is the American way, that everyone is welcome, generally, if civil and reasonably behaved and able to foot their bills, or have them footed by someone else. The one thing we really miss here, I think, is children; we have only the three, and one of those a teenager, who doesn’t count as a child, but as the larval stage of the uneasy adult, especially in his case; he is an uncomfortable young man, although Edward is of the opinion that he will end well, and Edward is usually right about such things.” This was a boy named Ovious, who despite his orotund name was amazingly thin, and who conducted himself in public with a series of sighs and grunts, the former for his parents and the latter for everyone else; supposedly he attended the technical high school nearby, apprenticing to be an electrician, but since he used the back alley for his peregrinations I hardly saw him; even when I did spot him, furtively slipping through the alley, he seemed obscure around the edges, as if he wasn’t fully formed yet, or had not been completely transported to this world from another one, where people were incredibly thin and didn’t speak much.