THE FIRST TIME I set foot in Miss Elminides’ apartment was that month—she had been on a sea-voyage, as she said, and I had been absorbed in grappling with the opening weeks of my job at the magazine downtown, where it seemed to me I was utterly useless to begin with, and then slowly grew slightly less useless by the week—and it was mid-November before I found myself in her bay apartment, accompanied by Mr Pawlowsky and Edward. The proximate event was a contretemps with keys; I had misplaced mine, Mr Pawlowsky was sure he had left the master keys with Miss Elminides, and Edward came along to convey his regards to Miss Elminides, whom he much admired.
We did not knock, when we arrived at her door—it wasn’t necessary, Mr Pawlowsky said, she knows when visitors are imminent—and indeed just as we arrived the door swung open and we stepped into her apartment, which was flooded with light and seemed immense, though I learned later it was only slightly bigger than the other apartments. It was furnished with austere grace: lean wooden tables and chairs, a modest marble fireplace, and large arches through which I could see a small kitchen to one side and a sort of studio to the other, with tables stacked with books and papers, and a wall hung with maps and musical instruments, among which I thought I saw the gleam of a flügelhorn. There was no hint of a bedroom or necessary room, and given the dimensions of the building I couldn’t imagine where such spaces would be in Miss Elminides’ apartment; when I asked Edward about this later he had to confess that this had always been a puzzle to him as well, and that he had wondered if she slept in her studio, or in a daybed under her bay windows, or perhaps did not sleep at all; she certainly had the translucent complexion of someone who regularly bathed in moonlight.
She was tall, but not gangly; slender, but not weightless like poor Ovious; and she seemed to be that wonderfully indeterminate age that some women achieve after thirty or so, anywhere between thirty and sixty. Her hair was black and long; her eyes and eyebrows and earrings were also black; and her voice was murmurous as she stepped forward to say hello. I cannot remember to this day what she wore, and it afterward proved that I never could remember what she wore; oddly Mr Pawlowsky said the same thing, although Edward maintained that she was one of the few people he knew who could wear loose clothes like robes and shawls and never appear to be lost or hiding inside them.
The matter of the keys was quickly addressed, and our discussion of rent and terms and deposits, long dreaded by me because of my pitiful bank account, was also quickly settled, slightly to my advantage, and a moment later we were out in the hallway again. Mr Pawlowsky bustled off to fix a broken window upstairs, but Edward and I lingered in the hallway, trying to identify what we had smelled in Miss Elminides’ apartment: honey, nutmeg, and what Edward thought was indisputably crushed or diced olives. He also thought that he could smell owls and books printed in Aramaic, but there he lost me. I was willing to believe him on the olives, until he claimed that he could smell the difference between crushed and diced olives, which seemed fanciful to me; but later Mr Pawlowsky said that Edward could indeed make such distinctions, and there were many stories to be told of his exquisite sense of smell.
“Some things,” said Mr Pawlowsky, “you can easily imagine he is able to smell from either vast distance or from the faintest evidence, like fish runs in the lake or forest fires in the deep northern woods, but the other things are startling. He can actually smell a rising tide in the lake, for example. How can he possibly do that? Yet he does. He can tell which of the two standard morning lake-run buses are in operation, without even leaving the room; all he needs is the window to be cracked open an inch. He can smell imminent asteroid showers. He can indeed smell owls, although you would not think that was possible. He can smell snow a day and sometimes two before it happens. Both of the times Miss Elminides was confronted by ruffians he smelled trouble and was out and away faster than you can blink your eyes. He is a lot quicker than he seems to be when he needs to be. The one time that his superb sense of smell deserts him is during the alewife run in the lake, when they wash up by the uncountable thousands and Edward disappears for days at a time and comes back sleek and redolent and moaning gently with surfeit. You never saw a dog who liked fish more than Edward. At those times his nose is useless for a couple of days and I also have to give him a bath. He is not much for bathing, although he does like swimming in the lake, but if I didn’t give him a bath then we would smell the alewife run for the rest of the year. I have the greatest respect for alewives but I do not want to live with their aura every day. I think he not only eats them but rolls in them for reasons that elude me. There is a lot to be said for the alewife, but the smell gets to be a little much. You’ll see, come spring. Edward believes the run will be early this year, probably late April, and if he thinks it’s so, it’s so. You’ll see.”
* * *
My job with the magazine downtown, I should say, grew more entertaining by the week, or perhaps it was me becoming less obtuse by the week, for by Thanksgiving I was enjoying it so much that I happily volunteered to fill in for several colleagues who wished to be off in various directions for various tribal feasts and ritual slayings of native fowl with gun and bow. In general my duties were so various that I did not have time to be bored, and in the course of business I got to meet reporters, editors, printers, deliverymen, truck drivers, priests, nuns, monks, postmen, writers, teachers, photographers, painters, typesetters, a sculptor, a woman who painted holy icons, and a man who had spent his career running a linotype machine, who in turn introduced me to a man who had spent his career setting hot-lead type for small-town newspapers; suffice it to say that in my time with that magazine in Chicago I may well have met every riveting unfamous person in the city, including water mystics, street preachers, a quiet woman who fed a thousand people a day, beggars, all sorts of men and women in law enforcement, political operatives of every sort and stripe, barmen and barmaids, cooks and boxers, all sorts of people having to do with the operation of trains, and a slew of people who quietly do the work of Catholic parishes in America, the vast majority of them women, who for the most part grinned when I said tart things about male dominance in the faith—“that’s what we want the poor dears to think, as we run things from behind their voluminous robes,” as one woman said to me, smiling broadly.
The magazine’s offices were also a source of stimulation and pleasure to me, for they were on Madison Street where it met Wells Street, which was named for a soldier who died fighting the people who lived in Chicago before there was a Chicago. (His killers, impressed with his courage, immediately cut out and ate his heart, hoping for some of his valor.) Wells Street carried elevated trains, and the combination of roaring rattling trains above, and the intricate steel and iron latticework of the tracks and their pillars, and the swoop and flutter of pigeons and starlings, and the hustle of taxis and bustle of pedestrians below, and the moan of car horns and rumble of trucks, along with the endlessly changing patterns of swirling sun and fog and rain and snow, absorbed me so thoroughly that I sometimes paused for many minutes at a time on the corner of Madison and Wells, fascinated by yet another new combination of sight and sound.
Also the then-hapless Chicago Bulls played just down the street a few blocks, in the cavernous echoing Chicago Stadium, where so few patrons paid to watch them lose that the ticket-taker waved us in for free; and the famous Billy Goat Tavern was a few blocks north, and always filled to bursting with besotted reporters and commuters gulping beer before their long train ride home; and Grant Park was a few blocks south, where almost always there was a protest or a ringing speech or a peripatetic madman or a busker of startling skill; and Union Station was a few blocks west, with its vast marble Great Hall, bigger and lovelier than any cathedral I had ever seen; and the Chicago River was just west too, a river never without surprise, for I saw boats and people and animals and many other things floating or swimming in that slow dark green murk, on their placid way into the lake; one time even a policeman, who dove from the Clark Street Bridge to save what he thought was a child, but which turned out to be a small dog wearing a tartan sweater.
* * *
If I have given the impression that Mr Pawlowsky was frail or languorous I have done badly, for he was active as a bird around the building, fixing this and that, replacing worn and battered things, tinkering steadily with plumbing and electrical conundrums, spackling and grouting and plastering and washing and painting seemingly all day and often at night; many times when I came in late from work or from rambles in the city I would hear or see him quietly at work, usually accompanied by Edward, especially if the matter had to do with carpentry, at which Edward was gifted, according to Mr Pawlowsky; also Edward was deft at carrying boards and tools up and down stairs, and one of the first hilarious moments I had in the building was watching our youngest resident, a boy of six named Azad, gape in amazement as Edward managed two six-foot oak timbers, a red steel toolbox, and a bucket of lost-head nails all the way from the basement up to the roof.
Active as Mr Pawlowsky was in and around the building, however, I saw him more than a few feet away from the building very rarely. I had begun to be curious about how he and Edward procured food, and how he got all the necessary materials for building repair without a truck, and if Mr Pawlowsky ever went to the doctor, or church, or a ball game, or a pub, or Navy reunions down on the Pier, and had he ever been married, and did he have kids, or what?
In short I was curious, or rude, and I was awkward or honest enough then to simply knock on his door and ask, which I did one crisp lovely Saturday afternoon before Thanksgiving, when you could feel the first whip of winter in the air, and the sure prospect of snow. As I remember it was one of those Midwest autumn afternoons where you could faintly smell burning leaves somewhere, and hear various college football games from Illinois and Indiana and Wisconsin and Michigan and Iowa on various radios, and hear geese honking overhead, and trees were almost wholly naked, and even teenagers were wearing jackets, and that morning at the grocery store there had been a learned discussion at the meat counter about hunting permits and deer season and deer camps and what wines go best with venison.
Edward opened the door, and again I found Mr Pawlowsky shivering under his old faded blue Navy blankets. I apologized for intruding and made to withdraw, figuring he was suffering from his recurrent malady, but he was in a cheerful mood, pale as he was, and called me back over to sit and talk, while Edward went off to the grocery store for coffee beans.
Even though I was in my first few months as a professional journalist I was already experienced enough to approach a big question sideways, or sidelong, so instead of coming right out and asking him about love and marriage and children and family I asked him about his provenance and childhood and early chapters, figuring that would loosen him up enough and get him talking freely—appetizing talk before the main meal, as it were.
“‘I am an American, Chicago born, Chicago, that somber city, and go at things as I have taught myself,’ as our great urban chronicler Saul Bellow wrote,” he said, smiling, “and to date I have departed the city just once in this life, to take the train to Iowa, to make sure it was there—this was when I was young, and not altogether sure there really was anything outside Chicago, despite persistent reports. I remember disembarking from the train and walking for hours, apples in my pockets, through endless forests of corn and rustling carpets of soybeans. I cannot remember that I saw a soul that day, although the birds were profuse, and I saw deer and raccoons, animals wholly new to me, and what I later ascertained was an otter, in a small river. In the evening I took the train back to the city, enlightened. This was long before I met Edward, and it remains the longest journey I have taken solo, to date.”
He told stories the rest of the afternoon, as the light slowly melted away on the street outside and dusk parked for a while and then night pitched camp; Edward came and went on various errands, carrying groceries and the mail and the afternoon edition of the newspaper; I made coffee for the three of us at one point, Edward showing me the necessary apparatus and its machinations; and all the while Mr Pawlowsky spoke of his childhood in the city, when horses and chickens were not uncommon in the streets and alleys, and fishmongers plied their trade in carts and wagons, and the city’s throbbing engine was the stockyards, where cattle beyond number came and went, some to be slaughtered and sold piecemeal, others to be shipped farther on in every direction and across the oceans; the city swirled with smoke from mills and factories beyond number; the snap of gunfire in the streets was not unknown, as ruffians fought the police, themselves often worse ruffians; and the lake was alive with barges and steamers and ferries and workboats of every shape and description; “and the city was such a magnet for people from all over the world that there were thirteen different languages spoken in our neighborhood,” said Mr Pawlowsky; “I know the number exactly because my brother Paul and I counted them one day, measuring in four blocks in every direction from our apartment, and including our building, in which there were five languages, basically one per floor: Polish on the first floor, where we lived, Russian on two, Gaelic on three, Greek on four, and Scandinavian in general on the fifth floor, from Swedish and Finnish to an Icelandic family, the Peturssons, lovely people who made an extraordinary cured salmon dish that I can taste even now on particularly cold days. And there were hats and caps everywhere when I was a boy, and cars became more common. There were the years of great poverty, of course, during which people indeed did sell apples on corners, and line up by the hundreds in hopes of a single job, and line up for charitable soup, and families doubled up or even tripled up in apartments, as they lost their lodgings. I saw all that, yes, and I well remember walking in a crowd of thousands of children to the house of the city’s school chief to ask for food, although I was just along for the fun of it—a friend ran by as Paul and I were on our front stoop and he called to us and we ran after him. But in general our childhoods were pleasant, if pinched, Paul and me; mostly, when I put my mind to it, I remember voices, and angles of sunshine and rain, and animals—the fishmonger had a mule I was especially fond of, as he was not at all recalcitrant or sour-tempered, as so many of his brethren seem to be.”
Thus spake Mr Pawlowsky at eloquent length, and by the time I stirred myself from my chair and rose to make my own small dinner it was full dark. Not until late that night, as I was falling asleep, did I realize that Mr Pawlowsky had never mentioned anything about his family other than his brother Paul, nor had he gotten the story of himself even into his teenage years. For a moment I was disgruntled, feeling as I did when I was outplayed at chess, but then I resolved to keep asking questions; even then, in the first flush of my career as a journalist, I sensed the irresistible lure of inquiry, the power of an invitation to fill an ear, the open arms of silence welcoming story. I fell asleep in the sure knowledge that there would be many moments to come in which I could tease Mr Pawlowsky’s story out from behind his dignified reserve; and I could also, if necessary, resort to Edward, who knew much and forgot nothing.