I WENT ALL THE WAY HOME to New York City for Christmas, taking the Hoosier State train through Cincinnati and Indianapolis (I was crazy for trains then, and at one time or another took the Zephyr to Denver, and the Ethan Allen Express to Vermont, and the Hiawatha to Milwaukee), and it was a wonderful time, crammed with laughter and chaffing and intense basketball games with my many brothers, but when I got back to my apartment I was washed with loneliness for the first time since I had come to Chicago.
I tried to run it off, dribbling my smooth shining basketball ever farther and faster along the lake, along the slippery paths cleared through the snow, and extending my brisk alley explorations much deeper into the west side of the city, which seemed to stretch all the way to Iowa; I tried to walk it off, twice walking home the four miles from Madison Street to the apartment building; I tried, one night, to drink it away, getting all the way to a fourth whiskey at the pub around the corner until Raymond the barman stopped pouring and asked me what was wrong and sent me home with an off-duty policeman who told me jokes in Gaelic and smelled vaguely of rain.
I even, for once, accepted a social invitation, to a weekend barbecue on the Iowa border, but once there I found the desperately witty banter too much to bear, and drifted off into the cornfields, where I got so helplessly lost that I finally hitched a ride back to Chicago from a carload of burly muddy football players on their way back to school from a pig roast.
It was Edward finally who rousted me from my brown study, with another expedition to the South Side, this time to a tiny subterranean blues club named for its proprietress, a large calm woman named Theresa, who seemed to know Edward, and waved us into the murk without charge. It was more of a basement than a club, it seemed to me, but Edward led me to a corner where a young piano player was just finishing a meditative blues with a lovely trickling solo that had the patrons staring at him in amazement. “That was Otis Spann, you know,” said the pianist quietly into his microphone. “He died eight years ago not far from here and he buried under old oak trees not far from here and we going to play Otis all night long like praying. Otis was the best of us all. He a wonder of a man. God gave that man a heart unlike any heart ever was. He was a beautiful man. He died so very young. He only forty when he died. Anybody ever to hear Otis play, you different ever after. A piano player to hear Otis for the first time, that was the end of the piano player you used to be and the beginning of your new one. This happened to me. So tonight we going to play Otis as long as Theresa let us stay here. We maybe play ’til morning if she let us. We going to pray on the piano. We begin with ‘Someday’ played slow and low so you feel the blues at the bottom of your bones,” and he closed his eyes and began to play again, and the music was so lean and sobbing and sweet and sad, so slow and haunted and resigned, with a hint of thorny endlessly patient weary bemused endurance in it, that I did feel it in the bottom of my bones; and I had the odd feeling that I had always known this music somehow without ever actually hearing it before, that it had been waiting patiently for me, so to speak, and now we were friends, and would always be so; we understood each other somehow, we thought and dreamed in the same language, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with skin color or gender or occupation or avocation, or any of the other things by which we define and categorize and wall ourselves off from other people. This music was bone music, music that you either felt very deeply, inarticulately deeply, or you did not. I had the sense that you could enjoy it on the surface, with its propulsive rhythm and repetitive pulse, its predilection to chant and litany and tides of chorus, without loving it, in the way that you could enjoy pop and folk and ethnic music here and there, usually married to an occasion or event; but even before the young piano player finished the song I was utterly and completely and forever absorbed by the blues, and have remained so ever since.
* * *
Actually meeting Miss Elminides finally had piqued my curiosity about her, and between Edward and Mr Pawlowsky I learned a great deal. Edward was of the firm opinion that she had taken up residence ten years ago, not six, and even at that time she was in the habit of riding the bus, destination unknown, although Edward believed she was a teacher, from various mannerisms and accoutrements and habits, and even the way she carried herself. She had a firm but gentle mien, always willing to listen but brisk and impatient with her time being wasted; she had a preternatural sense of people lingering or waiting in the hall, about to knock on her door; she was apparently erudite in geography, topography, cartography, history, navigation, and music, if the maps and instruments we had seen on her wall were any indication; she took the bus south and west every morning, and returned to her bay apartment late every afternoon; she had the eerie teacherly ability to quell young Azad’s exuberance with a look or a quiet word or even a slight decisive gesture of her hand; and occasionally, at the times that you would think matched the intense periods of a school calendar, she would lock herself in her room for days on end with large stacks of papers and folders, and subsist, apparently, on nothing but coffee and honey and olives, if Edward’s sure sense of smell was to be believed.
“You see his line of thinking here, and there is a lot to be said for his calculations,” said Mr Pawlowsky, on a particularly starry night on the roof in early December. “But there are, of course, many other explanations for her habits. She could be, for example, a composer, or a novelist, or an accountant, or a deft and thorough robber of banks, for which she needs to carefully scout the premises and behavioral patterns of the employees, and scour over vast troves of architectural drawings and geological surveys and city plumbing and piping maps. That could be. Or she could be some sort of spiritual visionary, the leader of a small sect of some sort, devoted particularly to maps as forms of prayer, along with the usual predilection to music that most religions evince, playing on the natural rhythms of the heart. That could also be. Or indeed she could be working for the city in some capacity, or perhaps she is the bookkeeper for a business entity of some sort, from gyro shop to music store to the reading of palms and casting of horoscopes. The possibilities are as endless as Miss Elminides’ range of skills and talents, which is remarkable for one so young.”
This line of talk led to a discussion of her age. Mr Pawlowsky put her in her late twenties, given the translucence of her skin and the way she walked with the effortless springing graceful step of a young deer, but Edward was sure she was in her late thirties, her youthful appearance and carriage being more a matter of admirable sleep patterns, balanced diet and living habits, and the luck of the draw in the matter of heritage and ancestry. I hadn’t the slightest idea, having had no experience at all then in gauging the age of women; and later this was to prove a skill I never could acquire; in the years since my time in Chicago I have regularly embarrassed myself and others in underestimating advanced age and overestimating that which is less so; never to the point of mortification, thankfully, but occasionally to hilarity, and once to tears.
What I remember best about that December night on the roof, though, was not the interesting and essentially detective discussion about Miss Elminides, but my first intimation that she loomed large in Mr Pawlowsky’s affections, more than he was willing to admit, and more, perhaps, than he knew. As that night wore on, and Edward made sure to draw our attention to the wonderfully clear outlines of the constellations Andromeda and Pegasus (they share the star Alpheratz, as he noted), Mr Pawlowsky, perhaps unbuttoned somewhat by the astonishing clarity of the stars, spoke ever more warmly about Miss Elminides, about her grace and kindness, her unassuming but attentive authority with the building, her meticulously honest handling of taxes and city inspectors, her lack of false or tinny morality about the businessmen who lived two by two on the second floor or the tailor and the detective who lived together in 2B, her quiet extension of credit occasionally to trustworthy residents who were caught short for one reason or another, her adamant refusal to pay nominal protection fees to local ruffians despite the very real possibility of material or physical assault, her smiling willingness to allow Mrs Manfredi’s weekly bakery to operate illegally in the basement once a week, her careful management of her apartment (he had never had to repair or replace anything in her rooms, in the six or ten years she had lived there), and various other adulatory remarks. Finally, along about midnight, he stopped, perhaps having sensed that he was revealing more than he wanted to, and we went off to our rooms. The next day, though, Edward pointed out that Andromeda, the loveliest of young women in ancient Greek lore, was saved from a monster’s maw by Perseus, a man of the sea.
* * *
A week later it snowed for the first time, a light dusting on a Saturday and then a solid couple of inches the next day, and it was exactly the sort of gentle drifting opening snowfall that everyone enjoys and runs out into and spends the whole day savoring—snowball fights, tiny snowmen laboriously built by children and their puffing dads, kids making snow angels in fields and lots, people taking endless lovely photographs of snow sifting into the lake, dogs whirling and snapping at snowflakes, shopkeepers grinning as they sweep snow away from their front doors with brooms; they wouldn’t be smiling later, when they had to wield snow shovels against wet heavy onerous tons of grimy grainy snow, but for the moment they stood smoking cigars and laughing and calling insults all up and down Broadway and Halsted Street, brandishing their old brooms like staves or wands.
Then there was a last gasp of autumn, a brief flicker of wavering light, a few days when it was almost warm in the thin sunshine, and I noticed a flurry of old folks, wrapped in overcoats and scarves and mufflers and baboushkas, basking on benches along the lake all the way from Dog Beach to Oak Street Beach; it was like they were storing up as much heat and light as they could before they battened down for the winter in their tiny apartments, drinking tea and listening to the radio and reading newspapers in the tongues of old countries, or the labor union newsletter, or the shipping news, or the racing form, or the police log. Some of them I recognized, as I ran past dribbling my gleaming basketball, their heads turning slowly like turtles as they heard the ball approaching, their eyes glued to its glow as I went by, their heads turning slowly to watch me fade into the distance, their faces faintly disapproving except for some dim sweet memory of the days when they ran too, through woods or fields or streets; but most of them I had never seen before, and I wondered if they were like cicadas, emerging from their burrows once a year at a set time, or like alewives, compelled once a year to gather on the shore of the lake.
But then it really snowed—all through Christmas week and past New Year’s Eve and into January, when it finally slowed and then stopped just before the Feast of the Epiphany. By then there was so much snow on the street that parked cars were completely buried and people put pink rubber balls on the tips of their radio antennas to mark where their cars were. The city plows never came at all, the buses stopped running, I couldn’t dribble my basketball anywhere, and people walking to and from the grocery store and the pub had worn a narrow trail down the middle of the street, maybe five feet above the asphalt. The pink balls marking parked cars were about at knee height, most of them new but a few the loveliest faded pink, the color of shyness.
The radio and television and newspapers roared with indignation over the stalled plows and poor planning and corrupt machinations of oleaginous politicians, and that epic snowstorm, it turned out, was a hinge point for Chicago politics, because the mayor at the time, the Machine’s chosen man, heir to the gruff blunt Richard Joseph Daley of sainted memory and criminal record, was so damaged by his failure to plow the streets and collect garbage during the storm that he was soundly defeated in the spring Democratic primary elections, the first time the Machine had been defeated in a century in Chicago, and the new mayor was, gasp, female, the first time the city had ever had a person with a bra running City Hall, that anyone knew.
But the image I retain from the storm has to do with Edward. The first sunny day after the storm ended I was walking atop the snow to the gyro shop around the corner when I noticed Edward inspecting each of the pink balls on car antennas along the street. He went up and down the street, inspecting each one, until he found the one he wanted. I watched as he removed it deftly with his teeth and buried it a few feet away, digging a couple of feet down into the snow to be sure it would not be found for weeks. I wondered if there was some quiet enmity at work there—if the owner of the car had in some way bruised or insulted Mr Pawlowsky or Edward or Miss Elminides—but when I asked Edward about it, a week later when the snow had receded somewhat, he stared at me blankly as if he hadn’t the slightest idea what I was talking about.