“WE MUST GO ABOUT THIS SYSTEMATICALLY, WATSON.” Packy, who was enjoying himself altogether too much, it seemed to me, was seated at my rolltop, pencil in hand. “The girl has class, you say, despite her dime-store stationery. She has some experience waiting on tables. She works in elegant places like the Del Coronado and the Beverly Hills, so the first spots to investigate in Chicago are the quality restaurants in the best hotels—Pump Room, Empire Room, Boulevard Room, Beach Walk—and the top nightclubs—Chez Paree, College Inn, Rio Cabana, Latin Quarter, Vine Gardens, maybe even the Trianon and the Aragon. Would she maybe be a Chez Paree adorable?”
“She’s supposed to have a wonderful singing voice, but I can’t see her dancing in skimpy clothes.”
Pack glanced at my photo, which I had made from the slide, from which he had a hard time averting his eyes. “I won’t contend the point,” he said with a wink. “But I suppose we can write off the Silver Palm and the 606 Club.”
He tapped his pencil thoughtfully. “Why do you think she chose Chicago?”
“Because she is a clever little bitch.” I wanted to see her again, but I was very angry at her. “Right under my own eyes is the last place I’d look.”
“And yet she’d be close to you.”
“I guess I’d like to think that’s part of it.” I buried my face in my hands. Why had I ever become involved with the tiresome little wench?
“If she’s that clever,” Packy continued, so consumed by the excitement of playing detective that he was oblivious to my ambivalence, “she’d probably avoid the places where you might show up with a date—College Inn, Chez Paree, Aragon. We’ll try the hotels first.”
“A wig, glasses, makeup—she never wore it—might fool me if I wasn’t looking for her.”
“Is she that smart?”
“Very smart. And very scared. And, I guess, very confused.”
“How old did you say she was?” Packy picked up the photo.
“Eighteen, and, Packy, stop ogling that picture. She’s my girl.”
He thought that was an outrageously funny remark. “Finders keepers, bro.” He turned the picture over, face down. “But I’m only looking for a sister-in-law to take care of you when I go off to the Big House next September.”
He grimaced, not liking the prospect of the seminary at Mundelein at all. With good reason.
“I wonder if the family will like her,” I mused, still not quite ready to organize the search. Or rather, to listen to Packy’s plan for organization.
He turned over the photo. “She’s crowded a lot of living into eighteen years, hasn’t she?”
I nodded. “A lot of tragedy.”
“They’ll like her,” he said confidently. “She’s Irish, she’s Catholic.…” He hesitated. “My God, Jer, she is a Democrat, isn’t she?”
“I didn’t think to ask … probably. She must be.”
“You didn’t ask?” My brother stared at me in disbelief.
“I don’t think so.”
“You certainly must have been in love!”
So Quixote and Sancho began their pursuit of Dulcinea in the bitter December cold before Christmas of 1946.
Or maybe it was Holmes and Watson in pursuit of the game that was afoot.
Dad was puzzled about this sudden joint social life of his two sons, but he only let us know that he had noted it. Mom observed that wasn’t it nice that the two boys were getting to be friends again.
We tilted at all the windmills in the Loop and the Near North Side (as Tower Town was now being called) in search for the dubious Dulcinea.
We were sorting through a haystack. Suppose that, for example, the day we sortied to Chez Paree on Fairbanks Court between Michigan Avenue and the Lake, and listened to Sophie Tucker and Bobbie Breen, it was Maggie’s day off. Or suppose that she had decided not to be a waitress. Or suppose she had been passing through Chicago when she mailed the eleven ten-dollar bills—paying loan-shark rates, as Packy had commented. Or suppose she was working in a suburban speakeasy turned gambling resort.
Suppose a hundred other possibilities. Once you’re on the chase, it becomes an end in itself.
Our technique varied. Usually Packy was the advance scout, peering into the restaurant or the nightclub over the maître d’s head in search for a plausible Dulcinea. He would then report to me in the lobby or outside in the bitter cold where I would be waiting. If there was someone inside who might be Maggie, we would bribe the maître d’ to find us a table and investigate more closely. At the Pump Room of the Ambassador East, I actually called the young woman with the crisp auburn halo “Maggie” and made her very angry indeed.
Packy cooked up a wonderfully sad story about a woman lost in the war to win her over to our side.
We listened to the music of Dick Jurgens, Art Kassel, Lawrence Welk, Ted Mills, and even Sol Perola at Colosimo’s, the Outfit joint out on South Wabash where I was sure Maggie would not work more than one day.
“Who knows what a young woman on the run would do?” Packy enjoyed the revue at Colosimo’s more than I thought a seminarian should.
We listened to swing, jazz, and even waltz music. We met some pretty and friendly girls, with whom Pack was very cautious, as a seminarian ought to be.
“I’d get thrown out if the rector knew I was here.” He dismissed his caution with an easy laugh. “Talking with a girl would mean excommunication reserved personally to the Pope.”
A couple of the young women would have been interesting date and even courtship material, if I were not chasing and being chased by a will-o’-the-wisp.
“Why do you shut up when they try to be friendly?” I asked my brother.
“I don’t want to pretend to be anything I’m not. Strictly off limits for those whose proximate goal, as we say in philosophy class, is husband, home, and family.”
“Fair enough.”
I hate to confess it, but we had a great time on our search. Good music, presentable entertainment, pleasant companions, the excitement of a quest with a brother whom you admire. The only problem for Quixote and Sancho was that we did not find Dulcinea.
We even investigated, very briefly at Packy’s insistence, the Silver Palm. “It would be a perfect hideout,” he argued.
He was disgusted by the show. I—God and the Feminist Movement forgive me—was both repelled and attracted.
None of the admittedly lovely young women, I insisted in my head, was as beautiful as my Maggie.
They were not, however, ugly.
“Let’s get out of here,” my brother insisted after the first number. “I think those poor kids are being used.”
“By their own choice, but okay. I told you Maggie wouldn’t be in a place like this.”
“Let’s try Ireland’s,” he suggested.
Ireland’s was a steak house more or less around the corner on Broadway, a legendary steak house, I would add, for a long, long time.
“That’s not a bad idea.” I rose from the table with him. “It’s classy and yet not on the beaten path exactly.”
There were more nightclubs in Chicago in those days because there was no TV. And fewer restaurants because not very many people could afford to eat out often and because the pleasures of expense account living had yet to be invented.
We both demolished mammoth steaks, drank a couple of beers (not strictly legal for my brother, but he was rarely carded), enjoyed discussing the prospects for our various teams next year, and had another entertaining evening.
But no Dulcinea.
So, despite the alluring images from the Silver Palm that continued to swirl in my head, we returned home to River Forest the Saturday night after the Bears victory discouraged.
“As I said, Pack”—we were sprawled in his room, drinking yet another beer—”we’re in the haystack. What if she was passing through on a train, remembered me, and threw the money in an envelope?”
“And just happened to have the right address?”
“Suburban phone book.”
“What if”—he sucked on his beer bottle, no cans then—”what if it really is money from the ‘other side’?”
“That’s always a possibility. Remember what Father Donniger said.”
“In principle.” He set the bottle down on top of his Greek dictionary. “That’s always a possibility, a final duty required by Saint Peter before she gets in the front door.”
“Or the Blessed Mother before she gets in the back door.”
“That girl is not the back-door type … oh, damn!” He jumped up enthusiastically. “We made a terrible mistake! We forgot the most obvious place of all!”
“What’s that?” All I wanted to do was to finish my beer, go to bed, and dream of the lovelies from the Silver Palm.
“The Camellia Room at the Drake!”
“Sweet-sixteen parties and golden-wedding anniversaries?”
“What better place for our Maggie? No passes, classy clientele, pleasant if dull setting, and little chance to find a single war veteran, under thirty anyway, sitting at your table. And they hire attractive young women who look like they’re finishing their college courses. Ideal! Lemme think. Yeah, they do serve late breakfast on Sunday mornings. Let’s give it a whirl! Eight o’clock Mass at Saint Luke’s, then we whip down Chicago Avenue and pretend we are really high-class tourists. Wear a tie, bro, and no Ike jacket or Wehrmacht coat.”
He dashed to the phone, dialed a call and carried on a conversation with someone at the Drake Hotel.
“No waitresses? Are you sure? Only men? Even during the war? But … yeah, I see.” He hung up. “Damn!”
“No waitresses at the Camellia Room?”
“I guess they’d defile the black and white tiles and the fake camellia trees.… I have the feeling Alexander Dumas would not be amused.”
“Alexander who?”
“Dumas. Fils, of course. The illegitimate son of Dumas pére. The Frenchman who wrote the book La Dame aux Camélias. You know, the book on which La Traviata is based. Hey, is this broad literate?”
“To put it mildly.”
“Well, that’s good. Anyway, I’m frustrated. That would have been the perfect place for her … our own little Lady of the Camellias.”
“She likes operas,” I said.
“Yeah. Well, that won’t help us find her.… Wait a minute. I have an idea. I bet she’s in the Lantern Room, right next door. That’s a classy place too. Then she gets first shot at the Camellia Room, when they let waitresses in. Okay. I know they have a late breakfast too. It figures.”
It didn’t figure at all. It was rather a wild shot in the dark. I protested that I wanted to sleep late, but Sancho would hear none of it.
“Get thee to bed, the game’s afoot and we need our sleep!”
I protested weakly against this mixture of literary references but did indeed get me to bed. And dreamed not of the girls of the Silver Palm but of Maggie Ward.
Dressed like a girl at the Silver Palm.
My nightmares seemed to have been left behind at Superstition Mountain. I couldn’t quite remember when they had stopped; but apparently, save for occasional reruns when, to tell the truth, too much of the drink had been taken, my war dreams had submerged. For the moment.
“The drink being taken,” as anyone who is Irish knows well, is more than a couple of beers. My wife contends that it rarely happens with me, not because of any inherent virtue but because I fall asleep.
The sermon at Saint Luke’s the next morning was about “being home for Christmas”; the priest welcomed home all the vets who had not been home last year and reminded us that at Christmas home was wherever love was.
A proposition with which I was fully prepared to agree that morning. My reluctance to charge the windmill at the Lantern Room had been swept away by a great tidal wave of hope. Maggie Ward would be home for Christmas, I was convinced. Home meant River Forest.
Where, I told myself, she belonged.
Hope does not mean certainty; every other minute I doubted the common sense of the hope of the previous minute. As I drove carefully down slippery Chicago Avenue, dodging around the occasional poky streetcar, I hid my enthusiasm from Packy behind a mask of pretended sleepiness.
He was not fooled.
“This is going to be it, bro; she’ll be there. A Maggie Ward belongs at the Lantern Room, in the middle of all that pink and green and the nice old ladies and the wide-eyed tourists and the giggly high school girls.”
“There aren’t many tourists a couple of days before Christmas,” I said with a pretense at sourness.
We parked in the lot where the John Hancock Center is now and hiked down Michigan Avenue against the north wind to the Drake. The Magnificent Mile was not magnificent yet. State Street was still “that great street.” North Michigan was still a kind of a gap between the Loop and the Gold Coast. Before the Bridge was built in 1920, Pine Street, as it was then called, was a neighborhood of breweries and soap factories. Then, after the Bridge was opened, it began to expand slowly with the construction of the Wrigley Building and Tribune Tower, which stood as sentinels on the riverbank. At the north end the Drake and the Palmolive Building (with its Palmolive beacon designed to guide planes across the Lake—the Lindbergh beacon before he became identified with the political right) told you that you had arrived at the Gold Coast. In between there were a few hotels that did not compare with the Palmer House or the Stevens, but were useful for proms, one- and two-story buildings with shops that were beginning to be fashionable, parking lots, the Fourth Presbyterian Church, and an occasional apartment building, like the gracious old queen mother, 900 North Michigan.
Cardinal Stritch could have bought the block east of Quigley Seminary just before the war for a hundred thousand dollars. In 1946, Saks Fifth Avenue opened a shop in what had been a record store on that site and is now the Crate and Barrel. The Magnificent Mile had begun, as anyone who thought the Depression might not last forever would have guessed.
Even now the Drake is a stately old hotel, not at all a place to be ashamed to admit is your Chicago address, despite the proliferation of luxury neighbors all around—Mayfair Regent, Ritz-Carlton, Tremont, Whitehall, and soon Four Seasons. It was, as I pointed out to my wife on our wedding night as we rode up to our suite, the only hotel I knew that had couches in its elevators. She wondered if that was a suggestive remark. We laughed at that comment all the way to our door.
If it was not on our list of windmills in 1946, the reason was that it was a bit too formal and stiff for the youthful trade, the unmarried young men and women and perhaps the recently married, who would soon spill over from the Loop into the new night-life district that was beginning to take shape on Rush Street.
Perhaps you looked forward to living in an apartment in the Drake when you retired. You might entertain important guests from out of town there. You might bring your family for supper there on special occasions, particularly when the children were partially civilized, so they could experience a touch of gracious living. You might well spend your wedding night there—as my wife and I did. But it was not a place you went to be entertained.
Packy and I ducked in out of the cold through the Walton Street entrance, checked our overcoats and climbed up the stairs to the massive oak-beamed lobby, which always seemed to me to be ready for the arrival of the Queen Empress. Today it was the Queen Empress at Christmas: the lobby was festooned with wreaths, colored lights, and a massive Christmas tree.
Humbug, I thought bitterly to myself—I was in the unhopeful minute.
“Come on,” Packy urged me. “It’s exactly the same food as the Camellia Room and you get a view of Michigan Avenue. And they have waitresses, pretty young ones, as I remember.”
“You go in and check it out,” I told him.
“What are you going to do for breakfast?”
“I’m not hungry. She’s not there, I feel it in my bones. Check it out, then come back and we’ll go over to the Pearson or some less elaborate place and have a cup of coffee and a piece of toast.”
“With jam?”
“Don’t be an idiot! Now check it out.”
“All right, all right. These jobs can’t be rushed.”
Packy disappeared into the refined pastels of the Lantern Room in which soft music from a violin and a piano mingled with the discreet clinking of silverware and china.
I found a comfortable chair at the other end of the lobby and resolved to sleep for a few minutes. I closed my eyes, but my heart was thrashing away too rapidly for me to keep my eyes shut, much less snooze.
Packy stayed in the Lantern Room for at least a thousand years.
The bastard was eating breakfast.
Finally he emerged, all six feet four inches of handsome, virile blond. With a grin on his face as wide as Lake Michigan.
He glanced around the lobby, searching for me. Then he caught my eye and lifted his thumb upward in a sign of victory.
It can’t be true.
“She is even more beautiful in person,” he raved, “than in your picture, even if she is fully dressed. You think at first, well, she’s okay, pretty even, but nothing to brag about. Bring her home to Mother for Sunday dinner, fine, but don’t boast to the guys at the corner about her. Then you take another look and you know you’re watching undiluted radiance.”
“How do you know it’s Maggie?” I demanded frantically.
“Huh?” He seemed surprised at my question. “Oh, that’s easy. I asked her what her name was. Sure enough, it’s Maggie.”