Pops, my other grandfather, my mother’s father, and his brothers spent much of their time playing bridge and talking baseball in the back room of their fur coat business. From the time I was four or five Pops would set me up on a high stool at a counter under a window looking down on State Street and give me a furrier’s knife with a few small pelts to cut up. I spent whole afternoons that way, wearing a much-too-large-for-me apron with the tie strings wrapped several times around my waist, cutting up mink, beaver, fox, squirrel, even occasional leopard or seal squares, careful not to slice my finger with the razor-sharp mole-shaped tool, while the wet snow slid down the high, filthy State and Lake Building windows and Pops and my great-uncles Ike, Nate, and Louie played cards.
They were all great baseball fans, they were gentlemen, and didn’t care much for other sports, so even in winter the card table tended to be hot-stove league speculation about off-season trades or whether or not Sauer’s legs would hold up for another season. Of course there were times customers came in, well-to-do women with their financier husbands, looking as if they’d stepped out of a Peter Arno New Yorker cartoon; or gangsters with their girlfriends, heavy-overcoated guys with thick cigars wedged between leather-gloved fingers. I watched the women model the coats and straighten their stocking seams in the four-sided full-length mirrors. I liked dark mink the best, those ankle-length, full-collar, silk-lined ones that smelled so good with leftover traces of perfume. There was no more luxurious feeling than to nap under my mother’s own sixty-pelt coat.
By the time the fur business bottomed out, Pops was several years dead—he’d lived to eighty-two—and so was Uncle Ike, at eighty-eight. Pops had seen all of the old-time great ballplayers, Tris Speaker, the Babe, even Joe Jackson, who he said was the greatest player of them all. When the White Sox clinched the American League pennant in 1959, the first flag for them in forty years (since the Black Sox scandal of 1919), he and I watched the game on television. The Sox were playing Cleveland, and to end it the Sox turned over one of their 141 double plays of that season, Aparicio to Fox to Big Ted Kluszewski.
Uncle Nate and Uncle Louie kept on for some time, going in to work each day not as furriers but to Uncle Louie’s Chicago Furriers Association office. He’d founded the association in the ’20s, acting as representative to the Chamber of Commerce, Better Business Bureau, and other civic organizations. Louie was also a poet. He’d written verse, he told me, in every form imaginable. Most of them he showed me were occasional poems, written to celebrate coronations—the brothers had all been born and raised in London—and inaugurations of American presidents. In the middle right-hand drawer of his desk he kept boxes of Dutch-shoe chocolates, which he would give me whenever I came to visit him.
Uncle Nate, who lived to be 102, came in to Uncle Louie’s office clean-shaven and with an impeccable high-starched collar every day until he was a hundred. He once told me he knew he would live that long because of a prophecy by an old man in a wheelchair he’d helped cross a London street when he was seven. The man had put his hand on Nate’s head, blessed him, and told him he’d live a century.
Uncle Louie was the last to go, at ninety-four. Having long since moved away, I didn’t find out about his death until a year or so later. The fur business, as my grandfather and his brothers had known it, was long gone; even the State and Lake Building was about to be torn down, a fate that had already befallen Fritzl’s, where the brothers had gone each day for lunch. Fritzl’s had been the premier restaurant of the Loop in those days, with large leather booths, big white linen napkins, and thick, high-stemmed glasses. Like the old Lindy’s in New York, Fritzl’s was frequented by show people, entertainers, including ballplayers, and newspaper columnists. Many of the women who had bought coats, or had had coats bought for them, at my grandfather’s place, ate there. I was always pleased to recognize one of them, drinking a martini or picking at a shrimp salad, the fabulous dark mink draped gracefully nearby.