by Brian Doyle
“About the nun?”
“About the magazine and your duties.”
“No, sir.”
“Better get to work, then.”
“Yes, sir.”
“God bless.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Remarkable woman.”
“Yes, sir.”
* * *
Mr Pawlowsky had often told me that he had only once in his whole life been outside the city of Chicago, to the Iowa border to the west, from which vantage point he gazed out over fields of corn and soybeans, and admired tractors and silos and church steeples and railroad towers, and delighted at small stands and copses of trees around which the fields flowed like dark corduroy rivers, and smelled the rich dense redolence of it all; but then one day when we were on the roof talking about how farmland was gently lovely even though some people (“mostly automobile drivers and young people trying to convince themselves, not to mention others, of their own sophistication,” he said) sneered and called it flat and boring though it wasn’t at all, he suddenly said, “But I was often on the lake in ships and boats, of course, so I suppose I was outside the city much more than I thought,” and off he went on a long peroration about his life on the vast inland sea we could just see, roiling and gray, from our chairs on the roof.
“We went out on rafts, in the beginning, just like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn,” he said. “My friends and I built rafts of varied quality out of anything we could. The prospect of being afloat was irresistible. I think I was perhaps six years old when I first went out on the lake. I had a friend named Raymond. His father drove a truck delivering goods on wooden pallets, and he built us a sturdy little raft, perhaps six by six feet, with three paddles also of wood, and he waded into the lake with us on the raft and then gave us a shove and we were away. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that feeling the rest of my life. It was a calm summer day and the lake murmured as we edged away from the shore. I remember the look on Raymond’s father’s face—worried and pleased and concerned and proud and worried. Raymond was nervous but I was delighted. I kept looking for fish. Raymond kept looking for tankers. He was afraid we would be run over and there would be nothing left of us but splinters. I remember I saw three enormous fish pass below us in a sort of arrow formation, going south toward Indiana. To this day I can see them if I close my eyes. Perhaps that was the moment I joined the Navy, in a sense. I think that they were sturgeon, although there are also very large salmon in the lake. After that I was on the lake as often as I could possibly be. I went out in canoes and rowboats and skiffs and ketches and catboats and sloops and motorboats and old historical schooners and brigs and steamboats and scows. I got summer jobs as a crewman on barges and freighters. When I was in my teens I was on the lake every single day I was not in school, I bet. My parents did not mind as long as I had a job. My father said as long as I was earning money for the family from honest work I could be on the lake or the moon or on a dirigible for all he cared. Finally when I was eighteen years old I went down to Navy Pier and joined the United States Navy. I don’t think I was ever so proud and happy as I was that day. Although it is ironic to note that I never once went out on the water in my official capacity; never was there a more landlocked Navy man than me. But I was out on the lake every other moment I could spare. Even during the war I owned a catboat with Raymond and we were out on the lake at every chance we got, until Raymond went overseas. He left a letter under the thwart of the boat for me, giving me his half of the boat if he didn’t come back. He didn’t come back. I found the letter a few weeks after his father told me about Raymond being killed in New Guinea. His father came down to the Pier to tell me. I’ll never forget his face. It was like a mask whereas it used to be a face. He asked me if he could see the catboat and I took him down to the end of the pier where Raymond and I kept the boat in a little secret slip we had built in the shadows. He stared at the boat for a long time and then he said Raymond left you a letter somewhere in the boat. He said Raymond was the love of his life and he would never see him again and he could not stand even thinking about never seeing him again. He said he remembered the day he waded us out into the lake when we were little and handed us each a paddle and gave the raft a good shove and watched us paddle away and he was scared and happy and proud and worried. He said now that there were some nights that he could not sleep at all and all night long he waded with us out into the lake and in the morning it was all he could do to get out of bed and shower and have coffee and pretend that life meant anything at all anymore. He said that he wished me the best with the boat and he asked that if ever I needed to sell it that I come to him and he would buy it for whatever price I asked. For a while after the war I kept the boat, and took it out a good deal, ostensibly fishing but not really, but it wasn’t the same boat without Raymond in it, and eventually I sold it to Raymond’s father. I wanted to just give it to him in memory of Raymond but he insisted on buying it. It had something to do with pride and pain. I was uncomfortable taking money but eventually we agreed that I would give him the boat and he would give me the collected speeches and writings of Abraham Lincoln, which is the lovely set of books you see in our apartment. I would treasure them anyway for the humor and genius of the author but I treasure them the more because in my view Raymond owns half of them. In my estimation I own the ones up to the presidential years and Raymond owns the presidential years. Edward is of the opinion that it is the other way round, as Raymond was older than me by a few weeks, and has the right of primogeniture.”
10.
IT WAS ALSO EDWARD’S CONSIDERED opinion that Mr Pawlowsky and Miss Elminides were made for each other, that they enjoyed and were stimulated by the other’s company, that they both secretly harbored affection and romantic interest in the other and had done so for years without the slightest productive action along those lines, and that hell would freeze over before the two shyest human beings in the city of Chicago would ever so much as shuffle an inch toward the idea of actually asking the other to have tea or coffee or lunch or dinner or go to a movie or a jazz club or even God help us all go for a walk together along the lake, how hard is that, to walk together along the lakefront, watching the gulls and savoring the gentle music of the waves? You don’t even have to say anything or walk arm-in-arm or hold hands or have a destination, you can just shamble along and enjoy the crisp wind, how hard is that?
But no.
I had noticed that Mr Pawlowsky spoke of Miss Elminides with respect and almost a proprietary reverence, and that Miss Elminides, in the few brief conversations I had had with her, spoke of him with a grave courtesy and hint of humor; she had, for example, once listed all the things in the building that Mr Pawlowsky had repaired or renovated or rebuilt, from doors to windows to cabinets to shelves to ceilings to walls to stairs to mailboxes to the roof to the epic boiler in the basement, and she had concluded her litany by saying, again gravely but with the tiniest flash of something in her face, that Mr Pawlowsky had in fact rebuilt the building in toto over the last few years, an amazing thing to say, a remarkable accomplishment which her grandfather would have much enjoyed for the odd humor and amazement of it, not to mention awe at the sheer amount of quiet dogged work involved, and work done by one man alone to boot, with total respect for Edward’s role in lugging tools and lumber up and down the stairs, for which she was very grateful.
It wasn’t that they didn’t talk to each other; indeed they did, morning and afternoon and evening, for one reason or another; but their conversations were always stilted and formal, and each addressed the other as Miss and Mister even after years of daily discourse, and they seemed to carefully stay within established boundaries, subject-wise; the building, the neighborhood, the weather, the lake. Miss Elminides had no interest whatever in actually watching the Bears or the White Sox or any other sporting proposition; Mr Pawlowsky, while interested in Wes Montgomery’s guitar, evinced no interest in actually playing a musical instrument; neither of them seemed to care overmuc
h about politics or popular culture or the making of money, the usual seas on which Americans sail; neither was particularly absorbed with food or alcohol, and both seemed generally content to live quietly and contemplate home repair and Abraham Lincoln, in Mr Pawlowsky’s case, and maps and musical instruments, in Miss Elminides’ case.
In March, as the snow finally began to subside, I suggested to Edward that perhaps it was our responsibility as their friends to gently nudge them toward seeing each other in a new light, as it were; to gently intimate to them that their dignity could be both at once wholly admirable and a sort of prison; to hint that their courteous reserve could and maybe had slipped infinitesimally from virtue to habit.
But Edward declined, dismayed by the very idea of matchmaking; and as he noted, there is a selfish aspect to setting people up on dates, and pushing them together not of their own volition, and arranging matters so that people are thrown together in the social ramble, with no routes of escape; it’s almost cruel, not to mention often awkward and uncomfortable public theater in which the principal actors have not sought or prepared for their roles. He was adamant about this, and I was uncomfortable enough about it myself, so we agreed to do nothing but hope for something like a thaw in their formality, a warming of their friendship, the serendipitous opening of new windows in their affections; which indeed did come, but not until spring turned to summer, on the weekend the White Sox took three in a row from the Oakland Athletics and rose to first place in the west.
* * *
The Third Awkwardness, the most serious crisis in the history of the apartment building, began in the middle of April, with a letter to Miss Elminides from the City of Chicago. According to the city, the building was in epic arrears tax-wise; property taxes had not been paid for the last two years, and repeated inquiries to the trustees had gone unanswered. The city then sent a second letter, announcing a new assessment of the building’s worth, and thus a new charge attached to the taxes already in arrears. A third letter announced a rise in water rates; a fourth letter announced a new charge for building inspections; a fifth letter announced new building codes from which no buildings whatsoever would be released, so as to protect against the illegal sale and trading of permit releases, as if such things had ever happened in the city of Chicago in living memory. A sixth letter announced a new scheme for sewer connections, which doubled the rates for connection for both residential and commercial properties. A letter came from a bank noting that a routine analysis of title status had discovered no extant registered title for the building; could Miss Elminides come to the bank and elucidate the matter, with documentation? A letter came from a second bank, inquiring as to a lien on the building, resulting from a series of loans issued through a now-defunct bank in Greece, of which investigators could find no legal history whatsoever. Could Miss Elminides come to the bank and explain the lien and loans? And finally a letter came from the United States Post Office, reporting a slew of returned letters addressed to the trustees of the building; according to their postal colleagues in Greece, the address for the trustees there was a boathouse, and a note pinned to the door of the boathouse directed all mail to Miss Elminides in Chicago. Could Miss Elminides stop by the post office on Dearborn Street and illuminate the mystery of the boathouse?
And this was not all. The weather turned bad, and torrents of rain fell; it grew eerily and uncomfortably cold, with mean slicing snarling winds off the lake; sleet poured down at dusk three times in four days, and cars skidded and skewed everywhere; a barge, disoriented in the storms, drove directly into Dog Beach and sank, with only the tip of its bow visible the next morning; a police horse slipped on the ice and broke its spine and had to be shot on the spot by its weeping rider; an alderman who was about to be imprisoned for defrauding a Catholic grade school of its auction proceeds was mysteriously reinstated to office, whereupon he devised incalculable new thefts from children; the icy rain choked and hammered the first sprouts of corn and soybeans outside the city, causing farmers and their families to lie awake worried and frightened in the nether reaches of the night; the wooden fence built by hand by Abraham Lincoln behind his house on Jackson Street in Springfield fell down suddenly, section by section, as if it was being flattened by a huge invisible hand; and Edward grew so sick he could not rise from his bed, or eat, or drink tea, or even, after three days, open his eyes.
On the first day Edward was sick Mr Pawlowsky assumed this was Edward’s annual spring cold, which usually presented itself on April 15, the day Lincoln died, and arrived with the same calendric precision as his annual autumn cold, which always arrived on September 22, the day Lincoln informed the known universe that in one hundred days he would thereafter forbid the sale of human beings in America by virtue of the color of their skin, and free those who were enslaved to others by virtue of the color of their skin, and thereafter make illegal the possession of human beings by other human beings for any reason whatsoever. Edward had himself speculated that perhaps his autumn cold came to him because the Emancipation Proclamation was a proximate cause of Lincoln’s murder, so that September, which was usually a sunny and lovely month in Illinois, had the virus of disaster and loss in it, and some residents, especially those who may have been close companions of Mr Lincoln, were afflicted by sadness in September, and felled by the knowledge that what was spoken in autumn would reap blood come spring. But even Mr Pawlowsky, who usually agreed with Edward on speculative matters, thought this was overblown, and considered that Edward was just particularly susceptible to the first-month-of-school colds that every schoolchild in the city came down with by the end of the month.
But this time Edward did not recover quickly, and his breathing grew ragged and desperate, and by the third day he could not rise from his bed, or eat, or drink tea, or even open his eyes. Miss Elminides came up and sat by him and read to him, as did Azad and his sister Eren from next door in 4A, and one by one most of the rest of the residents came too, some shyly standing in the doorway and murmuring their respects and best wishes, and others coming in and kneeling down and whispering or even singing to Edward; but he did not respond, and Mr Pawlowsky began to grow quietly frantic.
Miss Elminides summoned an animal doctor, a tall cadaverous man who conducted tests and took blood and stool samples and left small jars of bright elixirs that Edward could not swallow. The four natty businessmen in 3A and 3B sent a friend of theirs who was a nondenominational healer, a gentle gaunt man who spent a whole afternoon with Edward and then withdrew silently with a face of terrible sadness.
On the fourth day I was at a conference of editors and printers and such deep in the country, and got back to the apartment building quite late; I ran up the stairs to 4B, taking them two and three at a time, and knocked very gently; there was no answer, but the door was slightly ajar, and I poked my head in and found Mr Pawlowsky sitting in the dark, under his Navy blanket. Edward was motionless in his bed. I knelt down as quietly as I could to feel Edward’s chest and he was still breathing but very slowly, like each breath was being excavated from some deep ancient cave inside him where he refused to die.
Mr Pawlowsky had not said a word as I knelt there but I could see his huddled face in the moonlight and I stood to say something but he raised his hand and said quietly, “I have been reading Lincoln to him. I think it helps. I think he hears me. I think he knows the words so well that perhaps it gives him pleasure or hope. The speech from the train at Springfield, when he left everything he knew and loved. ‘Friends, no one who has never been placed in a like position can understand my feelings at this hour, nor the oppressive sadness I feel at this parting,’ he said. Probably he had removed his hat and was holding it in his hand. ‘For more than a quarter of a century I have lived among you, and during all that time I have received nothing but kindness at your hands.’ Some say he spoke from the last car on the train and others say he was standing on the platform before boarding the train, which was waiting for him, but to me this is an immaterial detail. ‘Here I
have lived from my youth until now I am an old man.’ He was fifty-two years old, my age. ‘Here the most cherished ties of earth were assumed. Here all my children were born and here one of them lies buried.’ That was Eddie, who was four years old when he died, although his son Willie was also born and died in Springfield, only three months old; it is interesting that he does not say two of them, you wonder if he and Mary just did not talk about Willie because he didn’t live very long. ‘To you, dear friends, I owe all that I have, all that I am. All the strange checkered past seems to crowd now upon my mind. Today I leave you … for how long I know not.…’”