by Brian Doyle
It was inconceivable that Miss Elminides was unaware of the burble of activity in the building, but if anything she became even more remote, and I saw her only once in the month of May—a meeting I remember vividly to this day, for it was the first time we spoke at some length, and the first time I got a sense of her past and personality. Curiously our conversation was not in the building but out by the lake, where I found her sitting on the seawall staring out at the darkening water late one afternoon. I ran right past her, dribbling my basketball, intent on working on my weak (left) hand, and it was another minute or so before I registered that the quiet dark-haired woman with her knees drawn up under her chin was my landlady.
Most of me instantly wanted to keep going, and dribble faster, and avoid the moment, for I was shy and uncertain with women in general, and not at all confident that I could be discreet and not mention the seethe of projects among the building’s residents, but I was also as curious then as I am now about people—my greatest virtue, I suppose, except when it is a vice. Anyway I spun around and walked back to her, not dribbling, and asked if I might sit a moment and chat, and she said yes of course please do, and I joined her on the wall.
She said that she liked to watch the lake especially in the evening, as it reminded her powerfully of the sea. Even when she was young, she said, she was convinced that what people called the Aegean and Ionian and Mediterranean seas were all fingers of the great ocean, and that there was in the end one vast ocean that was the true earth, with islands small and huge as its guests, or passengers, or interlopers; maybe landforms are merely suffered temporarily by the ocean, which will eventually whelm them, she said. Even the lake before us, she thought, was in truth an extended finger of this great ocean, which is why it had tides, as it rose and fell in rhythms originating with the ocean, which itself yearned for the moon.
Even then, in my first year as a journalist, I had already learned the cardinal rules of my profession, which are to ask questions and then listen intently without interrupting; people will talk freely and surprisingly honestly if you give them a chance, an opening, a window, a genuinely interested ear, and I was very interested, partly because Miss Elminides was such a mystery to us all, and partly because I had such respect for Mr Pawlowsky, and admired him and wished him well, and knew of his feelings for Miss Elminides; and I suppose I thought that perhaps, if I listened carefully, I might glean something that would somehow inch them closer together. Not that I was any kind of matchmaker, but I was even then beginning to sense that stories were the true seeds of relationships, and that romance and friendship were as much a matter of shared stories as pheromones, or overlapping interests.
So she talked, and I listened, and here and there when she paused overlong I asked a question, and she relaxed, and talked about growing up on a beach in Greece, with her grandparents (she never did mention her parents), and the foods she loved as a child, and the pet fox she had for years, and her grandmother’s stories of spirits and angels everywhere around them, and her grandfather’s stories of Chicago, the greatest city in the greatest country in the world, the city where someday she could live if all went well and she did well in school, and the little fishing boat her grandfather used, and the songs the neighbors sang every Thursday, a holy day for them (she did not know their religion, but it had something to do with Thursday being a holy day, on which they fasted until dark, and then feasted). She talked about the school she attended, and the other children of all sorts and shapes and predilections, including one boy who thought he was an owl, and was later institutionalized; and her first suitor, a boy who taught her to read maps and charts; and a girl who fell in love with her, and on finding her love unreciprocated, shaved off all her hair and locked herself in a church for two days. She talked a lot about her grandfather, who had sheaves of poems given to him by his friend the poet Konstantinos Kavafis, and her grandmother, whose death, when Miss Elminides had just turned twenty, was the proximate cause of her granddaughter coming to America.
I think I will remember that story all the rest of my life, in part because night had fallen and I could hardly see Miss Elminides’ face, so that her voice came gently out of the dark, disembodied; and because I think she had almost forgotten that I was there, and was telling the story to herself, in a sense, perhaps to better understand it.
The grandmother had failed slowly, eaten by some secret interior disease, so that she shrank day by day; she never seemed in any pain, said Miss Elminides, but she did seem mournful, for there was never anyone who loved being alive and talking to spirits and angels and laughing and cooking and eating and singing more than Grandmother did. When she died I was on one side of the bed and Grandfather was on the other. We each held a hand. When she died you could see the spirit go out of her body. My grandfather left a window open so her spirit could go home to the ocean. A few days later we packed up my things and he took me to the ship and I came to America. He said it would be wrong to fly in an airplane and I had to come by sea. He said that Grandmother’s death was the end of the first part of my life and now it was time for me to begin the second part, in Chicago, and that once I knew what the second part would be, I would also know the third and final part. He said that all lives are lived in three parts like that. He said that the best part of his life, the second part, was his twenty years with me and Grandmother in the little house on the beach, and that now he had to go live his own third part. He said that he personally would love to live the third part of his life with me, as I lived my second part, but that this would be wrong, and he and Grandmother had talked about it and come to an agreement, and he would honor that agreement, although his sadness at our parting was greater than the great ocean itself. He said that he and Grandmother had provided for me such that I would be able to live safely in Chicago, and that once I was established there, in lodgings he had arranged and secured, I would be able to find the work I was to do, and grow into the woman I was to be, and he knew in his heart, as he and Grandmother had discussed, that I would be an extraordinary person, famous not for the things of small accomplishment like money or beauty, but for generosity of spirit, which would be as a sun to those around me, and provide light and hope to those who were in darkness, and lift many hearts that were heavy.
I remember the lapping of small waves in the lake, and the whistle and boom of nighthawks diving for insects, and the swirl and splash of a large fish in the shallows, as we sat there silent for a while, after she finished; I knew enough not to ask any more questions, and finally she said that she must be getting back to the building, as she had to be up quite early the next morning; I mumbled something like thanks and she said thank you for listening, heaven alone knows why all that came tumbling out, and she walked back home. I waited a couple of minutes to give her some privacy and then followed, not dribbling; somehow it didn’t seem right to dribble in the street at night, even under the dim streetlamps. When I got home I thought about going up to see Edward and Mr Pawlowsky but somehow I didn’t feel like talking, and later when I went to bed I remember dreaming about beaches and owls and rustling sheaves of poems.
16.
LATE THAT MAY I WENT OUT on the lake for the first time, and it happened like this. It turned out that Mr Pawlowsky and the former sailor in the basement had long talked about going into business together as a salvage concern, to locate and reclaim various treasures at the bottom of the lake; what with Mr Pawlowsky’s naval experience and connections, and the sailor’s knowledge of the lake’s weathers and currents, they were convinced they could choose a few wrecks, locate and raise them without fanfare, and sell what was recoverable to collectors and museums and historical societies. The law allowed any licensed concern to salvage and sell what it could of long-lost shipping, and while the sailor, a student of lost Lake Michigan ferryboats and steamers, had a couple of legendary vessels in mind, Mr Pawlowsky was set on recovering an airplane that the Navy had lost in the lake in 1943—a Wildcat, a fighter jet that had crashed on a training f
light and sunk without a trace. The pilot had escaped, but the location of the plane had never been recorded, and the Navy, desperately trying to win two wars abroad, had never taken the time to find or recover the craft. Mr Pawlowsky, however, had known both the pilot and the men who fished him out of the lake, and he had never forgotten their estimates of where the plane went down, and where it might yet be found.
He explained all this to me one glorious sunny morning as we walked down to Belmont Harbor, a little south along the lakefront, where the sailor was waiting in what looked exactly like a whaleboat, “because it is a whaleboat,” explained the sailor, who had borrowed it from a friend who ran a school for building wooden boats. I had never been farther into the lake than my knees before, and as we slid out of the little hooked harbor and into the lake proper I saw that Miss Elminides was right to be reminded of the sea; the lake stretched away endlessly in every direction, and the city shrank so quickly behind us that in minutes it looked like a tiny tourist’s postcard, and then it vanished altogether, and we were alone on an immensity of deep blue-gray water.
All that morning, as the sailor fished for whitefish, which he called humpbacks and which he said were absolutely the best eating especially if you caught a big one of five pounds or so, Mr Pawlowsky explained about ships and shipwrecks in the lake, craft of every kind from huge freighters to tiny sloops, and those were just the ships that were known to be at the bottom of the lake, which was almost three hundred feet deep on average and almost a thousand feet down at its deepest point, at the northern end of the lake; up there was where he thought the truly huge lake sturgeon lived, beyond the reach of any fishery, and as no one knew how long sturgeon lived, there might well be sturgeon there who were old when Lincoln was alive, and who might well have heard him speak in Chicago, in 1858, when he said that the Declaration of Independence “will link patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.” It was just possible, said Mr Pawlowsky, that one of these sturgeon who were now ancient among their species, respected elders probably, were young bucks then, and adventurous, and had come down to Chicago to see the town, and sport in the shallows with their Illinois counterparts, committing foolery and horseplay, but perhaps also catching a voice ringing in the city, a voice they remembered to this day, and perhaps discussed in their mysterious councils in the murky depths of the lake.
Mr Pawlowsky went on in this vein for a while, while the sailor caught a remarkable number of trout and perch along with two large whitefish, and I kept mental notes on the wonderful array of birds overhead and in the water—mostly loons, grebes, and cormorants, although here and there I saw little troops of scoter ducks—until we reached the area of the lake where Mr Pawlowsky thought they might begin prospecting for the Wildcat. Here I was put to work cleaning and icing the fish that the sailor caught while they consulted maps and charts and laid plans for winching and grappling; they also spent nearly an hour lowering plumb lines, measuring wind and current, and jotting copious notes. After a while Mr Pawlowsky opened the ice chest and brought forth sandwiches and beer, while the sailor again fished for a while; but this time he returned the three small whitefish he caught to the lake.
On the way back to Belmont Harbor I asked the sailor why he had not kept the little whitefish, and he said well, first, they were really too little to eat, and second, he wanted to be respectful to the life that had grown up around the airplane down there, as the airplane was serving as a sort of reef, and if he and Mr Pawlowsky could successfully salvage the Wildcat, then the fish down there would be losing their apartment building, so to speak, and he agreed with Mr Pawlowsky that a courteous gesture to those fish now would not be out of place, considering the magnitude of the changes that were imminent; and third, the lake had given us plenty of food today, and greed was never good. When we got back to the building he divvied up the fish, giving me two trout, dividing the two large humpbacks between himself and Mr Pawlowsky, and giving all the perch to Edward, who was delighted and had an oily sheen about his coat for the next week.
* * *
As June began there was a roaring hot spell and I played a lot of basketball at the park with Bucket and Monster—there’s nothing quite so pleasant as playing intense basketball outdoors, with good players, when it’s so hot you can sweat off a pound in an hour, if you play hard enough—and one afternoon I got into a weird fight with the leader of their gang, a guy named Luis. He was almost thirty years old, I would guess, and he was a gifted athlete, although not actually a great ballplayer—although he thought he was, which turned out to be the reason for the fight.
I had never seen him at the park before, and I have no idea why he was there that day, but he and I took an instant dislike to each other, and in the way of young men and ballplayers we immediately jockeyed to cover each other in the game. It was a Saturday, and we were playing games to fifteen, best of five, you have to win by two baskets. There were eight guys, so we played four on four, full-court. It was unbelievably hot, so hot that halfway through the afternoon, when a sudden brief Midwestern epic rainstorm drenched the court, the rain steamed and dried by the time we came back from getting water at the fountain behind the school.
Full-court games to fifteen baskets are tough enough, but with such evenly matched teams (I had Bucket on my team, with Monster and Luis on the other side) overtimes are almost inevitable, and all of the first four games spiraled up into the twenties or even late twenties by the time they were done. After four games we were tied, and everyone was tired and chippy; even Monster, who never spoke, said something curt after one rebounding melee, and I got cracked so hard by Luis on a baseline drive that I thought he broke my finger. That set me off—like many middling players I played best when I was annoyed—and after that I hammered him every chance I got, setting picks with grim pleasure, grappling for position with elbows high, and cracking him back once deliberately when I went for a steal and got all hands and no ball. He grew infuriated too, and by the end of the fifth game we were no longer playing ball as much as we were fighting without fists.
He was older and much more muscular, but I was quicker and, I think, angrier. Part of it for me was that I had felt established in the park, I felt that I belonged there, it was a part of Chicago where I was known and even respected, a little; and to me this was huge, for I was still relatively new in the city, far from home and school and friends and brothers. And the park was not the magazine office, where I was paid to work, or the apartment building, where I paid to live, but a place I had earned, so to speak, by being myself. And here was an interloper, hammering me on my turf!
I was a fool, of course, and it was his turf, really, not mine; and I think that made me angry too, for in my mind I had glossed over the nature of the Latin Kings, what they actually were and what they actually did. I was young, I was sentimental, I was a fool, and to me Bucket and Monster were essentially cool guys, ruffians who admired my game and chose me quickly when they chose teammates; but here was their king, and maybe part of what made me so angry was that looking at him I realized what a fool I had been to gloss over the reality of the Kings, who were collectively murderers, rapists, thieves, drug lords, pushers of evil and death to children, human vermin who didn’t think twice about smashing families and neighborhoods. It was Bucket himself who had once told me that the Kings had started right, as defenders of poor Spanish-speaking kids against white gangs, but soon they had gone the way of all gangs.
And here, not two inches away, for a solid hour, was the perfect encapsulation of the real Kings, an arrogant blunt instrument pounding my stupidity right into my face; and I got angrier and angrier, at my own illusions, at his infuriating ego, at some lost thing that he was somehow responsible for, and then it boiled over.
The fifth game went into overtime too, of course, and Bucket won it with a quicksilver pair of stunning baskets that I do not think any defender on earth could have stopped. There was a second of exhausted silence and then L
uis swung at me with all his might, but Monster, who had seen this coming, pulled me out of the way. I lost my temper and said foul and vulgar things and Luis came at me again but now Monster was joined by the rest of the players, ostensibly protecting their leader. Luis was shouting incoherently and I was still so angry that it did not occur to me that I was standing on gang turf with seven members of a gang that had murdered more people than anyone will ever know.
Bucket said quietly, “He think you disrespect him,” and I said angrily, “How the hell did I do that?” and Bucket said, “You play him even, man, and you skinny whitey and dork glasses.” This last was true—when I played basketball I wore a pair of ugly old thick-rimmed spectacles, to keep my good glasses safe from damage.
Monster said firmly, “Man to man, best two of three buckets, then magazine man be leaving, Kings ball first,” and Luis and I stepped in. I knew full well there would be no fouls. Luis drove right at me, head down like a football fullback, and I jumped out of the way, poked the ball away as he went past, and then picked it up and scored.
He who scores gets the ball again. Usually you “check” the ball with the opponent, a sort of polite gesture to be sure he’s ready, but I knew if I gave Luis the ball it would come back at a hundred miles an hour, so I bounced it to Monster, who bounced it back, expressionless. Luis was fuming. I drove as hard as I could to his left for one huge step, and then spun back away as fast as I could, evading the forearm I knew he would throw at my head, and put up a little fallaway jump shot from about ten feet out. Not a shot I was very good at, but this one dropped through the net. Game.