by Brian Doyle
There were also a startling number of postage stamps, both new and canceled, and Mr Pawlowsky explained, smiling, that Edward had a major serious yen for stamps, especially pink ones and those having to do with Lincoln; his single favorite of all was the pink Lincoln four-center, of which he had seven, so far, with negotiations in progress for an eighth, which was in the possession of a brilliant mathematics professor in Lisle, a town west of the city. For a while, in their early years together, Edward and Mr Pawlowsky had made an effort to organize the stamps into books and sheets, and there had been some talk of careful cataloguing, and the building of wooden bureaus with special sliding drawers for exhibits, but that talk had piddled away and now Edward just kept his stamps in a closet, “organized mostly by color, as far as I can tell,” said Mr Pawlowsky—brighter ones down low where Edward could reach them easily, and the darker colors on shelves above, to be brought down occasionally on request.
Edward was delighted with the Whitman, which was gratifying—it’s hard to choose the right gift for a dog you admire, and when you get it right it’s a good feeling—and I read aloud from it for a few moments, trying to catch the swing and roar and mercy and energy of the man; I still think that Walt is as close to distilled Americanness as you can find in print, along with Mark Twain and Willa Cather; and there was a time there, sitting by the window in 4B, as the sun slid into Iowa, with Edward and Mr Pawlowsky sitting quietly listening to me read old Walt, that I still remember with a startle in the heart. The memory comes to me sometimes at dusk, usually in the autumn, and sometimes I find myself moved to pull old Walt down from the shelves, and read a little, quietly, thinking of my friends in their apartment by the lake.
I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear …
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand
Singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning …
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work …
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day …
* * *
The thought occurs to me that I have gotten all this way in this account of my life in Chicago without ever saying much about my actual apartment, 2F, which had a big front window facing the street, which was always fascinating theater, although my window faced north, which meant that I never did see the sun, although quite often I could see the sun slide along the windows of the brownstones across the street, which caused window-shades to come down and go up in a pattern much like a wave breaking on the beach.
Although perhaps I have not said much because there is not much to report. There was a bed and a table and a chair from the convent, the bed ancient beyond reckoning and overstuffed with straw, so that occasionally a stalk would wriggle free and do its level best to puncture me. There was a rickety arrangement of bookshelves built with bricks and planks I had borrowed from a construction site on Addison Street (to which I actually did return the materials finally, piling them neatly on the front steps of the condominium complex that had arisen somehow without my bricks and planks). There was a large cardboard box covered with a blanket that I used as a table for bills and mail. There was a pot and a pan and a spatula, gifts from my mother on my graduation from college. There was a stereo set, my first big purchase in Chicago, on which I played the same ten or so records incessantly (which must have annoyed Denesh, my neighbor in 2E, although he never complained), and on which I listened nightly to jazz (WDCB) and rock (WXRT, with Terry Hemmert, who had a classic relaxed gravelly radio voice and adored the Beatles). I had two spoons and two forks and one knife and I was lonelier sometimes than I have admitted heretofore. I had two plates and a salt shaker shaped like a hawk that my brother Tommy gave me and whenever I felt particularly lonely I grabbed my worn shiny ball and went out to play or dribble along the lake, working on my left hand. I had two pairs of sneakers and one black suit for all occasions, as I am of Irish descent and know how to dress correctly for weddings and wakes. I had twenty books, mostly Robert Louis Stevenson and Jack London and a Bible in which my grandmother had written with a shaky hand On my wedding day 1911 town of Kildare county of Kildare to John my iordaltha love, iordaltha being Gaelic for certain and constant and trustworthy. I had a photograph of Abraham Lincoln that Mr Pawlowsky gave me, the last photograph ever taken of him alive, in which he is grinning. I had three pairs of pants and three shirts suitable for office wear. I had two pairs of black socks which both wore out over the course of the year so that after April I no longer wore socks, figuring that no one noticed socks anyway, which turned out to be true of men but not of women, interestingly; why would women be looking at men’s ankles? I did have seven pairs of white basketball socks which I washed and rotated religiously and repaired meticulously whenever they seemed to be growing weary. These hung on a string pinned across the room and on the rare occasions when anyone else entered my apartment and asked about them I explained that they were an art installation by my sister who was an avant-garde artist in São Paolo, which was a whopping lie. I thought about buying a second basketball during the year but I could not abide the thought of not playing with my worn shiny ball which sometimes when in my doldrums I thought was my best and truest and most constant friend. In the first few weeks I was in Chicago, as it got darker and colder by the day, I was sometimes overcome by loneliness, and would dribble my ball as quietly as I could, close to the floor, working alternately with both hands; but even I knew that this was rude to my neighbors, and I stopped dribbling in the apartment, although once or twice I did have to go out to the lake quite early in the morning and dribble for a while until calm was restored.
* * *
And yet I sit here years and years after leaving Chicago and I still can hear the wind sliding off the lake, and the faint sound of grinding ice on the shore in the basement of winter, and piano music trickling out of the window of the man behind the temple (who was a composer who never titled his songs but only numbered them and was up to 332, the rabbi told me once), and the stories of the two sturgeon ten feet long and a thousand pounds each who once haunted Dog Beach and picked off cats and squirrels and once a poodle, and the boy who stole a motorboat from the marina and went out into the lake and for some reason having to do with ritual or madness cut off his pinkie fingers and nearly bled to death. So many stories that are now just scraps and tatters of fading stories to be forgotten unless I tell them now even in their truncated staccato versions. The old woman on Cornelia Street who reportedly rose into the sky from the roof of her apartment building and was not seen again by mortal eyes. The great war between rats and crows that raged up and down Pine Grove Avenue so savagely for weeks one summer that people were afraid to walk alone in the street and traveled only in tight armed phalanxes. The blue snow that fell all day one day in the years before there were such things as cameras. The healer who lived on Roscoe Street across from the convent and would never accept money for touching people and accepting their ills. The family with nineteen children whose habit was to adopt a new baby every time the oldest child left. The soldier who came back from secret service in the tunnels of Cambodia and never spoke another word the rest of his life although he was by all accounts the nicest most tender smiling man you ever met. The rabbi who ran off with both his director of lifelong learning (female) and the cantor (male), supposedly to what was once called the Northwest Territories in Canada and is now called Nunavut, which is Inuktitut for Our Land. The boy who was by many accounts the best football player in the state of Illinois until he cut so sharply one way in a game on a muddy field that his defender’s knee tore completely apart with a terrifying ragged sou
nd and the great football player walked off the field and never played again, although in another version of that story (told to me by the dairy manager at the grocery store on Broadway) he switched sports to tennis on the theory that he would never be directly responsible for an opponent’s injury again.
And so many more stories—about the days before there were any office buildings or large commercial concerns at all in the neighborhood, and the north side of the city along the lake was a sort of large village, where everything was tenements and shops and the streets were not quite paved; about the man who claimed to be the last of the original Potawatomi Indians who had lived in Chicago before white people came to build forts and take all the fish and furs, and who gave erudite talks about his people and their culture and history and legends, but who turned out to be a man named Saul from Beaver Crossing, Nebraska; about the nun who left her hour-old infant in a shoebox at dawn at Our Lady of Mount Carmel on Belmont Avenue and a man bicycling past stole the box and so found his son whom he named Samuel, which means God has heard me. And so many more stories that, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. Amen.
25.
MR PAWLOWSKY TOLD ME enough stories about Edward to fill a dozen books, and while many of them have slipped my mind over the years, and slipped through my fingers too because I did not know enough then to jot notes to serve as spurs to memory, some of them remain adamant and resistant to erosion; the story of the boy left on second base, for example, which would be a story sufficient in itself to say something piercing about Edward, if you could only tell one chapter of his character.
The boy was eight or nine years old, as Mr Pawlowsky told the tale. His family lived in a mossy old wooden tenement behind which there was one of those tiny neighborhood playing fields you often see in old cities—unnamed, not officially a city park, probably essentially an accident of motley development over the years, a sort of asymmetrical space that no one claimed to own and everyone used as playground, baseball and football field, dog run, picnic ground, and refuge for new or illicit romance. The grass grew in uneven patches, most of the field was dirt, and the backstop, which had been built by neighborhood dads years ago, sagged.
The boy was small for his age and no great athlete, and was picked only reluctantly for teams by the other boys, and even then only when they were so short-handed that they had no choice but to let him play. He had rarely caught the ball and never even been on base; he was such an easy out that he was never walked.
Mr Pawlowsky said that Edward just happened to be strolling past the field when the boy came up to bat, and something about the game, or the angle of light that evening, or the boy’s strained face, made Edward stop and watch for a while—“he’s like that, you know, alert to things, and patient enough to wait for them to arrive,” said Mr Pawlowsky. The boy missed one pitch badly, waited out two pitches below his knees, and then gauged a slow pitch perfectly and lined it down the right-field line. The outfielder, shocked, got a terrible start on the ball, and by the time he got to the ball the boy was standing on second base.
“According to Edward there was the usual derision and shouting from the other boys, and overmuch congratulatory blather, so that everyone knew it was false in character and intent, but the boy at second base never said a word. The next batter popped up and that was the end of the inning, but then what Edward was waiting for happened: the boy wouldn’t leave second base. The other kids yelled at him and ragged him and shoved him and all of that but he wouldn’t budge, and after a lot more yelling the game broke up and the other boys went home, probably because it was by then too dark to see. The boy stayed at second base, though. Edward stayed where he was, sitting along the left-field line. The boy never sat down on the base or fidgeted or anything, according to Edward. He just stood there and Edward just sat quietly, waiting. It was a lovely late-summer night and there were a remarkable number of swifts and then nighthawks loose in the ocean of the air. Along about midnight Edward approached the boy and they came to an understanding and Edward walked the boy home. Edward did not give the boy a ride home, as some versions of the story have it. Now somehow that story says a great deal about Edward, although I am not sure it’s easy to articulate just what it says about Edward. But it’s one of those stories where the teller and the listener know what it’s about, even if the words don’t, quite.”
* * *
One Saturday morning in November I woke early and went down to the basement for Mrs Manfredi’s empanadas, and something about the line of grinning sleepy residents, and the patience and courtesy with which they waited on a line that went halfway up the stairs, struck me forcibly, and I was filled with regret and remorse about my decision to leave. This was made worse a moment later when Azad and his sister Eren showed up, holding hands; their parents had let them come downstairs alone for the first time to get their own empanadas, and some for their mom and dad. I was third from the front when word filtered down that the children had shyly joined the end of the line, and I knew what would happen: they would be passed up the line until they got to the front, each resident tousling their hair, and this is exactly what happened. A moment later I got my empanadas and went back to my room and ate them and then packed a small bag and took the bus down to Union Station and got on the Empire Builder train from Chicago west, rattled. I had no plan except just get on the train, and think for a while; something about trains then and now seemed to focus and sharpen my mind—maybe the sliding scenery, or the rhythmic regularity of the ride, in which you could lean back and dream rather than have to concentrate on the conduct of the car.
I watched the Illinois farmland roll by. I thought about the girl from Wyoming but everything that seemed so right and alluring about going to be with her now seemed foolish and callow. What if there were no jobs? What if none of the college friends I knew in Boston wanted to get a cheap apartment with me? What if what felt like a magical mutual attraction wasn’t at all, as usual, and I was once again fooling myself? And most of all, waiting patiently at the end of the line of questions, was the one I had hesitated to ask myself forthrightly: Why was I leaving friends and a job and a city and a life I enjoyed immensely, for what seemed the airiest of pipe dreams? In the year since I had arrived I had met friends I savored, friends who were startling and generous and riveting; and foremost among those friends were the man and the dog in 4B.
It was two hours from Chicago to Milwaukee, and for most of those two hours I thought of Edward. I had never known a dog as a child; our family beagle, Cleo, was banished to life on a farm before I was born, as penalty for serial romantic assaults on other dogs (including a neighboring wolfhound, which led my dad to speculate Cleo must have used a ladder), and the arrival of four small boys in five years after his banishment precluded the possibility of another dog in the house; as my father said, why get a dog when you had perfectly good badly behaved messy roaring beings already in hand? I had some casual acquaintances among the neighborhood dogs, but no real companion, and certainly no close friend, as Edward had proven to be. Indeed Edward had opened my eyes about the whole idea of relationships with beings of other species than mine; like many people I had casually assumed such relationships were matters mostly of property, affectionate at best, but Edward had made me see that the much deeper play had something to do with real admiration and genuine reverence, a lesson I have not forgotten in the years since I first met him on the steps of the building, the day I moved in with my basketball and my duffel bag. He and I had nodded gravely to each other that day, and I had thought that here was a fine example of a dog of indeterminate species; but he had turned out to be my closest friend in Chicago.
I got all the way to Red Wing, Minnesota, on the Mississippi River, some six hours from Chicago, before I turned around and took the train home again. There were a few hours to wait in Red Wing and I sat in the lovely old stone station and thought about how someday I would stay on that train
all the way west, through North Dakota and Montana and Idaho and Oregon to Washington, finishing up by the vast Salish Sea, where I would wander Seattle and eat oysters and listen to the piercing screams of gulls; and I thought too about how sometimes in life you just take leaps and hope for the best, and don’t hedge your bets and make sensible decisions based on what you know, but deliberately make decisions based on what you don’t know, but might find out. On the way back to Chicago I slept so deeply that the conductor had to wake me up when we got to Union Station, and I was so groggy that I walked to my office, only realizing it was Sunday when I finally heard the absence of commuter trains overhead on the elevated tracks.
* * *
Just before Thanksgiving that year I deliberately took a sick day on a Thursday to watch Edward’s office hours in the alley. This I did with Mr McGinty, the two of us standing by his kitchen sink in the morning and silently watching the line slowly shuffle forward. Again there was a remarkable variety of beings, and again there was apparently a sort of truce or détente between animals who would usually be predator and prey, or combatants; there was a sharp-shinned hawk behind two mice, and near the end of the line there were several crows standing patiently behind a red-tailed hawk, perhaps the same hawk I had seen last time. Mr McGinty declined to open the kitchen window, on account of the cold and from respect for Edward’s privacy, so we didn’t hear any snatches of conversation, but it was fascinating enough to watch the quiet advance of the line, and the way animals turned from their time with Edward and walked or flew thoughtfully back to their regular lives. Again there were a number of dogs of various kinds, including a wolfhound the size of a pony, though no cats. Just as we thought the line was drawing to an end a small deer trotted up and joined the queue, behind a gaggle of squirrels. Mr McGinty made a note about the deer; it turned out he kept a list of species, just from curiosity, and at this point, he said, he would not be totally surprised if a sturgeon appeared one day, or a brace of salmon, or a mountain lion. He had seen coyotes, eagles, geese, ducks, and once what sure looked like a lynx, although probably that was a large bobcat—the two cats are hard to tell apart unless you are fairly close to them, and he wasn’t about to go out to get a better look, mostly from respect for Edward but also because a lynx could tear your face off in a second, and he liked his face where it was, personally.