I Sailed with Magellan

by Stuart Dybek

  The first few times he escaped, the hospital called my mother and we waited thinking that Lefty might show up at our house, but he never did. He’d disappear for weeks at a time and refuse to say where he’d been. My mother had a theory that Lefty had a girlfriend somewhere in the city, but the few times she hinted around to Lefty about it he just gazed silently at her with those hooded eyes.

  His last escape was during a mild spell when December felt deceptively like April, misty and wet. They found his body on the morning after the night that it turned bitter cold again. Wearing the light sport coat that he’d escaped in, Lefty had tried to climb back into the Booby Hatch during the night over the locked front gates, and, blind drunk, had apparently fallen from the top of the gate and landed facedown in a puddle. The autopsy determined he’d drowned in three inches of muddy water. By morning the puddle had frozen around him, and they had to chip his body free from the ice. If he had to die in such a way, I wished that at least he had been climbing out instead of back inside.

  I thought of the woman in the bronze wig, standing at the back of the church. Perhaps she had been Lefty’s secret girlfriend, maybe a woman he had met at the track or at some bar where he’d gone to listen to music, or a waitress on whom Lefty had used his I’ll-never-forget-you-for-that line. But the woman, wearing her sunglasses as if they were a sign of mourning, had looked too regal for a waitress. There was a fiery blush of rouge war-painted along the bronze of her high cheekbones. I tried to recall if she was wearing earrings, tried to imagine how those earrings that Lefty had bought might look on her. They’d have matched her oval eyes. Maybe it was her place where Lefty hid out during his escapes; maybe she was what kept him escaping. It hadn’t occurred to me before that Lefty needed something to escape to as well as from, and when I realized that, I wanted to see her again, to see her from Lefty’s point of view. I wanted to know what happened, why he hadn’t stayed with her that night when it turned cold, what drove him back to the Booby Hatch, though even in my fantasy of tracking her down, I knew we’d never have that conversation.

  The cold had cleared my head. I wasn’t feeling sick any longer. In fact, I was starving. I almost turned back; then, walking down Adams, I passed Berghoff’s, a restaurant with an annexed stand-up bar that Lefty used to talk about. It was one of his favorite hangouts for celebrating when he hit it big at the track, a state of affluence he called “being in the peanuts and caramel.” Standing at the polished oak bar, he’d eat cold hard-boiled eggs, and Thuringer sandwiches on rye spread with brown mustard and horseradish, and wash them down with steins of Berghoff’s private-label dark beer. Probably he’d stood at the bar wearing the very topcoat that I was wearing now. Instead of heading back to St. Peter’s, I stepped into Berghoff’s.

  Three bartenders were working the long bar, where businessmen, some still in their topcoats and scarves, stood packed together eating sandwiches and plates of hash and quaffing foamy steins. A line of men, shaking off the cold, waited for sandwiches from a server dressed in chef’s white, who expertly wielded a carving knife against the grain of mountainous roasts.

  I noticed a Tribune left behind at one of the high, wooden tables along the wall where men stood as an alternative to crowding at the bar. I picked up the newspaper, which was folded to the market report, and wished I was smoking a cigar. No, I thought, that would be overdoing it. Instead, I snuck the butt of a half-smoked filter cigarette from an ashtray and struck a light from a handy Berghoff matchbook. I raised my topcoat collar up around my face, wedged in at the bar, and assumed the nonchalant pose of a man on a late lunch immersed in the financial section. My heart had begun to race. I was counting on the suit and Lefty’s topcoat to help me pass for legal drinking age; after all, there was no telling how many drinks that topcoat had been served in here.

  “What’ll it be?” a gray-haired bartender with moles on his face and a German accent asked me, scooping up the tip from the man beside me who’d just left.

  I inhaled as if considering, blew a cloud of smoke, and very deliberately stubbed out my cigarette in the ashtray on the bar.

  “I’ll take one of those eggs,” I said, and went back to studying the market report.

  He brought the egg, a plate for shells, a napkin, and salt and pepper shakers.

  “Anything to drink?” he asked.

  “Just a stein,” I said, without looking up from the paper.

  I could feel him staring at me, not just with his eyes but with his moles as well, but he didn’t ask for my ID.

  I peeled the egg, my hands steady, though I was sweating under the weight of the topcoat. I felt as if Uncle Lefty was at my shoulder like a guardian angel, as if instead of my abandoning him, his spirit had followed me out of the church and was here at the bar rather than transported off in a hearse running red lights, towing a line of funeral cars in a last ride down Milwaukee Avenue, way out to the Northwest Side, past the forest preserves, to the family plot in St. Adalbert Cemetery, a place that Lefty called the Old Polack Burial Ground. There would be a brief service at the graveside, that all-too-fertile-looking black rectangle gaping from a snow-clotted lawn. Then the living would retire to the White Eagle Restaurant, conveniently located across from the cemetery, for a huge spread of chicken, roast beef, kielbasa, kraut, pierogi, mashed potatoes, cucumbers in sour cream, and for dessert, platters of kolacky.

  I salted and peppered my egg, applied a dab of horseradish from one of the bowls along the bar, and glanced up at my reflection in the gleaming mirror that ran the length of the bar. I watched myself loosen my tie. Already a plan was hatching: I’d finish the egg and order another, and with it another stein, then stand in line for a Thuringer sandwich on rye with a dill pickle. And for dessert, a boilermaker featuring a shot of Berghoff’s aged bourbon from one of the bottles reflected along the base of the mirror—a private toast to Uncle Lefty.

  The bartender hammered a stein down before me, mopped the foam with his white apron, and I peeled off a couple crisp two-dollar bills and slapped them on the bar. He picked them up without batting an eye at the unusual bills and walked over to the register.

  I raised the egg I’d dressed in pepper and horseradish to my mouth. It tasted better than anything I’d ever bit into before. Then I lifted the heavy stein, with its dark brew and beige head of foam, and took a swallow.

  It was root beer.

  “Everything okay?” the bartender asked when he returned with my change.

  “Fine,” I said.

  I finished the egg in another bite but left the root beer. When I was little and Uncle Lefty took me with him to neighborhood bars, root beer was what he’d always buy me.

  “Excuse me,” I said to the bartender.

  “Yah?” he asked as if we were speaking German.

  “Do you have something to write with?”

  He handed me the pencil from behind his ear.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I slid the cardboard coaster emblazoned with the red Berghoff emblem out from under the stein of root beer, flipped it over, and on its blank side carved GO FUCK YOURSELF, and left it for a tip.

  Outside, it had begun to snow, ticking grains that turned the afternoon as gray as a rainstorm would have. An icy wind off the lake funneled down Adams. I could hear the flags on the corner of State whipping the way my topcoat whipped around my knees. Instead of sticking, the snow blew off like grit, though behind display windows along State Street, sequined flakes suspended by threads gathered in cotton drifts around elves and reindeer.

  On the other side of the expressway, downtown turned into blocks of pawnshops and strip bars displaying pictures of women in G-strings and pasties who were presumably disrobing inside. In the spirit of the season, some of the women were pictured wearing Santa hats. When Uncle Lefty took me pawnshopping with him, he’d blinder my eyes with his hands when we passed the strip bars, saying, “You’re too young yet.” Now, I was simply too cold. The streets that had seemed forbidden and exciting looked sleazy
and dismal. I turned around and walked north back into downtown.

  If not for the cold I could have kept walking. I wasn’t wearing a hat, and my ears burned numb. My hands felt raw from taking turns holding the topcoat closed at the throat, where it was missing a button. When I passed Marshall Field’s, I went in to get out of the cold.

  The revolving door spun into a rush of steam heat and perfume, and I was drawn into a current of shoppers that led inevitably to the great Christmas tree at the center of a rotunda domed with Tiffany glass. To view the tree properly, you rode up the escalator, gaping over the edge to take in the lavish decorations—a dizzying sensation I recalled from childhood. A trip to Field’s, as my mother familiarly referred to the store, was a pilgrimage we made each holiday season. Instinctively, I followed the old route my mother and I would take to the toy department on the fifth floor. I wanted to see if the knights were still there. Until about sixth grade I’d obsessively collected them. They were miniatures made of metal, not plastic, imported from Europe and found only at Field’s. Their armor gleamed like newly minted nickel, their helmets had working visors that opened to reveal individual faces enameled with the intense expressions of combat. They swung broadswords, maces, battle-axes; some were jousters on armored steeds. I dreamed of amassing an army, but they were too expensive for me to acquire more than one or two each Christmas. At that rate, childhood would be over before I could marshal my forces. I wondered if I’d ever thought back then about stealing one. Probably not with my mother waiting patiently while I agonized over my choices. I wanted them all.

  It was too late to buy them, even though I had Uncle Lefty’s wad of money. I wondered if there was anything in Field’s I wanted as much now. I began to browse, looking not for something to steal, exactly, but for something that I wanted enough to steal for. I rode the escalator as high as it went and worked my way down, drifting through aisles of furniture, crystal, china, clothing. I was back on the main floor, checking out jewelry, when I saw the woman at the perfume counter.

  It was an impulse to take it. I had it in hand before I’d dared myself to do so; a flush of alarm at what I was doing shot through my body like an amphetamine. Beneath my topcoat the box of perfume felt pasted by sweat to where I’d pinned it between my arm and ribs. I backed away from the counter convinced that people were staring accusingly, yet it wasn’t getting caught that I was most worried about. In the instant during which I’d snatched the perfume, I’d lost sight of the woman in the crowd.

  Jostling past shoppers laden with packages, I hurried along the aisle to catch up to her, trying not to look like a thief fleeing the scene of the crime. She had vanished. I stopped and surveyed the store, but picking her out of the milling crowd was impossible. Perhaps she was already riding the escalator up to women’s apparel. It seemed better to take a wild chance on finding her there than to stand paralyzed with a box of perfume under my coat. I turned for the escalator, and suddenly saw her straightening up from a drink at the water fountain.

  After the panic of losing sight of her, simply to be following her through the store felt like incredible luck. She headed directly for the Washington Street exit, and I thought I could almost follow her by the scent of her perfume, although probably what I was smelling was the perfume that I’d blasted on my palm.

  Even back out in the cold I caught her scent through the diesel fumes of buses and wafts of caramel corn and roasted nuts, as if I’d been blessed with a dog’s power of smell. The wind had let up, and the floating snow collecting on the windshields of cars parked illegally along the curb now resembled the snow behind display windows—hanging flakes that sparkled in the lights.

  She turned south on Wabash and waited for the signal to cross the street. I caught her profile bathed in the green of the traffic light. Her breath steamed. She wore the same intensely private expression that I’d noticed as she stood before the perfume counter. Not a dreamy look—the opposite, really, though I couldn’t have described it at the time: the look of someone so alerted to her inner life as to be detached from the world around her. She wasn’t part of the bustling crowds, she wasn’t shopping, she wasn’t stopping to browse.

  The light changed, we crossed the street. An El racketed overhead, balanced precariously at the edge of the tracks, scraping blue sparks from the third rail. My mind raced with plans for what to do next. I thought of simply running up behind her and, as I went by, wishing her Merry Christmas and handing her the box, then rushing off. Or perhaps it would be better to say, “Excuse me, miss, you dropped this,” and before she could recover from her surprise enough to say anything or try to hand it back, I would be racing off as if I was late for an important engagement, glancing over my shoulder and waving at her as she stood there puzzled but smiling while the rush-hour crowd parted around her.

  Whatever my strategy, she’d be surprised, but then I considered that it might not necessarily be a pleasant surprise to have some guy in a topcoat that was too big for him, and wearing a Robert Hall suit purchased for the Sophomore Hop and already outgrown, running up out of nowhere and handing her a perfume she’d just surreptitiously sprayed along her breasts.

  It would be better if, in passing on the street or stopped at a traffic light, we were jostled together in the crowd, and in that instant I slipped the perfume into the pocket of her black coat. She was walking bareheaded with her coat unbuttoned, one hand thrust in a pocket, and the hem flaring open with each stride. Slipping the perfume into her coat was a plan that would work only if I was a pickpocket, as deft as one of those kids under the tutelage of Fagin in Oliver Twist. Whatever I settled on had to be unobtrusive, and, as I hadn’t arrived at a workable scheme, I merely followed her down Wabash.

  We caught the light on Madison and crossed. In the middle of the block, a Salvation Army band played “O Come, All Ye Faithful” to the accompaniment of blaring traffic. The closer we got the more off-key the band sounded. The trumpet player, a gangly kid in wire-rim glasses, was the worst offender. His acne scars were violet in the cold, and his tone broke repeatedly like an adolescent’s voice. I would have sympathized with him if each time he flubbed a note he hadn’t blown louder. Beside him a tuba player oompahed a bass line that would have made him a natural in the Polka Gents. There was an old guy wearing woolly white earmuffs, thumping a bass drum with a matching woolly mallet, and a fellow with a beard off a Smith Brothers cough drop box playing an ice-cold-looking glockenspiel. They all looked cold, and remarkably they all looked as if they were smiling, even the two brass players.

  The woman’s gait slowed as she approached them. She glanced at her watch, then joined the small group of people who stood listening to the carol. The band roused to a crescendo on “sing choirs of angels, sing in exultation,” and the trumpet player hit a flat note that had passersby shaking their heads, but he simply raised the bell of his horn higher into the falling snow and continued to play. Behind his thick glasses, his eyes were squeezed closed, and I noticed that the woman, too, had raised her face to the snow and closed her eyes so that the snowflakes crumbled on her lashes.

  Amidst the small gathering, I had edged just beside her, closer than I’d dared before, close enough to catch the scent again. Inside my coat pocket I clutched the box of perfume, still waiting for the right moment. The carol hung suspended on the last refrain, drawing out the notes before raggedly collapsing to a conclusion. There was a smattering of glove-muffled applause and the tink of donations. She dug into her coat pockets as if searching for a coin, but came up with only a rumpled Kleenex. I took the opportunity to step forward, peel a bill from Uncle Lefty’s wad, and drop it into the collection pot, and she turned, gazed directly at me, and smiled. Then, glancing at her watch again, she continued down Wabash, and the moment dissolved like the scent of her perfume as I watched her walking away.

  I should have stopped right there and watched her disappear into the crowd, content with the acknowledgment of her smile, but the musicians launched into “The First Noel
,” and suddenly it felt so lonely there listening to them by myself that I started after her again.

  She was already across Monroe, and I had to cross against the light and dodge through traffic. She stopped at the Wabash entrance to the Palmer House hotel, and a bellman with a luggage cart pushed by, momentarily shielding her from view. I sped up so as not to lose sight of her as I had in Field’s, but she remained standing before the entrance, watching an airline bus with dark windows load up passengers while guests returning from shopping sprees bustled around her. A doorman in green livery, with a whistle piercing enough to carry over the roar of the El, hailed a Checker cab, opened the passenger door, and gestured toward her. For a second I thought she was going to get into the cab, and I had an impulse to rush up and toss the perfume in after her, though what I did was stand there frozen. Then another woman and a man, both dressed for the theater and laughing uproariously over some private joke, dashed past her and grabbed the cab instead. It swerved off into the snow, taking their merriment with it, and she turned as if a decision had been made for her, and walked through the entrance.

  I trailed behind her past an arcade of shops, then up a broad flight of marble stairs to the vaulted lobby on the second floor, with its coral-and-green expanse of carpet. Mirrors and marble reflected the electric candlelight of the brass sconces. A Christmas tree, not the equal of Field’s but magnificent all the same, rose up to a mezzanine. At a grand piano, a pianist rippled Christmas tunes as if they were Chopin. Gone was the bustle at the outside entrance, the lobby seemed serene. I was no longer one of a crowd on a snowy street. Since she’d smiled at me outside, I’d lost the camouflage of anonymity integral to my impossible schemes.