by Scott Simon
Sunny almost never actually asked for money. It would be boorish— “Like asking for a blow job over the bread basket,” said Linas Slavinskas—and risked snapping the mutual illusion that their worldliness alone accounted for the alderman's assiduous interest in their opinions. If a politician was sensitive, it was also unnecessary. “Like asking for a blow job over the brandy,” is how Linas put it. “If you haven't talked your way in by the budino al cioccolato, no amount of begging will get you there.”
Eldad Delaney wriggled the folder at Sunny as if he were trying to signal a passing plane.
“We can't skip a night? Under the circumstances …”
“Under the circumstances, I think they'd be even more eager to hear from you. A phone call now is worth five or six a few weeks from now.”
Sunny sighed as Eldad dialed up the number of Mendy Huster, a securities analyst on Wacker. Sunny remembered his oaken office along the green river, the bridges in his prodigious windows yawning open slowly for barges, and a grove of frames standing on his credenza showing the smiles of four daughters, two stepsons, two sandy-haired wives, and a white-throated Bernese mountain dog.
Mendy Huster was a busy man. They were still open for business in San Jose. They were still trading commodities in San Francisco. They were making plans for Monday in Tokyo. He came to the phone for Sunny's call within a moment.
“Alllderman Roopini,” he said with unusual formality. “You must be a busy man.” It was his highest accolade.
“Thank you for taking my call,” said Sunny. “I appreciate it.”
Eldad was already pointing to the name of Hannah Williams, a trial attorney in Sears' Tower who was next on his list. Worried about proposal to make Sheridan one-way west of Clark, he murmured into Sunny's uncovered ear.
“I know how hectic Fridays are for you, Mendy. But first, how is the family?”
FRIDAY NIGHT
The Granville North Side Neighbors met in the basement of a Methodist church in which Sunny had also attended meetings of the Concerned Citizens of Andersonville, the Edgewater Watch Auxiliary, and the Margate Park Native Seeds Association. He recognized the tall, tarnished coffee urn that the Reverend Sillitoe kept simmering at the back of the room as well as the one in his own kitchen (though Reverend Sillitoe kept only hot water roiling in his urn, which attendees could use to moisten herbal teabags, powdered decaffeinated coffee, or dietetic hot chocolate).
People sat in folding chairs under tawny yellow light, the sleeves of their nylon snow jackets sliding as they squirmed in their seats, the suction smack! of wet snowshoes pulling away from the slick floor. Sunny could see posters from his seat: WHO WOULD JESUS BOMB? GO SOLAR, NOT BALLISTIC, and IMAGINE ALL THE PEOPLE, SHARING ALL THE WORLD.
“We are so glad that Alderman Roopini could make time for our humble community meeting,” said the reverend. “We know he is now concerned—we see it on TV—with so much loftier issues.”
Sunny spotted the tartness in the reverend's thanks and began by springing to his feet and holding his hands at his waist.
“Thank you for your warm welcome,” he said. “And now I ask that we all observe a moment of silence in honor of our late mayor.”
The room rose, sorrowfully and dutifully, sleeves scratching, snow-shoes clopping, and faces downcast. The reverend could see that Sunny had gained a tactical advantage with his reminder of his close association with the mayor. He stewed through half a minute of reverential silence before moving to recapture the room.
“We thank thee, oh Lord, for the late mayor's commitment to sustainable neighborhoods,” he said, his eyes fastened in prayerful communion. “Thy creatures know that taller is not better, that bigger is not more beautiful, and that responsible planning, rather than unchecked development, can make His earth in this ward into Eden once again.”
(Reverend Sillitoe was in favor of a proposal to limit the height of new buildings along a newly leveled block of Broadway to six stories.)
But before murmurs of “amen” could move around the room, Dennis Pietrzak, a realtor who owned four buildings on Glenwood, added his own supplication from the third row.
“And remember, oh Lord, as Thy mayor always did, that sustainable neighborhoods require vital local enterprises at street level, and that commerce is also a part of Thy kingdom. Thy will be done!”
(Dennis favored an eight-story height limitation on that block, to encourage small stores on ground floors.)
The meeting wound on an hour and forty-six minutes. Sunny, who explained that he was there to listen and learn, kept his eyelids open, but only by blinking very hard, as if he were casting out sand.
Proponents of the six-story height limitation said that if eight-story buildings were built, those two blocks along Broadway would soon look as cold and forbidding as the crags of the Khyber Pass. Eight-story buildings would choke off all sunlight. They would massacre all greenery. Could city pigeons even twitter in such a ghastly landscape?
But supporters of eight-story buildings said they were necessary so that hardware stores, shoe repair shops, and independent coffee houses could abound on the ground floors, each staffed by knowledgeable, personable proprietors. Otherwise, the streets would be lonely, dangerous, and desolate. Unemployed young toughs would gather in gutters to mug grandmothers and exchange infected heroin needles. So the debate bounded back and forth.
“We don't want our streets to look like canyons!”
“And we don't want a whole block of Broadway to look like a bunch of army barracks!”
“You want to live like the folks on the Gold Coast? Four-million-dollar condos, and you can't buy a stick of sunlight!”
“If I had a four-million-dollar condo there, I'd go to Miami every year for a little sunlight!”
“Look how developers leveled lower Manhattan!”
“Developers!” gasped Floyd Porteus, who ran a stationery shop and newsstand on Sheridan Road. “That was terrorism!”
“By the U.S. government!” shouted several people from their seats, and when a few more voices bellowed back, Jack Merritt, who was an information technology teacher at Senn Academy, rose with a rolled-up newspaper in his hand to emphasize, “The FBI and Enron wanted to suck the American people into war. Just like Pearl Harbor!”
“That's nuts!”
“You don't know that Roosevelt planned Pearl Harbor?” roared Jack. “Then you're nuts.”
“I deeply respect this exchange of views,” the Reverend Sillitoe stepped in, hands waving. “But just in the interest of time—can we keep this discussion a little more focused?”
“If you're not part of the exposure, you're part of the cover-up!” Jack rasped.
It was two hours before Sgt. McNulty could convey Sunny back into their long black car and pull away from the church, wheels crunching and whining in the thudding snow.
“Such a wide-ranging discussion, alderman,” Sgt. McNulty told him after they had dropped Eldad Delaney at home, just a few blocks away. “Down in Alderman Corcoran's ward, we don't hear quite so much of that world perspective.”
Sunny smiled sourly. World perspective sounded like receiving a compliment for your child's feistiness.
“The Grrreat Forty-eight,” Sunny reminded him. “I remember one night when a proposal to extend weekend parking on Sheridan Road turned into a debate on nuclear power. What's the story of America? The farmers and the ranchers. What's the story of urban development? The families and the single people. Any debate about housing and zoning, and you can match up sides like that.”
“I noticed that you didn't express any opinion,” said the sergeant.
“Vehemently so,” Sunny agreed.
They came to a block of North Clark Street that was nominally identified with Swedish immigrants. But that lineage lingered only in the names of a few bakeshops. Greek and Persian families had moved in a generation ago. Blue and white striped flags were taped into deli windows, next to Farsi language ads for shampoo and cigarettes. The newest arr
ivals were gays—and their families. The newer restaurants they opened had loudly Italianate names, like Fredo's, Lucca's, and Fat Clemenza's. The newer bakeries had signs blaring LOW-FAT CINNAMON RAISIN SCONES, not cinnamon rolls.
Sunny had gotten a message from Rita and Rula, the two of them crowding the mouthpiece and alternating sentences.
“Why don't we, Pappaji—”
“We're down on Lincoln, it's on the way—”
“—meet at Big Ern's.”
Big Ern was a tavern that, its current owner claimed, had been opened as a speakeasy in the late 1920s. Big Ern (who was less so after having a triple bypass operation at the age of forty-six) kept the front door with the peephole and small grate, which now was shoved aside only so that the Budweiser man could shout, “Delivery, Ernie!” Boasting of an outlaw pedigree was an attractive word-of-mouth promotion in Chicago.
Big Ern insisted that the bar had been built to resemble one in the old French ocean liner Normandie, so that people who could not afford to cruise could have a cocktail in comparable surroundings. The tavern had low ceilings, snug red booths, and porthole windows that looked out onto the salty spray of Clark Street. When someone pushed open the door, the hinges creaked, light from the streetlamp flashed off ship's brass bells behind the bar, and Big Ern sang out, “Hi, neighbor!”
Sunny and Elana used to end their nights out there, on a slumping red velvet couch in the back, under an old neon display of a fish dancing on his fins and holding out a martini glass in some underwater toast.
“A pickled herring,” Ern explained.
Sunny usually nursed a brandy and coffee, Elana one more glass of white wine. When Ern began to sing along from behind the bar: “When the moon comes over the mountain …” it seemed to remind Sunny to complain that their daughters no longer needed him.
“Only to leave a twenty on the table in the morning,” he said, usually running an index finger around the smooth rim of his brandy glass. “You can tell them about sex, college, smoking—not smoking. Boys—no boys. What could they possibly find out from me? Whole continents have emerged from the sea since I learned anything. Stars have been discovered, diseases conquered. What value is there in knowing how many onions to order every week, or how to get a tree stump removed from Ainslie? They think that running a restaurant is squalid. They think that politics is stupid. They think …”
“They love you,” Elana pointed out—not always gently.
“They're convinced that Salman Rushdie or Antonio Banderas must be their real father. They think anything I might know a little bit about isn't worth knowing.”
“I would never have anything to do with Salman Rushdie,” Elana would smile (Sunny changed the name of his example every few months).
“Remember when they were little?” she asked, her long dark hair swishing sensationally over the lip of her long-stemmed wine glass. “All the giggles at Pappaji making faces, squirting water out of his nose, and talking like Donald Duck? God it irritated me! I wiped their asses. I pulled the pants over their little puffy squirmy sausage arms and legs; it was like trying to put pantyhose on rabid dogs. I'd pack their little juices and snacks. And they'd act like little memsahibs—”
“Schmucks,” Sunny amended.
“—barking that they wanted milk in the blue cup, not the red one, and throwing it across the floor, like Henry the Eighth flinging a chicken leg. Then you'd step through the door, and I'd hear the goddamn giggles. That's what people in love really want to hear—anyone can learn to say, ‘I love you.’ The girls and I are just making up for lost time, Sunny. They'll rediscover you, too.”
“I'd give five years of my life,” Sunny would say, drumming his right hand along the small, smooth table. “Just to have them back like they were when they were five and three. Just for ten minutes. Shit, I'd give ten years.”
“Don't you dare,” Elana would tell him, running a long finger across the top of his closed hand. “Those years are for me.”
Sunny stopped going to Big Ern's after Elana died. Ern left a few messages over several weeks. “Aren't you thirsty? I have a bottle of Baron de Sack-o-shit or something on the back row that's getting dusty,” and when none of those tender and considerate invitations prompted Sunny's reappearance, Ern left something sharper.
“You lost your wife, Sunny,” he said. “Not your friends.”
Sunny finally came in with his daughters on a Sunday night. The Bears were six points behind Green Bay on the screen behind the bar, and Russ Morgan's wah-wah trombone whined through “Dance with a Dolly With a Hole in Her Stocking.”
“Nice to see you, alderman,” Ern sang out, taking care not to turn his head from the rose-colored Cosmopolitan he was straining from a beaded shaker. “But we already paid you off this month.”
“I've heard that your bar sink lacks a second tube for proper evacuation,” Sunny told him with elaborate composure. “It'll cost you another fifty to overlook that code violation.”
“Hey, alderman. I'm just a small businessman trying to survive,” said Ern.
“Me, too,” said Sunny, and the laughter of drinkers tinkled up and down the bar. Big Ern came around as he showed Sunny and his daughters to the drooping red couch below the dancing fish.
“I can see why you've been keeping these beautiful young women away,” said Big Ern.
“We're old enough to drink,” Rula told him. “In truly civilized cultures.”
“This is the Forty-eighth Ward,” Ern reminded her. “I make something—a touch of cola in 7Up—that looks just like Glenfiddich and a splash on the rocks. I'll set it up for you.”
“Could I have an orange slice in it? Cherries, too, please,” Rula asked.
From that night on, Sunny and his daughters usually met at Big Ern's one night a week, the girls sitting on the frowning red couch, Sunny settling in a seat across the way.
It was neutral territory for Sunny and his daughters. Elana still lingered in their apartment, her skirts and shirts still hanging in their closets. He still hadn't brought himself to remove or use her towels from the rack in their bathroom. They still drooped down, wrinkled, frowning, and sagging, when he snapped on the light in the middle of the night. Sunny and his daughters just couldn't talk around their mother.
They were arrayed along the red couch when Sunny and Sgt. McNulty rocked open the door to Big Ern's, and they sprang to their feet, red scarves encircling their necks in the way Elana had taught them to wrap themselves against the cold.
He brought both girls into his arms. Rula put her head onto the right shoulder of his topcoat. Rita kissed the left side of his neck.
“Pappaji …” It was Rula, alongside his ear.
“Poor Pappaji,” Rita added from under his chin. They helped him into the couch, swinging his legs to fill one side, and took chairs across from their father. Ern appeared above them.
“Hi, neighbor. Good to see you intact, Mr. Acting Interim,” he said. “Your girls have been passing out ambassadorships.”
Ern swept an arm toward the screen behind the bar, showing long lines of people with bowed heads and slumping shoulders standing noiselessly along Randolph Street, waiting for the mayor's casket to be borne up the steps of the Cultural Center.
“Quiet tonight,” he added softly. “I turned off the juke. And I hear—” Ern threw a thumb over his shoulder, up toward the screen— “that the south side is a ghost town …”
There were two white restaurant boxes on the low table in front of the couch, which Rita and Rula popped open to reveal a beige lagoon of baba ghanoush, speckled with smoky bits of charred eggplant, and a creamy pink lake of taramosalata.
“Anmar sent it over,” Ern explained. The Békaa Gardens was just across the street. Rula and Rita reached over with crusty spades of pita, while Sunny struggled up from the cushions to stand to shake hands with a short, dark woman who had appeared alongside Sgt. McNulty.
“Sgt. Andrea Jelsen-Gidwitz, sir,” he explained. “You rate an overnight shift now
.”
The sergeant with the hyphenated name had wavy dark hair, almond eyes, and commanding hands. She wore a long black coat and heels that gave her an extra inch of height.
“Whenever you're ready, we bring you home and sit outside on Lawrence,” she said. “Sgt. Gallaher—I believe you know her—takes over tomorrow morning.”
Sgt. McNulty had reached over for Sunny's hand to say goodnight, but Sunny ran his free hand up the sergeant's arm to clutch his shoulder. At first, Sunny was moved to take the sergeant into his arms, but caught himself. McNulty had probably worked around enough politicians to know that they hugged people the way that chimps hung off tree limbs. So Sunny settled on the shoulder clasp, and the steady—so he hoped—look into his eyes.
“You saved my life.”
“Not even close,” Sgt. McNulty reassured him.
“Are you off duty?”
“As soon as Sgt. Andi shook your hand.”
“A bon vivant like you must have places to go,” Sunny told him. “But a man saves my life, I ask him what he drinks.”
Sgt. McNulty looked around the room before breaking into a smile.
“One for the road then,” he said, before sitting down on a bench across from Rita and Rula.
“Johnnie, rocks, please,” he said to Ern. “I'm not a fancy guy.”
“Blue label, please, Ern,” said Sunny, sitting down on the rim of the red sofa's cushions. “I beg to differ.”
“I know you,” Big Ern told the sergeant. “I saw you all day. They've been playing your big scene over and over, like JFK in Dallas. Better ending, of course.”
“Think what Sgt. McNulty could have done for Lincoln,” said Sunny.
“What would you have done if the guy reached for his piece?” asked Ern, presenting the sergeant's drink, ice cubes crackling and elegantly tinkling.
“My job.”