by Scott Simon
“No, thank you,” he said.
“You'll need your strength,” Evelyn suggested. “If you've come to put an arm on me.”
A Korean man in a white cap thumped knives and forks against the table, then dealt down a quick sequence of small dishes with almost blinding colors and biting smells, grunting as he turned to go. By the time Sunny turned to thank him, he was back on a stool by the bar.
“Something I said?” he asked.
“He was a medical technician in Sinchon,” said Evelyn Lee, “who worked with radio isotopes. Now he's serving tiny little plates of panchan—appetizers—to a bunch of people like me, who used to be seamstresses and tailors.”
The small bowls glowed like a science fair project, scarlet-orange kimchee, small hard brown sweet beans, lustrous green seaweed salad, dappled with toasted sesame, bone-white tempeh, pearl white slices of radish, white whittles of garlic, and pale green chips of cucumber.
“Is this one of those situations,” asked Sunny, “in which a gentleman is expected to belch?”
“After, not before,” laughed Evelyn, holding up two fingers for beer. While Sunny comically smacked his stomach, as if to coax something up, Evelyn held her head close to his own.
“I love Vera, Sunny,” she told him as the beer was quickly set down. “But it isn't who would be the best mayor. Who would be best for me to vote for?”
Sunny took a small sip from his brown bottle.
“You could vote for Mickey Mouse, Evelyn,” he said. “You could kiss a toad, rob a bank, and still get reelected.”
Evelyn Lee let Sunny's praise evaporate before she replied. Their surly server had plunked down a dish of beef, raw, sliced, soaked in soy, sesame oil, and garlic, and rolled to resemble a bouquet of petals.
“I vote for Vera, Sunny, and I take a number,” she continued. “Number twenty, from what I hear. I don't mind waiting my turn. I mind being taken for granted. I've carried some hot coals for the mayor on quite a few things. I heard a lot of, ‘The size you want is on order, we'll let you know,’ from him, Collins, and Vera. Our ward is swelling, Sunny. We need two grammar schools. We need an adult learning center. We need—”
Sunny shifted in his seat, and daubed a gray ash from the coals against his chin.
“Evelyn, you can't just snap your fingers, abracadabra, and pull out new schools,” he said. “People want schools, roads, teachers, police, armies, doctors on call, and a chicken in every pot. But they don't want to pay for them. It's like reasoning with my daughters.”
The Mexican man slapped rosy shards of chicken and ruby-red thick slices of beef onto the grill, the drips of marinade making smoke and flames sputter.
“That's smoke, Sunny,” she said. “You don't need new schools. You can change the boundaries. You don't need three grammar schools in Shirley's ward.”
The 16th was Shirley Watson's ward.
“Have you walked down Garfield Boulevard?” Evelyn asked. “Sixty-third? You see more boarded windows than after a hurricane. Three grammar schools within fifteen blocks? But the mayor wouldn't let them redraw the district lines because the mayor needed Shirley,” she pointed out, gently tapping her elbow in emphasis. “The mayor needed the teacher's union. The teacher's union is filled with certain teachers who think they're going to lose jobs if their classes start filling with the children of immigrants, and their parents start getting active on school boards.”
“Certain teachers?” Sunny asked with a tone of admonishment, but Evelyn Lee was prepared.
“Teachers who don't speak Chinese, Cambodian, or Korean,” she said almost primly. “I hadn't noticed anything else about them—like color, creed, Cubs or White Sox fan—if that's what you mean.”
Sunny raised his brown bottle and clicked it against his head.
“Your point, Alderman Lee,” he conceded with a laugh. Evelyn Lee had laid out a lettuce leaf, swabbed it with soybean paste, and then laid in a slice of beef and a sprinkling of radish slices.
“Bloody hell, Evelyn,” Sunny told her as she leaned over to take half of the loaded leaf into her mouth. “One of those schools is called Crispus Attucks.”
Alderman Lee sat back to chew, then took a half-swallow of beer before clearing her throat in reply.
“I don't want to change the name to Reverend Moon, Sunny. Just redraw the boundaries.”
Sunny picked up a set of chopsticks to seize a wedge of chicken and wrap it in the lettuce leaf with some charred motes of garlic and a springy chock of white rice.
“Shirley's folks always turned out for the mayor, Evelyn,” he reminded her. “Your ward is a little less assimilated to our quaint local folkways.”
Evelyn Lee sat back to laugh at Sunny's own artful construction. During the last elections, an independent reform candidate for state's attorney, Shin Rhee, an Evanston lawyer, had run almost even with the mayor's choice in Evelyn's ward.
“Sometimes you have to take your pillow out to the sofa to get a little more love,” she explained as she rubbed the last dollop of lettuce leaf across her front teeth. “There's not much you can tempt me with, Sunny,” she went on. “I don't need help getting elected. I don't need help to be any busier.” It was another genteelism; Evelyn said busy where others would say successful. She had opened six dry-cleaning outlets and two Korean movie houses.
“Linas hasn't promised me any abracadabra,” she said. “Just his direct line. He's good to his friends, Sunny. You're his friend. You know—he has every quality to make a great mayor.”
“And more,” said Sunny. “I don't worry about his qualities; it's the more.”
When Evelyn launched an eyebrow as she laughed, Sunny said, “I wouldn't move to Canada if Linas were elected, Evelyn. But you know Vera. She's got ideas that can match the size and drive of this city. She loved the mayor—we all did. But now she's her own enterprise.”
Evelyn Lee put her chin on her right hand, then gently raised her left and shot up two fingers.
“Maekchu,” she commanded the angry man who had whacked down their bowls and cutlery. As she spoke, Sunny saw him move his knees over slowly, as if he had been pinned beneath a crumpled car, before standing and shuffling toward the kitchen.
“I'm just one vote, Sunny.”
“We need every one.”
“You need six,” she reminded him.
“People respect you, Evelyn,” and while the alderman unflinchingly absorbed this established politician's flattery, Sunny added, “We make it known that you're voting for Vera, and Alonzo Gutierrez and Patrick Tierney might figure that you've added things up and join in before they get left out.”
Their churlish server put down two more brown bottles, as if he were trying to stamp them on a scampering bug. Sunny tamped down his tone.
“Those schools in the Sixteenth are part of those neighborhoods, Evelyn. People have learned to read there, sing songs, play on the swings.”
“Drug buys, drug busts, and drive-by shootings, too,” she answered. “Neighborhoods change, Sunny. They've got a McDonald's in Tiananmen Square now.”
“They've had tough times in the Sixteenth, Evelyn,” he answered with a note of pleading. “The stores get boarded, buildings are abandoned; pretty soon the cops stop patrolling. Even the churches pack up their candles and leave. You can't take away their schools.”
Gently, they clinked their two new brown bottles.
“Linas says you're thinking about cashing in and leaving the table,” said Evelyn.
“Thinking, yes.”
“About Congress?”
“Or the restaurant business,” said Sunny. He motioned toward their waiter, now implacably planted on a stool and watching a game show. “I've got the perfect front man in mind. Lots of people can represent the Forty-eighth,” he went on. “I'm the only person who can provide for my daughters.”
“So you're trying to make time for them now, when all they want to do is get away?”
“I'm just trying to do a little better for them than I did for her,” said Su
nny. Evelyn Lee ran a lone chopstick around the edge of her dinner plate.
“Politics didn't kill your wife, Sunny,” she told him heavily. “It didn't kill George.” Evelyn's late husband had died from the lifelong saturation of cleaning chemicals into his lungs, clear down to his mustard-colored fingernails.
“Politics doesn't kill people, Sunny. It just suffocates them, little by little.”
They sat back, the last wedges of chicken turning brown and brittle on the cold gray edge of the grill.
“Sunny,” she began in a softer tone, “Vera can never be as grateful to me as she has to be to the people who are her core and soul. You know? It's not them or me. But if it's their wishes or mine, it has to be theirs. We've got competing grievances in this city. Our elbows are poking their ribs. I don't blame Vera. It's blood, it's family. If she walked in now, I'd throw my arms around her, drink with her, gossip with her. I'd want my brother to marry her. If I could shut a curtain and cast my ballot … But that's not how this works.”
Sunny stayed still and silent. He sensed that Evelyn would have to answer any response with something rehearsed and prepared. His only small chance of moving her off her script would be to oblige Evelyn to fill the silence on her own.
“Sunny,” she said finally, “my commitment to Linas is as total as it gets in politics. So we're not Romeo and Juliet, swallowing drams of poison in the last act. He's a professional. If it's just not breaking for him, I'll have to vote for someone else.” She let the chopstick fall off the rim of her plate with a clang and roll toward the edge of their table. “Who can say what I'll do? That's the best I can do right now.”
“I understand,” Sunny said simply and Evelyn took three strong gulps of water; the ice cubes inside had melted down to chips and chimed with each swallow. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, leaving a wide pink blot on her wrist.
“You can't leave the council,” she said.
“It would be downhill from here,” he told her. “Mayor for only three days, but I get my portrait hung alongside everyone else's, like it was three terms. And I don't have to worry about taxes, schools, jobs, the Tribune, or trash. Time for me to try something new. Why have an interesting life and still think the same things I did twenty years ago? I'll get the check from Mr. Personality,” Sunny added, but before he could wave in his direction, Evelyn laid a strong hard hand over Sunny's palm.
“They don't serve that here,” she said. “Leave a tip—a good one,” and as Sunny fumbled in his pocket for two twenties, Evelyn Lee fell back in her seat in sudden mock astonishment and chagrin.
“You can't leave the council, Sunny,” she said. “You're twenty-five percent of the Pan-Asian People's Congress!”
Back in the car with Sgt. Gallaher, Sunny smelled smoke in his sleeves, blinked smoky tears from his eyes, and saw small, soft puffs of chimney smoke scurry just above the streetlights in the dark sky as their car clipped past low brown buildings and flat roofs along Ashland Avenue. They passed a Catholic girls’ school with a small white marquee sign above an entrance: TIME WILL PASS, it said. WILL YOU? Sunny lifted his forehead away from the tinted window and turned to the sergeant. “You go to graduations or career days and students ask, ‘Do you have to sell your soul to be in politics?’ ‘Sell your soul to be an alderman?’ I tell them. ‘That's a little grand. Selling a pint of your blood should more than suffice. In fact, just prick your finger—a few drops should do.’”
The police sergeant responded with a schoolgirl's chortle and shook out a thumb. Sunny smiled and turned back toward the window.
“At this point in my life, I've sold little slivers of my soul just to change a zoning ordinance,” he said. “Or to get a man a job scouring fish feces off the docks at Burnham Harbor. I've sold chips of my soul at discount just to get someone a loading dock permit. I figure—I hope—that I have just enough splinters left to try to do right by my daughters for a while.”
Sgt. Gallaher let another block of Ashland roll by—more Spanish, more red, and painted pictures of fruit in store signs—before she spoke again.
“May I ask a question sir? It's not strictly business, but … How did you meet your wife?” Sunny seemed to sit back with some relief. A preamble like the sergeant's usually led to a question about Elana's death.
“Oh, that,” he said. “She just came in with some friends one night. The restaurant was smaller then. I had just put Sunny Roopini's Italian Specialties on the menu. We still can't have a liquor license—council ethics regulations, you know—but we'd send someone next door to get whatever they wanted. They ordered biryanis, with eggplant, shredded chicken, peppercorn, cinnamon, and cardamom. They ordered penne arrabbiatta, which has red pepper flakes. They wondered what wine I'd recommend. None, I said, beer would go better. And Elana—she looked up, I saw her brown eyes with little gray flecks, like pebbles—said, ‘White or red beer?’”
“What had she been doing?”
“A media buyer at an ad agency in the Hancock building. Marked for success, until she met me. Sometimes, I'd catch her at night, going over our books with one hand, the girl's homework with another, and she'd say, ‘I have a degree in integrated marketing from Northwestern so that I can count yellow onions and glue cotton pads in a shoebox to make a third-grade diorama of the Siberian tundra.’”
“She must have enjoyed the restaurant,” said Sgt. Gallaher— testing, thought Sunny; it was the kind of observation that could be quickly turned away.
“Not the food part so much. I don't think she thought one way or another about that. But all the other things draw you in,” Sunny explained. “You sure get to learn the price of milk, eggs, beef, and butter. You find out where Hidalgo, Gdynia, and Michoacán de Ocampo are. You know that every month you don't make a dime until you've taken in enough to pay rent, food, salaries, insurance, and electricity. Some months you look up and see that it's the twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth, and you haven't even made the rent. You get drawn into lives. A cook comes to work with a hacking cough, but he doesn't want to take a sick day because he needs to add them all together so he can visit his mother in Puerto Barrios. A server comes in late because his wife or boyfriend left. Or his girlfriend tested positive. Suddenly, those are your problems, too. You see people propose, confess that they're pregnant, declare that they're leaving, tell someone they're dying. You see that as soon as you've put out the trash, turned off the lights, and locked the door, there are people who come out of the shadows, no matter how cold, smelly, or wet, to scrounge through your trash. Your trash, their dinner. All of that—almost nothing to do with food. Everything to do with the city. That, I think she liked.”
They had come to a stop on a small street a couple blocks off the main lane of Little Italy. Sgt. Gallaher noticed that this restaurant also had no sign, but was relieved to see that it at least had windows; they were gauzy with breath and steam. Even through the glass, she heard the clink of heavy plates, and the peal of throaty, scotch-soaked laughs.
“The uniforms knew right where to find this place,” she told Sunny. “Prices must be good. They rave about the chicken limone with angel hair pasta.”
“And they always send you home with a brown bag,” said Sunny. “I notice that the officers never turn off the motor,” he added.
“Standard procedure, sir,” Sgt. Gallaher explained. “In case we have to pull away quick.”
“I wouldn't worry, sergeant. The clam sauce here is pretty reliable.”
At first, the sergeant's face seemed to stiffen with incomprehension, but softened as Sunny's joke snuck into her smile.
“Sgt. McNulty is right outside, sir, with outstretched arms and two new uniforms. I'll see you in the morning. I understand we're headed for church. I called my mother. She's delighted.”
“A church, a Lithuanian festival, and a Chinese wedding,” he said. “You can tell—Chicago the Sunday before a special election.”
Sunny rapped on the thick window between the front and back seats and called
out his thanks to the two uniforms, as Sgt. Gallaher rocked open the car door.
“And I hope we can find a Druid festival before nightfall,” he told her.
Cold air surged into the car with a whistle.
Mama T's was filled with small children, squirming in their parents’ laps as they slurped worms of spaghetti, and men and women in thick coats cracking loaves of crusty bread and pulling off great white hunks as they turned up their heads to keep track of that night's basketball game. The flocked walls were speckled with tea towels of Mt. Etna and the Strait of Messina, and graying photographs, illegibly signed, from Jack Nicholson, Jerry Vale, Spiro Agnew, Dolly Parton, and Frank Sinatra (who, according to local recollection, preferred a more posh spot nearby on Taylor Street—“Better broads,” explained Terry Taliaferro, who ran the restaurant now—but sent his guards and gophers over to Mama T's).
Rita, Rula, Muriel, and Virginie were already seated. Sunny saw plates of crackling sausages and glistening red and green peppers, stuffed shells spilling white drifts of ricotta, and a yellowy pillow of eggplant parmigiana. A young man with buttery brown hair imperfectly bunched into a ponytail and a claret corduroy jacket above his blue jeans and boots stood up and extended his hand.
“Diego Pomeroy” he said.
“Yes,” was all Sunny could manage. The name was familiar, but only recently. Sunny had begun to hear it emerge from Rita and Rula's detonating giggles, as if it was the name of a new pop star that Sunny couldn't possibly be expected to know. Sunny couldn't tell from their inadvertent accounts if one or the other of his daughters intrigued Diego the most; or if, as Sunny feared, both were some incomparable dual parcel to fuel an adolescent desire. For the moment, he was slightly mollified by the impression that the girls seemed to run in packs with their friends. The pride of the pack would deal with Diego if he threatened to reduce their circle.
A warm older woman with strawberry curls brought over Sunny's accustomed favorite, spaghetti with red pepper and brown curls of minced garlic blistered in olive oil. He inhaled the steam and twirled several strands on a fork.