by Unknown
‘Oh,’ she said, happy to have remembered, ‘somebody else called. A man.’
‘Did he manage to say who he was?’
She shook her head; obviously it had been too much to ask. ‘He wouldn’t leave a name or a number. Said he’d call back.’
‘What did he sound like?’
She looked at him with mild disbelief. ‘He was just some guy. Sorry,’ she added tartly. ‘But he did say he’d call again.’
‘Was he old or young? Caucasian or a person of colour?’ He didn’t know why he was pressing her – actually, he did. This might be Duval.
Vicky pursed her lips. ‘You mean African-American?’ He felt embarrassed and she looked cross.
The press was part of a university, and Robert had lunch downtown with one of its trustees, a banker near retirement age named Everton. He seemed more interested in talking about his own visits to London than discussing Robert’s publishing plans. Each time Robert tried to discuss ways to raise the profile of the press, Everton would deflect the conversation onto the wonders of the British Museum and the lunch he’d once been given in the Athenaeum.
Afterwards, Robert walked back along Michigan Avenue, stopping at the river to look down at its small greased coils as it passed under the bridge. The river ran famously backward, long ago reversed to send water from the lake down its thin channel. It was the least impressive river of any city of Robert’s acquaintance – he thought fleetingly of London and Paris. Yet it had enjoyed a curious revival thanks to the boats conducting architectural tours of the city’s downtown; even in London, prospective visitors to Chicago were told to ‘take the river boat tour’, which corresponded to the stereotype of the place. A city of man-made heights, preoccupied throughout the last century with skyscrapers, as if vertical lift could somehow make its mark against the drear spread of so much zero-elevation soil. There was no natural drama to the habitat here, only the blankness of the prairies edged onto a lake with an unvarying shore.
He moved on, the avenue sloping straight and professionally downhill as it spread north towards its newest congregation of expensive stores – Saks, Neiman Marcus, Lord & Taylor – which had displaced the old shopping centre of the city in the Loop. The shoppers here were overwhelmingly white, unspoken reason for the emigration northwards.
Here too the city opened up, with lower buildings, and plazas and small parks, though further down the avenue the Hancock Tower loomed like a charcoal monolith, a hundred tapering steel storeys of offices and apartments. There was a bar on the ninety-fifth floor; Robert remembered going there as a teenager one night with his brother Mike, a week before his brother’s marriage. Robert had sat facing south, drinking in the view, the city’s hatch lines of streets stretched out before him on a grid that was dazzlingly illuminated by streetlights against the dark underlying plains. How he longed for his youthful ease with heights; merely the memory of having been so close to the clouds started a thin line of anxiety trickling across his chest like a barium tracer.
His office was on a side street off Michigan Avenue, in a low-slung building of cream stone, with modernist windows lying flat as a map against the line of its outer skin. The press was on the third of five storeys. The university’s main campus was in the near north suburbs, not far from Robert’s new home, but its famous medical school was based here in the city, and the press had been tucked in as well. This suited Robert; he could think of nothing more dreary than to be located ‘on campus’. Occasionally, noises emanated from his university overseers that it might be useful to have him closer, on tap. He ignored them, determined to preserve a distance he intuitively associated with independence.
On the third floor he walked down the corridor, flinching reflexively as he passed Dorothy’s empty office, until he saw Vicky at her desk. She was on the phone and waved at him frantically. She cupped the receiver with one hand and said, ‘I’ve got David Balthazar on the line.’
‘Really?’ He was surprised. ‘Okay, tell him I’ll be right there.’
Balthazar was a New York literary agent Robert had first known during his own time in Manhattan when he worked at Knopf. Once in London, Robert had not lost touch – perhaps every other year, they had a drink together during the city’s book fair. Still, Robert was surprised to find him phoning. He could not conceive of what business they might now do together, unless Balthazar was trying to foist off a client he could no longer sell to more commercial houses.
‘Hello, Robert, so how’s the Second City treating you?’ asked the agent.
‘I’m okay, David,’ he said, ignoring the traditional New York jab at Chicago. Balthazar thought of himself as a smooth operator; Brooklyn born and bred, he had worked scrupulously to eradicate any trace of the borough. He dressed with natty fastidiousness: a silk paisley handkerchief jutting out like a gigolo’s badge from his Paul Stuart blazer, gold cufflinks with the punch of an ancestral family on the cuffs of his bespoke soft shirt. Although Balthazar was tactless, even obnoxious, he was someone Robert found impossible to dislike – you had to admire the sheer industry of his social climb.
‘Enjoying the new job? It’s a good little press.’
‘It’s pretty good. I’m trying to make it really good.’
‘Ah,’ said Balthazar. ‘You know, some people wondered why you wanted the job. I mean, going from a big one to, um . . .’
‘Such a small one?’
‘Something like that,’ he said, acknowledging his tactlessness. ‘I mean, it’s not as if the job’s a sinecure. Or that you got in any trouble in London.’ He made both statements with such certainty that they were obviously questions.
‘If I had screwed up over there, David, I’m sure you’d know about it.’ Balthazar had the decency to laugh. ‘But no, I wanted to come back to America, and Anna wanted a change.’ This was more or less the truth, though it was also true that he had been spinning his wheels in his old job, thanks to a cloud over his reputation which he had been powerless to dispel.
‘It must be nice to be back in your hometown.’
‘I suppose so.’ Robert looked out the window towards the lake, the city’s one natural advantage – a blue sea-sized body of water rimmed by yellow sand. In the distance he could just make out a lone tanker. An ore boat, cruising to Duluth for another load? He had never understood the complicated commerce of the Great Lakes. ‘Though it’s not like I know the place. I left here when I was thirteen – they shipped me to boarding school out east.’
‘A preppy, eh?’
‘Can’t you tell?’ They both laughed.
He found himself thinking of Duval. Had he been phoning that night from Chicago? His mother had moved years before to St Louis – Aurelia, that was her name. Would she still be alive? Given her history back then, Robert thought it unlikely.
‘Does your wife like it here?’ asked Balthazar, snapping him out of his reverie.
He spoke with energy to cover his abstractedness. ‘Very much. I was worried she might find it all a bit too alien, but she’s taken to the place.’ She had indeed, to his intense surprise.
‘She can’t practise here, can she?’
‘No, but she’s got a job at the British consulate. She gives legal advice to companies that do business in the UK.’
A pause followed, and Robert sensed small talk was over. Balthazar said at last, ‘I had an interesting meeting yesterday with a colleague of yours.’
‘Really?’ Mentally, Robert surveyed the list of candidates. Dorothy seemed the only possibility, but what would Balthazar be doing talking with her? Did he want to take her off his hands? A happy thought.
‘Well, maybe not a colleague. It was Bud Carlson.’
‘Our football coach?’ It seemed preposterous, the socially ambitious New York agent breaking bread with a man who ran gladiators – that was how Robert viewed American football, with its padded behemoths knocking each other around. His mind whirred as he considered new possibilities. ‘Where was this?’ he said, trying to sound casual.<
br />
‘Here in my office,’ said Balthazar. Robert could picture the agent in his midtown room, leaning back in his padded leather chair, his handmade shoes propped on his desk, looking out at his splendid view of the Chrysler Building.
‘What was he doing in New York?’
‘He’s almost finished his memoirs.’
‘Good. We can schedule them then. You must know they’re contracted to us.’ It was the one big trade book they had in the forward list.
Balthazar said nothing, and Robert emitted a small groan. ‘Don’t tell me. He wants you to represent him – and renegotiate his contract.’
Balthazar coughed politely. Robert supposed there was no point being an agent if you embarrassed easily.
‘Well . . .’ said Balthazar.
‘Spare me the palaver. How much?’
Balthazar hesitated, as if pained by Robert’s bluntness. ‘I’m not sure money is the problem.’
Any uncertainty about this call was gone. Suddenly irritated, Robert said, ‘You’re telling me he doesn’t want to renegotiate? What does he want then? Another publisher?’
There, it was out in the open now; he had done Balthazar’s work for him.
‘Look, Robert, nothing’s set in stone. Why don’t we set a time now to talk in a couple of weeks? Then I’ll know how Carlson wants to proceed. I don’t want you to think I went looking for this.’
No, thought Robert, but you didn’t send him away either. Not that he could really blame Balthazar. As he waited while Balthazar consulted his busy diary, Robert thought wryly, Some sinecure.
He was disconcerted by the call. Balthazar was precisely the prosperous face of the trade publishing Robert no longer had a role in – indeed he’d been delighted to escape. But he didn’t like being patronised by a big shot from New York and he bristled in time-honoured fashion at the designation of Chicago as the Second City. He had thought that New York’s own sense of self-importance had diminished; not in the book business, it seemed.
Robert had only met Carlson once, at a reception given in the president of the university’s house. A tall, loose-limbed man with a floppy kind of handshake. Affable, perhaps a little shy, quite unlike the stereotypical crew-cut bully, half drill-sergeant, half Nazi, who paraded through American popular culture with a policeman’s whistle around his neck. They’d talked briefly and innocuously, and then President Crullowitch, a former ambassador to Mexico, had intervened to move the coach onto a rich alumnus. There had seemed no point following up this brief encounter, since Dorothy Taylor had secured the book to begin with and said she knew the coach well. Hands off, had been her unspoken message, so Robert had gladly left her to it. Maybe he shouldn’t have.
For here was Balthazar the Beast, as he was known in his press profiles, poaching the one big trade book he had – about of all things an American football coach. Robert had known baseball books could do well, but then it was in Robert’s view a subtler, more graceful game, which appealed as much to intellectuals and statisticians as it did to jocks. Football seemed leaden by comparison. Yet books about it were now in vogue – Publishers Weekly, the American book industry’s bible, had recently run a spread on the genre. No wonder the press’s rep force spoke with unbridled enthusiasm about the prospects for Carlson’s book, happy to be selling in a popular title for a change, one that didn’t require explanation or excuse, unlike the rest of the press’s obscurantist titles. The rights person had said a big book club deal was a possibility; the publicist had talked unprecedentedly about television appearances for the author. Even the university’s president and trustees (Everton excepted) seemed positively excited.
Admittedly Carlson was an unusual football coach, as interesting as he was successful (three times Rose Bowl champion, countless winner of the Big Ten). Even for the football non-enthusiast like Robert, there was something admirable in Carlson’s recruitment of countless black players from the Deep South, and in his insistence that all of them – even those turning pro – complete their educations. Carlson was the respectable amateur face of a college sport infamous for its professionalism, but he was also that rarest of things – a white hero to the black community. Robert couldn’t think of many others.
There was a knock on the door and Vicky came in. ‘Andy Stephens is waiting,’ and he could see the man standing by Vicky’s desk. One of the university’s cadre of accountants, he wore a cotton suit that was the colour of martini olives, a uniform of summer poised uneasily between comfort and convention.
Vicky handed him a pink message slip. ‘While you were on the phone,’ she said tersely, apparently still annoyed by his tetchiness before lunch.
He looked at the message. Duval called.
‘He said he could meet you at Nelson’s Coffee Shop on Wacker Drive at three fifteen.’
He looked at his watch: he had ten minutes. ‘Did you get his cell number?’
She shook her head sharply. ‘He said he was calling from a pay phone.’
Damn. He could stand up Duval or postpone Andy. A need to get it over with (though he couldn’t have said exactly what ‘it’ was) and some other un-articulated sense of obligation meant he felt there wasn’t any choice.
He went out into the corridor. ‘Andy, I’m really sorry, but I’ve got a kind of emergency. I’ve got to see somebody; I shouldn’t be gone more than an hour.’
Stephens looked at him with irritated, unaccepting eyes. ‘I suppose you want me to stick around?’
‘Could you? I apologise, but it’s family.’ Was this a lie? Well, Duval had almost been family once, or at least his grandmother Vanetta had.
II
IT WAS SEPTEMBER 1965, and the ambulance was a converted station wagon with two back fins. It came around the corner by the maple tree, then slid slowly to a stop on the gravel driveway in front of the old Michigan house. Two attendants emerged, wearing starched white uniforms. One wore yellow chukka boots on his feet and as he followed the other into the house he stopped to admire the rusting pump, verdigris with age, that sat unused in the back yard.
They wheeled his mother out in a large steel-framed bed, and his father locked the back door behind him – their own car was packed and ready to go. She was sitting up, propped against two pillows, wearing a fresh nightgown and a terrycloth robe draped around her shoulders. Her hair was freshly brushed, the auburn traces of its brown ends catching the glint of the midday sun. Bobby thought she looked like a beautiful queen. They let him come up to the bed to say goodbye, and even took down the side rail, but he still couldn’t reach her face to kiss her. She stroked his cheek instead and told him to be a help to his father.
He had thought before the men arrived that she was just going for a ride, and wondered if this meant she was getting better – after all, she had been in bed for days now. But his father had explained she was going all the way down to Chicago, as were they – ‘You’re already a week late for school as it is,’ his father explained. Bobby felt a twinge of jealousy as the ambulance departed, since his mother got to ride in it while he was stuck in the Chevy, sandwiched in the back between the twins. They were five years older than him, so he always had to sit in the middle over the hump. His father was driving, talking to Uncle Larry in the front passenger seat.
He often felt sick on the long drive and today was no exception. Worse, his father had forgotten the Dramamine and they only stopped once – usually his mother insisted on a picnic lunch, at one of the state parks down near the Indiana border. Today they just barrelled ahead, pausing only to fill up with gas, after which Uncle Larry did the driving. They moved from the hilly fruit country, with its occasional glimpse of Lake Michigan, down through the endless flatlands of the southern belly of the state into the big snow pocket in the lower corner. You could just make out the dunes in the distance west of them, where so many Chicago people went on weekends. His father scoffed at the idea, as if proud of the effort they had to make to get to their own house, three hours’ drive farther north.
W
hy did they have to go back to Chicago anyway? He didn’t like the city. His mind’s images of it were always dark: the brown brick of their own building, the black gaunt trees, the tawny shit of the neighbourhood dogs. Even the snow would darken within hours, speckled with soot.
Near Benton Harbor Uncle Larry reached 100 mph on the speedometer and in the back seat they all squealed, but as they moved into the Indiana steel basin the car was quiet. Usually his father would start to sing, or maybe turn on the radio at this point, and young as he was Bobby would sense he was trying to lift his spirits, since he didn’t want to go back to Chicago either. But today his father didn’t even pretend, and when Bobby spied the enormous brewing vats of the Blatz beer company and tried to sing the jingle – ‘I’m from Milwaukee and I ought to know’ – his brother Mike elbowed him sharply to keep quiet.
On the Sky Bridge he held his breath as he always did, scared they would slide over the side into Calumet Harbor, and then they swooped down onto Stony Island Avenue and his father said ‘Bip your bips’ and everybody locked their car door – it was dangerous here, though he didn’t know why. ‘They don’t give a damn about your civil rights,’ Uncle Larry said bitterly, pointing to some men holding cans of beer in their hands on a corner.
And then they were on Blackstone Avenue, leafy and hot, the wet asphalt of a new patch in the middle of the street actually steaming, and he got out and took deep breaths until the nausea went away. There was no sign of the ambulance.
Upstairs Lily opened the door to the apartment while his father and uncle and Mike unloaded the bags from the back of the station wagon, and Bobby raced down the long dark hallway, almost slipping on the torn bit of carpet his mother always wanted to replace, and the bedroom door was closed, which seemed right since they’d told him over and over again that his mother wasn’t feeling well. He stopped long enough to knock very lightly on the door, and ignoring whatever Lily was calling to him from the hall he slowly twisted the copper-coloured door knob. The door budged grudgingly then suddenly cracked open. He started to put a big smile on his face until he saw his mother’s bed was neatly made up – and unoccupied.