by Ward Just
Sometimes you don’t know what to believe, Aurora said with an ingratiating smile that hinted at an ulterior motive, I didn’t know what.
That’s the way they like it, Charlie said firmly. I did not know if he meant the Russians or the White House, but when he added, It’s a fudge factory down there, I assumed he meant the White House or perhaps Washington in general. He was a large man and spoke in a lawyer’s careful baritone, leaning forward in the way he would lean into the rail of a jury box.
The one thing you can’t believe is the papers, he went on, to a murmur of agreement.
That’s so true, Aurora said. Don’t you agree, Wils? This, with the smile I had come to know so well. She loved to put me on the spot, and always signaled her intent with the smile.
But before I had a chance to answer, the lawyer was rocking on his heels and lowering his voice to confide that “the president”—the formal title implied an intimacy that the familiar “Ike” could only pretend to—was struggling with unimaginable burdens, responsible for the domestic economy and the Cold War and that was why the office was called a splendid misery, too much really for one man, and thank God for the team he had assembled, George Humphrey at Treasury and Charlie Wilson at Defense and the Dulles brothers elsewhere. He deserved every American’s support and confidence, and also it was wise to remember that in Washington those who speak don’t know, and those who know don’t speak, and that was why the papers were worse than useless.
Aurora had hooked her arm through mine and gave me a pinch as she said, Gosh, really? Did you hear that, Wils?
Only a few people knew the score, Charlie continued, and then, with a wide smile, he added, How the fudge is made, and the ingredients of the fudge and who it’s sold to and for how much—and here the company began to laugh, the metaphor so apt, a suggestion that fudge was only a convenient synonym for the various aspects of governance and statecraft, everything from the interstate highway program and rolling back the captive nations of Eastern Europe to keeping taxes low and the State Department under control and, most important, giving the president a Republican Senate at the midterm elections. Dick Nixon will be carrying the ball on that, Charlie concluded, and fell silent. There seemed nothing more to say and everyone nodded thoughtfully, having been given a privileged look behind the gray façade of the national government. Of course it was no more than a look, a glimpse into the shadows; and a good thing, too, because the more discreetly the administration went about its work, the better. Thank God for men like Charlie Smithers, whose soundness was not in question. Charlie would keep them up to the mark, and it was good of him to share his insights. Wasn’t it worthwhile to talk politics occasionally?
And then people turned to the dance floor, red-faced Bill Bartlow dancing a tango again, this time with his wife, stepdaughter Marcie watching from the sidelines. They flew into a double reverse, the bandleader clapping and trying to encourage more dancers onto the floor. But Bill and his wife remained alone, it was so damned hot.
At some point during these evenings a woman would think to ask what had happened to the colored girl found frozen in the alley and taken to the city morgue where her heartbeat was miraculously discovered and she was revived, thawed as you would thaw a piece of meat. Where was she now? There was general agreement that she had no doubt returned to her self-destructive ways and was even now lying dead drunk in some alley on the South Side, probably the same alley, except now the weather was warm and she could sleep it off like anyone else. The point was, you couldn’t change people. People would do what they wanted to do regardless, the natural consequence of a lack of self-discipline, a moral compass, and a failure to imagine the future and prepare for it, and a likelihood also of unfortunate breeding and, in that one sense, inevitable. There was nothing to be done about it. People simply had to pull up their socks and when they didn’t, well, the results were tragic all around. It was like watching a train wreck; you were helpless in the face of it. Yet Chicago had a big heart. A few days after the story appeared a Help-Her-to-Hope Fund was established and everyone gave what they could, a matter of civic pride. No one was left behind in Chicago. New York wouldn’t do as much.
Still, fact was, people had to look after their own.
Where was the girl’s family?
Absent, AWOL.
Thing is, there’s too much reliance on government.
Among the colored, someone put in.
Everyone’s looking for a handout. And when they get one, they buy a Cadillac.
The evening was ending. The bandleader looked at his watch and announced last dance, but only a few people drifted to the floor. This weather, bad luck for the deb and her parents, and they’d made such an effort, the flowers, the orchestra. The men had taken off their jackets but even so, their shirts were soaked with sweat. The group I was with, Paul and Louise Binning, their houseguest and her date and his brother, loped over to the bar for a last drink and it was there, everyone laughing, that I spoke up at last.
I said, She was in her thirties, so she wasn’t a girl.
Who’s that, Wils?
The woman who almost froze to death. The one who wouldn’t pull up her socks.
Well, Paul said, seemingly at a loss.
And she’s disappeared, I said.
What do you mean, disappeared? People can’t just disappear.
She did, I said. She put on her clothes and walked out the front door of the hospital. Disappeared. The doctor wanted to follow up but couldn’t because no one can find her. She had no address. No one knew her name because she had no ID. No one has come forward. They have her fingerprints but the fingerprints do not match any fingerprints they had on file. It was in the newspapers.
That’s what I mean, Paul said. Someone saves your life and you can’t be bothered to stick around. Can’t be bothered to say thank you very much for your trouble. You just say, The hell with medical science. Where would we be if everyone behaved like that, no sense of responsibility?
She had no money, I said. No family, either, at least none that showed up.
She had the fund, he said. The Help-Her-to-Hope Fund.
The fund’s still there, I said. It’s her that’s missing.
How do you know all this?
The paper, I said. We’ve had two reporters on it for months. No one can find her. The police can’t. She’s vanished.
It’s obvious, Paul said. She’s on the South Side somewhere. And that’s a place your writ does not run, bud. He laughed loudly, the cords of his neck bulging from the strain. His eyes narrowed, too, his head cocked to one side as if he were hearing something unearthly. If he were another kind of man he might have tried to put an image to the sound, violins under the horns in Tannhäuser or one of Picasso’s morbid one-eyed horses, but as it was he heard only the blank rustle of disorder, Genghis Khan and his ten thousand horsemen, foreigners, foreign ideologies, bad breeding, people not from here, people who wanted things that didn’t belong to them, a most unpleasant sound at odds with this unusually warm night attended by a full blue moon rising over the bland skin of our lake, pretty young girls in crinoline dresses and orchid corsages and pearls gleaming in the soft glow of lanterns, the tinkle of their laughter reminiscent of so many superb summer nights on the North Shore, a spectacle consoling in every way, like church bells on Sunday morning. Yet in his mind he heard marching feet, the low growl of a mob creeping like beasts from a disheveled wilderness to the boom of jungle drums, prepared to seize by force what had been gathered by fathers and grandfathers over decades of hard work, self-denial, individual responsibility, and civic pride. None of this went unnoticed. You had to be watchful every minute of every hour simply to keep things as they were. So it was a matter of maintenance.
And then Paul returned to the present moment, managing a thin smile though his fists remained clenched at his sides and a light sweat had broken on his forehead. He moved his shoulders back and forth like a prizefighter. He said at last, You go down there, try to fin
d that girl, you’ll get your white throat cut ear to ear. No one will give a damn. They’re savages.
No one has a picture, either, I said. No one knows what she looks like, except she’s slender. In that way she’s a species of phantom. You could meet her on the street tomorrow and not know who she is. There are rumors that the coroner has one photograph, taken when they thought she was dead. But that photograph is unpublishable.
Not even in your paper? He laughed, a kind of bray.
Your paper prints anything, his wife said. Sometimes I wonder how you get away with it, Wils. The stuff you print. Really, you should be ashamed. I don’t mean you personally, but the paper. It’s scandalous.
I’m just—at a loss, she concluded.
I’ll tell the managing editor, I said.
I wish you would, Louise said.
But I’m afraid we don’t have much circulation on the North Shore.
And I don’t wonder, she said.
We certainly hope you find that girl, husband Paul said. And I know you’ll spare no expense. It’ll sell papers and of course that’s what you want. I sell stocks and bonds, you sell grief. And what I want to know is, what’s the P-E ratio on that? You find that girl, you’ll be doing well on the bourse. But I wouldn’t take any bets. She’s gone, she’s flown the coop. You’ll never see her again. Your genie’s out of the bottle, good riddance. He threw a massive arm around his wife’s shoulders and guided her away, but then she turned to face me.
What I don’t get is, Why are you working there? What’s possessed you? You don’t have to. Your father has a perfectly respectable business. Why would anyone want to be a newspaper reporter? It’s so sordid, what you have to see and do. It’s so—vulgar. That colored girl, for example. The stories about her throw such a bad light on things, accentuating the negative, makes us all feel rotten, as if we’re being accused of something. I’ll tell you this. I won’t allow your paper into the house. I don’t want the maid to see it.
She shook her head angrily and for a moment I thought she would break down in tears of frustration or anguish. But she gathered herself, took her husband’s arm once again, and marched off to say good night to the deb and the deb’s parents.
That kid’s trouble, the husband said.
It makes me sick, said his wife.
That left the houseguest, her date, his brother, and me standing together in an awkward zone of silence. The houseguest announced that she didn’t know what that was about because she didn’t read newspapers. Who was the colored girl? She hadn’t heard anything about any colored girl where she lived, Pittsburgh. The date and the brother said it was a local story, a Chicago story. But they were so angry, the houseguest said. She looked at me and said, What was it about?
I was searching the dance floor for Aurora and finally saw her near the bandstand talking to Charlie Smithers. She seemed most intent on whatever it was he was saying, and when she caught my eye made no sign of recognition except a minute raising of her eyebrows before turning again to the lawyer, listening hard.
What was it about, Wils?
I was still watching Aurora, her focused expression, and said the first thing that came to mind, Fear.
Why, they don’t have anything to be afraid of!
More than you think, I said.
Well, the houseguest said. That’s silly-billy. Look at this beautiful house, the grounds, and everything about it. And then she, too, turned away in frustration.
When we left the party, I asked Aurora about Charlie Smithers.
He’s not what you think, she said.
He’s a bully, I said.
Of course he’s a bully. Dick Nixon will be carrying the ball on that. Touchdown assured. But he’s something else, too. I like listening to him. What’s between the lines.
He’s an idiot, I said.
No, he isn’t, Aurora replied. She walked on, and when we were settled in the car she said that, as a matter of fact, Charlie Smithers wanted very badly to go to Washington. He was bored with his law practice. He had always thought that if you could contribute to a cause you believed in you should do it as a matter of conscience, civic responsibility. Wasn’t there more to life than making money? And Washington was exciting, not the gray city of government you read about. He told me to visit the Lincoln Memorial at night and look at Lincoln’s ruined face and read the writing on the walls, the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural. Also, the Metropolitan Club was agreeable for lunch and in the evenings there were dinners where the business of government was conducted over brandy and cigars, women excused to powder their noses. Aurora raised an eyebrow at that and continued, But Charlie’s wife refused to leave Wilmette because of their son, who was troubled. Charlie went on and on about the boy, Aurora said, an intelligent boy but self-destructive. Not a lovable boy, Charlie said, except to his mother and me.
So I said that sometimes adolescents grew out of their problems.
He said his son was twenty-five.
I said I knew a doctor who might be able to help.
He said he knew the same doctor. But the boy was very difficult.
So there we are, Charlie said.
Sometimes, he went on, whatever you do, it isn’t enough.
Nice talking with you, Aurora. Say hello to your dad for me.
Aurora managed to put herself on the same footing as older people, I don’t know how. She had a manner older than her years, but it wasn’t only that. She had a talent for listening and understanding what was between the lines, like a musician with perfect pitch. And what she heard, she remembered. Whenever I thought about our future, which was often, I thought of us in this serious grown-up world, people telling Aurora their secrets. Meanwhile, I went to the newspaper office downtown as if I were attending classes at a progressive trade school. I had no intention of becoming a newspaper reporter, then or later. The work was repetitive and easily grasped and didn’t lead anywhere I wanted to go. I was in it for something else, I wasn’t sure what. I suppose I wanted to observe the down-and-out—the vulgar and the sordid, as Mrs. Stockbroker would have it—to see how their lives were lived actually, the terms of the deal; and who was shuffling the cards. Yet I discovered soon enough that you necessarily observed from the outside and the glass was opaque, unless you were someone like Aurora Brule in whom people confided as a matter of course. What I had was secondhand stuff, vital statistics on a police blotter or the phoned-in report from the firehouse. Actual life as it was lived actually was missing in action.
I worked as a copy boy for an afternoon paper, the one that would die a few years later, victim of its own excess. Readers were loyal but advertisers were not, the State Street merchants worried that the paper’s enthusiastic coverage of the interminable Red Scare and the city’s nightly mayhem—the crushed skull in the garbage pail, the Norway rat in the infant’s crib—compromised the hoped-for sobriety and civic equilibrium promised by the new Republican regimes in Washington and Springfield. Who saw progress and prosperity in a Norway rat? Did the page one photograph of the rat baring its teeth from a bloodstained layette encourage the Winnetka housewife to visit Marshall Field’s for a new bedroom suite? The paper seemed mired in Chicago’s criminal past, refusing to recognize that the Republican landslide signaled a new optimism, progressive, forward-looking, constructive, and good for business. So the paper was on the skids and the response in the newsroom was to uncover ever more revolting examples of municipal disorder and enemies within. The Norway rat in the spring and Judge Greenslat in the summer were but grace notes to the continuing search for the colored woman who had vanished so mysteriously from Cook County General.
When I remarked to one of the reporters that the case was fascinating, romantic almost, a woman with no identity, who had left no trace upon the face of the earth, who had managed to elude the posses of police and newspapermen sent to run her to ground, he looked at me sourly and said, She has an identity, son. She knows who she is. She knows where she is. It’s only us who don’
t. And there’s not the least thing romantic about her.
She’s a down-and-out, Henry Laschbrook said. We’ll never find her. He hesitated a moment, looking at me, I thought, with something approaching interest. He said, Do they like this story up where you live?
They do, I said. And they don’t.
Well, he said. Which is it?
They read it. But they don’t want to be seen reading it.
Like a girlie book, he said.
Like that, I said.
They don’t read our paper up there, do they?
Not much, I said.
We’re a little too raw for them, I suppose.
The Norway rat, I began.
You ever see a bigger god damned rat?
Never, I said.
They lead sheltered lives up there on the North Shore, he said.
They don’t have rats in the bed, if that’s what you mean.
And they don’t want to read about people who do, he replied.
It upsets them, I said.
But not enough for them to do anything about it.
That’s why they live on the North Shore. So they don’t have to.
Henry laughed unpleasantly and said that was certainly one way to look at it, though not necessarily the best way.
It was suddenly important to me that Henry Laschbrook get one thing straight. I said, I don’t live on the North Shore.
You don’t?
I live in Quarterday, I said. Farther west.
Quarterday, Henry said. That’s not the North Shore?
No, I said. Quarterday’s another place altogether.
Well, Henry said. I’ll be damned. You could have fooled me.
I led an appealing double life, bon vivant by night, workingman by day. I owned two uniforms, the tuxedo and a seersucker jacket and khakis, and most mornings only a few hours separated the one from the other, when I hurried to my car for the long drive to Chicago, anticipating the day’s unruly events. I strolled into the newsroom to report to Ozias Tilleman, the city editor. Tilleman: fiftyish, saturnine, surly, always badly shaven, nursing a wildfire of a hangover. He had a wife somewhere and children, too, but no one had ever seen them. I handed him the paper bag with a Boston coffee and a jelly doughnut, took his money, and waited for whatever assignment he had for me, usually research on an obituary or some oblique angle on the night’s bloodletting. Tilleman had been in the navy during the war, so his language was sprinkled with maritime expressions, loudly delivered. A story was either running at flank speed or in dry dock, and if you missed something important you were aground, at anchor, lying to windward, up shit’s creek without a paddle. I was happy enough working away in the morgue, scouring the clips for tempting facts, all the while eavesdropping on the ribald conversations at the water cooler, office romances and after-hours escapades, and rumor upon rumor of the paper’s probable demise. In the afternoon, when the reporters wandered back from their assignments, I hustled copy from their desks to the pencil editors on the rim, fanatical grammarians who, when they discovered a split infinitive or a misplaced comma, chirped like canaries in a mineshaft, whispering the offender’s name or nickname, Moron, Idiot. No one at the paper knew of my nighttime life on the North Shore, though Tilleman guessed, and, when the time came, cashed the chit.