by Ward Just
What the devil are those? he asked one morning, pointing at my feet. God damned bedroom slippers in my newsroom. Take ’em off. Wear ’em again, you’re in the brig.
You look like a fairy, Tilleman said.
Tinker Bel Air, he added.
In my haste and confusion that morning I had mistakenly slipped into my dancing pumps, the ones with the little bows, and when I discovered what I had done I was already halfway to Chicago. I was always on thin ice at the paper, and careful to do nothing that would cause Tilleman to fire me. I seemed to know instinctively where the line was, and while I often walked up to it, I never crossed it. I loved my job—grace and favor from the publisher, who was a golfing friend of my father’s—and the atmosphere of the newsroom, never quite real, as if the people we wrote about were characters in a play or a novel who did not exist outside the narrow columns of type. Its atmosphere was as special and specific as the locker room or infantry bivouac with its own language and code of conduct, as disheveled as life itself, a man’s cruel world where the odds were eternally six-to-five against. The paper was a carnival of love nests, revenge killings, slumlords, machine graft, and Communists deep in the apparatus of state and national government. The city itself was thankfully Red-free except for the degenerate intellectuals at the University of Chicago, rootless cosmopolitans whose primary allegiance was to Europe. It was easy enough for me to believe that the world of the newsroom was the real world, wised-up and unforgiving, brutal as a matter of course, life’s mediator, but always with a reassuring insinuation of the indomitable American spirit asserting itself in countless miniature acts of selflessness, the fireman who climbed all fifty-one rungs of the ladder to rescue the cat in the tree or the nun who spent her weekends praying with unwed mothers or the hero doc who discovered the faintest of heartbeats in a body frozen solid. Surely it was a public service to present this wholesome world to the readers, poor saps, in order, to—the word would be “console.”
The stories translated wonderfully at the parties I went to in the evening. North Shore girls knew nothing of the ambiance of a big-city newspaper devoted to sexual mischief, crime, life’s terrors, a chronic melancholy among the city’s down-and-out. It was a netherworld to them, a sinister murk invisible from Lake Forest or Winnetka, and many light-years away from their boarding schools in Connecticut or Massachusetts except for the insights gained from the assigned reading, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, for example. Of course they were fascinated, being invited backstage at the burlesque. The reporter’s telephone call (“Deputy coroner calling”) to the distraught mother whose children had “perished” in a tenement “blaze.” The businessman who—the word was not “fell” or “jumped” but the immaculate “plunged” from his tenth-floor office on Division Street following a visit from the friends of Sam Giancana.
Gosh, really?
Who’s Sam Giancana?
Perhaps their fathers were a little less impressed, and now and again one of them would interrupt my aria with a gruff comment, correcting a newsroom rumor related to municipal corruption, favors given and favors received in the matter of a tax break, a zoning variation, a property assessment, a favorable ruling on an ambiguous section of the city building code—all the grease for the great wheels of commerce. I assumed they did not like the idea of a nineteen-year-old instructing their daughters on the way of the world as observed by newspaper reporters, and once I heard myself referred to as “that wiseacre Ravan kid, Teddy’s boy, what he doesn’t know about Chicago would fill Soldier Field...”
This hinted at another level of reality in Chicago, a parallel world more sinister even than the one I had discovered, but I didn’t take the hint. If I was wised up, the bankers were necessarily naïve; the naïveté of the American ruling class was an appealing idea, a cohort of dimwitted La Salle Street financiers jumping through hoops held by aldermen and Mob muscle. I believed I represented a threat to their vision of civic order, my arias hitting a little too close to the mark, the corrupters believing they were victims of a process whereby an honest businessman couldn’t stay honest and also stay in business, owing to the genius of the Democratic machine and the Mob, whereas perhaps the reverse was true. I specialized in stories that were better left untold, or at least not told to their young and impressionable daughters just now embarking on life’s great journey and whose very expensive educations were designed to shield them from life in the city, and specifically how things worked. That part was true enough. But that part wasn’t the half of it.
Aurora listened to my stories, too, but tended to drift away when my audience of debs was at its most attentive. Gosh, really? she would say later, batting her eyelashes after listening to yet another description of one reporter who kept a pint of whiskey in his desk and another who was having a love affair with an alderman’s daughter, this one a male Mata Hari who came back to the newsroom with stories of how the alderman conducted his business from the corner saloon and was never known to pay for a drink, though there was always money on the table. She did not find my newsroom yarns enthralling but conceded that was no doubt because she did not attend a boarding school in Connecticut or Massachusetts but a private day school in Lincoln Park, a city school where aldermen’s daughters were her classmates. There were bankers’ daughters as well, she said, and lawyers’ daughters, and she often had difficulty telling them apart. There were loud ones and shy ones in each group.
Bankers’ daughters often wore pearls, Aurora added thoughtfully, and the others gold. The pearls tended to come off more quickly than the gold but that was surely because the aldermen’s daughters tended to be strict Polish or Irish Catholics and the bankers’ daughters amorphously Protestant. The lawyers’ daughters were often Jewish and somewhat mysterious, unclassifiable. There were exceptions in all categories, as any conversation in the locker room after gym would demonstrate. All that sweat, she said, loosened inhibitions. When I said, Gosh, really?, Aurora smiled and said, Really. But I was imagining the after-gym conversations, girls sprawled on benches and in chairs in their underwear, disclosing the secrets of the deep.
Sometimes I think the Midwest is a nation apart, Aurora said, and the North Shore is a hidden valley inside that nation, protected on all sides. It’s undisturbed. They have all the stuff that everyone else has, radios and movies and newspapers, and the books are the same coast to coast. But we do not listen or read in the same way.
We listen and read defensively, she said.
I don’t know why I say “we,” she added. I don’t live in the hidden valley.
They hold on to what they have, believing that it can’t be improved upon.
I have affection for the South, she said. What they aren’t up to down there! Probably it’s the heat and humidity, like the locker room sweats. She had a cousin who lived in Texas, went to the local high school, changed boyfriends every week, loved being a cheerleader. What a time she has. Full of life, that southern cousin. The only thing she wants is that thing just out of reach and absolutely forbidden, except down there the forbidden sign comes with a wink attached. Her father owns the bank, as a matter of fact, Aurora said, and laughed and laughed.
She did listen carefully when I told her about Henry Laschbrook, star reporter, who began his day at the pool hall on Wabash, down a flight of stairs to a large basement room, quiet and cool as a library, taking the high chair in front of table number six, requesting a cup of black coffee, lighting a cigar and sitting quietly for a little while in order to contemplate the green baize field and mahogany rails of the table, as full of mystery and potential as a waiting chessboard and as violent as Antietam.
I go there because when I am there no one knows where I am.
An hour of serenity, Henry said, before the racket of the newsroom.
The thing about a game of pool, the playing field is small, the variations infinite.
Unlike the newsroom.
What does he look like, your Henry Laschbrook?
Tall, I said. Very thin.
Wears double-breasted blue suits and a fedora.
Aurora looked at me and asked, Jewelry?
A pinkie ring, I said. One small diamond.
What else? she asked.
Well-groomed. Barbered, I’d say.
Shoes?
Wingtips, I said. Black and white. Why are you asking?
Thank you, Wils. It’s for my archives.
The party season ended and my work at the newspaper was soon to end. Most days I met Aurora after work for long walks along the lakeshore, Lincoln Park to Michigan Avenue, and down the avenue to the Water Tower and, farther on, the Art Institute, where we would wander through the rooms until closing time. Aurora was taking courses there in the morning, the Impressionists at ten, Persian miniaturists at eleven. There was a sultan in a turban and red robe that reminded us, in his girth and stillness and imperturbability, of Richard J. Daley. Aurora and I would dine somewhere nearby and go to a movie on the Near North Side and then I would take her to Lincoln Park and drive home alone. My parents were soon to leave for New Orleans and Havana and I was busy devising a scheme whereby she could spend a few days with me in the empty house in Quarterday with its terrace and screened-in porch, the one with the white shag rug, the soft lighting, and the matching chaises.
Were we absorbed in each other? Here’s how much:
On our third or fourth date—it seemed to me that we had been talking for half our lifetimes and I could not remember what I had talked about before I met her except it was surely inconsequential and she believed the same, and wasn’t it remarkable how many variations there were on the philosophy of the Midwest when you had a sympathetic listener, one who picked up where you left off, building on the idea the way a composer builds on a simple melody, the notes coming so fast and with such intensity that you had to concentrate like a virtuoso because the worst thing would be to say something foolish or inattentive—I asked Aurora when I could meet her father. Parents, I corrected myself. Your mother, too.
My mother? Aurora asked. My mother does not live with us. My mother lives with her new husband in Detroit. Grosse Pointe, rather. They’re particular about it being Grosse Pointe and not Detroit. He does something with cars. And they have a child of their own, a boy, five. His name is Dwight. Named for our general, much admired by her husband. His name is Robert. Probably he was named for a general, too, but I can’t be sure. He’s from the South so you can probably guess which general, if it is a general. Aurora spoke as if she were reciting from a prepared text, and it took me a moment to understand what I had heard. She had never spoken of her mother but I thought nothing about it because I never spoke of mine. Our parents were absent during the long conversations concerning the philosophy of the Midwest. Aurora had paused, waiting for me to catch up. She said, When they separated I was given a choice, him or her, and I chose him. My mother is a very modern woman. At least, that’s how she sees herself.
She didn’t always, Aurora added.
The place she wanted to live more than anywhere in the world was the North Shore. She liked its apartness. She liked the North Shore for the opposite reason your Henry Laschbrook likes his pool hall. When she was there, everyone knew where she was.
But then Robert came along and she had to settle for Grosse Pointe because they don’t make cars in Chicago.
We were walking up Astor Street in the late afternoon, the air most mild. The street was quiet but all around us were animated voices heard clearly through open windows, people at predinner cocktails. Now and then a phrase of music drifted by, and the ballgame, second half of a double-header at Wrigley, bottom of the seventh, one out, one on, count two-two, outfield deep for Cavarretta, fouls once, fouls twice, steps back from a breaking ball inside, count three-two, and the noise from the stands rises a decibel and falls when Cavarretta steps out of the box, looks to third for the sign, steps back in, the tedium of waves on the surface of a windless sea and the sea is bottomless. We walked on. That part of the Near North Side was like a village, none of the row houses more than three or four stories high, looking like filing cabinets back of the great stone wall of Lake Shore Drive apartment buildings. You expected to see village shops, a shoemaker’s or an ironmonger’s, but commerce was not allowed. Baby carriages and bicycles crowded the front stoops, gate-bounded gardens facing the sidewalk.
I said, Do you see her often?
Christmas and Thanksgiving, Aurora said, except I missed last Christmas because they wanted to take Dwight to Key West. He’s a swimmer. And I didn’t want a Christmas without snow. My father is not exactly Mr. Ho-ho-ho Christmas Spirit but he makes an effort and the big thing is that in Chicago there’s always snow for the holidays, mountains of it. You can count on it, set your watch by it. We always went to the Drake for Christmas lunch when my mother lived with us, so each year my father and I go, just us two, and have a fine time. Last year he ordered a bottle of champagne to go with the goose and analyzed everyone in the room, even the maitre d’hôtel. The dining room was full, all the waiters tricked out in tuxedos, season’s greetings at the Drake. There were plenty of people for him to analyze. We had a baked alaska for two but he gave his portion to a little girl at the next table. Her parents tried to protest but he insisted. Aurora was quiet a moment and then she said, So there are those two holidays and whenever else I feel like it.
There’s no formal custody agreement, she said.
They share custodial responsibilities.
I always thought a custodian was a kind of janitor, she went on.
My parents promised the judge they could work it out between themselves, and after listening to them, the judge agreed. He was a friend of my mother’s and knew my father, too, though they were not friends. My father does not have many friends. Later on, I had my say and Judge Maxwell called me a very poised young lady and consented to the Christmas-and-Thanksgiving-and-whenever-else-I-feel-like-it, which I don’t, often. They have their own life and I don’t like suburbs, the lawns and the empty sidewalks and you need a car whenever you want to go anywhere, even to the movies. That’s all they talk about, by the way, cars and the advertising slogans for cars. Did you know they call a Buick “the doctors’ car”? Bet you didn’t.
So that’s the story of my modern mom and her modern marriage, where she lives, and who she lives with for now.
I was trying to form a picture of Aurora and her father at the Drake Hotel drinking champagne on Christmas, the room full, a tinseled tree in the corner. That was as far as I got.
I know what attracted her to him, Aurora said. He’s big, as tall as my father but thick. Beefy. He has that molasses accent, always sounds like he’s making a speech on the floor of the Senate. He has a big mane of yellow hair that he’s proud of. He believes good grooming is an essential part of success. He plays the piano. Probably the most important thing about him is that he isn’t my father. He chain-smokes, for one thing. And he talks all the time.
Like us, I said with a smile.
Not like us, Aurora said firmly. Not anything like us. He talks to fill the air. No silence so golden that a word from him wouldn’t improve. And since my father rarely talks at all, I suppose she was attracted to someone who does. Talk all the time. Even when he plays the piano, which, incidentally, he’s good at. They chatter together like a couple of railbirds and they’re always trying to get me to join in but I don’t. I listen to my own thoughts. I’m sitting at their table and I’m wishing I was home where it’s an event when my father says, Please pass the salt. I began to laugh but Aurora put up her hand, palm out. She said, Yes, there is one other thing. I think he’s afraid of my father.
I nodded. I knew at once she was correct.
Unpredictable, she said. He thinks my father is unpredictable, “not right,” and he’s not alone. People worry about my father, men and women, too. I’d say he enjoys it but I’m not sure he’s aware of it.
I wouldn’t call him unpredictable, I said.
It’s not my word, it’s Robert’s word. But it’s mo
re than that.
I said, Unreliable?
No, she said. Not at all. That’s the last thing he is.
Are you? I asked. Afraid?
She looked at me crossly. No, she said. Of course not.
We strolled on. The air and sky had an end-of-summer look and feel. I was conscious that our time together was short. After Labor Day she was headed east to Barnard and I was remaining in Chicago and that was that. We rarely discussed the matter but it was always with us, uncomfortable baggage.