by Ward Just
I drove slowly, the windows down to clear my head. The traffic was sparse. There was a detour at Western Avenue but I did not need to pay close attention because I knew the route by heart, Chicago’s great sprawl, a clutter of gas stations, steak houses, insurance agencies, and the stone spires of churches on the horizon. The Eleven-Eleven Club was an interlude, almost forgotten now except for the song, not Brunis’s version but Mildred Bailey’s version repeating itself in my head. The song was an old favorite, one I requested often at parties. Aurora and I had danced to it once, Antoinette watching us with a dreamy expression from the sidelines, and she wasn’t the only one. I tapped the steering wheel to the music inside my head. I knew that wherever I went in the world I would associate the song with this day. I imagined a café in some unlikely city, Cairo or Singapore or Los Angeles, sitting with someone and hearing Mildred Bailey on the radio and remembering a summer in Chicago and north of Chicago, my father’s troubles, Squire’s death, the debutante parties, and Jack Brule and Consuela and beautiful Aurora and everything that surrounded them, including the photographs in the study and the untouched drink on the sideboard; and pausing in the conversation, my memory tumbling, suddenly nineteen years old once again and discovering how disturbed life could be and how unexpected its events and how unsettled and discouraging, all in the space of a summer when you left your own family for another’s family believing that, in time, you would have your own life with the girl you loved. All these summer fragments lay around me and I knew there was coherence to them but I could not fit them together now.
Aurora and I were finished. I thought of a city destroyed in wartime, the inhabitants looking at the sky at the moment the bombs fell, dead silence before the catastrophe. In minutes there was no physical trace of what had been. Everything familiar was swept away and replaced by a wasteland. We did not know where we were. All that remained to us were our memories and these rested on rubble, untrustworthy memories. We would remember different things and the same things in different ways; and the city we knew so well had vanished utterly. We were no longer for each other but displaced persons trying to find our own way, and governed by opposing regimes. The distance was too great to be bridged. It was a chasm and when I looked across it I saw her turn her back and walk away. Aurora and I had existed in a tremendous zone of privacy and that had been violated, not only by the circumstances of her father’s appalling death but by its epilogue in Lincoln Park when she had made her involuntary gesture, the one that seemed to come from another place entirely, centuries old and as immutable as a fossil. Aurora and I had failed in our understanding of each other. She had needed my help and I had not given it, or given the wrong kind and only added to her helplessness and fury. I was suddenly on the outside and so was she. God damn Jack Brule. God damn him to hell. And my sense of what had happened between us stopped there.
Now I waited impatiently for a traffic light, tapping my fingers on the steering wheel. I accelerated on the yellow, faster than I intended, the car barely under control. I was trying to remember how many drinks I had had at the Eleven-Eleven, three certainly, maybe four. Earl always poured with a heavy hand when it was on the house, giving good weight like an honest butcher, a bartender you could count on, damn right you could. There were no other cars on the road and as I looked left and right I realized the surroundings were unfamiliar. I had no idea where I was except that I was much farther south and west than I wanted to be, now in one of Chicago’s many anonymous outlying neighborhoods. I was on a narrow brick street, three-decker houses either side, people sitting on their front steps listening to the radio. The street lights were weak, woodsmoke was in the air, and scrawny elms arched over the bricks, the whole of it giving the aspect of a rural village. The dull lights of a tavern were visible down the street and next to the tavern the remains of a house consumed by fire. Someone was poking about in the debris while a companion lit the way with a flashlight. They were moving with caution, lifting a charred board and looking under it and replacing the board. The fire looked to be days old and it was hard to imagine anything of value surviving. I saw now that they were wearing masks, handkerchiefs tied over noses and mouths like bandits in western movies, except these handkerchiefs were white and gave a funereal air to whatever it was they were doing in the ruins. The people on the steps leaned forward, their eyes following my car as I drove slowly to the corner, where I stopped and waited, trying to find my bearings. The tavern’s façade was shingled, windowless, a place where men went to drink in privacy. Over the tick-tick of the car’s engine I heard violin music, an unfamiliar European melody of high emotion, deeply melancholy and rhapsodic at the same time, the words in a language I could not identify. I listened a moment, trying and failing to translate the words, which seemed a long lament, a hard life of struggle and betrayal except for the vivacity of the treble notes. The two men in the ruins had stopped digging and were watching me.
What do you want? said a voice at my elbow.
The voice, guttural, heavily accented, startled me. Polish, I thought, but I could not be certain. I said, I’m lost. I want Foster Avenue.
This is not Foster, he said.
I know that, I said.
He shook his head. Foster. Long way.
Yes, I said. I’m lost.
Where do you go? he said, looking into the car, back seat and front. His huge hands gripped the car door as if to prevent premature flight. His voice was filled with old-world suspicion of outsiders. His breath smelled sourly of garlic and beer.
North, I said. The North Shore, I added, wondering if he knew where the North Shore was. He continued to grip the door and I wondered if this was the usual welcome for strangers in the neighborhood. Whatever it was, I didn’t like it. Two friends joined him and they spoke for a moment in the unfamiliar language.
Go back the way you came, one of the friends said. Turn right.
Thanks, I said. I moved to put the car in gear, looking at the hands gripping the door. The entire street was watching us now, including the two in the fire-ruined house, and three more standing in the open door of the tavern, beer glasses in their hands.
He pointed up the street. That way.
What’s the name of the song? I asked.
They looked at me blankly.
The song on the radio, I said.
You go now, he said, tapping the hood of my car. The three in front of the tavern advanced unsteadily into the street holding their glasses of beer. They looked like workingmen who had been off shift awhile.
Gypsy music, isn’t it?
The one with the garlic breath leaned on the door, the car gently rocking.
Get away from the car, I said. I didn’t like being crowded and his sour breath and the car’s motion made me queasy. I motioned in the direction of the ruined house. What are they doing in there? What happened?
Fire, he said.
Anyone hurt?
He took his hands off the door and looked at me in the way you look at anyone who has trespassed. He said, Drive careful. He sniffed the air and shook his head in disgust. I was no longer worth bothering about.
He said, You drunk.
Go away now.
Plenty cops here—
The fire, I said.
Not your business, he said. You don’t belong here.
Thanks for the advice, I said. They stepped back. The three men stood watching me as I put the car in gear and drove slowly back the way I had come, nodding at the two with handkerchiefs over their faces and the beer drinkers, all this time the music rising in the street. All the radios were tuned to the same station. It sounded to me like Gypsy music but Gypsies were not a feature of Polish life, even Polish life in Chicago. Gypsies lived in Romania, unless the Reds had thrown them out. They lived also in the Balkans. Probably there were a few in Poland and in Germany. I didn’t know about the Low Countries or Scandinavia. Of course Gypsies moved around, so they might be anywhere. The old people on the steps did not look like Gypsies but maybe th
ey were trying to fit into the neighborhood, become good Americans like the first-generation Eastern Europeans who worked for my father. But this neighborhood was not as anonymous as I thought. It seemed to have an unhappiness all its own. I had behaved like a fool but that had had no effect on the unhappiness. I was counting again and discovering that I had had not three or four drinks at the Eleven-Eleven but five drinks, one drink too many in the space of a little more than an hour, and on an empty stomach, except for the chicken sandwich. Maybe it was only four drinks but I had had a drink at Aurora’s also, making five in all. Quarterday was forty miles distant, and when I found the Skokie peat bogs later on, I was still worrying the Gypsy problem and where it fit in the Polish scheme of things and whether the great composer Chopin had borrowed melodies from them as he went about his piano business. Probably he did. The Gypsy gift to the world was music, along with fortunetelling. Also, they stole things. They did not recognize the sanctity of private property and in that way they resembled the Communists. Still, there was much to admire in Gypsy culture. They did not leave traces as they moved from place to place in their caravans, keeping to themselves, desiring only freedom of movement while they lived off the land.
13
I PULLED INTO the driveway of the house in Quarterday and turned off the engine. I sat in the sudden silence, not moving, so happy to be home that I wanted to applaud. Quarterday was a small corner of the world but it was mine, unlike Chicago, which was for anyone who wanted it badly enough. The effects of the scotch had mostly worn off, leaving me with a dull headache and a flannel mouth from too many cigarettes and a belief also that I had pushed things to the limit in the not-so-anonymous unhappy neighborhood. I had behaved like a fool, worse even than the rude Englishman, but it had worked out all right. I was still in one piece and so was the neighborhood, except for the vacant place where the house had been. I knew then that the men in the masks had been looking for valuables left behind, or even bodies, as neighbors would do after any conflagration. But I would never forget the smoky smell in the air; woodsmoke, all right, but it did not issue from a fireplace or a cooking stove. All the houses were made of wood and I supposed it was only a matter of time before the same thing happened again, a spark from somewhere, a fire spreading along the floors and walls, the inhabitants in a panic. I had seen nothing about it in the newspaper but there were fires all the time in Chicago, and the newspaper’s writ did not run in that neighborhood.
The dog next door was barking. I saw the sycamore trees and beyond them the sixth fairway and the raised green, its flag limp. The golf course was brilliantly moonlit. The house was dark save for a sliver of light from the den and a glow from behind the closed curtains of my parents’ bedroom. The time was ten o’clock but I felt I had been awake for a week and had lived a lifetime in one day. Now time came to a halt. The earth ceased to turn. It was there in these familiar surroundings, the trimmed hedges, the silhouette of the eaves of the house against the night sky, the shade trees and the lawn and my mother’s slumbering garden beside the front door, that I broke down.
After a while I opened the car door and got out and stood in the moonlight, stretching my arms, the night so warm it felt like the tropics. I walked around the house to the grove of sycamores and the pond where my father skated before his knees gave way. I stood with my hands in my pockets remembering my father’s circuits around the pond, his stick hitting the branches of the trees. There was something of feng shui in the arrangement of things that caused me to wonder if my mother had applied Oriental principles to the outdoors; and then I noticed the skeletal outline of a backhoe next to the pond and knew that more changes were planned. I walked across the lawn to the terrace and looked in through the French doors. My father was sitting in his usual chair reading a book in an attitude of complete contentment, knees crossed, the book in his lap. He was alone. I could hear Gershwin on the phonograph, my father’s foot moving in time to the music. A Havana cigar in its silver tube rested next to the glass ashtray, the remains of a drink nearby. He looked up suddenly and smiled and I thought for a moment that he had seen me, but he was only reacting to a passage in the book. How I envied him at that moment. I watched him for a minute more, then backed away into the shadows and returned to the driveway and came in through the front door.
It’s me, I called, and went at once to the downstairs bathroom. I washed my face and hands, combed my hair, and looked in the mirror. The mirror disclosed no more or less than usual, so I straightened my tie, made a face, and walked out the door.
My father put his book down when I walked in but I knew he was still at a country club somewhere in Pennsylvania. He was reading one of John O’Hara’s novels, holding the place with his finger as he remarked dryly that it was good of me to come home before midnight, he wasn’t certain that I hadn’t decided to leave home for good, put in with my new Chicago friends ... And then he focused and stopped talking. He put his book aside and waited.
We stared at each other. Finally he said, Something at the office?
I shook my head.
He said, I’ll get us a drink. What do you want?
I said, Scotch.
While my father rummaged for ice, I picked up the new cigarette box from Havana. The silver had the feel of satin and the hallmarks were English. It was perfectly plain, no decoration of any kind, no indication it had been owned by anyone else. I wished I had a souvenir from Aurora, something I could put on a table somewhere; and I wished she had something from me. I replaced the cigarette box when my father returned with the drinks, put one beside me, and sank heavily into his own chair.
He said, I like O’Hara. But God, his people get into trouble. The women are always in heat and the men can’t keep their trousers buttoned and someone’s always broke or going broke and borrowing money from the wrong sort of man. What kind of trouble are you in?
Not the kind you’re thinking of.
And what kind is that? What kind of trouble am I thinking you’re in?
Police trouble, I said. Am I right?
It had crossed my mind, he said. Your mother and I, we don’t know where you’ve been, what you’ve been up to. All I know is, you haven’t been home. And now you show up on a Friday night looking like something the cat dragged in—
Drunken driving, something like that?
I hadn’t gotten that far in my thinking, he said.
Homicide? I said.
Don’t get fresh with me, he said.
It isn’t police trouble, I said wearily. It’s personal. It’s more in the nature of O’Hara trouble.
My father looked at the ceiling, then back at me, his expression stern and infinitely sad at the same time. Who’s the girl?
Aurora Brule, I said.
The doctor’s daughter? The headshrinker, lives in Chicago? Jesus, Wils. He sighed heavily and took a long pull of his drink, staring into the glass before he put it down. His mouth moved as if he were saying something to himself, trying it out before he spoke aloud. He said, Do you love her?
Of course, I said.
Well, that’s something.
She’s a wonderful girl, I said.
I remember her, he said. Pretty girl.
Very pretty, I said.
So you’ve been with her these past weeks. And I suppose longer than that.
She’s changed my life. And now—
I’m sure she has, my father said.
—it’s just gone to hell, I said brokenly.
Does her family know? my father asked gently.
About us? Well, yes.
How far along is she?
It took me a moment to understand what he was asking, and I had to compose myself before answering. I said, She’s not pregnant, Dad. It’s not that kind of O’Hara trouble. O’Hara trouble comes in all colors of the rainbow and this is another color altogether.
Thank God, he said. Then he paused before adding, I’m sorry. I sort of jumped to conclusions, I guess. The stuff you read in the papers—
I wish to God she was pregnant.
No, my father said. You don’t.
How do you know what I wish or don’t wish?
Maybe you could tell me what it’s about. Because as it is now, I’m pretty much in the dark.
Just then we heard my mother’s voice at the top of the stairs. Teddy? Who’s down there? Who are you talking to? My father forced a laugh and said, It’s Wils, come to pay us a visit. We’re just having a nightcap, then I’ll be up.
Wils? my mother said. Are you all right? I knew she had heard the timbre of our voices and intuited that something was amiss.
I cleared my throat and replied heartily that all was well, that my father and I were having a nightcap and we would be up shortly. I’m celebrating, I said. This was my last day on the job!