The Gossip Columnist's Daughter, page 16
You didn’t?
Stalks back to his radiator, tail rigid as an antenna, clean little butthole jeering at me.
GUZIK DIED IN 1956. The first reports were that he had a heart attack at an address on Stony Island Avenue. He’d been in bed with his mistress. His wife was in Arizona. The following day, out of deference to the wife, the initial reports were corrected. Jake Guzik, officially, died in his own bed on Fifty-Ninth Street. In his will, he left his favorite chauffeur three thousand dollars and a car, a Mercury Montclair convertible. After the funeral—which was so enormous and chock-full of underworld bigwigs they had to hold it across the city line in Berwyn, lest the Chicago cops be obliged to round up half the mourners—Solly retired.
For years, he ran errands for Lou.
Eventually, he took Guzik’s advice and earned his GED. In the fall of 1967, he enrolled at Roosevelt College.
IN 1970 (THE story we tell goes), Solly shocked the family by arriving at Babs and Lou’s for Thanksgiving with a woman. Her name was Pauline Haynes. It wasn’t so shocking that she was Black, though it wasn’t so un-shocking, either. Chicago is Chicago, and, let’s be honest, many of its people, then as now, lived in entirely separate universes. But it was the late sixties, early seventies, and all kinds of crazy things were starting to happen, even in segregated Chicago, and Roosevelt, which was founded after the war, was known to be a hotbed of socialism where races mingled—and who knew what else—till all hours.
No, what rocked the family was the fact that Solly had found a woman at all, let alone a pretty one who wore high heels and spoke French like a Parisian.
He’d always kept to himself. He still lived with his mother.
Solly? A woman?
The following spring, the two drove to Reno and got married. One last trip in Jake Guzik’s convertible. There’s nothing harder to imagine than other people’s happiness, in this case the decades-old laughs of two people I barely knew.
Still, I like to imagine Solly and Pauline out west. Coasting down a two-lane road with the top down, Pauline’s bare feet on the dashboard, and Solly, a man who rarely even smiled, he’s outright laughing now. He can’t even remember what she said. It was miles back. He’s just laughing. Solly Rosenthal is laughing.
AT THE TIME they ran off to Nevada, Solly would have been in his early forties. Pauline was more than ten years younger. My grandparents and my parents encouraged Lucy and, later, me to call Pauline “Auntie Pauline.” That’s what she was. She was our aunt. But we called Aunt Judith “Aunt Judith.” I remember that when we were all together everybody would repeat her name multiple times, in the most ham-handed way. Can I get you another drink, Auntie Pauline? Oh, Auntie Pauline doesn’t want to hear that old story again, do you Auntie Pauline? I also recognized the novelty of Pauline being an official member of the family. Showing her my drawings, I’d shriek, “Auntie Pauline, Auntie Pauline, look, my dinosaur had babies!”
We must have been exhausting.
But those times we saw Solly and Pauline together, Thanks-givings, mostly, Pauline was always friendly and laughed a lot. And, we noticed, she touched Solly often. He’d be sitting on the couch in the family room of the old place on Waverly Road, sitting there in his silent way, not smiling but not unsmiling either, and she’d be casually rubbing his forearm or toying with his fingers.
My parents were always at each other’s throats.
And Babs and Lou?
Those stoic single beds.
Thinking back, I realize that Solly’s marriage was the only one in our family that seemed even vaguely passionate. But what did we know of them? Beyond the holidays? Some relations don’t exist beyond the periphery of family, or maybe they don’t exist at all until they materialize on Thanksgiving, only to vanish again after a few hours.
Pauline got a job teaching high school French at Lane Tech. Solly got a job at the same school, first as an assistant custodian, and later as the chief custodian.
An interracial couple on the North Side of Chicago in the seventies. They weren’t common, but they weren’t unicorns, either. It couldn’t have been easy. But what I remember most about them is their ease with each other.
As far as I know, nobody in my family, not even Lou or Babs, ever set foot in the apartment that Solly and Pauline shared on North Spaulding, just off West Irving Park Road. They both liked jazz, so maybe at night they’d put on WSDM. Pauline grading papers at the kitchen table while Solly read a book or a magazine borrowed from the school library. Lester Young’s on the radio. Or maybe Solly just stares into space, as we sometimes do when we’re content and there isn’t anything, now, that we want, given what we already have. They never had kids. Who knows where or when it went wrong, or even if it did? If we can’t pinpoint such a moment in our own lives, why should we be able to pinpoint it in anybody else’s?
MOST LIVES DON’T need close to a thousand words. Obituary writers know this. If you get one at all, at most you get a column, maybe two. If you’re luckier you get what? Three hundred and fifty words? Five hundred? Seven hundred and fifty? Also, obituary writers write on deadline. Multitudes get left out, even for the very famous, but a good obituary writer can capture the contours of a life in a few broad strokes. This principle extends to the art of conversation, in which, sometimes, we also practice this sort of concision. Meet an old friend and catch up. How long does it take to get to the crux of it? The basics are exchanged before anybody opens their mouths. The way an old friend sits. Heavily in the chair or with a lighter touch? And then come the highlights. Success versus failure. Love versus its lack. Who died, who didn’t.
And all that we can’t shape into words, we say with our eyes.
Jed Rosenthal. Born at Michael Reese, Chicago, Illinois. 2/21/70. Mother, Clarice; father, Aubrey; sister, Lucy. Childhood in Highland Park. Lake Michigan. Paternal grandparents, Babs and Lou, a quarter of a mile away. At two and a half, swallowed bottle of paregoric. Stomach pumped. Indian Trail School. Mrs. Gerstad: “Gentlemen and gentle ladies only tie their shoes…” Sailor suit, rather not discuss. Elm Place Junior High. For four straight years remained shortest boy by a number of inches. Highland Park High School. Ran cross-country slowly. Met Rob Preskill (“best friend”). Junior year Lisa Bonetti shared her gum and saliva, not much else. AP English. Mrs. Engerman: “Your handwriting and grammar are atrocious, but you have some not unoriginal ideas.” Bless you, Mrs. Engerman. University of Illinois. Virginity eliminated. Blur. Name omitted. C+ on Prufrock essay. Still loathe Eliot. “Let us go then, you and I.” Fuck that. Creative writing major. Went to few other classes. Mark Costello, author of The Murphy Stories, generous, gruff, gave attention when probably wasn’t warranted. Remain grateful. Hanna Abrams. Met in library late sophomore year. Glasses, no-nonsense. Long hair then. Practical ponytail. Theater major with concentration in performance art. Not quick with a smile, which is why when she did… Hanna, Hanna. 403 South Coler Avenue, Apt. 2, Urbana, IL 61801. Two years of nights and mornings. Broke up senior year. Not saying you’re clingy, I mean you are, but that’s not— Graduated. Waited tables in Wicker Park, Buono Fortuna on North Milwaukee (fired for being late for shift multiple times). Eurail pass. Spain. Grew beard. Graduate school, Iowa City. Barely made it out alive. Chicago again. Story in Atlantic Monthly. “Kup’s Column” mention. First book, 2003 (short stories). Couple nice (short) reviews. Teaching job. Assistant prof. Thanks, Jesuits! Grandfather dies. Second novel tanks but helps tenure case. Close call. By a squeak. Thanks again, Jesuits! Years. Relationships came and went, mostly went. One not quite engagement. At Sovereign on N. Broadway, November of 2016, to drown election sorrows in a PBR. Or three or four or five. Curveball. Hanna Abrams happened to walk into that beloved dive with her friends. All this time, same city. Amazing. What’s it been, fifteen years? More like eighteen. Jesus. What have you been doing? Still making art? I’m a psychologist. No kidding, wow. Married? No. How about you? Nope. Almost but nope. (Pause.) You want to meet up? Sure. Couple dates. Maybe three, four. Could have been five. I’m pregnant. No. Seriously? Really? No way. Honestly? It happened. I mean something obviously must have— Wow, that’s terrific. I think. No kidding. Amazing, actually. I never thought I’d. I mean, why not? Those nine months. A country of us. Moved to the house on Jarvis. Hanna’s father loaned down payment. July 2017, Leah (Snook) born at Northwestern Memorial. Kiddo so cute. Snug in that carrier thing named after a tennis player. But stress? Creeping dissatisfaction? Malaise? Third novel splutters, deadline passes. Publisher doesn’t notice. Irritable, morose, sullen. Cat acquired. (Hanna allergies.) April 2019. Hanna: A parting. A trial… Meanwhile, we co-parent. What even is that? September 2019. Babs dies. Vague new idea for third book. Oh and yeah, and then an earth-wide pandemic. Hey, listen, now that we’re cooped up anyway, why don’t we—Not ready. Why? Hard to pinpoint. But what are the tribulations of two relatively privileged people compared with the world as we know it collapsing? Snook sticks a Lego up her nose at day care. Hour later sneezes it out and into the side of another kid’s head. Obsession with Cookie Kupcinet takes further hold. Pretty directionless most days, but an obsession. Somewhere in there, father dies. Begins talking with (not to) the cat. We’re about caught up. Died on / / in Chicago.
Who do you think you are? Worst obit ever. You’d flunk out of Medill. Need to cut at least five hundred words but that’s not the half of what sucks about it. It reads like you’re talking in your sleep.
Also, this cat’s got a name.
THANKSGIVING, 1975, AND Solly arrived alone. Midway through the meal (after Lou had delivered his usual speech about the pilgrims), he stood up at the table and tinked his glass with a fork. He’d never done anything remotely like it before.
“Oh, Solly,” Babs said. “You’d like to make a toast?”
“An announcement.”
“All right, we’re listening.”
“Pauline has accepted a position at the Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan.”
“Oh my, that’s very prestigious.”
“It certainly is,” Solly said.
“And you’ll be joining her in Michigan?”
At first he smiled at the thought of it. Then he shook his head.
“No.”
He clamped his eyes shut and sat down.
The family had always considered Solly a little slow compared with the rest of the Rosenthals. Now I wonder if what we considered slow was simply his way of dodging us.
On those Thanksgivings in the years after Pauline left, he always let on that he was happy to see everybody, but it was clear he was going through the motions. I see him now, his paunch, his sweater vest, how his bulk would dominate the table and still he made so little eye contact. Present and not present. He wasn’t a pathetic figure. If that’s the portrait I’ve created, I’ve failed. He just had a lonely dignity we didn’t bother to notice much. My father and sister would be raging about politics. This was after my father became a militant Reaganite. My mother had one foot out the door at that point. Babs was preoccupied; Lou, distant. Aunt Judith, those years, usually remained in Seattle during the holidays.
After dinner, but before dessert, Solly would stand up and say, “Well, it’s getting late early.”
Then he’d go outside and stuff himself into his Gremlin, the matchbox he drove those years, and drive south, back to the city.
SOLLY LIKED TO drive, even that crappy little car made him happy, but what he loved above all else was to walk. He’d walk for hours. On weekends, he walked all day. He once told Lucy—if he confided in anyone, it was Lucy—that if she wanted to know Chicago, she had to walk it.
“Walk west,” he told her. “Away from the lake.”
He’d walk with a sandwich in his pocket. He never carried an umbrella. I hardly knew him, and yet lately, this rainy April, I keep having visions of Solly walking. If it started to drizzle, he’d put his coat over his head. A working-class pharaoh loping down the sidewalk along Irving Park Road in the rain. M streets. Meade, Moody, Melvina. There’s a nice name, Melvina. He stops for a rest on a bench in Merrimac Park before heading south on Narragansett toward the entrance of Mount Olive Cemetery. He’s drawn to cemeteries like Ishmael is drawn to the watery parts of the world. The headstones are a comfort. He runs his fingers in the grooves of the names. There are days he feels less alone among the dead than he does out on the streets.
Sometimes he walks even longer, farther west and farther south, to where his parents and my great-grandparents are buried at Waldheim in River Forest. There, he places the stones he’s collected along the way on their graves, before turning and heading, once again, for home. It’s already late.
In Blue in Chicago, Bette Howland writes, “Chicago isn’t a city: just the raw materials for a city.” This might describe any city, but this city is especially rich in raw materials. Solly Rosenthal might have understood this better than anybody. Block after block he walks, studying the raw materials. The cracks in the sidewalk. The cigarette butts. Broken glass. The places where people imprinted their own shoe prints in what was once fresh concrete. Temporary immortality. He stops at the corner of Lawrence and Harding. There’s a check-cashing store. A chow mein place. A Kentucky Fried Chicken. At the Admiral Theater: Flesh Gordon. Lights begin to pop on in the apartments above the storefronts. He likes to catch this, the moment when people start to turn on the lights in their apartments.
SOLLY PAUSES HIS mopping. A book on a student’s desk has caught his eye, a blue paperback. He squeezes his bulk into the miniature desk as if lowering himself into a cockpit, which strikes him as funny, since the book is Catch-22. He’s not read it, but he knows it’s about war and probably has a fair share of cockpits. He wonders for a moment about the etymology of the word cockpit. Like his brother, Lou, he’s always been interested in the origin of words, a trait both brothers inherited from their mother who’d come to Chicago from a place called Shershev in Poland and taught herself English by pestering her neighbors with questions and writing down their answers in a small black notebook she carried with her everywhere.
Solly opens the book to a dog-eared page in the middle and reads a paragraph the student has underlined. It’s about an army chaplain who has the sensation that he’s seen this naked man in a tree before, at some other time, in some other existence.
I ought to read this one from the beginning.
Déjàvu. French, of course. He didn’t need Pauline to tell him that. Still, what wouldn’t he give to be able to ask her about it? Not call her up. He’s got her number. He can call her.
To ask her in the kitchen.
Some nights he goes into the kitchen for a glass of water and sees Pauline at the table reading with her glasses on. She could read for an hour straight and not look up once. A hallucination? Or does the fact that she used to sit like that with a book in her hand and glasses nudged toward the end of her nose suggest that she’s left behind some physical presence that is not entirely fantastical?
Can I ask you a question.
What is it?
Déjàvu? How do the French fit all that into one word?
It’s two words.
Oh.
He’s got three more classrooms to finish. Then the gym.
How It Was Done in Chicago
Everybody has a little larceny in them.
—Sonny Capone, who ripped off
the line from Bing Crosby
NOT EVERYONE IS on the take in Chicago. The whole point of being on the take is there’s people who aren’t. A crooked city needs its straights to uphold its reputation. Lou Rosenthal had always been one of the do-gooders. A lawyer who played by the rules as laid down by men who didn’t always follow them themselves.
He believed that laws were greater than the imperfect men who made them.
When it turned out that Lou himself was one of the imperfect men, it might have stunned us, but not Lou. True, as the guilty party, it couldn’t have. But also this: Lou had never held himself up to be any more righteous than anybody else. When he tipped his imaginary hat to other lawyers on LaSalle Street, it wasn’t from a position of higher moral authority.
Rosenthals, it goes without saying, don’t have the height to look down on anybody. (My father would have if he could have.)
By the standards of today’s white-collar crime, the allegations against my grandfather were almost quaint. As a probate attorney, he had unfettered access to trust accounts. What he did was move money from some of these accounts, beyond his regular fees, into a personal account.
An individual scheduled by law to become, in time, a beneficiary of one of these accounts noted some “discrepancies” in the accounting. This individual notified the Illinois Bar, which notified the state’s attorney, which began an investigation.
This is my understanding of what happened. I’ve never been able to track down any records, though whatever evidence might still exist is probably hidden in the columns of numbers in Lou’s files.
More than anything, I remember how he wore the trouble on his face. Lou got ruddier, maybe from rubbing his face so much, as if he was trying to erase himself. He may not have been self-righteous, but he was still Lou Rosenthal. To the family and to everybody else. He’d always had such a flawless reputation. In his business, any whiff of impropriety was enough to disgrace him. There didn’t need to be an indictment. Yet. Lou, quietly, and with deliberation, closed up shop. He sold his half of the law firm to his partner. He announced to Babs and the rest of the family that he’d be selling Waverly Road. With all deliberate speed. That’s the term he used.
All deliberate speed.
He needed ready cash to cover the “discrepancies,” which were, according to my father, upward of at least a few hundred thousand dollars. And, as far as I know, he did cover those discrepancies. But the damage was done.
Stalks back to his radiator, tail rigid as an antenna, clean little butthole jeering at me.
GUZIK DIED IN 1956. The first reports were that he had a heart attack at an address on Stony Island Avenue. He’d been in bed with his mistress. His wife was in Arizona. The following day, out of deference to the wife, the initial reports were corrected. Jake Guzik, officially, died in his own bed on Fifty-Ninth Street. In his will, he left his favorite chauffeur three thousand dollars and a car, a Mercury Montclair convertible. After the funeral—which was so enormous and chock-full of underworld bigwigs they had to hold it across the city line in Berwyn, lest the Chicago cops be obliged to round up half the mourners—Solly retired.
For years, he ran errands for Lou.
Eventually, he took Guzik’s advice and earned his GED. In the fall of 1967, he enrolled at Roosevelt College.
IN 1970 (THE story we tell goes), Solly shocked the family by arriving at Babs and Lou’s for Thanksgiving with a woman. Her name was Pauline Haynes. It wasn’t so shocking that she was Black, though it wasn’t so un-shocking, either. Chicago is Chicago, and, let’s be honest, many of its people, then as now, lived in entirely separate universes. But it was the late sixties, early seventies, and all kinds of crazy things were starting to happen, even in segregated Chicago, and Roosevelt, which was founded after the war, was known to be a hotbed of socialism where races mingled—and who knew what else—till all hours.
No, what rocked the family was the fact that Solly had found a woman at all, let alone a pretty one who wore high heels and spoke French like a Parisian.
He’d always kept to himself. He still lived with his mother.
Solly? A woman?
The following spring, the two drove to Reno and got married. One last trip in Jake Guzik’s convertible. There’s nothing harder to imagine than other people’s happiness, in this case the decades-old laughs of two people I barely knew.
Still, I like to imagine Solly and Pauline out west. Coasting down a two-lane road with the top down, Pauline’s bare feet on the dashboard, and Solly, a man who rarely even smiled, he’s outright laughing now. He can’t even remember what she said. It was miles back. He’s just laughing. Solly Rosenthal is laughing.
AT THE TIME they ran off to Nevada, Solly would have been in his early forties. Pauline was more than ten years younger. My grandparents and my parents encouraged Lucy and, later, me to call Pauline “Auntie Pauline.” That’s what she was. She was our aunt. But we called Aunt Judith “Aunt Judith.” I remember that when we were all together everybody would repeat her name multiple times, in the most ham-handed way. Can I get you another drink, Auntie Pauline? Oh, Auntie Pauline doesn’t want to hear that old story again, do you Auntie Pauline? I also recognized the novelty of Pauline being an official member of the family. Showing her my drawings, I’d shriek, “Auntie Pauline, Auntie Pauline, look, my dinosaur had babies!”
We must have been exhausting.
But those times we saw Solly and Pauline together, Thanks-givings, mostly, Pauline was always friendly and laughed a lot. And, we noticed, she touched Solly often. He’d be sitting on the couch in the family room of the old place on Waverly Road, sitting there in his silent way, not smiling but not unsmiling either, and she’d be casually rubbing his forearm or toying with his fingers.
My parents were always at each other’s throats.
And Babs and Lou?
Those stoic single beds.
Thinking back, I realize that Solly’s marriage was the only one in our family that seemed even vaguely passionate. But what did we know of them? Beyond the holidays? Some relations don’t exist beyond the periphery of family, or maybe they don’t exist at all until they materialize on Thanksgiving, only to vanish again after a few hours.
Pauline got a job teaching high school French at Lane Tech. Solly got a job at the same school, first as an assistant custodian, and later as the chief custodian.
An interracial couple on the North Side of Chicago in the seventies. They weren’t common, but they weren’t unicorns, either. It couldn’t have been easy. But what I remember most about them is their ease with each other.
As far as I know, nobody in my family, not even Lou or Babs, ever set foot in the apartment that Solly and Pauline shared on North Spaulding, just off West Irving Park Road. They both liked jazz, so maybe at night they’d put on WSDM. Pauline grading papers at the kitchen table while Solly read a book or a magazine borrowed from the school library. Lester Young’s on the radio. Or maybe Solly just stares into space, as we sometimes do when we’re content and there isn’t anything, now, that we want, given what we already have. They never had kids. Who knows where or when it went wrong, or even if it did? If we can’t pinpoint such a moment in our own lives, why should we be able to pinpoint it in anybody else’s?
MOST LIVES DON’T need close to a thousand words. Obituary writers know this. If you get one at all, at most you get a column, maybe two. If you’re luckier you get what? Three hundred and fifty words? Five hundred? Seven hundred and fifty? Also, obituary writers write on deadline. Multitudes get left out, even for the very famous, but a good obituary writer can capture the contours of a life in a few broad strokes. This principle extends to the art of conversation, in which, sometimes, we also practice this sort of concision. Meet an old friend and catch up. How long does it take to get to the crux of it? The basics are exchanged before anybody opens their mouths. The way an old friend sits. Heavily in the chair or with a lighter touch? And then come the highlights. Success versus failure. Love versus its lack. Who died, who didn’t.
And all that we can’t shape into words, we say with our eyes.
Jed Rosenthal. Born at Michael Reese, Chicago, Illinois. 2/21/70. Mother, Clarice; father, Aubrey; sister, Lucy. Childhood in Highland Park. Lake Michigan. Paternal grandparents, Babs and Lou, a quarter of a mile away. At two and a half, swallowed bottle of paregoric. Stomach pumped. Indian Trail School. Mrs. Gerstad: “Gentlemen and gentle ladies only tie their shoes…” Sailor suit, rather not discuss. Elm Place Junior High. For four straight years remained shortest boy by a number of inches. Highland Park High School. Ran cross-country slowly. Met Rob Preskill (“best friend”). Junior year Lisa Bonetti shared her gum and saliva, not much else. AP English. Mrs. Engerman: “Your handwriting and grammar are atrocious, but you have some not unoriginal ideas.” Bless you, Mrs. Engerman. University of Illinois. Virginity eliminated. Blur. Name omitted. C+ on Prufrock essay. Still loathe Eliot. “Let us go then, you and I.” Fuck that. Creative writing major. Went to few other classes. Mark Costello, author of The Murphy Stories, generous, gruff, gave attention when probably wasn’t warranted. Remain grateful. Hanna Abrams. Met in library late sophomore year. Glasses, no-nonsense. Long hair then. Practical ponytail. Theater major with concentration in performance art. Not quick with a smile, which is why when she did… Hanna, Hanna. 403 South Coler Avenue, Apt. 2, Urbana, IL 61801. Two years of nights and mornings. Broke up senior year. Not saying you’re clingy, I mean you are, but that’s not— Graduated. Waited tables in Wicker Park, Buono Fortuna on North Milwaukee (fired for being late for shift multiple times). Eurail pass. Spain. Grew beard. Graduate school, Iowa City. Barely made it out alive. Chicago again. Story in Atlantic Monthly. “Kup’s Column” mention. First book, 2003 (short stories). Couple nice (short) reviews. Teaching job. Assistant prof. Thanks, Jesuits! Grandfather dies. Second novel tanks but helps tenure case. Close call. By a squeak. Thanks again, Jesuits! Years. Relationships came and went, mostly went. One not quite engagement. At Sovereign on N. Broadway, November of 2016, to drown election sorrows in a PBR. Or three or four or five. Curveball. Hanna Abrams happened to walk into that beloved dive with her friends. All this time, same city. Amazing. What’s it been, fifteen years? More like eighteen. Jesus. What have you been doing? Still making art? I’m a psychologist. No kidding, wow. Married? No. How about you? Nope. Almost but nope. (Pause.) You want to meet up? Sure. Couple dates. Maybe three, four. Could have been five. I’m pregnant. No. Seriously? Really? No way. Honestly? It happened. I mean something obviously must have— Wow, that’s terrific. I think. No kidding. Amazing, actually. I never thought I’d. I mean, why not? Those nine months. A country of us. Moved to the house on Jarvis. Hanna’s father loaned down payment. July 2017, Leah (Snook) born at Northwestern Memorial. Kiddo so cute. Snug in that carrier thing named after a tennis player. But stress? Creeping dissatisfaction? Malaise? Third novel splutters, deadline passes. Publisher doesn’t notice. Irritable, morose, sullen. Cat acquired. (Hanna allergies.) April 2019. Hanna: A parting. A trial… Meanwhile, we co-parent. What even is that? September 2019. Babs dies. Vague new idea for third book. Oh and yeah, and then an earth-wide pandemic. Hey, listen, now that we’re cooped up anyway, why don’t we—Not ready. Why? Hard to pinpoint. But what are the tribulations of two relatively privileged people compared with the world as we know it collapsing? Snook sticks a Lego up her nose at day care. Hour later sneezes it out and into the side of another kid’s head. Obsession with Cookie Kupcinet takes further hold. Pretty directionless most days, but an obsession. Somewhere in there, father dies. Begins talking with (not to) the cat. We’re about caught up. Died on / / in Chicago.
Who do you think you are? Worst obit ever. You’d flunk out of Medill. Need to cut at least five hundred words but that’s not the half of what sucks about it. It reads like you’re talking in your sleep.
Also, this cat’s got a name.
THANKSGIVING, 1975, AND Solly arrived alone. Midway through the meal (after Lou had delivered his usual speech about the pilgrims), he stood up at the table and tinked his glass with a fork. He’d never done anything remotely like it before.
“Oh, Solly,” Babs said. “You’d like to make a toast?”
“An announcement.”
“All right, we’re listening.”
“Pauline has accepted a position at the Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan.”
“Oh my, that’s very prestigious.”
“It certainly is,” Solly said.
“And you’ll be joining her in Michigan?”
At first he smiled at the thought of it. Then he shook his head.
“No.”
He clamped his eyes shut and sat down.
The family had always considered Solly a little slow compared with the rest of the Rosenthals. Now I wonder if what we considered slow was simply his way of dodging us.
On those Thanksgivings in the years after Pauline left, he always let on that he was happy to see everybody, but it was clear he was going through the motions. I see him now, his paunch, his sweater vest, how his bulk would dominate the table and still he made so little eye contact. Present and not present. He wasn’t a pathetic figure. If that’s the portrait I’ve created, I’ve failed. He just had a lonely dignity we didn’t bother to notice much. My father and sister would be raging about politics. This was after my father became a militant Reaganite. My mother had one foot out the door at that point. Babs was preoccupied; Lou, distant. Aunt Judith, those years, usually remained in Seattle during the holidays.
After dinner, but before dessert, Solly would stand up and say, “Well, it’s getting late early.”
Then he’d go outside and stuff himself into his Gremlin, the matchbox he drove those years, and drive south, back to the city.
SOLLY LIKED TO drive, even that crappy little car made him happy, but what he loved above all else was to walk. He’d walk for hours. On weekends, he walked all day. He once told Lucy—if he confided in anyone, it was Lucy—that if she wanted to know Chicago, she had to walk it.
“Walk west,” he told her. “Away from the lake.”
He’d walk with a sandwich in his pocket. He never carried an umbrella. I hardly knew him, and yet lately, this rainy April, I keep having visions of Solly walking. If it started to drizzle, he’d put his coat over his head. A working-class pharaoh loping down the sidewalk along Irving Park Road in the rain. M streets. Meade, Moody, Melvina. There’s a nice name, Melvina. He stops for a rest on a bench in Merrimac Park before heading south on Narragansett toward the entrance of Mount Olive Cemetery. He’s drawn to cemeteries like Ishmael is drawn to the watery parts of the world. The headstones are a comfort. He runs his fingers in the grooves of the names. There are days he feels less alone among the dead than he does out on the streets.
Sometimes he walks even longer, farther west and farther south, to where his parents and my great-grandparents are buried at Waldheim in River Forest. There, he places the stones he’s collected along the way on their graves, before turning and heading, once again, for home. It’s already late.
In Blue in Chicago, Bette Howland writes, “Chicago isn’t a city: just the raw materials for a city.” This might describe any city, but this city is especially rich in raw materials. Solly Rosenthal might have understood this better than anybody. Block after block he walks, studying the raw materials. The cracks in the sidewalk. The cigarette butts. Broken glass. The places where people imprinted their own shoe prints in what was once fresh concrete. Temporary immortality. He stops at the corner of Lawrence and Harding. There’s a check-cashing store. A chow mein place. A Kentucky Fried Chicken. At the Admiral Theater: Flesh Gordon. Lights begin to pop on in the apartments above the storefronts. He likes to catch this, the moment when people start to turn on the lights in their apartments.
SOLLY PAUSES HIS mopping. A book on a student’s desk has caught his eye, a blue paperback. He squeezes his bulk into the miniature desk as if lowering himself into a cockpit, which strikes him as funny, since the book is Catch-22. He’s not read it, but he knows it’s about war and probably has a fair share of cockpits. He wonders for a moment about the etymology of the word cockpit. Like his brother, Lou, he’s always been interested in the origin of words, a trait both brothers inherited from their mother who’d come to Chicago from a place called Shershev in Poland and taught herself English by pestering her neighbors with questions and writing down their answers in a small black notebook she carried with her everywhere.
Solly opens the book to a dog-eared page in the middle and reads a paragraph the student has underlined. It’s about an army chaplain who has the sensation that he’s seen this naked man in a tree before, at some other time, in some other existence.
I ought to read this one from the beginning.
Déjàvu. French, of course. He didn’t need Pauline to tell him that. Still, what wouldn’t he give to be able to ask her about it? Not call her up. He’s got her number. He can call her.
To ask her in the kitchen.
Some nights he goes into the kitchen for a glass of water and sees Pauline at the table reading with her glasses on. She could read for an hour straight and not look up once. A hallucination? Or does the fact that she used to sit like that with a book in her hand and glasses nudged toward the end of her nose suggest that she’s left behind some physical presence that is not entirely fantastical?
Can I ask you a question.
What is it?
Déjàvu? How do the French fit all that into one word?
It’s two words.
Oh.
He’s got three more classrooms to finish. Then the gym.
How It Was Done in Chicago
Everybody has a little larceny in them.
—Sonny Capone, who ripped off
the line from Bing Crosby
NOT EVERYONE IS on the take in Chicago. The whole point of being on the take is there’s people who aren’t. A crooked city needs its straights to uphold its reputation. Lou Rosenthal had always been one of the do-gooders. A lawyer who played by the rules as laid down by men who didn’t always follow them themselves.
He believed that laws were greater than the imperfect men who made them.
When it turned out that Lou himself was one of the imperfect men, it might have stunned us, but not Lou. True, as the guilty party, it couldn’t have. But also this: Lou had never held himself up to be any more righteous than anybody else. When he tipped his imaginary hat to other lawyers on LaSalle Street, it wasn’t from a position of higher moral authority.
Rosenthals, it goes without saying, don’t have the height to look down on anybody. (My father would have if he could have.)
By the standards of today’s white-collar crime, the allegations against my grandfather were almost quaint. As a probate attorney, he had unfettered access to trust accounts. What he did was move money from some of these accounts, beyond his regular fees, into a personal account.
An individual scheduled by law to become, in time, a beneficiary of one of these accounts noted some “discrepancies” in the accounting. This individual notified the Illinois Bar, which notified the state’s attorney, which began an investigation.
This is my understanding of what happened. I’ve never been able to track down any records, though whatever evidence might still exist is probably hidden in the columns of numbers in Lou’s files.
More than anything, I remember how he wore the trouble on his face. Lou got ruddier, maybe from rubbing his face so much, as if he was trying to erase himself. He may not have been self-righteous, but he was still Lou Rosenthal. To the family and to everybody else. He’d always had such a flawless reputation. In his business, any whiff of impropriety was enough to disgrace him. There didn’t need to be an indictment. Yet. Lou, quietly, and with deliberation, closed up shop. He sold his half of the law firm to his partner. He announced to Babs and the rest of the family that he’d be selling Waverly Road. With all deliberate speed. That’s the term he used.
All deliberate speed.
He needed ready cash to cover the “discrepancies,” which were, according to my father, upward of at least a few hundred thousand dollars. And, as far as I know, he did cover those discrepancies. But the damage was done.
