Windy City Blues (2 page)

One Hundred Thirtieth passes Metron, one of Chicago’s few surviving steel mills, Medusa Cement, and the Scrap Corporation of Chicago—with a mountain of scrap iron to prove it. At Torrence Avenue you run into the giant Ford Assembly Plant, their largest in the world. There you turn north again, crossing the Calumet River on an old counterweight vertical lift bridge. Immediately beyond is 122nd Street, a narrow, badly paved industrial thoroughfare. Turn left under the Welded Tube Company billboard and follow the semis west.

Under a sky purple-pink with smog, marsh grasses and cattails tower above the cars. Despite a century of dumping that has filled the ground water with more carcinogens than the EPA can classify, the grasses flourish. If you are a bird-watcher, and patient, you can find meadowlarks and other prairie natives here.

After a mile 122nd Street intersects with a gravel track, Stony Island. To the right it goes up to the CID landfill. To the left it runs next to Dead Stick Pond until both of them dead-end at Lake Calumet. Medusa Cement is busy digging at the south end of the marsh; on the west the Feralloy Corporation buildings
loom; to the east major construction is underway.

Conflicting signs tacked to the trees proclaim the area both a clean-water project and warn trespassers of hazardous wastes. Despite warning signs, on a good day you can find anything from a pair of boots to a bedstead dumped in Dead Stick Pond.

Fish have been returning to the Calumet River and its tributaries since passage of the Clean Water Act in the seventies, but the ones that make their way into the pond show up with massive tumors and rotted fins. The phosphates in the water further cut the amount of oxygen that can penetrate the surface. Even so, wild birds continue to land here on their migratory routes. And Chicagoans so poor they live in shanties without running water catch their dinners in the marsh. Their shacks dot unmarked trails in the swamps. The inhabitants have a high mortality rate from esophageal and stomach cancers because of the pollutants in their well water. The half-feral dogs around their homes make it hard for any social welfare agent to get a clear idea of their living situation.

By this point in your tour you are either cold and tired or hot and thirsty. Either way you would probably like to relax over the native drink—a shot and a beer. The ideal place to do so is Sonny’s Inn a few miles north.

Retrace your route to Torrence Avenue, and go left, or north. From 117th to 103rd Street, almost two
miles, you can see the remains of Wisconsin Steel. Once one of the world’s largest producers, it has been bankrupt and gone half a decade now.

At 97th Torrence becomes Colfax. Ride it up to 95th, where you’ll turn right and drive three blocks to Commercial Avenue, the main drag in South Chicago. Two blocks north to 91st Street and you’ll find Sonny’s Inn just across the railroad tracks.

The little bungalows that line the route are well kept up for the most part, although a few look pretty hopeless. Even though almost 50 percent of the population is out of work they still take pride in their homes and yards. And the Steel City and South Chicago banks, which hold most of their home mortgages, refinance them time and again. In themselves these banks make an amazing tourist attraction: what other big city in the world can boast of banks so committed to their community that they carry their customers through a prolonged period of trouble?

It is the gallantry of this old neighborhood that made me take it for the home of my detective, V. I. Warshawski. The gallantry, on the one hand, and the racial and ethnic mix that turned it into a volatile soup on the other. South Chicago was traditionally the first stop for new immigrants in Chicago. The mills, running three shifts a day, provided jobs for the unskilled and illiterate. The neighborhood has been home to Irish, Polish, Bohemian, Yugoslav, African, and most recently Hispanic Americans. As each new
wave of immigrants arrived, the previous ones, with a fragile toehold on the American dream of universal prosperity, would fight to keep the newcomers out. The public schools were frequent arenas for real fights. Girls on South Chicago’s streets either acquired boyfriends to protect them, or were carefully watched day and night by their parents, or learned the basics of street fighting to protect themselves. Even though V. I. grew up under the watchful eye of her mother, her father wanted her to be able to look after herself: as a police officer he knew better than most parents what dangers faced a girl who couldn’t fight for herself.

So V. I. came of age under the shadow of the mills, with weekend treks to Dead Stick Pond to watch the herons feed. She certainly knows Sonny’s Bar. Sonny’s has stood through all the waves of ethnic and racial change. It is a throwback to the days of the late great Mayor Daley. His icons hang on the walls and stand on shelves—signed photos of him with the original Sonny, signed photos of him with President Kennedy, campaign stickers, yellowing newspaper articles. A set of antlers over the bar obscures some of the memorabilia.

If you go at lunchtime on a weekday your dining companions will represent a complete cross section of the south side—every racial and ethnic group the city can boast, and most of the neighborhood occupations.
You can get a drink and a sandwich for under five dollars. And if you do decide to go native and ask for a shot and a beer—that’s rye and a draw. Don’t call attention to yourself by asking for brand-name whiskeys.

South Chicago doesn’t top the city’s list of neighborhoods eligible for limited street and sidewalk repair funds. You may notice places where pavements have collapsed. If you look into the holes you’ll see cobblestones five feet down. Because the landfill a century ago didn’t hold back the underlying marshes, the city jacked itself up and built another layer over the top. South Chicago is one of the few places where the original substratum remains.

If you happen to stay at the Palmer House downtown you might like to know that it is the only surviving building from the lower city. Not wanting to dismantle his pride and joy Mr. Palmer raised the whole building up on stilts so that the new, higher State Street could be paved in front.

With your shot and your Polish dog under your belt you’re ready now for more sight-seeing. Driving west two miles to Stony Island and four blocks south to 95th Street you’re now in the Pullman Historic Landmark District. George Pullman, who made his fortune inventing and manufacturing the Pullman car, built almost two thousand houses to form a model village in 1880. The area was supposed to be a show-case
for workers, partly to keep union agitation low. The houses were built in the federal style from clay bricks dug out of nearby Lake Calumet. The Pullman Company operated all the village stores and provided all services.

Unfortunately the houses rapidly became too expensive for the working population to own. Discontent with the company over that and other matters came to a head during the depression of the 1890s, when many workers lost their jobs. The scene of violent confrontations, Pullman lost a court battle with its workers over the right to own and operate the town. When the company pulled out the neighborhood went through numerous economic and ethnic upheavals, but in 1970 was designated a national landmark. Since then people have been renovating these beautiful old homes.

Clay from the Calumet made better bricks than any available today. One of the crimes Pullman residents have to guard against is loss of brick garages—people go on vacation and come home to find their garages have been dismantled brick by brick and carted off to become part of some house under construction in a remote neighborhood.

Instead of taking the expressway north, you should slide out of the south side the back way, going east to Buffalo Street, past the National Shrine to St. Jude, the Catholic patron of hopeless or difficult cases. Drive north on Buffalo, and suddenly you find it’s
turned into US highway 41. It twists and turns a bit for the next two miles, but the US 41 signs are easy to follow.

At 79th Street you’ll see the last of the USX works on your right, and suddenly you’re out of the industrial zone, back in quiet residential streets. At the corner of 71st Street and South Shore Drive stands the old South Shore Country Club. It was once the meeting place of the wealthy and powerful who lived in the area. One of the late Mayor Daley’s daughters was married here. The private beach and golf course have been taken over by the Chicago Park District, police horses now occupy the stables, and the natives are the ones swinging clubs on the green. The clubhouse is a community center now, a beautiful place, worth a side stop.

Beyond the country club Lake Michigan springs into view. You might pull off at La Rabida children’s hospital half a mile up the road to climb the rocks overlooking the lake. From this vantage point, looking south you can see the industrial quag you just visited. To the north the skyline made famous by Skidmore, Edward Durrel Stone, Bud Goldberg, and their friends is silhouetted against the sky.

Back in your car return to US 41. Soon it becomes an eight-lane highway that takes you the quick way to the Loop. Lake Michigan will be your companion the rest of your journey, spewing foam against the
rocks—a barricade put up by men hoping to tame the water. It is not a tame lake, though. Underneath the asphalt lies the marsh, home to herons for twenty-five thousand years. The lake may yet reclaim it.

I WAS READING
the
Herald-Star
at breakfast when the notice jumped out at me from the personal section. I put my coffee down with extreme care, as if I were in a dream and all my actions moved with the slowness of dream time. I shut the paper with the same slow motion, then opened it again. The notice was still there. I spelled out the headline letter by letter, in case my unconscious mind had substituted one name for another, but the text remained the same. There could not be more than one Gabriella Sestieri from Pitigliano.
My mother, who died of cancer in 1968 at the age of forty-six.

“Who could want her all these years later?” I said aloud.

Peppy, the golden retriever I share with my downstairs neighbor, raised a sympathetic eyebrow. We had just come back from a run on a dreary November morning and she was waiting hopefully for toast.

“It can’t be her father.” His mind had cracked after six months in a German concentration camp, and he refused to acknowledge Gabriella’s death when my father wrote to inform him of it. I’d had to translate the letter, in which he said he was too old to travel but wished Gabriella well on her concert tour. Anyway, if he was alive still he’d be almost a hundred.

Maybe Gabriella’s brother Italo was searching for her: he had disappeared in the maelstrom of the war, but Gabriella always hoped he survived. Or her first voice teacher, Francesca Salvini, whom Gabriella longed to see again, to explain why she had never fulfilled Salvini’s hopes for her professional career. As Gabriella lay in her final bed in Jackson Park Hospital with tubes ringing her wasted body, her last messages had been for me and for Salvini. This morning it dawned on me for the first time how hurtful my father must have found that. He adored my mother, but for him she had only the quiet fondness of an old friend.

I realized my hands around the newspaper were
wet with sweat, that paper and print were clinging to my palms. With an embarrassed laugh I put the paper down and washed off the ink under the kitchen tap. It was ludicrous to spin my mind with conjectures when all I had to do was phone Malcolm Ranier. I went to the living room and pawed through the papers on the piano for the phone book. Ranier seemed to be a lawyer with offices on La Salle Street, at the north end where the pricey new buildings stand.

His was apparently a solo practice. The woman who answered the phone assured me she was Mr. Ranier’s assistant and conversant with all his files. Mr. Ranier couldn’t speak with me himself now, because he was in conference. Or court. Or the John.

“I’m calling about the notice in this morning’s paper, wanting to know the whereabouts of Gabriella Sestieri.”

“What is your name, please, and your relationship with Mrs. Sestieri?” The assistant left out the second syllable so that the name came out as “Sistery.”

“I’ll be glad to tell you that if you tell me why you’re trying to find her.”

“I’m afraid I can’t give out confidential client business over the phone. But if you tell me your name and what you know about Mrs. Sestieri we’ll get back to you when we’ve discussed the matter with our client.”

I thought we could keep this conversation going all day. “The person you’re looking for may not be the
same one I know, and I don’t want to violate a family’s privacy. But I’ll be in a meeting on La Salle Street this morning; I can stop by to discuss the matter with Mr. Ranier.”

The woman finally decided that Mr. Ranier had ten minutes free at twelve-thirty. I gave her my name and hung up. Sitting at the piano, I crashed out chords, as if the sound could bury the wildness of my feelings. I never could remember whether I knew how ill my mother was the last six months of her life. Had she told me and I couldn’t—or didn’t wish to—comprehend it? Or had she decided to shelter me from the knowledge? Gabriella usually made me face bad news, but perhaps not the worst of all possible news, our final separation.

Why did I never work on my singing? It was one thing I could have done for her. I didn’t have a Voice, as Gabriella put it, but I had a serviceable contralto, and of course she insisted I acquire some musicianship. I stood up and began working on a few vocal stretches, then suddenly became wild with the desire to find my mother’s music, the old exercise books she had me learn from.

I burrowed through the hall closet for the trunk that held her books. I finally found it in the farthest corner, under a carton holding my old case files, a baseball bat, a box of clothes I no longer wore but couldn’t bring myself to give away…. I sat on the
closet floor in misery, with a sense of having buried her so deep I couldn’t find her.