Chapter 9 #2
The docent started talking. He was good.
He had the voice of a man who had said the same sentences ten thousand times but still liked saying them.
He told us about Daniel Burnham. About the 1871 fire and the city that rose out of the char.
About the Wrigley Building with its clock tower, the Tribune Tower with its fragments of the Parthenon and the Alamo and the Great Wall set into the stone, the Marina City corn-cob towers built in 1964 so that people could live and work and park their cars in the same vertical mile.
Serafina stood at the rail.
She had her hands on it. Her hair was loose today and the river wind came up the channel and lifted it off her shoulders in slow dark ribbons, and the sun caught the gold chain at her throat and she was not listening to the docent the way a tourist listens.
She was listening the way a student listens.
We passed under the Michigan Avenue bridge. Came out into the stretch where the river opens and the canyon of the Loop rises on both sides and the buildings do the thing they do—the stepped setbacks, the Art Deco crowns, the grid that Burnham dreamed and the city built.
She turned to me.
The wind moved her hair across her mouth and she did not push it away.
“Palermo was layered—organic,” she said. “This city was planned. A grand vision. There’s beauty in it.”
It was a compliment. She had paid it to my city.
Something in my chest caught.
I found my voice.
“Yeah,” I said. “You’re so right.”
She looked back out at the water. Her shoulder touched my shoulder at the railing. Neither of us moved.
The docent was talking about the Merchandise Mart. I could not have repeated a word of it.
Al’s #1 Italian Beef on Taylor Street had a painted sign out front that had not been repainted since I was in high school.
The red letters were faded to pink at the top edges.
The line inside was six deep at the counter and the guy at the register was wearing a paper hat and yelling at the guy at the slicer and the guy at the slicer was yelling back and both of them were smiling while they yelled.
Serafina stopped on the sidewalk.
“Marco.”
“Yes.”
“This is a sandwich restaurant.”
“It’s an Italian beef restaurant.”
“Italian— “
“Trust me.”
“I do not. You changed my perception of pancakes. I’m now operating without a safety net.”
I laughed. I hadn’t expected to. It came out of me in a way that laughs used to when I was nineteen and before I’d decided how Marco Caruso was supposed to laugh in public.
I got her to the counter. Ordered two. Dipped, hot, sweet and hot peppers both.
The guy at the slicer pulled a handful of beef off the sheet of paper he’d been draping it onto, dunked it in a pan of jus so dark it looked like espresso, piled it on a white roll, and passed it across the counter in wax paper that was already transparent with grease by the time it reached my hand.
There was nowhere to sit. That was the point. Al’s had a counter along the wall and you stood at it and you leaned over the counter at a forty-five-degree angle which was called the Italian stance and which existed because if you did not lean over, the sandwich would empty itself into your shoes.
I demonstrated. Passed her a sandwich. Passed her a wad of napkins the size of a small paperback.
“Bite. Lean. Don’t stand up straight or you die.”
She looked at the sandwich in her hand. Looked at me. Looked at the sandwich.
She bit.
Her eyes closed.
A string of hot giardiniera slid out of the end of the roll and landed on the wax paper in a small green-and-red heap.
She chewed. I watched her face go through three distinct expressions in the space of ten seconds: mild horror, then analytical calculation, then something that was not quite surrender but was adjacent.
She swallowed. Dabbed her mouth with the napkin. Looked at me with the flat, dry gaze I was learning to love.
“This is a crime,” she said.
I laughed so hard I nearly inhaled a pepper.
She took a second bite. Chewed. Swallowed.
“But I understand why you commit it.”
“Thank you.”
“It is good. It is criminally good. My grandmother would strike me with a wooden spoon.”
“She’d get over it.”
“She would not. She is very committed. She is also dead, which gives her the advantage.”
I stopped laughing. Not because it wasn’t funny, but because she had said it without flinching, and the ruined Bialetti was still on the nightstand upstairs in a place I had been pretending not to keep thinking about.
She saw my face.
“Don’t,” she said. Quiet. “It’s okay to make her a joke sometimes. She would prefer that to being sad about.”
“Okay.”
“Eat.”
I ate.
We finished standing up. The giardiniera had stained the wax paper in streaks of red oil that would not come out of my shirt if they got there, and somehow neither of us was wearing it.
She balled her napkins and threw them into the trash with a little underhand flick that was the first athletic gesture I had ever seen her make.
She licked her thumb. Caught me watching. Raised one eyebrow.
“Walk,” I said.
We walked.
Taylor Street in the middle of a weekday is a street that has been getting quieter for a generation.
There used to be twenty-seven Italian groceries on this stretch.
Now there are two. Conte di Savoia on one corner still, with its window full of bomboloni and dried salumi and hundred-dollar olive oil in dark bottles.
A shuttered bakery three doors down, the murals on the brick above it fading—Saint Anthony, Saint Lucy holding her eyes on a plate, a cracked portrait of Padre Pio with his hands lifted in something that might have been blessing or might have been a shrug.
“Our Lady of Pompeii is around the corner,” I said. “My cousins Maria and Tony got married there in 1998. The reception was at this place—“ I pointed. “—that used to be a social club. It’s a Chase bank now.”
“Progress.”
“Yeah.”
“Tell me about your grandfather.”
I looked at her. She was looking at the murals. Her hand was in her jacket pocket.
“Salvatore,” I said. “He came through here in ‘47. Off a boat in New York, a train to Chicago, a cousin with a spare bed on Aberdeen. He was seventeen. He spoke six words of English and most likely four of them were wrong. He opened the restaurant in ‘74 because he’d always wanted his wife to have a business. She ran the kitchen until 1989. Her ragù is still on the menu. Rosa learned it from her. Rosa will kill me if I ever try to change it.”
“What was her name?”
“Lucia.”
“It is layered,” she said. “Your city is also layered. I was wrong.”
“No. You were right. It’s planned. The layers are just—hidden under the grid.”
“Mmm.”
We walked past the Hull House plaque. I didn’t explain it. She read it without stopping. I felt her reading it—the slight slow of her pace, the small turn of her head—and then she was beside me again and her hand came out of her pocket and slid into mine.
She did not look at me.
Her fingers were cool. They laced through mine and settled there with quiet certainty. I felt the faint pulse at the base of her thumb.
She did not let go.
Neither did I.
We walked north along the lakefront because she asked. The path along Lake Shore was busy with cyclists and joggers and a man on rollerblades who was too old for rollerblades and knew it and did not care. The water was a deep, serious blue that remembered it was an inland sea.
She stopped at the rocks near Oak Street.
“Can I touch it?”
“Okay.”
She climbed down. Not gracefully—the limestone was uneven, and her flats were not made for this—and I held her elbow and she let me and she crouched at the edge and put her fingers in the water.
“Oh,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“It‘s fresh. I forgot. You never have this.”
“Never.”
“In Sicily the water is salt and the salt is in your hair and your skin and your food and it is the taste of the whole island.” She took her fingers out of the lake and touched them to her lips. “This tastes like nothing. It tastes like water. It is —“
“Strange.”
“Yes.”
“I know.”
She looked up at me. The wind off the lake was pulling her hair across her face and the late sun was behind me and throwing my shadow across the water and she was crouched on the rocks in Chicago with her fingers wet from a lake her grandmother had never seen, and something in my chest did the gear-catching thing for the second time in a day.
I pulled her up by the elbow. We walked to Cindy’s.
The Chicago Athletic Association was a limestone pile on Michigan Avenue that used to be a men’s club and was now a hotel, and the thirteenth floor was the kind of place where the ma?tre d’ was paid to remember a face.
He remembered mine. He walked us to the east corner without asking, past the pool tables and the long bar and the scatter of early-evening drinkers, to a glass-walled corner that faced Millennium Park and the lake beyond it, and he pulled out her chair and left without comment.
Serafina sat. Looked out.
The sun was behind us. The park was below—the Bean catching light, the small moving figures of tourists, the green lawn of the Pritzker Pavilion rolling to the shell of the stage. Beyond the park, the lake. Beyond the lake, nothing—just water going to the horizon the way oceans do.
The wine came. A Nebbiolo. I had ordered it at the door because I had ordered it at the door with her in mind an hour ago, and the sommelier poured and left and we were alone in a corner thirteen floors above the city with the water going dark in slow degrees.
The sun dropped.