Hardball

20

PETRA SHOWED UP THE NEXT MORNING JUST AS I WAS returning from the lake with the dogs. She’d come to collect her Pathfinder, but when she saw us she climbed out of it and jogged over. The dogs raced to her, fawning and barking, covering her white cargo pants with water and sand. She was as bright as ever, showing no after-effects of her evening with Spumante.

“You know, we could look at that trunk of yours before I go to work,” she said, playing with Mitch’s ears.

“What’s with you and my trunk?” I demanded. “Do you think there are going to be false teeth or rubies or something?”

She grinned at me. “I don’t know. I guess since coming to Chicago, I’ve gotten more interested in my family’s history. I mean, my mom’s family, they’ve been in the Kansas City area for centuries. One of her ancestors was a colonel in the Confederate Army, and another came out to Kansas with the anti-slavery pioneers in the 1850s, so I grew up on all her stories. And her family is, well, so WASPy that Dad’s story was always kind of looked down on. You know, Polish meatpackers. Now I want to know more about the Warshawskis. They seem more interesting since I’ve been in their city, and met you and so on.”

I’d taken her to look at the bungalow on Fairfield Avenue where my grandparents lived when they moved from Back of the Yards. Now Petra wanted to see the house on the city’s Northwest Side, where Grandma Warshawski moved after the ’sixty-six riots, and the tenement in the stockyard district where my dad grew up and her own father had been born.

She followed me up the stairs, energetically planning an outing for the end of the workday that would include Back of the Yards, my childhood home in South Chicago, and Norridge Park, where our grandmother lived out her old age.

“Petra, darling, calm down. How about one house at a time, being as how just getting from Norridge Park to South Chicago will take us a couple of hours?”

She gave her self-mocking pout. “Sorry! Mom always says I take off like a rocket ship when everyone else is still riding in buggies. Let’s go see Back of the Yards and your house today. We can go to Norridge Park tomorrow.”

“Or even on the weekend, my little Saturn booster. I have plans for tomorrow night.”

I put my stove-top espresso maker on to heat, asking my cousin to turn it off when the pressure built up, while I rinsed sand out of my hair and off my skin. When I returned to the kitchen, there was espresso all over the stove and floor and no sign of my cousin. I turned off the flame, cursing loudly, and began mopping up coffee.

“Oh! Sorry!” Petra suddenly appeared in the doorway. “I didn’t know how long it would take, so I thought I’d just try to find your trunk.”

“Damn it, Petra, why couldn’t you stay in here long enough to turn off the stove?”

“I said I was sorry!”

“That doesn’t solve the problem. I don’t want you helping yourself to my home, especially not when you don’t do a very simple task that would have kept this explosion from happening!”

“I’ll clean it up while you get dressed,” she muttered.

I’d used the towel I’d dried off with after my shower to soak up the worst of the mess. I put it in her arms, wet grounds and all, and stalked back to the bathroom to rinse coffee from my hands. When I returned to the kitchen dressed for work, Petra was standing in front of the stove, anxiously monitoring my little espresso pot. The floor was washed and the bath towel I’d dumped on her was hanging on the porch railing outside my back door.

She looked at me with an expression so much like Mitch’s after he’s been caught digging up the backyard that I couldn’t help laughing.

Her own face relaxed into a smile. “Gosh, Vic, do you know how scary you look when you get mad? I hope I’m doing your coffee thingy the right way.”

I turned the flame off as the pot started to burble, and offered to lend her some clothes; her own were stained with coffee, both from the towel and her energy in diving in to clean up the kitchen. She took a T-shirt, and trailed after me into the living room.

I felt my temper rise again when I saw that she’d been rooting through my big walk-in closet. She’d pulled out my winter boots and my bike to get at the trunk, which stood open. She’d ripped apart the protective tissue in which I’d wrapped my mother’s velvet concert gown. The dress itself was flung over my armchair so that a sleeve and the skirt were on the floor; my dad’s dress jacket lay open on the piano bench.

“I guess I’m so used to living with my sisters and my roomie, I forgot not everyone wants to share,” Petra said in a small voice after a glance at my face.

“It’s not about sharing, it’s about consideration, empathy.” I picked up the evening gown and started to fold it back into the sheets of tissue, my hands shaking. “Do you know how many hours of lessons my mother gave so that she could buy this dress? How many evenings we ate pasta without sauce?

“Do you know what it’s like to live with so little that each possession has to be cared for and cherished? My mother started to rebuild her career in this gown. After each performance, I helped her hang it up, with dried apples and cloves to keep moths out of it. She could mend little tears in it, but, if it had been badly damaged, she couldn’t have afforded another. My mother died when I was sixteen. I don’t have much left to me that has her hands on it, her touch. I don’t want you near this trunk or her clothes.”

“I’m sorry, Vic. I was thinking about your dad, and you wanting to find something to show what he was doing in 1966. I didn’t think how this would look.”

I took a breath and tried to steady my voice. “I think it would be a good idea if you left now.”

“But aren’t you going to look at your dad’s stuff?” she asked as I started to fold Tony’s jacket.

“By myself. When I feel up to it. I’m late now for a meeting with a client.” I tried to find a lighter note. “Doesn’t the Chicago Strangler expect you to show up some time? Even if you were yesterday’s hero, you could be today’s goat. Campaigns aren’t forgiving places.”

She started to explain how relaxed her work atmosphere was. “… And, anyway, because Brian’s dad and my dad were, like, homeys, Brian knows that family comes first.”

“Brian told you to come look at my dad’s dress uniform because he and Peter grew up together?”

She turned red. “No, of course not. I just meant… Oh, never mind. I’ll see you tonight, okay? We can go look at Back of the Yards!”

I looked at her wearily. “I’ve had enough family for today, Petra. I’ll call you when I feel up to spending an evening with you.”

“I cleaned up your kitchen, I apologized for taking out your mom’s dress, I think you could show some kind of response.”

“Do you?” I was kneeling by the trunk to lay my mother’s gown inside but turned to look at Petra. “My response is that you are a wonderful young woman with a lot of energy and goodwill, but you’ve lived your whole life in a privileged bubble. Come back and see me when you’ve thought through how you’d feel if your mother was dead and your only memento of her was treated like… like a towel for mopping up coffee.”

She stared down at me, her face a mix of surprise and anger. Her cellphone rang. She pulled it from her shirt pocket, looked at it, looked at me, and bolted from my living room. I heard her cluntering down the stairs in her heavy shoes, the sound drowning her voice as she answered her phone.

I sat for a time on the floor, my mother’s dress still in my lap. I smoothed the tissue, my throat tight, remembering how Gabriella looked onstage at the old Athenaeum Theatre, her only major recital before she became too weak to perform. She had been luminous in this gown, and her voice had filled the theater.

I looked at my watch. I had about an hour to get downtown. Instead of replacing the gown and my dad’s dress uniform jacket, I started rummaging through the trunk myself. My mother’s music, a box of my old school report cards, my birth certificate, my parents’ marriage license, my mother’s naturalization papers.

Another thin box held reel-to-reel tapes. My mother had recorded herself when she began training seriously again. She went to a professional coach but could afford only a single session a month. Mr. Fortieri, the instrument maker, had a Pioneer recorder, a beautiful piece of machinery, that he let my mother borrow. It weighed a ton, and I remembered helping her carry it home on the train.

Mr. Fortieri lived on the Northwest Side, and it was a day trip for us to go there and back: the Illinois Central downtown, the Ravens-wood El to Foster, and then the long bus ride across Foster to Harlem, where Mr. Fortieri lived in an old Italian enclave. While he and my mother discussed music in Italian, I was given a quarter to buy gelato or a cookie at Umbria’s on the corner.

The day he decided to lend my mother his machine, she demurred twice, as good manners dictated, but I knew she had been subtly hinting at her need for it for several months. I helped her wrap it in a blanket. We carried it between us, as we transferred from bus to El to train. At home, she let me and one of my girlfriends record a play we’d written for school, but Boom-Boom wasn’t allowed near it. Once or twice, I remember my father using it, too, although, like me, he was just goofing around. For my mother, it was a serious work tool.

I put the tapes to one side. If I could find a place that would transfer them onto CDs for me, I could listen to her again. I owed Petra a little consideration for making me open the trunk. I might have gone the next forty years without remembering I had these tapes.

All I found in my father’s handwriting was a few love notes to my mother and a letter he’d written me when I graduated from college. I sat back on my heels to read it.

You know how proud I am of you, the first person in our family ever to go to college. I wish your mother was here. I wish that every day, but most of all on this day. You know she saved her nickels and quarters from all those piano lessons so you could have this chance, and you’ve made the most of it. We’re so proud.

Tori, everything you do makes me proud to be your dad. But you need to watch that hot temper of yours. I see so much of it on the streets, and even in our own family. People let their tempers get the best of them, and one bad second can change your life forever in a direction you don’t want to go. I wish I could say there’s nothing in my life I regret, but I’ve made some choices, too, that I have to live with. You’re starting out now with everything clean and shiny and waiting for you. I want it always to be that way for you.

Love, Dad

I had forgotten the letter. I read it through several times, missing him, missing the love that he and my mother surrounded me with. I thought with regret, too, of the many times I let my temper get the best of me, turning difficult situations into impossible ones. Even yesterday, talking to Arnie Coleman. Or this morning, with Petra. I could get so much better a response from people if I stopped shooting first. Maybe Mr. Contreras was right. Maybe I did need to be more like Petra. I thought it over. Maybe I did. But I couldn’t move myself into sanctity. I was still furious with her for raiding the trunk to begin with.

I put the letter into my briefcase so I could take it downtown and get it framed. As I put it away, I wondered what my good-natured, peaceable father had ever done that he regretted enough to mention in this letter. I couldn’t bear the notion that it had to do with Steve Sawyer.

I looked quickly through a cardboard box that held my father’s memorabilia. I had kept his citation for bravery from an armed robbery he’d stopped in 1962, his wedding ring, and a few other odds and ends. There was also a baseball. I held it for a moment. Like Mr. Contreras and his wife’s false teeth, I hadn’t remembered putting it away. Funny, my dad’s game had been Chicago slow-pitch. I didn’t think he’d ever even played hardball. I realized as I turned the ball over in my hands it was autographed by Nellie Fox. That made it even stranger, because Fox had played for the Sox, and my dad had been a Cubs fan.

South Side still means White Sox. When Tony was young, you could be beaten to a pulp for showing Cubs paraphernalia south of Madison Street. Comiskey Park was a few blocks from the stockyards where my dad grew up. His high school buddies were all Sox fans. Only Tony Warshawski and his brother Bernie, sick of the stench of blood and burning carcasses, decided to risk their lives by taking the El up to Wrigley Field.

So why had Tony kept a Sox ball? It was weather-beaten, with holes in the horsehide. Maybe he’d used it for target practice, although the holes were too small for bullets.

I jumped as I heard footsteps in my entryway, and then a man’s voice calling to ask if anyone was home. Petra had left my front door open on her way out, and Jake Thibaut, wandering down to check his mail, had noticed. I got to my feet, looking guiltily at my watch. I’d been mooning over family mementos far too long.

“What are those old reel-to-reels?” Thibaut pointed at the faded Scotch boxes on the floor.

“My mother’s old tapes. She was a singer who was trying to reclaim her voice after twenty years of breathing iron dust. I was hoping to find a place that would put them on a CD. But, then, I don’t know, my mother is dead. Maybe her voice won’t sound as wonderful as I remember it. Maybe I should just let these lay.”

“Iron dust?” Thibaut asked doubtfully.

“I grew up down by the old mills.” I looked at my watch again, and bent to pick up the tapes and the Nellie Fox ball.

“Give me the tapes. I have a friend with a studio. Even if you’ve romanticized your mother’s voice, don’t you want to hear it again?”

Of course I did. He took the tapes while I stuffed the ball into my briefcase with my papers and Tony’s letter. I tried to curb my impatience while Jake ambled to the hall, talking about the better quality of sound you got with some of the old eight-tracks than with digital equipment. He was helping me. I didn’t need to be belligerent over a few more minutes’ delay. I could curb my pit bull personality for three more minutes.

I tried to flash a Petra-type smile of thanks, with an apology for needing to run, and tore down the stairs, running to Roscoe to flag a cab.