Three Strikes You're Dead

Chapter 3

Logan Square... I’ve never completely gotten used to going back. At the start, just after I moved out, I wasn’t surprised that my stomach tightened up every time I rounded the corner and turned into what had for almost ten years been referred to by Norma and me as “our block.” But that feeling had never gone away, never diminished in all the times — it must be close to a hundred times now — that I’ve gone back to the apartment to pick Peter up for our times together on weekends. And it was no different on this second Saturday morning of the new year — the dryness in my throat, the perspiration even in freezing weather, the urge for one last Lucky Strike, even just a few puffs.

I climbed the eight concrete steps to the door of the brick two-flat and rang the upper bell with the typewritten N. MALEK under it. The buzzer sounded, unlocking the door, and I walked up the carpeted stairs, which squeaked in all the usual places. Norma was silhouetted in the doorway at the top, also as usual.

“Hello, Steve,” she said. “Peter’s been talking about the museum for three days now.”

“Glad to hear it,” I answered, thinking how good she looked in the brown housedress with white trim on the collar and sleeves, which I had never seen. “How’ve you been?”

“Fine, fine.” She nodded and brushed a strand of auburn hair from her cheek as she backed into the living room. “And my folks are well, too. Dad’s back at the plant on a regular schedule again; the doctor says his heart is strong, that he could easily live to be 90 despite the stroke.”

“I’m glad to hear that, I really am. He’s one heckuva guy. You said hello to both of them like I asked?”

“Just like you asked. And they said to wish you a happy new year. Oh, and Peter could hardly wait to get home to start playing with that Erector set you gave him. It’s his favorite Christmas present, by far. He really loves it. But now he says he has to have more girders, whatever they are.”

I laughed. “Yeah, I figured that was going to happen. I should have given him a larger set. Me, I had a nice quiet New Year’s Eve,” I volunteered.

“We did, too. But then, so does everybody back home, as I know you recall. We listened to the midnight countdown on the radio, Peter too, and we played ‘Twenty Questions’ and were all in bed by 1:00.”

“No surprise there. I did have one interesting thing happen myself last Saturday, which was New Year’s night,” I said, pausing for effect. “I had dinner with Helen Hayes.”

“Helen Hayes!” Norma’s brown eyes widened. “You and Helen Hayes? Only the two of you?”

“Yep, only us chickens. At Henrici’s. I’d gone to a movie, and I just ran into her there, after her play.”

She put her hands on her hips and shook her head in wonderment, smiling. “Steve Malek, you’ve been ‘just running into people’ all your life. You really are something, do you know that?”

I returned the smile. “It must be that essential brashness of mine, as somebody I know once termed it. But just so that you know, I was very much the gentleman.”

“How could you be anything else with Helen Hayes, for heaven’s sake? She’d even bring out the gentleman in that gorilla over at Lincoln Park Zoo — what’s his name again?”

“Bushman. And thanks a lot for the comparison.” Norma and I hadn’t had such a lighthearted bit of conversation since the divorce, and it made me feel good, very good. I almost asked her to have dinner with me sometime, but I felt this wasn’t the time, not yet. “Where’s Peter?”

“In his room — where else — with that Erector set. I’ll get him.”

“No, I will. I know the way, remember?” I went through a dark living room too filled with furniture and memories and down a corridor past our — Norma’s — bedroom to Peter’s room at the back of the flat. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor fastening a nut onto a bolt near the top of a three-foot tower of miniature steel beams. “Looks a lot like the Parachute Jump at Riverview,” I remarked approvingly from the doorway.

“Oh, hi, Dad,” he said over his shoulder. “This set is really super, except I’m running out of girders.” He stood up, grinning. He was short for his age, and he had Norma’s brown eyes, which was a lot better than getting stuck with my watery blue ones. His light brown hair, which stuck up something like Dagwood’s in the Blondie comic strip, was somewhere between hers and mine in color.

“Tell you what, you’ve got a birthday in April. We’ll make sure you get some then. Think you can wait that long?”

He nodded thoughtfully. “I guess so. Sure. Are we going to the museum now?”

“That’s the plan, my man. Get your cap and coat. We’ve got places to go and things to do.”

Peter loved riding the streetcars, so the day was off to a fine start. We needed to transfer twice to get to the Field Museum out on the Lakefront, and he kept his nose pressed against the window for the forty-five minutes it took: east on Diversey, transfer, then south on Clark and transfer again to the line that runs all the way out into Grant Park. “Dad, remember the time I spent the whole day with Grandpa on his streetcar?” he asked as we walked up the long flight of steps at the museum entrance.

“I sure do. He and I both figured you’d get bored silly riding for that long. But you fooled us.”

“Uh-huh. We went all the way down to the end of the Western Avenue line and back again a bunch of times, maybe four. And Grandpa even let me put up the trolley pole when we changed directions.”

“Yeah, I remember him telling me how good you were at that. Well, you ready to see some mummies now?” His sixth-grade class was studying Egypt, and Peter had gotten enthusiastic about the pyramids and the mummies and how people lived along the Nile thousands of years ago. The class had made one field trip to the museum already to see the Egypt exhibits, but they didn’t stay long enough to suit him. He could really get interested in his studies, unlike me when I was in school. He took after Norma in that respect.

“You have a good time in Indiana?” I asked him two hours later as we ate ham sandwiches with dill pickles and peach pie in the museum cafeteria.

“Uh-huh, it was okay,” he said with his mouth full. “The train ride was really neat. We took the Pennsylvania Railroad, and Grandpa and Grandma met us at Fort Wayne. On the way there, Mama and I had lunch in the diner, and they gave us these funny little silver dishes to wash our hands in before we ate.”

“Yeah, finger bowls. Didn’t drink out of yours, did you?”

He laughed. “Hey, that’s a good joke, Dad. Mama had told me what they were for.”

“Sure, she would have. Are you taking good care of your Mama?” This was a question I asked each time we were together.

His expression now serious, Peter nodded. “I just wish she didn’t have to work so hard. I think I’m the only one in our class whose mom works.”

“Well, she has a pretty important job at the bank,” I reminded him. “Is she home when you get back from school?”

“Most of the time. But she has to work on Saturdays, you know. She waits until you come to pick me up, then she leaves.” I knew; she had worked Saturdays at the bank even when we were together.

“Is she still seeing Mr. Baer?” This was a question I rarely asked him.

“Uh-huh,” he said, concentrating on his sandwich.

Then a question I had never asked: “Do you like him?”

“He’s okay, I guess,” Peter responded flatly, not looking at me. “He drives that neat car I told you about, that red Packard roadster.”

I felt guilty about grilling my own son, but unlike past occasions, I couldn’t seem to stop. “Where do he and your Mama go?”

“Movies, restaurants, stuff like that, I think.”

“And a sitter comes to stay with you then?”

He made a face. “Yeah. Usually Mrs. MacAfee, you don’t know her. She moved in next door a few months ago. She’s fat and she stinks, like she doesn’t take baths or something. I’m really old enough to stay at home now, Dad. I don’t need somebody there.”

“I think you’re right about that — I’ll talk to your Mama. It sounds as if she really likes Mr. Baer.”

He shrugged. “I guess so. After we eat, can we go and see the stuffed elephants and the dinosaur skeletons?”

Norma had been seeing Martin Baer for several months. I first heard about him from Peter just after Baer had taken both of them on out to Brookfield Zoo in the suburbs in his red Packard. All that I was able to learn from him at the time was that Baer used cologne (“He smells sort of like a Christmas tree”) and owned a men’s clothing store in the Lincoln-Belmont-Ashland shopping district on the Northwest Side.

I walked around that area a week or so later and spotted a fire engine-red Packard cabriolet parked at the curb in front of a shop, “Martin’s Haberdashery & Fine Men’s Footwear.” I went in, pretending to browse for a necktie, and saw him across the room talking to a customer. I figured it was Baer even before I heard one of the sales clerks call him by name. His appearance screamed retailing prosperity. He had black hair slicked down and parted in the center and a thin moustache, neatly trimmed, and he wore a double-breasted gray herringbone suit that was a twin to the one in the window that cost forty-four bucks. I had to concede this was a good-looking specimen, about six feet, lean, and with a profile that would have stacked up well against the great Barrymore himself.

I never went back to the store, of course, but a few times after that when I stopped by to pick up Peter, I asked Norma what she did with her free time. Her answers were always short and vague, like “Oh, once in a while, I’ll go to a movie.” I never let on that I knew about Baer.

It was almost 3:30, with light snow falling in the near-darkness, when we left the museum. I was ready to collapse, but Peter seemed to possess endless energy. “Can we stop by Field’s toy department, Dad?” he asked in a plaintive tone.

We caught a streetcar within two minutes and were on State Street well before the big store’s closing time. If Marshall Field’s didn’t have the largest selection of toys in the world, I couldn’t begin to guess who did. The highlight of all my Christmases as a boy was the whole family’s annual pilgrimage to the toy department in that big and wonderful building. I looked forward to it for weeks, even though my parents never had the money to get me what I wanted, variously an Ives mechanical train, a Radio Flyer wagon, and a Schwinn bicycle. But that did not diminish my excitement that time of year. Besides, none of the other boys in the neighborhood ever got much more than we did. If any of us were deprived, we weren’t aware of it.

Even now, a full generation beyond my own childhood and in the backwash of another holiday season, the toy department worked its special magic on me. It stretched into room upon room filled with bicycles and tricycles, Shirley Temple dolls and doll houses, Lincoln Logs and Tinker Toys, scooters and wagons, Chinese Checkers and chemistry sets, and of course trains — but now the brands were Lionel and American Flyer.

With Peter leading the way we wound up, hardly to my surprise, in a corner where an Erector display, including a Ferris wheel and a double-arch bridge, gave testimony to what could be fabricated by aspiring civil engineers. “Aren’t these swell, Dad?” he said, eyes wide as he studied the constructions. “I just want to stay a minute and see how they’re built, okay?”

“May I be of help to you gentlemen?” a grandfatherly sales clerk asked, peering over dark-rimmed glasses perched halfway down his nose.

“Indeed you may, sir,” I answered. “My colleague here and I are in dire need of some extra parts for our Erector set — girders, nuts, bolts, the works. Have we by chance come to the right place?”

He nodded and winked, moving to a shelf behind him, and Peter smiled up at me.