On a summer day, with the lake in the background and the trees around the fake-Gothic buildings a greeny gold, the campus itself didn’t look quite real. I walked down to the water, tempted to join the students who were lounging on the beach behind the engineering building and lose myself in the dreamworld.
My cellphone rang: Darraugh’s personal assistant. I sighed and returned to reality, and told Caroline that Darraugh would have to start a new search, that I’d give him full details from a landline. The call broke my mood. I knew it was time to devote myself to Miss Ella and her son. Prickly, unpleasant woman, with her grim forty-year-old past, I didn’t want to touch her problems. But I’d agreed to work for her, and that meant she deserved my best efforts, no matter what I thought.
I could hear my mother standing behind me while I practiced the piano: “Yes, I know you resent this, Victoria, but you make it harder for yourself by refusing to put your best work into it. Engage with the music. It needs you, even if you don’t think you need it.”
I pulled back onto Lake Shore Drive, whipping around the curves, ignoring the lake. I exited downtown and crossed the Loop to pick up the southbound Dan Ryan Expressway. I hate the Ryan, not just because of the traffic, although there isn’t an hour of the night or day when all fourteen lanes aren’t heavy with trucks and cars. I hate the way it was built, and everything about how it got built.
The road is dug deep into the earth. All you see as you drive are high concrete walls. They’re full of cracks with ragweed and crabgrass poking through. If you look up, you get a glimpse of scraggly trees and the occasional run-down tire warehouse or apartment building. Since money for the expressway came from the cronyism in the Democratic machine, they called it Dan Ryan, after the chairman of the Cook County Board who anted up the bucks for it in 1960.
When I left the Ryan at Seventy-first Street, I got an even more depressing look at reality, if that’s what it was. Too many of the houses in West Englewood leaned drunkenly away from their foundations. Too many of them had sheets or cardboard filling in for missing windowpanes, and most of the doors would give way to a brisk kick. Vacant lots, filled with urban flotsam and overgrown with weeds, were almost as common as the houses. The only food stores were the kind that prey on the urban poor, hiding a little high-priced, rotting produce behind the shelves of liquor and chips.
Few people were on the streets. I passed a woman clutching an overgrown toddler under one arm, a plastic shopping bag under the other. A couple of men perched on the curb at the corner of Ashland were passing a paper bag from hand to hand. A radio on the sidewalk behind them blared loudly enough to shake my Mustang while I waited for the light to change.
When I pulled up across the street from Fit for Your Hoof, I sat for a minute, trying to dispel the depression I’d let build in me during the drive. A man was sweeping the sidewalk, talking loudly to himself. When he realized I was watching the store, he shook his broom at me, yelling something unintelligible, before scooting backward, crab-like, into the shop. He almost collided with a woman carrying a scuffed pair of white nurse’s shoes by the heels who was leaving the shop, but he circled around her in the nick of time.
I stopped to look in the window, where Rivers was displaying goods to “Help your feet Feel pretty neat When they hit that concrete.” Toe pads, arch supports, gel inserts. Above them hung a clotheslineful of dog leashes and collars, and, on the shelves at the back, bright headbands, sashes, handbags, and even a little cache of toys. The tidy, cheery window did its own work for change in a hard world.
When I opened the door, I found myself in a thicket of leather. Ropes hanging from the ceiling displayed more purses, briefcases, harnesses, berets, even work boots and cowboy boots. Behind the ropes, a radio was tuned to Talk of the Nation, and I could hear the whine of a belt sander. When I pushed the ropes apart, a steam whistle blew, and a voice cried, “Welcome to Chicago.”
I stopped, startled. Two men in front of a chessboard looked up at me and laughed. The counter was behind them. A man working on a pair of shoes, his back to the room, didn’t turn around but kept sanding the edges on a new heel. I didn’t see the man who’d flourished his broom at me.
“Whistle always makes people jump when they don’t know it’s coming,” one of the chess players said. He was a balding man with a paunch that pressed against an old T-shirt with the Machinists Union logo on it.
“You lost?” His partner was skinnier and older, with skin the color of dusty ebony.
“Often. I’m looking for Curtis Rivers.”
The man behind the counter picked up the second shoe, still not looking at me.
“IRS or paternity suit?” the first chess player said. The savage tone underlying the jokey comment was directed at me, not the man at the belt sander. What are you doing down here, anyway?