“Is that why you don’t have any LaSalle Street lawyers left, Mr. Merton? Are they all in the Chicago River wearing cement booties?”
I’d been amazed at the time that I could utter those words without my voice quavering, but I’d had to clutch my legal pad to control the trembling in my hands. Even now, the memory of the Hammer’s venom could keep me from sleeping. Maybe he could have intimidated Rivers, at that.
I sat up. If I wasn’t going to sleep, I might as well get going. I let Peppy out the back door and stood on the small porch, stretching my ham-strings and shoulders, while my stovetop espresso maker heated up.
The midsummer sky was already a deep blue. I drank a coffee, collected Mitch from Mr. Contreras’s kitchen—he’d been whining behind the door, indignant at being locked inside while Peppy got to play—and ran the dogs to the lake. The water was still so cold, I gasped when I jumped in, but I swam with them to the first buoy. Maybe if I got my blood flowing fast enough, I’d feel as though I’d spent eight hours asleep.
It didn’t exactly work: I was still gritty-eyed and grumpy as I drove south. But I reached the University of Chicago library just as the doors opened. I’d picked up a cappuccino and a croissant at one of the little neighborhood coffee bars and, against all library etiquette, smuggled them into the microform room.
I pulled reels for all the major Chicago newspapers. In 1967, there had been eight dailies, morning and evening editions of four different papers. I started with the Daily News, my dad’s paper. He liked Royko.
January 25, 1967, the day before the big snow. It’s strange how little you remember of events you lived through yourself. Scrolling through the pages, I wasn’t surprised that I didn’t know the national news: LBJ’s war budget; the student protests at Berkeley, which California governor Reagan denounced as a Communist plot against America; or even newly elected Senator Charles Percy’s wife’s miniskirt. I’d been in fifth grade, and that stuff sailed completely past me.
It was the local news that surprised me. I’d completely forgotten the tornadoes that swept the South Side the day before the big snow, the big storms Rose Hebert had mentioned.
The winds had blown over a half-constructed building at Eighty-seventh and Stony, three miles from my childhood home. A cop had been killed at the scene. I stared at photos of the rubble. Cinder blocks filled the streets, looking like Legos thrown on the living-room floor by a bad-tempered child. A VW bug was buried up to its windows in the debris. And then, the next day, twenty-six inches of snow fell, covering the debris, the mills, the roads, all of Chicago, burying the living as well as the dead.
My memory of the storm wasn’t the tornadoes, nor even the dead cop—although every cop’s death was an occasion of anxiety for my mother and me—but Gabriella waiting outside for me when school ended. My mother never walked me home from school, and I was scared when I saw her, scared that something had happened to my dad.
That she was worried about the snow seemed funny to me. A blizzard blowing five-and even ten-foot drifts was exhilarating, a game, not cause for alarm. But after a year of riots and protests, where she had sat up night after night waiting for Tony to come home, me sometimes watching from the top of the attic stairs, sometimes joining her at the kitchen table, whenever she did something out of the ordinary I thought first of my father.
“Tu e Bernardo, spericolati e testardi tutti e dui voi!” she said to me in Italian, seizing my mittened hand. “Both of you reckless and head-strong! If I don’t stop you, you will get lost in this blizzard. You will do something impossibly dangerous that will cost you your life and forever break my heart.”
“I’m not a baby! Don’t treat me like one in front of my friends.” I shouted at her in English, yanking my hand away.
It upset her when I didn’t answer in Italian. In my anger, I wanted to hurt her feelings. The truth was, I’d been planning on finding Boom-Boom—Bernardo—who went to Catholic school. We wanted to see if the Calumet River had frozen enough for skating. Being caught out made me sullen, even more so when Gabriella made me play the piano for an hour when we got home.