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.