Chicago by Brian Doyle Read Free Book Online Page B

nothing but coffee and honey and olives, if Edward’s sure sense of smell was to be believed.
    â€œYou see his line of thinking here, and there is a lot to be said for his calculations,” said Mr Pawlowsky, on a particularly starry night on the roof in early December. “But there are, of course, many other explanations for her habits. She could be, for example, a composer, or a novelist, or an accountant, or a deft and thorough robber of banks, for which she needs to carefully scout the premises and behavioral patterns of the employees, and scour over vast troves of architectural drawings and geological surveys and city plumbing and piping maps. That could be. Or she could be some sort of spiritual visionary, the leader of a small sect of some sort, devoted particularly to maps as forms of prayer, along with the usual predilection to music that most religions evince, playing on the natural rhythms of the heart. That could also be. Or indeed she could be working for the city in some capacity, or perhaps she is the bookkeeper for a business entity of some sort, from gyro shop to music store to the reading of palms and casting of horoscopes. The possibilities are as endless as Miss Elminides’ range of skills and talents, which is remarkable for one so young.”
    This line of talk led to a discussion of her age. Mr Pawlowsky put her in her late twenties, given the translucence of her skin and the way she walked with the effortless springing graceful step of a young deer, but Edward was sure she was in her late thirties, her youthful appearance and carriage being more a matter of admirable sleep patterns, balanced diet and living habits, and the luck of the draw in the matter of heritage and ancestry. I hadn’t the slightest idea, having had no experience at all then in gauging the age of women; and later this was to prove a skill I never could acquire; in the years since my time in Chicago I have regularly embarrassed myself and others in underestimating advanced age and overestimating that which is less so; never to the point of mortification, thankfully, but occasionally to hilarity, and once to tears.
    What I remember best about that December night on the roof, though, was not the interesting and essentially detective discussion about Miss Elminides, but my first intimation that she loomed large in Mr Pawlowsky’s affections, more than he was willing to admit, and more, perhaps, than he knew. As that night wore on, and Edward made sure to draw our attention to the wonderfully clear outlines of the constellations Andromeda and Pegasus (they share the star Alpheratz, as he noted), Mr Pawlowsky, perhaps unbuttoned somewhat by the astonishing clarity of the stars, spoke ever more warmly about Miss Elminides, about her grace and kindness, her unassuming but attentive authority with the building, her meticulously honest handling of taxes and city inspectors, her lack of false or tinny morality about the businessmen who lived two by two on the second floor or the tailor and the detective who lived together in 2B, her quiet extension of credit occasionally to trustworthy residents who were caught short for one reason or another, her adamant refusal to pay nominal protection fees to local ruffians despite the very real possibility of material or physical assault, her smiling willingness to allow Mrs Manfredi’s weekly bakery to operate illegally in the basement once a week, her careful management of her apartment (he had never had to repair or replace anything in her rooms, in the six or ten years she had lived there), and various other adulatory remarks. Finally, along about midnight, he stopped, perhaps having sensed that he was revealing more than he wanted to, and we went off to our rooms. The next day, though, Edward pointed out that Andromeda, the loveliest of young women in ancient Greek lore, was saved from a monster’s maw by Perseus, a man of the sea.
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    A week