“Don’t you have any friends or relatives to help you out? What about the baby’s father?”
“Oh, he be trying to find us a place,” she said listlessly. “But he can’t get no job. And my mother, we used to stay with her, but she had to go into the hospital, now it look like she going to be sick a long time and she can’t keep up on her rent.”
I looked around the room. Dozens of people were waiting ahead of me. Most of them had my neighbor’s dragged-out look, bodies stooped over from too much shame. Those who didn’t were pugnacious, waiting to take on a system they couldn’t possibly beat. Elena’s needs—my needs—could certainly take a far backseat to their demands for emergency shelter. Before I took off I asked if Todd and she would like some breakfast—I was going over to the Burger King to get something.
“They don’t let you eat in here, but Todd could maybe go with you and get something.”
Todd showed a great disinclination to be separated from his mother, even to get some food. Finally I left him whimpering at her side, went to the Burger King, got a dozen breakfast buns with eggs and wrapped the lot in a plastic bag to conceal the fact that it was food. I handed it to the woman and left as fast as I could. My skin was still trembling.
3
Not St. Peter
The kinds of places Elena could afford didn’t seem to advertise in the papers. The only residential hotels listed in the classifieds were in Lincoln Park and started at a hundred a week. Elena had paid seventy-five a month for her little room at the Indiana Arms.
I spent four hours futilely pounding the pavements. I combed the Near South Side, covering Cermak Road between Indiana and Halsted. A century ago it housed the Fields, the Searses, and the Armours. When they moved to the North Shore the area collapsed rapidly. Today it consists of vacant lots, auto dealers, public housing, and the occasional SRO. A few years ago someone decided to restore a blockful of the original mansions. They stand like a macabre ghost town, empty opulent shells in the midst of the decay that permeates the neighborhood.
The stilts of the Dan Ryan L running overhead made me feel tiny and useless as I went door to door, asking drunk or indifferent supers about a room for my aunt. I vaguely remembered reading about all the SRO’s that came down when Presidential Towers went up, but somehow the impact this had on the street hadn’t hit me before. There just wasn’t housing available for people with Elena’s limited means. The hotels I did find were all full— and victims of last night’s fire, savvier than me, had been there at dawn renting the few rooms available. I realized that the fourth time a blowsy manager said, “Sorry, if you’d gotten here first thing this morning when we had something …”
At three I called off the search. Panicked at the prospect of housing Elena for some indefinite future, I drove into my Loop office to call my uncle Peter. It was a decision I could make only while panicked.
Peter was the first member of my family to make something substantial of his life. Maybe the only member besides my cousin Boom-Boom. Nine years younger than Elena, Peter had gone to work in the stockyards when he returned from Korea. He quickly realized that the people getting rich in meat packing weren’t the Poles hitting cows over the head with hammers. Scraping together a few bucks from friends and relations, he started his own sausage manufacturing firm. The rest was the classic story of the American dream.
He followed the yards to Kansas City when they moved there in the early seventies. Now he lived in a huge house in the tony Mission Hills district, sent his wife to Paris to buy her spring clothes, shipped my cousins off to expensive private schools and summer camps, and drove late-model Nissans. Only in America. Peter also distanced himself as much as possible from the low-budget end of the family.
My office in the Pulteney Building was definitely down market. Most of the Loop expansion in recent years has been to the west. The Pulteney is at the southeast fringe where peep shows and pawnshops push the rents down. The Wabash L rattles the fourth-floor windows, disturbing the pigeons and dirt that normally roost there.
My furnishings are Spartan gleanings from police auctions and resale shops. I used to hang an engraved sketch of the Uffizi over the filing cabinet, but last year I’d decided its intricate black detail looked too drab with all the olive furniture. In its place I’d put up some splashy posters of paintings by Nell Blaine and Georgia O’Keeffe. They gave the room a little color, but no one would mistake it for the hub of an international business.