“I stayed up all night to watch poor Diana marry Prince Creep when I was that age,” she commented. “At least Emily got to touch Lacey.”
I had wanted to go to O’Hare to join the vigil for Ringo and John, but my mother was desperately ill by then; I wasn’t going to worry her by riding around on buses and L’s after curfew. “Some guy was trying to get next to Lacey as we left. He said they grew up together in Humboldt Park. Is that true?”
“I’m glad you asked.” In the sodium lights on the Inner Drive I could see Mary Louise’s grin. “I have eaten and drunk Lacey Dowell facts for the last two weeks, ever since you called with the invite, and it’s high time you shared the treat. Lacey’s birth name was Magdalena Lucida Dowell. Her mother was Mexican, her father Irish; she’s an only child who grew up in Humboldt Park and went to St. Remigio’s, where she starred in all the school plays and won a scholarship to Northern Illinois. They have an important theater program. She got her first break in film twelve years ago, when—”
“All right, all right. I’m sure you know her shoe size and her favorite color, too.”
“Green, and eight–and–a–half. And she still likes the chorizo from her home neighborhood better than any trendy food in L.A. Ha, ha. Her father died in an industrial accident before she started making real money, but her mother lives with her in Santa Monica in a nice oceanfront mansion. Supposedly Lacey gives money to St. Remigio’s. They say she kept the cardinal from closing the school by shoring up its scholarship fund. If that’s true it’s worth something.”
“A lot.” The light at Lake Shore Drive turned green, and I swung into the northbound lanes.
“Come to think of it, you should have picked up some of these gems from Murray’s interview. Didn’t you watch?”
I grimaced at the dashboard. “I think I was so embarrassed to see him doing it at all that I couldn’t focus on what he was saying.”
“Don’t be too hard on him,” Mary Louise said. “Guy has to live on something, and you’re the one who told me the Global team axed his biggest stories.”
She was right. I knew Murray had been having a tough time since Global bought the paper. They hadn’t stopped any of his digging, but they wouldn’t print any stories they considered politically sensitive. “We have to pay attention to the people who do us favors in this state,” Murray quoted to me bitterly when management killed a story he’d been working on for months about the new women’s prison in Coolis. He mimicked his editor one night at dinner last winter: Americans have grown accustomed to sound bites. Sex, sports, and violence are good sound bites. Skimming pension funds or buying off the state legislature are not. Get the picture, Murray?
What I’d somehow forgotten was how much of a survivor Murray was. No one was more surprised than me to get one of those prized tickets to Global’s postlaunch party—and maybe no one was more surprised to read on it that we were celebrating Murray’s debut as Chicago’s “Behind Scenes” reporter. What Murray had done to land the job I preferred not to contemplate. He certainly wasn’t going to tell me that—or anything else. When I called to ask, I spoke to an assistant who politely assured me she would give him my messages, but he hadn’t come to the phone himself.
I knew Murray had put out discreet feelers for reporting work around the country. But he was a couple of years older than me, and in your forties companies start looking at you as a liability. You need too much money, and you’re moving into an age bracket where you’re likely to start using your health insurance. Also against him was the same thing that made it hard for me to operate outside the city: all his insider knowledge was in Chicago. So he had looked long and hard at reality, and when reality stared back he blinked first. Was that a crime?
At two on a weeknight, traffic on the drive was sparse. To my right, sky and lake merged in a long smear of black. Except for the streetlights, coating the park with a silvery patina, we seemed alone on the edge of the world. I was glad for Mary Louise’s presence, even her monologue on what the sitter would charge for looking after Emily’s young brothers, on how much she had to do before summer session started—she was going to law school part time besides her part–time work for me—was soothing. Her grumbling kept me from thinking how close to the edge of the world my own life was, which fueled my hostility to Murray’s decision to sell himself on the air.