It was a car we’d pack once a year with shopping bags full of old clothes and jars of jam and the dill pickles Moms canned. Leaving Moms behind, my father and I would drive a long time into what seemed to me to be countryside because the streets were shadowy with trees. We’d arrive at a high iron gate and follow a road that curved through park-like grounds where people in wheelchairs were pushed by attendants in white. We’d park and enter a cavernous building of gray stone, tote our shopping bags down corridors acrid with disinfectant, and wait before a bank of windows that looked out on lawn. An old man with stunned eyes and a jawline grizzled in gray would be wheeled in to where we waited. The three of us would sit silently together. There was never any talk, not even in Polish, a language my father relied on for secrecy. My father took the old man’s veined, stony hand and traced its battered knuckles. Before we left he’d kiss that hand. We never stayed long, and I’d forget about our trip until a year later, when we’d again load shopping bags into the maroon Chevy and drive into what felt like a déjà vu.
After a few such visits I asked, “Dad, who is that old guy?”
“Grandpa,” he answered, the only time I ever heard him use the word. After that we never went back. If my father continued to visit, he did so secretly. Only later did I learn that the place to which we drove was Dunning, the state mental hospital that people then commonly called the insane asylum.
The beach house was shaped like an ocean liner with a huge orange smokestack. Lights glowed from its portholes; the air smelled like red hots and popcorn. People padded barefoot through sandy puddles slopped along the concrete decks, shouting in different languages. Men showered in open stalls in front of changing rooms, spraying sand off kids little enough to go naked.
As always, Mick and I stopped at a huge concrete drinking fountain where water gurgled from a dozen metal pipes, water rusty tasting and cold as if pumped straight from the lake. When he leaned for a drink, I plugged two of the pipes with my fingers and water shot up Mick’s nose. He chased me down to the lake, his cheeks bulging with a mouthful of water to spit.
“Doesn’t it feel kinda stupid running into the lake with your mouth full of water?”
He opened his mouth for a comeback, and the water dribbled out, breaking me up. I waded out laughing, and he came after me, both of us splashing sheets of water at each other. I dove under, and when I came up, Mick was chest deep, jogging up and down in time to the waves while milling his arms through the air as if he were doing the Australian crawl. His cheeks bulged; he’d gulped a mouthful of lake water to spit.
“You really think you’re swimming?” I yelled, recalling how I’d once done the same thing. But the Army helicopter whirring in overhead drowned out my voice. Everyone stopped and stood looking up as the helicopter hovered in to land behind the barbed wire of Meigs field, an airstrip that bordered the beach.
We’d always come here to Twelfth Street Beach. It was where Sir taught me to swim. But tonight he was going to take us off the Rocks, where the water was deep.
“The Rocks is where we used to swim when I was a kid,” he said, “me and my friends. We used to get out there around eight in the morning and not take the streetcar home till after dark. That was the life. Johnny Weissmuller used to swim off the Rocks with us.”
“Who’s Johnny Weissmuller?” Mick asked.
“Who’s Johnny Weissmuller? You never seen Tarzan of the Apes?” Sir beat his chest and gave an ape call. People on the blankets glanced at him and laughed in a friendly way. He was different whenever he got around water — younger, grinning, kidding around.
“So who were you guys? The Apes?” Mick asked, always quick to get one in on Sir. Mick had made up the nickname Sir one night when we were all watching Leave It to Beaver and Dad said how nice it was that Wally and Beaver called their father “Sir.”
“Apes is right — you shoulda seen us. Talk about tan! Italians would call me paisano. You shoulda seen this lake. People don’t realize how da-damn dirty it’s getting. When I was a kid you could see the bottom off the Rocks.”
“What’s down there?” I asked.
“A bunch of rocks. But who knows how old? They coulda been there when this was Indian country. Hell! Maybe rocks from back when it was all glacier with saber-tooths and mammoths. We used to dive down to see who could bring up the biggest rock. Weissmuller could swim faster and farther than any of us — one time I tried to swim to the pumping station with him, but hell, more than halfway I gave up. I coulda made it out there, but I was afraid about getting back. He didn’t tell me a boat was gonna pick him up. But I could dive deeper and stay down longer than anyone, even old Tarzan. Things were so clean then we used to swim in the Chicago River.”
“You mean the Drainage Canal!”
“With the floating turds?” Mick asked.
“It was still a river in some places, not a sewer. It was beautiful.”
The breeze off the Rocks felt almost chilly. It blew straight in over a horizon that was a blinding gleam, and beyond the horizon I could picture the forests of Michigan. I tried to recapture the daydreams I’d had all week about coming out to the lake; I tried to remember how stuffy it would be tonight when we got back home.
There weren’t any women. Men and teenagers plunged and swam in the deep green swells. Water bucked over the lip of the concrete walkway. I stared into the lake and couldn’t imagine touching bottom.
“Want me to lower you in by the arms and cool you off?” Sir asked Mick. Mick was watching the swells hump in, standing well back from the edge.
“No, I’m gonna climb the rocks.”
Just behind the concrete walk, enormous limestone blocks were piled in jagged, steplike tumbles as if some ancient city lay in ruins after a tidal wave.
“Okay, you do that”—Sir laughed—“and keep an eye on the towels.” He slipped his shoes and socks off, put his car keys in one heel and shook them into the toe.
Spray showered over the concrete. I felt like going with Mick. The walkway vibrated when the waves whumped in as if it were hollow underneath. The sun was slipping lower in the hazy lilac sky. Mexican teenagers with gang tattoos whapped at each other with wet towels, their gold crosses swinging from their necks as they pushed each other in.
Sir gave an ape call.
Everyone turned for a moment and looked at him.
He backed up against the limestones and sprinted toward the water, hurtling off the concrete edge. His body arced like that of a man shot from a cannon — legs together, arms against his sides, so that when he hit the water it was headfirst, arms still pressed to his body. A spume thumped up, then showered back around his point of entry.