I did, and I did.
Chapter 18
“Will you be right here when I get back, Dad?” Peter asked, trying to make the question sound casual rather than pleading.
“Right here, at this very spot, two weeks from today,” I assured him, pointing to the ornate, three-faced clock with Roman numerals that loomed directly above us. It was a muggy Saturday morning in July, and we were standing with Peter’s suitcases in the columned, echo-filled concourse of the North Western Terminal on West Madison, waiting along with hundreds of other chattering adolescent boys and their parents for the announcement that the “Campers’ Special” train to Wisconsin was ready for boarding.
Peter, who had never been to summer camp before, was not overjoyed with the prospect, which his mother had proposed. When I questioned her about it, she was adamant. “I need some time to myself, Steve,” she said in that quiet-but-firm tone that always had an unspoken “don’t argue with me” attachment.
“I need to get away for a little while, but I can’t very well do that with Peter at home all day. And remember, you don’t have any vacation coming until late September.”
When I asked where she planned to go (hardly my business any more), she said to St. Joseph, Michigan, a small resort town around the southern end of Lake Michigan from Chicago.
“Alone?” (Again, no business of mine.)
She paused, an expression of irritation on her face. “No. A friend has a place over there.”
“Who? Martin Baer?”
“I don’t see that it’s any concern of yours, Steve,” she had answered evenly. In the dozen-plus years we had been married, I had never known Norma to raise her voice — one of the things that was at the same time both comforting and maddening about her.
“Well, if anything happens to Peter when he’s up in Wisconsin, how will I get hold of you?” I countered with what I felt was irrefutable logic, although we both knew I was reaching.
“All right,” she said, letting her shoulders drop. “It is Martin Baer. I’ll give you the address and phone number over in St. Joe.”
“So, just you and him, huh?”
Norma came as close to glaring as she ever does. “Again, Steve, it is hardly any concern of yours, but in fact, we will not be alone. Martin’s mother will be there, too.”
“A chaperone, eh?” I retorted, wishing in an instant that I could pull the words back. She did not respond, and we parted that day without warmth but also without overt rancor — much the way we related to each other during those last, listless days of our marriage. In all the times I had come home looped, for instance, I was never met with outright anger or hostility, but rather with a resigned disappointment. Even the night I missed Peter’s seventh (or maybe eighth?) birthday and shambled into the apartment well after midnight, she turned over in bed when I walked into the darkened bedroom and asked if I was all right. When I told her I was, she said “Oh, good” as if she meant it and went back to sleep. Confrontation was not an element in our lives together.
By the time Peter boarded the camp-bound train, his mood had brightened somewhat, at least partially because of the anticipation of riding the brand new green-and-yellow North Western streamliner.
“How fast can it go, Dad?” he had asked, running his finger along the smooth yellow surface of the train as we walked along the platform, looking for his assigned coach.
“A hundred, easy,” I improvised, having no idea. “Faster’n that Pennsylvania train you rode on when you visited your grandpa and grandma over in Fort Wayne last Christmas.”
He liked that answer, uninformed as it was, and when I got him settled in next to an oversized and tinted window, I felt better about his being shipped off to the North Woods. “You’ll meet some nice boys, meet a lot of new friends,” I assured him, mouthing lines uncounted parents before me had used to hearten offspring who were facing the prospect of two weeks living in tents or spartan cabins, as well as other deprivations. I hugged him awkwardly and eased into the aisle to make way for the arrival of his seatmate, an acne-faced boy with straw-colored hair and an expression of doubt.
Within seconds, I learned from his parents that the newcomer’s name was Robert, that he was twelve, lived in Des Plaines, suffered from hay fever, and had never gone to camp before. After introductions were made, the boys sized each other up and I said my good-byes.
As I left the train, the last words I heard came from Robert’s mother, who gushed to her son: “See, now you’ve already met Peter here, and you haven’t even left the station yet. You’re going to make all kinds of friends when you’re up there in those beautiful Wisconsin woods just like your father and I have been telling you. All that worrying you did was for nothing, wasn’t it?”
Riding back to my place from the station on the Clark streetcar, I took stock of my feelings and my situation. On the one hand, I would truly miss seeing Peter over the next two weekends. On the other, I would have the time to myself. I felt guilty even thinking that — after all, I did only see my son for at most a day and a half a week, as was the agreement, while Norma was a full-time parent and a working one on top of it. Sure, I kicked in for alimony and child support, again as was the agreement, but she had to deal with most of the day-to-day stuff, like teacher conferences and buying school clothes and visits to the doctors and dentists and so on. She did all of this very efficiently and, as far as I could tell, very cheerfully.
But, so I rationalized, I had a job too, and I needed time to myself, same as Norma did. Besides, I was running out of things to do with Peter on weekends. After Riverview, the Lincoln Park Zoo, Wrigley Field, the Elevated and streetcar rides, and the big museums, there were only so many movies I felt comfortable taking him to. And of course, there was my current situation involving the mob and its interest in my activities.
That morning, for instance, when I left my apartment and went to Logan Square to pick Peter up, the car with its two fedora-lidded men was parked at the curb on Clark as usual. I slipped out through the alley and walked several blocks on side streets before flagging a cab on Belmont. Even then I wasn’t completely sure that I’d ditched the tail. Because Peter had so much luggage, he and I took another cab from Norma’s to the station, and on the way, I kept looking out the rear window of the hack, thinking I had recognized the tail car.
“How come you keep looking back, Dad?” Peter asked. “You think somebody’s following us?”
I forced a laugh. “Of course not, Peter. Why would anybody want to do something like that?”
The thick-necked cabbie turned back and laughed too, but it wasn’t forced. “Yeah, why would anybody be after us? It sure doesn’t figure to be a copper, because, heck, I ain’t even goin’ the speed limit. There’s just too doggone much traffic today.”
I didn’t look back again, although I was tempted to, so I never knew for sure if we were being dogged. And I didn’t spot a tail when I left the North Western Station after seeing Peter off. But as the streetcar approached my building, the sedan and its two occupants was still (or again?) out in front, so I rode a block farther north and made straight for Kilkenny’s.
The Killer had, as promised, added a touch to the outside: Next to the neon Pabst Blue Ribbon sign in the front window was an obviously posed black-and-white glossy photograph of a grinning Dizzy Dean in his Cub uniform, following through on a pitch with the empty Wrigley Field grandstands in the background. In the lower right-hand corner of the photo, Dean had scrawled “To my good friend Killer, who serves the best steaks in Chicago, bar none. Your pal, Diz.”
Although I wasn’t ready to call the Killer’s steaks the best in the city, bar none, they were good, and Chicago’s newest baseball luminary obviously agreed, as he’d become something of a regular since that night he had wandered in with Carl Reynolds. I’d even run into him there again myself, this time with another Cub pitcher, Clay Bryant, in tow, and I was surprised that Diz had remembered me.