Father's Day: Chicagoan

honoring your dreams even when they're scary

I have always wanted to publish this piece but have never had the guts. It reveals pieces of my childhood and identity that are squirmy to me but I’m learning not to give that feeling too much power when it comes to self-expression and the trajectory that a piece of writing has, despite its author. I have learned that when writers have the courage to share their inconvenient truths, it can help people in the exact way they need. It’s about Chicago, belonging, leaving home, and my family of origin, mostly my mother and father, the latter who is no longer with us, and the former who I am going to visit next week, age ninety-three.

It is perhaps about the guilt from leaving your childhood home seeping into the subconscious dream state. It is a dream I know well. I hope that if you have left home, you will forgive yourself for leaving, and remind yourself that it’s a moveable feast. I intend to return to the original “feast” next week. I know that my father will be there as I go. I will go to his grave and whisper, “Happy Father’s Day.” And I will go to my mother’s ear and whisper “I love you.”

Chicagoan  

I have a reoccurring dream. I am in Chicago, in a neighborhood I don’t recognize. I am whatever age I am at the time; last night, thirty-six. And I am carrying a suitcase. It is not a glamorous one. Not Louis Vuitton, or Hartman, or even Lark. Rather, it is Army/Navy olive drab, with all sorts of zipper compartments and it is heavy.

I am dragging this suitcase down the dirty city sidewalk, passing bars and liquor stores with locked gates across their entryways. People are waiting for the bus, not looking at each other. Not looking at me. I keep waiting to be recognized as the Chicago-born girl that I am—but no one recognizes me. It is just as well. I don’t recognize this me either.

It is one of those dreams when you are plucked into a scene with a singular motive, but no tangible cause. All I know is that I have this suitcase, and it contains a ridiculous amount of clothes and no matter what, I am not to lose it.

People eye me as the zipper compartments belch clothes, old clothes, the clothes of my life—onto the dirty sidewalks. Hippie scarves, a Blackwatch plaid kilt, Fair Isle sweaters, an L.L. Bean field coat, a boiled wool Loden jacket, woolen mittens with tiny red hearts. I shove the clothes back into the suitcase and try not to let anybody see the absurdity of what I, apparently, have packed. I turn a corner and lean up against a bank. There is always a bank with tall columns in my dream. I pull myself out of the sidewalk flow of pedestrian traffic, and sit on my suitcase to rest. Where can I go? Where can I put my suitcase so I can walk free?

A zipper busts forth a pink taffeta gown then. Embarrassed, I shove it back. Dirty underwear. Anther zipper belches out a pair of satin dyed dancing pumps. It is getting crucial that I hide this bag—that I find it sanctuary. It is becoming clear that it won’t be safe until it is out of my possession. But I only have ten dollars to my name.

I think of the lockers this city might hold. The train station? All the way across town. A bus station? I’ve never seen a bus station in Chicago. I’ve never ridden a bus in Chicago. What about a hotel lobby? I could go to the Drake and they would be nice enough to watch it for me, even though I’m not staying there—wouldn’t they? I’ve done that before—haven’t I? But I don’t have the energy to play that girl. I am wearing jeans and a dirty down parka held together by duct tape. The concierge at the Drake owes me no kindness.

Don’t I know somebody in Chicago? I grew up here. Isn’t there someone—a friend? A relative? A friend of a friend? But no one comes to mind. Not in this neighborhood.

And then it occurs to me. The University Club. The place my father has had lunch and a nap, entertained clients, and gotten his haircut for sixty years. The private men’s club at the corner of Michigan and Monroe. The place my mother and I would meet him, me in a fancy wool coat with a velvet collar and tights, she in a mink and heels. The place we would come to by cab from the train station, nod to the doorman—a nice fellow with a brimmed cap and a long coat—our nod saying, we belong, his nod saying, yes, I can see that.

In we’d go, past the desk, nodding at another man in a forest green gold-trimmed uniform—I think his name was Roosevelt—past the dark wood walls and shined brass fixtures, to the Ladies Lounge, where we’d freshen up, and sit, on uncomfortable couches, and wait with the other women, for their husbands and daddys.

His face would light up the doorway, and there, in this unsuspecting place, we’d find each other, with always this surprised smile in unison—how, in this colossal city, could we three have possibly found each other?—a little controlled coup every time. There would be extra heft to our hugs, a special giggly kiss on the lips for my parents, and we’d be off for lunch up to the Cathedral Room or out to the street to catch the symphony at Orchestra Hall. The doorman would nod and say, Mr. Munson, and I would feel famous. This is my city father.

But I haven’t been to the University Club for years. They won’t know me. I won’t fetch that nod. But it’s my last chance. I’ve got to get rid of this suitcase. I need to rest. I’m tired. I need to find a safe place. So I bet my last ten dollars on a cab and a name.

“Let’s go the pretty way,” I say, like it’s the last cab ride of my life.

He looks confused.

“Lake Shore Drive. Michigan Avenue.” 

This doesn’t make sense to him, but he nods. “It’s your money, Lady.” 

So we head east toward Lake Michigan and get onto Lake Shore Drive and the lake is bluer than I remember. Then Outer drive becomes Inner drive and we are faced with my favorite view of Chicago: the skyline of the Magnificent Mile. The way I’ve always seen the city first, since childhood when my mother would drive me in from the suburbs on Sheridan Road, “The Pretty Way.”

She’d ramble on like a tour guide as we passed all the landmarks of her city childhood. “That pink building is the Edgewater Beach Apartments and the Edgewater Beach Hotel was just down the street. It was where your grandparents spent their wedding night. All the Big Bands played there. I had my first drink there. It was a whiskey sour.” 

I’d hear Benny Goodman ghost music as she described for the countless time the old boardwalk lit by Japanese lanterns that she’d stroll down with boys in her debutante years, now covered by landfill. The road we call “The Pretty Way.”

“And if you look out on that peninsula way in the distance, you’ll see the Adler Planetarium where I was photographed as a debutante in my white gown with the skyline behind me for the cover of the Tribune society pages—“Virginia Aldrich—Has Chicago at her feet.” 

Then past the Saddle and Cycle Club where she and my father had their wedding reception— “the society pages called me a fairytale bride,” and where I too attended debut parties in a long gown forty years later, a little less happy than she to be a debutante.

I’d sit in the passenger seat of the station wagon and she’d go on and on like clockwork— “And there’s where we used to play field hockey with the Girls’ Latin School between Goethe—you pronounce it Gerta-- and Banks Street on Lake Shore Drive--”

“Where the pigeon pooped on your head.”

“That’s right. Where the pigeon pooped on my head. Now there’s an apartment building there—too bad. And my mother and father would take me riding off Montrose, along the lake—the stable was on North Avenue…”

And she’d go on like that while I’d try to picture her 1930’s Chicago-- a place I could barely imagine for all the rollerbladers and soccer moms out with jogging strollers.

 “There’s 1500 Lake Shore Drive. When I was little, the Peterkins had the penthouse and they had the most fabulous roof garden with trees and we used to play in it. Your friend’s uncle lives there now. You’ve been there. Remember?”

“The place with all the mirrors?”

“Yes. Oh, and there’s Oak Street where we’d go after school to the record store and listen to 78’s. And there’s the corner—Walton and Michigan--- where I’d meet Aunt Babby and Aunt Margot for school every day—they say it’s the windiest corner in all of Chicago…”

And I would tune her out to behold Chicago from this view where it looked suddenly like it could be her era instead of mine—with the Drake and the Playboy Building like a paperweight of old time Chicago, before they built all the big glass buildings and brought in the Every-city urban- franchised-sprawl where you wait twenty-five minutes for a cup of four dollar coffee.

We belonged to this mile because my mother had grown up on it, had played with children whose last names were locally famous— Palmer, Armour, Shed, Wrigley—Billy used to bring me gum…cartons of gum…

Now I hear her voice from the back seat of my dream cab. I grip my suitcase and start to feel that tucked-in feeling I haven’t felt for so long—and suddenly her generation yields to mine and it is all one Chicago. I watch buildings go by that haven’t been there for decades. This was my city, I whisper.

There, the Drake where I’d go with my best friend, at eighteen, and drink martinis and smoke Dunhill cigarettes in our mother’s minks and red lipstick; there 900 North Michigan where my mother took me for lunch at the old restaurant Jacques—I still remember the filet mignon and Bearnaise sauce and the glass of Chardonnay she let me order. There the corridor of my mother’s childhood on Delaware Place where she could see the Water Tower from her bedroom window at the Whitehall, and dream it was her “fairy princess castle.”  The Hancock—so many memories of the Hancock. My best friend’s father’s real estate company built it; later, when I was five, my mother decorated an apartment on the 75^th floor and we got to spend a weekend there—that was the weekend my brother and sister left me in the elevator and I had to find my way back to our apartment with 94 floors to choose from. Still later, a friend’s grandmother lived on the 91^st floor, and we’d spend weekends downtown getting makeovers in the lobby Bonwit Teller and swimming in the pool on the 94^th floor, eye to eye with the setting sun.

There, the old Bonwit Teller my grandmother loved; I’d beg her for the purple and blue lilac shopping bags. The Water Tower, the old Tiffany’s, Saks, the red door of Elizabeth Arden, The Tribune Building with the Christmas wreath, The Wrigley Building—my favorite building of all-- where my father first worked for American Steel Foundries. Then straight ahead, the 333 North Michigan building where my mother and grandfather worked, where the Tavern Club is—the place I met the definition of tall dark and handsome at a debut party in my 21^st year, smoking a Lucky Strike and feeling mutually morose about the entire society into which we were born, decided to make the status-breaking move to ditch the party before dinner was served, and go to the Sardine Bar where we fell upon Bobby Short singing at the piano, and discovered by way of aggressive flirtation that his father and my mother had repeated almost exactly, this night together, forty years prior. It was like the Chicago wind had been knocked out of us. So we took off our shoes and walked barefoot around Rush Street in Black Tie until dawn. We knew they had not done that.

Then the Michigan Avenue bridge where I see my grandfather in a blue and white seersucker suit and straw derby waving at people and my mother’s words: “I cannot remember a time when someone did not say, Hello, Jeff when I crossed this bridge with my father.”

Then over the Chicago River—it is always the green of St. Patrick’s Day in my dream, the Wendella afloat in summer time, Wacker drive off to the right—the Wackers, family friends. Magnificent Mile is finished then and the buildings become more downtown looking—more Loop-ish. Not my neighborhood.

I see the Prudential Building where my father worked from 1956-1983 for American Steel Foundries, and that is always the end of the line for me. The city fades out for those blocks until Orchestra Hall, and finally, The Art Institute, blocks away, where I worked as an intern in my 21^st summer in the Prints and Drawings room; where I spent hours alone with Cezanne’s sketchbook and Matisse’s book called Jazz. The summer when I realized I was going to be something very different than what Chicago debutantism had prescribed.     

“We’re here,” the cab driver says.

I wouldn’t have recognized it.

I give him the ten dollar bill and hold my suitcase proud in front of this mighty old club that looks shrunken, like an old man, amid the glass and metal buildings that have grown up around it. I look for the doorman. He sees me. He is not sure that I am in the right place—I can tell. But this is it—I have to go for it. I step up to the door and give him my practiced nod—you never forget it, just like riding a bike.

He hesitates, and nods back, setting the revolving door in motion. I stuff my suitcase in and we take our rotation and come out on the other side with only one more nod to go.

He is sitting at the reception desk in a forest green and gold-trimmed uniform with a nametag. Roosevelt.

There are men lingering in low mumbles in the foyer. They smell like cigars and aftershave. I walk by them, pretending my suitcase is light, praying it will not relieve itself of any of its contents. And I give everything to this nonchalance as I step up to the desk.

“I am Mr. Munson’s daughter,” I say. “I am wondering if I could possibly leave my suitcase with you for a while.”

“Certainly. When will you be back, Miss Munson?”

“I don’t know. Is that okay?”

“Of course. We’ll keep it for you as long as you wish.”

He takes the suitcase and brings it to the Hat Check lady, who gives him a plastic octagon with a number on it which he then gives to me. I put it in my jean’s pocket.

“Thank you,” I say, “Roosevelt.”

He nods and smiles. A gold tooth.

And I glide down to the Ladies Lounge where I use every last lotion and cotton product available, the brushes and combs, the monogrammed linens. And then I look in the mirror.

I don’t look that bad, I think.

And then I go out to the couches, still blue and quilted, and sit down, perfectly aligned, perfectly safe, perfectly Chicagoan, to wait.

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