By that time it was five and already getting dark; the neons gave off a funny, halfhearted glow in the dusk, an effect amplified by the mist, which was what the cloudy day had decided to give us instead of rain or snow. Christmas was looking to be gloomy and wet, not cheery and white. The streets were filled with rush-hour traffic as I walked the concrete canyons to City Hall; once there, I stood within the high marble lobby waiting for Janey, watching city employees get out of there as fast as possible- all of 'em except Janey, of course.
Janey was, like a lot of City Hall employees, a patronage worker. She worked in the county treasurer's office as a clerk, though she did a great deal of secretarial work for the man who ran the office, Dick Daley. The county treasurer was an obese drunken gambler named McDonough; his secretary, the de facto county treasurer, was Daley. Because a lot of the patronage workers in the county treasurer's office were, like Janey, from the Back of the Yards (which is to say the area that included the Union Stockyards), there was a problem for some of the clerks: they couldn't read or write. Janey's father, a drugstore owner and political precinct captain, had seen to it that she got a high school education in a neighborhood where that was an exception, and she had managed to pick up some secretarial skills, which led to her doing a lot of secretarial work in the county treasurer's office, some of it for Daley, whom she seemed to greatly admire.
A mutual friend at City Hall had introduced us almost three years ago, about the same time Janey went to work there. It was a bit unusual for anybody to move out of a neighborhood in Chicago, but I could well see why she might want to get the hell out of the Back of the Yards. The stockyards gave the nation its meat and the South Side its jobs, but it also gave the air a stench; and her neighborhood, Bridgeport, despite her father's relative affluence and influence, was a shabby little collection of frame houses and rented two-flats, though a lot of people found it a pleasant enough place to live. But Janey didn't, and at age twenty-one she had married a man named Dougherty, who was ten years older than her, lived on the North Side (and was a political associate of the powerful alderman Paddy Bauler), and ran a saloon, which became a speakeasy, and one drunken evening was hit by a streetcar and killed deader than he was drunk
Janey had been a widow? for about a year when we met; she rarely spoke of her late husband, and what I mentioned above is the extent of what I knew about him. What I knew? about her was that she did not return to the Back of the Yards after the death of her husband, but instead took a flat in the rooming-house district of the near North Side, an area of drearily similar, soot-stained stone houses, dirt)- alleys, and window? after window with the familial" black-and-white card reading ROOMS TO RENT. Nearby were the fancy apartments and homes of Lake Shore Drive, and the shade-tree-lined streets of the Gold Coast back of them. For someone like Janey, who had an eye on the finer things, this must have provided inspiration and irritation, depending on her varying moods. And they did vary.
The security guards were starting to talk quietly to one another, glancing over at me with obvious suspicion, when at ten after six. Janey finally emerged from an elevator. She looked stunning: her eyes. with their startled lashes, leaped out of her face, and her lips were appropriately red and bee-stung. She walked over like a model, her hands in knit cream-color gloves riding the pockets of her brown alpaca coat, thumbs out; the coat had a big double-breasted collar that rose around her neck, around which was a pale brown scarf, and there were two big buttons above the coat's belt, and two below, and she wore a fur felt hat with a brim that dipped just above one brown eye. A small cream-color purse was tucked under one arm.
I was leaning against a pillar. She approached me and looked up at me with a cute, arrogant smile. "I had to work a little late. For Mr. Daley."
"Fuck Dick Daley," I said.
I hadn't said it loud, but my voice carried a bit in the echoey corridor, and a security guard turned and looked at me with wide eyes.
But Janey didn't shock easy. She just said, "Maybe I would, if he weren't engaged," and her smile got even more arrogant, and even cuter, and she turned her back on me and walked toward the doors. I followed her.
Out on the street, I looped my arm in hers and said, "You just kept me waiting because I've had to stand you up a couple times these last few days."
The smile showed teeth now, and they were cute, too, and the arrogance was pretty1 much gone. "You're right. But I did have some work to do. And I had to freshen up. It isn't every day we go to the Bismarck dining room."
"No, it isn't. In fact. I've never been there before."
"I've been there with Mr. Daley for lunch lots of times."
"You're a damn liar, Janey."
"I know."
At the intersection of LaSalle and Randolph, the big Bismarck Hotel, rebuilt in '27 on the site of the original hotel, lorded it over German Square, where German clubs, shops, and steamship offices converged at the west end of the Rialto Theatre district. The elaborately uniformed Bismarck doorman let us in and we went up the wide, red-carpeted steps to the huge lobby and into the main dining room.
We checked our coats, and Janey was even lovelier under the alpaca: she wore a rust-color soft wool dress with a gentle V neck, trimmed in white, and a creped, belted skirt. She left the fringed scarf on, and her hat, as we entered the dining room.
"You went to work like this?" I whispered to her. as the maitre d' showed us to our table.
"Of course." she said, not whispering. Then in an affectionate if mocking whisper: "But the scarf and the hat are for you alone, dearest."
"You're too good to me."
"I know."
We had a table for two over to one side, and we sat and took the place in for a while, while a boy in a white coat filled our water glasses with water and ice. The walls were hand-carved walnut, the south one hung with tapestries on either side of a mantel, and brass chandeliers fell from the ceiling. But the room was not what I had expected: it was all very modern, on the art-deco order. The Berghoff, the German restaurant where Janey and I occasionally dined, was a bustling, no-nonsense affair, famous for pigs knuckles and sauerkraut, not atmosphere; but here I had expected an old-world peasant aura, and instead got German modernism. Germany's idea of itself was changing, and the Bismarck dining room reflected that.
Well, I'd already been at one quaint old-world restaurant today, and since it wasn't every day (it wasn't every week), (make that month), that I ate at two top restaurants, I decided to enjoy myself.
We made small talk throughout the meal (we both had Wiener schnitzel and potato pancakes) and Janey, though generally a good poker player, was not hiding her anxiety. She wanted to hear all about my new job, but she didn't want to act like she did, so she was waiting for me to tell her of my own accord. And it was killing her.
Finally, while she ate cheesecake with strawberries and I drank coffee, I said, "I don't think you're going to like my new job."
She kissed her bite of cheesecake and strawberries off her fork and shrugged a little and smiled. "You can't expect your uncle Louis to start you out at the top. These things take time."
"Janey, I didn't say anything about Uncle Louis getting me a job."
That caught her with a forkful of desert in midair. She returned fork to plate and with folded hands looked across the table at me with wide brown eyes that I could've dived into, and said. "I don't understand. You left the department. What else…?"
"You know what I've always talked about."
"I do?"
"Well, think about it. dammit. We're supposed to be engaged. You're supposed to know me better than anyone."
She thought, and played with the diamond ring, turning it slowly from side to side, just a bit. "I know what you've always dreamed about doing. But it's so impractical."