South Chicago itself looked moribund, its life frozen somewhere around the time of World War II When I drove past the main business area I saw that most of the stores had Spanish names now. Other than that they looked much as they had when I was a little girl. Their grimy concrete walls still framed tawdry window displays of white nylon communion dresses, vinyl shoes, plastic furniture. Women wrapped in threadbare wool coats still wore cotton babushkas as they bent their heads into the wind. On the corners, near the ubiquitous storefront taverns, stood vacant-eyed, shabbily clad men. They had always been a presence, but the massive unemployment in the mills swelled their numbers now.
I had forgotten the trick to getting into East Side and had to double back to Ninety-fifth Street, where an old-fashioned drawbridge crosses the Calumet River. If South Chicago hadn’t changed since 1945, East Side stuck itself in formaldehyde when Woodrow Wilson was President. Five bridges form the neighborhood’s only link to the rest of the city. Its members live in a stubborn isolation, trying to recreate the Eastern European villages of their grandparents. They don’t like people from across the river, and anyone north of Seventy-first Street might as well have rolled in on a Soviet tank for the reception they get.
I drove under the massive concrete legs of the interstate to 106th Street. Louisa’s parents lived south of 106th on Ewing. I thought her mother would be home and hoped her father wouldn’t be. He’d retired some years ago from the little printshop he’d managed, but he was active in the Knights of Columbus and his VFW lodge and he might be out having lunch with the boys.
The street was crammed with well-kept bungalows set on obsessively tidy lots. Not a scrap of paper lay on the street. Art Jurshak tended this part of his ward with loving hands. Street-cleaning and repair crews came through regularly. All along the southeast side, sidewalks had been built three or four feet above the original ground level. South Chicago held numerous gaping pits where the newer paving had collapsed, but in East Side not a crack showed between sidewalk and house. As I got out of my car I felt as though I should have undergone a surgical scrubdown before visiting the neighborhood.
The Djiak house lay halfway down the block. Its curtained front windows gleamed in the dull air, and the stoop shone from much scouring. I rang the bell, trying to build up enough mental energy to talk to Louisa’s parents.
Martha Djiak came to the door. Her square, lined face was set in a frown suitable for dismissing door-to-door salesmen. After a moment she recognized me and the frown lightened a little. She opened the inner door. I could see she had an apron covering the crisply ironed front of her dress: I’d never seen her at home without an apron on.
“Well, Victoria. It’s been a long time since you brought little Caroline over for a visit, hasn’t it?”
“Yeah, it has,” I agreed unenthusiastically.
Louisa would not let Caroline go to her grandparents’ alone. If she or Gabriella couldn’t take her, they gave me two quarters for the bus and careful instructions to stay with Caroline until it was time to return home again. I never understood why Mrs. Djiak couldn’t come and fetch Caroline herself. Maybe Louisa was afraid her mother would try to keep the baby so she wouldn’t grow up with an unwed single parent.
“Since you’re down here, maybe you’d like a cup of coffee.”
It wasn’t effusive, but she’d never been demonstrative. I accepted with as much good cheer as I could muster and she opened the storm door for me. She was careful not to touch the glass panel with her hands. I slid through as unobtrusively as I could, remembering to take my shoes off in the tiny entryway before following her to the kitchen.
As I’d hoped, she was alone. The ironing board stood open in front of the stove, a shirt draped across it. She folded the shirt, laid it on the clothes basket, and collapsed the ironing board with quick silent motions. When everything was stowed in the tiny pantry behind the refrigerator, she put on water to boil.
“I talked to Louisa this morning. She said you’d been down there yesterday.”
“Yes,” I acknowledged. “It’s tough to see someone that lively laid up the way she is.”
Mrs. Djiak spooned coffee into the pot. “Lots of people suffer more with less cause.”
“And lots of people carry on like Attila the Hun and never get a pimple. It just goes to show, doesn’t it?”
She took two cups from a shelf and stood them primly on the table. “I hear you’re a detective now. Doesn’t really seem like a woman’s job, does it? Kind of like Caroline, working on community development, or whatever she calls it. I don’t know why you two girls couldn’t get married, settle down, raise a family.”
“I guess we’re waiting for men as good as Mr. Djiak to come along,” I said.
She looked at me seriously. “That’s the trouble with you girls. You think life is romantic, like they show in the movies. A good steady man who brings his pay home every Friday is worth a lot more than fancy dinners and flowers.”
“Was that Louisa’s problem too?” I asked gently.
She set her lips in a thin line and turned back to the coffee. “Louisa had other problems,” she said shortly.
“Like what?”
She carefully took a covered sugar bowl down from the cupboard over the stove and placed it with a little pitcher of cream in the middle of the table. She didn’t say anything until she’d finished pouring the coffee.
“Louisa’s problems are old now. And they never were any of your business.”
“And what about Caroline? Are they any concern of hers?” I sipped the rich coffee, which Louisa still infused in the old European style.
“They don’t have anything to do with her. She’d be a good deal better off if she learned not to poke around in other people’s closets.”
“Louisa’s past matters a lot to Caroline. Louisa is dying and Caroline is feeling very lonely. She’d like to know who her father was.”
“And that’s why you came down here? To help her dig up all that trash? She should be ashamed she doesn’t have any father, instead of talking about it with everyone she knows.”
“What’s she supposed to do?” I asked impatiently. “Kill herself because Louisa never married the man who got her pregnant? You act like it was all Louisa and Caroline’s fault. Louisa was sixteen years old-fifteen when she got pregnant. Don’t you think the man had any responsibility in this?”
She clenched the coffee cup so tightly, I was afraid the ceramic might shatter. “Men-have difficulty controlling themselves. We all know that,” she said thickly. “Louisa must have led him on. But she would never admit it.”
“All I want to know is his name,” I said as quietly as I could. “I think Caroline has a right to know if she really wants to. And a right to see if her father’s family would give her a little warmth.”
“Rights!” she said bitterly. “Caroline’s rights. Louisa’s! What about my right to a life of peace and decency? You’re as bad as your mother was.”
“Yeah,” I said. “In my book that’s a compliment.”
Behind me someone turned a key in the back door. Martha paled slightly and set down her coffee cup.
“You must not mention any of this in front of him,” she said urgently. “Tell him you were just visiting Louisa and stopped by. Promise, Victoria.”
I made a sour face. “Yeah, sure, I suppose.”
As Ed Djiak came into the room Martha said brightly, “See who’s come to visit us? You’ll never recognize her from the little Victoria she used to be!”
Ed Djiak was tall. All the lines in his face and body were elongated, like a Modigliani painting, from his long, cavernous face to his long, dangling fingers. Caroline and Louisa inherited their short, square good looks from Martha. Who knows where their lively tempers came from.