When I first saw her like this, it had been a shock: I was so used to her muscular energy that I couldn’t think of her as ill, or old. Not that she was old-she was only sixty-six, I’d learned to my surprise. Somehow, when she was coaching me, and teaching me Latin, she’d looked as formidably ancient as her bust of Caesar Augustus.
She waited to talk until she’d walked to the kitchen and was sitting at the old enamel table there. Scurry jumped up onto her lap. I put the kettle on for tea and unpacked the groceries I’d picked up for her.
“How did practice go today?” she asked.
I told her about the fight; she nodded approvingly of the way I’d handled it. “The school doesn’t care if those girls play or not. Or even if they attend-under No Child Left Behind, Celine Jackman is dragging the test scores down, so they’d have been just as happy if you kicked her out, but basketball’s her lifeline. Don’t let her get suspended if you can help it.”
She stopped to catch her breath, then added, “You’re not making any of that tofu slop, are you?”
“No, ma’am.” When I first started cooking for her, I’d tried making her miso soup with tofu, thinking it would be easier for her to digest, and maybe help her get some strength back, but she’d hated it. She was a meat-and-potatoes woman through and through, and if she couldn’t eat much of her pot roast these days she still enjoyed it more than tofu slop.
While she slowly ate as much of the meal as she could manage, I went to the bedroom to change her sheets. She hated my seeing the blood and pus in her bed, so we both pretended I didn’t know it was there. On days when she was too weak to get out of bed, her embarrassment at the condition of the linens was more painful than the tumors themselves.
While I bundled everything into a bag for the laundry service, I glanced at the books she’d been reading. One of Lindsay Davis’s Roman mysteries. The most recent volume of LBJ’s biography. A collection of Latin crossword puzzles-all the clues were in Latin, no English hints at all. It was only her body that was failing.
When I got back to the kitchen, I told her Rose Dorrado’s story. “You know everyone in South Chicago. You know Zamar? Is he likely to sabotage his own factory?”
“Frank Zamar?” She shook her head. “I don’t know that kind of thing about anyone, Victoria. People down here get desperate, and they do the things desperate people do. I don’t think he’d hurt anyone, though: if he’s trying to destroy his own plant, he won’t do it while any of his employees are on the premises.”
“He have kids in the school?”
“He doesn’t have a family, as far as I know. Lives on the East Side, used to be with his mother, but she’s been gone three, four years now. Quiet man, fifty-something. Last year he donated uniforms to our program. Josie’s mom probably put him up to it. That’s how I met him at all-Rose Dorrado got him to come watch Julia play. That’s Josie’s sister, you know. She was my best player, maybe since you were in school, until she had the kid. Now her life’s unraveled, she doesn’t even come to school.”
I slapped the sponge against the counter hard enough to bounce it across the room. “These girls and their babies! I grew up in that neighborhood, I went to that high school. There were always some girls who got pregnant, but nothing like what I’m seeing down here now.”
Mary Ann sighed. “I know. If I knew how to stop them I would. Girls in your generation weren’t so sexually active so young, for one thing, and you had more possibilities in front of you.”
“I don’t remember too many kids in my class going to college,” I said.
She paused, catching her breath. “Not what I mean. Even the ones who only wanted to get married and raise a family down there, they knew their husbands would work, there were good jobs. Heck, there were jobs. Now no one feels they have a future. Men who used to make thirty dollars an hour at U.S. Steel are lucky to work for a quarter of that at By-Smart.”
“I tried to talk to your center, Sancia, about birth control-I mean, she already has the two babies. Her boyfriend hangs around during practice; he looks like he’s at least twenty-five, but if the word work has ever crossed his mind he’s dismissed it as something in a foreign language, probably obsolete. Anyway, I suggested if Sancia was going to stay sexually active it would help her chances in school and in life if she didn’t have any more children, but her mother came over to me the next day and told me she would yank her daughter out of basketball if I talked any more about birth control to the team, but-I can’t leave them lurching around in ignorance, can I?”
“I’d be glad if every kid in that school practiced abstinence, believe me,” Mary Ann said bluntly, “but since that’s as likely as the dinosaurs reviving, they should have reliable information about contraception. But you can’t go giving it to them unsolicited. Trouble is, Sancia’s mother goes to a Pentecostal church that believes if you use birth control you go to hell.”
“But-”
“Don’t argue with me about it, and don’t, for heaven’s sake, argue with the kids. They take their faith very seriously in those storefront churches. You see them reading their Bibles before practice?”
“Another change from my youth,” I said wryly, “the mass defection of Latinos from mass. I’ve read about it, of course, but hadn’t experienced it before. And they don’t seem to have a problem proselytizing among some of the other girls on the team-I’ve had to break that up once or twice.”
Mary Ann showed her strong teeth in a grin. “It’s hard work being a teacher these days-what you can talk about, what you can’t, what can get you and the school sucked into a lawsuit. Still, Rose Dorrado is a more practical mom than Sancia’s mother. Since Julia’s baby, she’s been on Josie like a hawk, checking who she sees after school, not letting her go out alone with any of the boys. Rose wants that kid in college. April’s folks are pushing her, too.”
“Come on!” I protested. “If Romeo-Bron-Czernin has one thought above his zipper, it’s about himself.”
“Her mother, then,” Mary Ann conceded. “She’s determined that her kid is going to get out of South Chicago. She tolerates the basketball in case it gets April a scholarship, but she’s probably one of a dozen parents in that school sitting on the kid’s head and making her do homework every night.”
The long conversation had worn out my coach. I helped her back into bed, took Scurry for a walk around the block, and then went north to deal with my own dogs. My downstairs neighbor had let them out, but I drove to the lake so they could run. I took Mitch and Peppy up with me to Morrell’s, where I left them when I got up the next morning at five to return to the South Side.
Even though the city was still shrouded in the mantle of night, the expressway was already busy-although, when is it ever not? Trucks, anxious people getting to the early shift, detectives looking for who knows what, filled the ten lanes. It was only when I exited at Eighty-seventh Street and headed east that the streets became quiet.
Fly the Flag stood against the embankment of the Skyway on South Chicago Avenue. I suppose there was a time when the avenue was full of active, prospering factories and shops, but I couldn’t remember it. Unlike the Skyway overhead, where traffic was thick with commuters from northwest Indiana, the avenue was deserted. A few cars were not so much parked as abandoned along the curbs, hoods sprung or axles reeling at odd angles. I left my Mustang on a side street so it wouldn’t stand out among the wrecks, and walked two blocks south to Fly the Flag. Only a CTA bus, grinding slowly north like a bear lumbering into the wind, passed me.
Except for an iron works, whose locked yard protected a modern sprawling plant, most of the buildings I passed looked as though only some defiant opposition to gravity kept them upright. Windows were missing or were boarded over; strips of aluminum waved in the wind. It’s a sign of the neighborhood’s desperate job shortage that people will work in these collapsing structures.