still there; he’d forgotten the incubator of chicken eggs, which Sophie promptly fell in love with, insisting on watching one slowly crack bit by tiny bit, until a small beak poked through an opening and the shell wall imploded, exposing a new-born chick, which emerged hungry, curious, and cross.
After almost two hours, half of him hoped Sophie would want to call it a day. But she said firmly, ‘Now I want to see where you grew up.’ So they retrieved the car and driving up into full sunshine went west.
He drove under the Illinois Central tracks and along the north side of the Midway, a mile-long expanse of grass, divided into three by avenues for cars, with an excavated middle stretch that was flooded each winter to form a skating rink. He pointed out his old school to Sophie, and further along his own father’s office in the ornamented Gothic stone of the university’s original buildings. He was hoping he might get away with a sighting-by-car tour, but no, Sophie said she wanted to go to his old haunts on foot. So he turned around and came back to Blackstone Avenue, the leafy tree-lined street of his boyhood, where so many members of the English Department had lived that it was known as the English Channel. At 58th he turned and turned again until he found a solitary parking place a stone’s throw from the Cloisters.
They were in the posher part of Hyde Park, famous as the site of the University of Chicago, and as an integrated oasis in a fiercely segregated city. Despite the conservatives associated with the university (like the Chicago economists whom Pinochet had found so helpful) the neighbourhood was a hotbed of liberalism, and fabled as the city’s one integrated neighbourhood. In Robert’s youth, it was viewed with suspicion by the rest of a deeply conservative city, for Hyde Park residents were thought to have long hair and smoke marijuana; its streets held too many bookstores and coffee houses. It was a kind of Berkeley of the Middle West.
His father Johnny had done his best to ensure his children grew up untouched by this, for he had been a conservative, not in a political sense (he had little interest in politics) but in his deep-rooted aversion to change. Johnny Danziger believed in the university he worked for, the small town in Michigan where he had a summer house, and in the US Army, where he claimed to have learned more than in college or graduate school. It was the army that had made him suspicious of intellectuals (though he was a card-carrying one himself), political radicals, and the counterculture Hyde Park embraced. Robert could think of no one else in Hyde Park with a son (Mike) who had made the military a career, nor imagine any resident who would have been so proud of the choice. No wonder Johnny and Mike had been so close.
‘That’s where Papa and Merrill lived,’ he said as they got out, pointing to the heavy-set thirties building.
He was astonished to find Jackson, the doorman, on duty in front of the building, looking as if it had been ten minutes instead of fifteen years since Robert had last seen him. He stood ramrod tall in the building’s entrance, wearing a blue suit with gold chevrons on its shoulders. A wide-brimmed grey dress hat was tipped back slightly on his head. The only sign of ageing was Jackson’s moustache, now the colour of snow.
Merrill had adored him; he would sweep open the door for her like a royal flunky, and let her park for hours in the strictly drop-off zone in front. In return, each Christmas Eve she gave Jackson a wad of bills in an envelope. Robert remembered seeing him one year, thanking Merrill effusively, then counting his stash like a bookie in the privacy of the doorman’s cubicle.
With Robert and Mike, Jackson had dropped the obsequious façade, and the banter that took its place contained an ill-concealed hostility bubbling just below the surface.
Robert called out now, trying to sound cheerful, ‘Hello, Mr Jackson.’
The doorman looked at him sceptically. Why did I think he’d remember me? thought Robert. ‘I’m Johnny Danziger’s son. I wanted to show my daughter the fountain. Would that be okay?’
‘Be my guest,’ said Jackson unenthusiastically.
The building’s four tiers of apartments were ringed around a small, open courtyard that contained a water garden lined by low box hedges, through which two tiled channels carried flowing water from a small