A pale wet morning in the Windy City. A sibilant river of automobiles congealing in Chicago’s down-town anastomosis. And scurrying Sunday people with grave ecumenical smiles. I feel nimble and smooth in blue stepping into the buttery of the Oxford House under a shawl of breakfast smells draped so deliciously over the sidewalk.
Hadn’t she said we’d meet up at ten, pass by her den and then maybe take in a cute roadhouse she knows along the lake for barbecued spare-ribs or a steak. I’d said in my brand-new vernacular sure that would be swell. Naturally I could take a spell with her new convertible.
I’m latish but she hasn’t arrived and so I sit on a plush bench between Custer’s Last Stand and a sign which says Best Damn Gaelic Coffee This Side of Galway Bay. And order plenty of coffee. Mid-west style, Jewish rye-bread and bacon and eggs fried sunny side.
I have a warm nostalgia for the Great American Breakfast. For the times we tucked in side by side at Toffenetti’s burnished counters. Or the day we drove up to Grand Rapids from mid-state Indiana on a white April morning. Two hundred miles of whistling turnpike; defying the fat boys in blue to pounce. To Aunt Jemima’s Pancake House with hot bilberry waffles and a pretty waitress called Ellen who shyly served us saying she’d always wanted to be a nurse. In this great land of opportunity. Or the stand up breakfasts in shanty pull-ins off the frosty morning highway: clapboard watering places in a hungry concrete desert. And then of course salubrious Sunday brunches on Forty-Second Street replete with jugs of ice-water and flowered dresses.
Now shaking the languid cuff for a look at the time and it’s well after twelve. I feel ungallant thoughts beginning to accrue. Perhaps by some mishappenstance she’s elected to be waylaid by that third-year student from Northwestern. Or worse still been taken for a ride by the St. Paul’s lawyer with a smart apartment near-north side.
But I can glean some lean solace in this snug buttery. Having lived vicariously for a number of years. And I must say we’re filling up with some great dishes, albeit sternly escorted by a legion of Frank Sinatras. Not preventing though my intrepid breakfasting on a cool young drawl across the room. Radcliffe I’m almost sure with mommy and daddy always just back from Florida. Phi beta kappa and a boyfriend in zinc. I think how nice it would be to indulge just once in a small felony. For these splendid shanks eating out my heart here in Illinois. They remind me of the ones I used to know all these happy-sad winter months away. Moonlight drives in sweet New Hampshire woods. And philosophical kisses in quilted corners when my accent was an invitation to all the best parties, and I learned to send odd-numbered roses with my bread and butter cards.
Yes life was just one camp-fire song until I moved west and put my pale signature on the streets and bars of Chicago’s stern jungle. I expected to see signs everywhere saying Limey Go Home. Thinking there could be no place here for a benign mid-Atlantic man. But instead they said hey mister spare a nickel for a smoke or something to eat. At the hot dog stand outside the library with its shelves of nourishing books. Where I often browse after dropping some coins as toll into a sad mahogany hand.
Why now they’re floating in for cocktails, the smooth upper-crust: men with long flapping overcoats and women with flashing golden knees. For the great American three-martini lunch. All looking with ineffable disdain at my umpteenth coffee cup so delicately poised. The bartender is all hands and smiles. A croupier dealing in ice and gin. Tucking the olives deftly into place. I wonder would someone come and lace my sad waiting with a smiling word.
Outside the afternoon has pulled the sky down to make a low gun-metal ceiling over the street. The rain has turned into feeble ersatz snow which slops on the windows and forms an arctic plateau on the sill. Fine weather to be cast adrift by a delinquent date. I contemplate whether to reach into my little rag-bag of words to nurture a comely neighbor. Phi beta kappa gets up from her drink and I think bequeaths me a cautious smile. Food for thought on this rapacious Sunday.
1966 Town magazine