Guardian Angel Page 2

  I grinned to myself. A real concession, if the old man thought there was a situation I could handle better than he. “Let me look at her first.”

  When we passed through the dining room to the hall I could hear Kruger’s snores coming through the bedroom door.

  “You have any trouble moving him?” A major altercation could have gotten the dog too agitated for easy delivery.

  “My first thought was for the princess, if that’s what you mean. I don’t need any criticism from you; it don’t help me right now.”

  I swallowed my tongue and followed him to the living room. The dog was lying much as she had been when I went upstairs, but I could see a dark pool spreading around her tail. I hoped that meant progress. Peppy saw me watching but made no sign. Instead she tucked her head underneath her body and started washing herself.

  Was she all right? It was all very well to say not to interfere with her, but what if we let her hemorrhage because we didn’t realize she was in trouble?

  “What do you think?” Mr. Contreras asked anxiously, mirroring my own worries.

  “I think I don’t know anything about birthing puppies. It’s twenty of ten now. Let’s wait till the guy comes in—I’ll go get my keys just in case.”

  We had just decided to make a pallet for her in the car so we could rush her to the clinic when the first puppy slid out, smooth as silk. Peppy attacked it urgently, washing away the afterbirth, using her jaws and her forepaws to settle it next to her. It was eleven before the next one appeared, but then they started coming every half hour or so. I was beginning to wonder if she would fulfill the vet’s prophecy and have a dozen. But around three o’clock, after the eighth little creature squirmed its way to a nipple, she decided to stop.

  I stretched and headed to the kitchen to watch Mr. Contreras fix her a big bowl of dry dog food mixed with scrambled eggs and vitamins. His absorption in the process was so complete that he didn’t respond to any of my questions either about his Las Vegas Night or Mitch Kruger.

  I figured I was an unneeded third at this point. Some friends were playing softball and making a picnic over by Montrose harbor and I’d told them I’d try to join them. I undid the bolts to the back door.

  “What’s up, doll? You going someplace?” Mr. Contreras paused briefly in his stirring. “You run along. You can be sure I’ll look after the princess a-okay. Eight”—he beamed to himself—“Eight and she did it just like a champ. My, oh my.”

  As I closed the back door a horrible noise came from the old man. I was halfway up to my apartment before it hit me: he was singing. I think the song was “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.”

  2

  Black Tie Optional

  “So you’ve become an obstetrician?” Lotty Herschel mocked me. “I’ve always thought you needed a backup profession, something with a more reliable cash flow. But I wouldn’t recommend obstetrics these days: the insurance would overwhelm you.”

  I flicked a thumbnail at her. “You just don’t want me muscling in on your turf. Woman reaches the top of her profession and can’t bear to see the younger ones scrambling up behind her.”

  Max Loewenthal frowned at me across the table: that was about as unfair an accusation as I could make. Lotty, one of the city’s leading perinatalogists, always had a spare hand to stretch out to younger women. Men too.

  “What about the father?” Max’s son Michael quickly changed the subject. “Do you know who it is? And are you making him pay child support?”

  “A good question,” Lotty said. “If your Peppy is like the teenaged mothers I see, you won’t get many dog biscuits out of the father. But maybe his owner will help out?”

  “I doubt it. The father’s a black Lab who lives up the street from us. But I can’t imagine Mrs. Frizell helping care for eight puppies. She’s got five dogs of her own and I don’t know where she gets the money to feed them.”

  Mrs. Frizell was one of the stubborn holdouts against the gentrification of my stretch of Racine. In her eighties, she was the kind of old woman who terrified me when I was small. Her wispy gray hair stuck out from her head in uncombed elflocks. Summer and winter she wore the same array of faded gingham dresses and shapeless sweaters.

  Although her house badly needed painting, it wasn’t falling down. The concrete front steps and the roof had both been replaced the year I moved into my co-op. I’d never seen any other signs of work on the place and vaguely assumed she had a child somewhere who took care of the most pressing problems. Her yard apparently didn’t come under that heading. No one ever cut the rank, weed-filled grass in the summer and Mrs. Frizell didn’t seem to mind the cans and cigarette packs that people tossed over the fence.

  The yard was a sore spot with the local block development committee, or whatever my upwardly mobile neighbors called themselves. They didn’t much like the dogs either. The Lab was the only purebred; the other four were mutts ranging in size from a large, off-white Benji replica to something that looked like a walking gray earmuff. The animals were nominally fenced in, except when Mrs. Frizell walked them on a tangle of leashes twice a day, but the Lab in particular came and went as he pleased. He’d jumped the four-foot fence to mount Peppy, and presumably other dogs as well, but Mrs. Frizell wouldn’t believe angry callers who told her so. “He’s been in the yard all day,” she would snap. And somehow, with that telepathy that exists between some dogs and their people, he would miraculously appear in the yard anytime she opened the door.

  “Sounds like a problem for the Department of Health,” Lotty said briskly. “An old woman alone with five dogs? I can hardly bear to think about the smell.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, but not wholeheartedly.

  Lotty offered dessert to Michael and his companion, the Israeli composer Or’ Nivitsky. Michael, who made his home in London, was in Chicago for a few days to play a concert with the Chicago Symphony. Tonight he was giving a solo recital at the Auditorium as a benefit for Chicago Settlement, the refugee assistance group. It had been a favorite charity of Max’s wife, Theresz, before she died nine years ago; Michael was dedicating tonight’s recital to her. Or’ was playing the oboe in a concerto for oboe and cello she’d written in Theresz Loewenthal’s name.

  Or’ refused dessert. “Prepremiere butterflies. And anyway, I need to change.” Michael was already superfine in tails, but Or’ had brought her concert gown with her to Lotty’s—“That way I can pretend it’s just an ordinary evening as long as possible and enjoy my dinner,” she’d explained in her clipped British English.

  While Lotty bustled out to fasten the back of Or’s dress, Michael went down with his cello to fetch the car. I cleared away the dinner plates and put water on for coffee, my mind more on Mrs. Frizell than on Or’s premiere.

  I’d refused to sign the neighborhood petition demanding that she cut her grass and chain the dogs. A lawyer who’d rehabbed the house across the street from her wanted to take her to court and force the city to remove the dogs. He’d been around, trying to drum up support. My building was pretty evenly divided—Vinnie, the tight-assed banker who lived on the ground floor, had eagerly signed on, as had the Koreans on the second floor; they had three children and were worried about dog bites. But Mr. Contreras, Berit Gabrielsen, and I firmly opposed the idea. Even though I wished Mrs. Frizell would neuter the Labrador, the dogs weren’t really a menace. Just a minor nuisance.

  “The puppies worrying you?” Max came up behind me as I stood lost in thought over the kitchen sink.

  “No, not really. Anyway, they’re living with Mr. Contreras, so they won’t be under my feet. I hate to find myself cooing over them with his enthusiasm, because getting them all back and forth for shots and everything else is going to be nightmare enough. And then finding homes for them, training the ones we can’t give away—but they are adorable.”

  “I’ll put a notice in the hospital newsletter if you like,” Max offered. He was the executive director at Beth Israel, where Lotty sent her perinatal patients.


  Or’ swept into the kitchen as I was thanking him, resplendent in soft coal crepe that clung to her body like soot. She kissed Max on the cheek and held out a hand to me.

  “Good to meet you, Victoria. I hope we’ll see you after the concert.”

  “Good luck,” I said. “I’m eager to hear your new concerto.”

  “I know you’ll be impressed with it, Victoria,” Max said. “I’ve been listening to the rehearsal all week.” Michael and Or’ had been staying with him in Evanston.

  “Yes, you are an angel, Max, putting up with our swearing and screeching for six days. Good-bye.”

  It was only six o’clock; the concert didn’t begin until eight. The three of us ate poached pears with almond cream and lingered over coffee in Lotty’s bright, spare living room.

  “I hope Or’ has done something palatable in Theresz’s honor,” Lotty said. “Vic and I went to hear the Contemporary Chamber Ensemble play an octet and a trio of hers and we both left with headaches.”

  “I haven’t heard the piece played through properly, but I think you’ll be pleased. She’s done some very painful work on this—examined the past in a way that many contemporary Israelis don’t want to.” Max looked at his watch. “I think I must have prepremiere butterflies as well, but I’d like to get an early start.”

  I was driving. Max had lent his car to Michael and no sane person would let Lotty chauffeur them. Max graciously took the small backseat the Trans Am offered. He leaned forward to talk to Lotty over the seatback, but once we were on Lake Shore Drive I couldn’t hear them above the engine. When I turned off at Monroe and stopped at the light between the Inner Drive and Congress, I could make out snatches of the conversation. Lotty was upset about something to do with Carol Alvarado, her nurse and right arm at the clinic. Max didn’t agree with her.

  The light changed before I could make out what the problem was. I turned down Congress toward Louis Sullivan’s masterpiece. Lotty whipped her head away from Max to admonish me sharply on the speed at which I’d taken the corner. I looked at Max in the rearview mirror; his mouth was pinched into a line. I hoped the two weren’t planning a major quarrel in honor of the evening. And anyway, what possible disagreement could they have about Carol?

  At the half-circle connecting Congress with Michigan Avenue we ran into a jam. Cars heading to the south underground garage were snarled with those trying to stop at the theater entrance. A couple of cops were frantically directing traffic, whistling people away as they tried pulling up to the curb in front of the Auditorium.

  I pulled over to the side of the road. “I’ll let you two out here and go park—we’ll never be on time if I try to get across here.”

  Max handed me my ticket before unwinding himself from the backseat. Although I’d put a blanket down to cover Peppy’s traces I could see red-gold hairs clinging to his dinner jacket as he climbed out. I made an embarrassed face and furtively looked at the skirt of Lotty’s tailored coral gown. It held a few hairs too. I could only hope her annoyance kept her mind off her clothes.

  I made a sharp U, ignoring an outraged whistle, and zipped the Trans Am back up to Monroe and the north garage. It was only half a mile from there to the Auditorium, but I was wearing a long skirt and high heels, not the best garb for jogging. I slid in next to Lotty in the box Michael had given us just as the houselights went down.

  Looking austere and remote in tails, Michael came onto the stage. He opened the evening with Strauss’s Don Quixote Variations. The theater was full—Chicago Settlement had become a trendy charity for some reason—but it wasn’t a music-loving crowd. Their whispered conversations created a background rumble and they kept applauding at the pauses between variations. Michael scowled at the breaks to his concentration. At one point he replayed the final thirteen bars of the previous section, only to find himself interrupted again. At that he made an angry gesture of dismissal and played the final two variations without stopping for air. The audience applauded politely, although not enthusiastically. Michael didn’t even bow, just walked quickly from the stage.

  The next performance evoked greater response: the Chicago Settlement Children’s Choir performed a set of five folk songs. The choir held rigorous auditions and the children sang with a beautiful clarity, but it was their appearance that brought down the house. Some PR genius realized that native garb would sell better than choir robes, so bright dashiki and velvet Afghan jackets gleamed next to the embroidered white dresses of El Salvadoran girls. The audience roared for an encore and gave a standing ovation to the soloists, an Ethiopian boy and an Iranian girl.

  During the intermission I left Max and Lotty in the box and strolled to the foyer to admire the costumes of the patrons—they were even more colorfully decked than the children. Perhaps left to themselves Lotty and Max would sort out their disagreement. Lotty’s ferocity creates periodic sparks in all her relationships. I didn’t want to be privy to whatever conflagration she had going with Carol.

  On my way out of the box I caught my heel in the threads of my skirt. I wasn’t used to moving in evening clothes. I kept forgetting to shorten my stride; every few steps I’d have to stop to disengage my heel from the delicate threads.

  I’d bought the skirt for my husband’s law firm’s Christmas party during my brief marriage thirteen years ago. The sheer black wool, heavily shot with silver, didn’t compare with Or’s custom-made gown, but it was my own most elegant outfit. With a black silk top and my mother’s diamond drops it made respectable concert attire, but it lacked the dramatic flair of most of the ensembles I saw in the foyer.

  I was particularly fascinated by a bronze satin dress whose top resembled a Roman breastplate—except that it was slit to the waist. I kept trying to figure out how its wearer managed to keep her breasts from spilling out into the middle. Starch, maybe, or Scotch tape.

  When the chimes sounded to announce the end of intermission, the woman in the breastplate moved toward me. I was thinking that the diamond choker didn’t go with the dress—that it was just a chance for someone with Trump-like ideas of female adornment to display his wealth—when my heel caught once more in my skirt. I twisted around to free myself as a man in a white dinner jacket hurried toward us from the other end of the foyer.

  “Teri! Where’ve you been? I wanted to introduce you to some people.”

  The light, authoritative baritone, with its faint undercurrent of petulance, startled me so much that I lost my balance and fell into the path of another diamond-encrusted woman. By the time she’d disengaged her spikes from my shoulder and we’d exchanged frosty apologies, Teri and her escort had disappeared into the theater.

  I knew that voice, though: I’d woken to it every morning for twenty-four months—six months of sweetly tormented eroticism as we finished law school and studied for the bar, and eighteen of simple torment after we married. It was as though by wearing my best outfit from those strange days I had conjured him up.

  Richard Yarborough, his name was. He was a partner at Crawford, Mead, one of Chicago’s giant firms. Not just a partner, but a significant rainmaker in a place whose clients included two former governors and the heads of most of Chicago’s contributions to the Fortune 500.

  I only knew these facts because Dick used to recite them at breakfast with the awe of a cathedral guide displaying his reliquaries. He might have done so at dinner, too, but I wasn’t willing to wait up to eat with him at midnight when he had finished salaaming to the prestige gods for the day.

  That kind of summed up why we’d broken up—my not being impressed enough with the power and money he was wallowing in and his suddenly expecting me to drop everything and be a Japanese wife when we finished law school and started working. Even before our formal split, Dick had realized that a wife was an important part of his portfolio and that he should have married someone with more clout than the daughter of a beat cop and an Italian immigrant could ever carry. It wasn’t my mother’s Italianness that bugged him, but the taint of immigrant squalor th
at clung to me. He’d made that clear when he began accepting invitations to Peter Felitti’s Oak Brook estate while I was doing Saturday duty at women’s court—“I made your excuses, Vic, and anyway, I don’t think you have the wardrobe for the kind of weekend the Felittis are planning.”

  Nine months after our final decree, he and Teri Felitti were married in a fanfare of white lace and bridesmaids. Her father’s financial prominence made the nuptials a major news item—and I couldn’t resist reading all the details. Which is how I knew she was only nineteen at the time, nine years younger than Dick. He had turned forty last year; I wondered if Teri at thirty-two was starting to look old to him.

  I’d never seen her before, but I could understand why Dick thought she was a better ornament for Crawford, Mead than I’d been. For one thing, she wasn’t sprawled on the floor as the ushers were closing the aisle doors; for another, she didn’t have to sprint, holding up her dirty hem to avoid her high heels, to get inside ahead of them.

  3

  Feeding Frenzy

  I dropped back into the box just as Michael returned to the stage with Or’. Hearing my panting, Lotty turned to me, eyebrows raised. “Did you need to run a marathon at intermission, Vic?” she muttered under cover of the polite smattering of applause.

  I made a throwaway gesture. “It’s too complicated to explain now. Dick is here, my old pal Dick.”

  “And that set your pulse racing like this?” Her astringent irony made me flush, but before I could come up with a snappy rejoinder Michael started speaking.

  In a few simple sentences he explained the debt his family owed the citizens of London for taking them in when Europe had become a hellhole in which they couldn’t survive. “And I am proud that I grew up in Chicago, where people’s hearts are also moved to help those who—because of race or tribe or creed—can no longer live in their native lands. Tonight we are going to play for you the debut performance of Or’ Nivitsky’s concerto for oboe and cello entitled The Wandering Jew, dedicated to the memory of Theresz Kocsis Loewenthal. Theresz supported Chicago Settlement most ardently; she would be moved to see the support you give this important charity.”