Creamy White Thighs

Garrick flipped through the opinion as he walked back to the press room in a flock with the others, looking up from the white pages occasionally to watch Alice walk. The opinion used long, winding strings of words to announce that Baby John’s life as he knew it would end in two days, when the biological father, accompanied by the Cook County sheriff’s department, would arrive at the Chicago home of the adoptive parents to take physical custody of his son. If there was a single, consistent truth in politics that Garrick had discovered, it was that for every person’s misfortune, there was some resulting benefit for someone else, and this was no exception. Because of Baby John’s approaching trauma—which was, after all, news, no way around that—Garrick and others on floor two-and-a-half would soon be taking the kind of little junket for which they often attacked politicians. The transfer of Baby John from his old life to his new would, according to the court order, take place at nine in the morning, too early for any of the Capitol reporters’ editors to reasonably expect them to be there to witness it without having woken up in Chicago. So, there being no other choice, Garrick and others from the press room would be forced to temporarily abandon their daily Springfield routines, pile into cars, drive up Interstate Fifty-Five, check into Chicago hotel rooms, eat in Chicago restaurants—a dinner and a breakfast, anyway, and probably a lunch or two—drink Chicago beer, maybe even listen to some Chicago music, all at the expense of their respective newspapers. No way around it.

Walking up the marble stairs and under the Mural with the other reporters, Garrick was already picturing what he knew would be the best part for him, better than the meals or the beer or the music: the moment when he would check into the hotel, walking by the other guests, his small overnight bag slung over one shoulder, his tie loosened, looking busy, weary, a reporter on assignment, an important enough assignment to require a hotel room—this was news, dammit, never mind the expense, that was the philosophy of the news business—and telling the clerk his reservations were under “The Peoria Post.” Or maybe he would just say, “The Post.” There had been a few such trips before, few enough that he could remember them each in quick succession. And the hotels were never the best ones; never mind the expense wasn’t actually the philosophy of the news business these days. But still he was always struck by how much the trips made him keenly feel the myth of his profession, how they allowed him to wrap himself in the myth for a few days. It was a better fit than the reality.

In the press room that afternoon all phone lines were aimed north, at Chicago, the callers comparing prices and making reservations. After some negotiation with Helen—who was fluttering at the expense of Garrick’s first choice, in the heart of the downtown Loop, and was pushing instead for a suburban budget motel that would have put him thirty minutes outside Chicago—Garrick managed to get approval for a little hotel on the south side, not the best neighborhood but at least a real hotel in a real city. Couldn’t very well feel the myth staying at some cookie-cutter motel chain in Schaumburg.

He had just hung up from Helen when the phone rang again. A woman’s voice said: “Garrick Martin, please?”

“This is Garrick.”

“Mr. Martin, I’m calling from St. James Hospital. You are acquainted with Anka Janovik?”

Garrick’s first random thought was: So that’s her first name. His second thought was how odd it was that she’d never once told him that, and that he’d never once asked.

“I know Mrs. Janovik,” he said into the phone, suddenly feeling dizzy. “Is something wrong?”

“I’m sorry to have to call like this, Mr. Martin. Mrs. Janovik listed you as the person to contact in case of an emergency? She was just brought into the E.R. We believe she’s had a stroke.”

For an empty moment, Garrick couldn’t remember what Mrs. Janovik looked like. He thought of Albert, a little boy with a blur for a face.

Garrick: When I die . . . “Um. Is she dead?”

“No, no. The doctors are with her now.”

. . . there will be no one alive . . . “Is she, um—is she talking?”

“Mr. Martin, I think you should come over. We’re still not sure of her prognosis.”

Alice was in the lobby pouring a cup of coffee as Garrick walked toward the glass-and-wood doors. She smiled, and he stopped, trying to look natural. He felt as if he might vomit. She asked: “You’re going to Chicago tomorrow?”

Garrick: Chicago? Chicago. “Yeah. You?”

“Oh, I’ll be there.” Suggestion in her voice, and something more—stretched vowels, a soft shape to the words. Garrick stared at her a moment, as if maybe some trace of the words might still be floating around her face so he could study them closer. Then, there it was: Ah’ll be they-ah. A Southern accent, clear as a March moon, how the hell had he ever missed it? How did one pick up a Southern accent growing up in Decatur, Illinois? Isn’t that where she said she grew up? Come to think of it, did she ever actually say where she was from? Why would she hide it? Funny, he thought, how we carry our histories like handbags, sometimes displaying them, sometimes hiding them, sometimes losing them.

Ukrainian Child-Stealer Versus Lunatic Mom

Of course, different neighborhoods were different worlds here: There was the world in which the Peoria Post could afford a hotel room—a box of a room with wafer-thin carpet and plastic cups wrapped in cellophane—and there was the world of the Dexter family, a good distance north, a world that clearly involved plenty of money. Garrick looked at the imposing brick house, easily a century old but pristine, framed by mature trees and a deep lawn and the distant line of the lake and the hard, rising shapes of downtown Chicago on the hazy horizon, and he wondered why he hadn’t chosen some profession that would have allowed at least the possibility of such a home. Reporters never lived in places like this, nor did astronomers. Dexter was an architect, someone had said? The subject of architecture made Garrick think of Mrs. Janovik, as just about every subject had for the previous eighteen hours. One of her neglectful sons was an architect, she’d mentioned once or twice, though he didn’t think it was the son he had met in the Springfield hospital room.

The brown squirrel barked down at the crowd now, as if getting mad—Why weren’t they watching? Garrick squinted up at it, as if to be polite. He could hear Worm, a few yards away, explaining to John Tulley, one of the Chicago reporters they had met the night before and had dragged into the “creamy white thighs” bet, how a horse shoe was constructed: “You ladle the cheese over the meat, and then mound the french fries on top of that.”

Tulley, patiently reciting: “Meat, bread, cheese, french fries.”

“No, no—bread, meat, cheese, fries,” said Worm. “If you put the cheese right on the bread it would get soggy.”

Garrick knew for a fact that Worm loathed horse shoes, but now here he was, Mr. Horse Shoe, laying out the culinary delights of Springfield for Tulley. Worm had been at it since the previous night, even before they all walked into the Billy Goat Tavern, looking like tourists. Of course, they’d all been to Chicago more times than any of them could count, but the difference from Springfield was so stark that it was hard to resist the urge to look up. The Billy Goat Tavern was fabled among newspaper reporters around the country, a basement bar, as old and grungy as Chicago journalism itself. A small group of the Chicago reporters were holding down a table under a row of hanging portraits of notable local journalists, many of them with the symbol “-30-” engraved under their smiling faces, the old-time copyediting symbol that meant: end of story. There was Ben Hecht— -30- —and Mike Royko— -30- —and Bob Brown, who had no number below his chin as yet. Worm’s monologue about the virtues of Springfield began the moment they walked into the bar to find it infested with Herald reporters and Sun-Times reporters and other arrogant Chicagoans. Most of them knew Harvey by voice rather than sight, but a few, including Tulley, recognized him and waved him over, hayseeds in tow. Tulley, slightly drunk, wearing a loosened tie that worked and a short, stylish haircut, rose, a bottle in one hand, and said: “Harvey! Welcome back to civilization!” The Worm stood looking dark as introductions or re-introductions were made. When Harvey got to Alice, Tulley pointed and, placing her, said: “You’re the one who fell.”

During it all, Garrick’s mind was on Mrs. Janovik, replaying their disjointed conversation in the hospital room, as he had dozens of times already. He was remembering her son, not the architect but the other one, as the banter rose around him.

“Must be slow in Springfield without old Jamison around,” said Tulley.

“Really slow,” said Julian. “Bell couldn’t commit news if his life depended on it.”

“Thank god for the I-Fifty-Seven killer,” said Harvey. “That’s selling some papers, at least.”

Martha, a young, competently dressed feature writer, asked: “Anyone here in the lottery to cover that execution?” Claire looked around the table at the question.

Harvey: “So, they’re really going to do this Baby John thing?”

Mark, a City Hall reporter: “Nine a.m., the kid goes. Gonna be a damned circus.”

“God, that grill smells great,” said Alice.

“Best cheeseburgers in the world,” said Tulley.

The Worm, muttering darkly: “Bet you can’t get a horse shoe here.”

Martha, intrigued: “Oh, is that that drink with vodka and pomegranate juice?”

The hour grew late and the drinkers grew drunk and cozy, except Garrick, who seemed to be watching the whole scene from a distance. Both Claire and Alice gave him long, questioning looks at various points, Claire finally giving up. Alice continued to look at regular intervals, her thin dark eyebrows full of patience. Garrick knew he should come out of it, put Mrs. Janovik away for a few hours and join the living, but he couldn’t. Every time he tried to look interested in the conversation, his mind fell back to the Springfield hospital room.

Mrs. Janovik had been asleep when Garrick arrived. A short female doctor with an indeterminate foreign accent asked how they knew each other and Garrick lied, only because the truth seemed too complicated: She’s my landlady, we have coffee every morning, she lets me use her roof, and I’m supposed to remember her dead little brother for her after she dies, though I don’t really know what he looks like, just blond hair and a small nose . . . Instead, he said: “She’s a friend of the family.” Her prognosis, the short doctor said, was unclear. The stroke hit while she was in the kitchen. When she fell, she knocked over a large glass bowl, which shattered loudly. Garrick knew the bowl. It was translucent green and sat on the chopping block next to her countertop. The young couple in the next apartment called through the door for a few minutes before deciding that the sound of shattering glass followed by silence was worth a call to the police. The officers knocked on doors and windows and finally jimmied the door open. Mrs. Janovik lay on the brown linoleum, glass shards scattered around her. The doctor said the breaking of the bowl probably saved her life—she lived alone, who knew when anyone would have found her? Garrick thought: It would have been the next morning, when I came for coffee.

There in the bar, Tulley turned out to be something of a philosopher. There was some suggestion that the media frenzy around the Baby John story—particularly the columns of Bob Brown, aimed squarely at Chief Justice Tipple and bordering on incitement to riot—had gotten out of hand, and that perhaps their profession had a responsibility to step back from the fire. Tulley wouldn’t have it. “The way I see it, we’re basically in the delivery business,” he said. “We have customers, we deliver information to them, just like a restaurant delivers a pizza—”

“Does this information have anchovies on it?” muttered Worm.

“—Now, if someone wants to take that pizza and throw it against the wall and make a big mess with it after the pizza man delivers it,” Tulley continued, “is that something the pizza man has to concern himself with? No. What they do with the information I give them is their business. If someone takes the news I give them about Baby John, and uses it to crucify old Judge Tipple, that’s not my concern.”

Shiny asked: “You don’t think you have any responsibility at all for the consequences of the stories you write?”

“My responsibility is to the facts,” Tulley said. “If the facts cause problems, so be it.”

A business writer named Carla said: “That poor little boy. Tipple deserves to be crucified.”

Harvey, raising a glass: “Hear, hear!” and the others laughed and clinked glasses, a dozen reporters toasting the crucifixion of a judge. Garrick looked up with a start. He was replaying Mrs. Janovik’s first words to him in the hospital room—she had awoken suddenly while he was sitting next to her, looked at him, and said: “Is it time for the wedding?”—and he wasn’t clear on why they were clinking glasses.

“Whatever happens, it’s going coast-to-coast,” said Tulley. “I heard this morning CNN’s going to be there live. New York Times, Washington Post, all of ‘em.”

Tulley took a sip of his beer, then added, as if in afterthought: “Of course, they all have bureaus here, anyway.”

The Worm said, drunken accusation in his voice: “What’s that supposed to mean?” Shiny and Julian and the others passed around a glance.

Tulley, confused: “What’s what supposed to mean?”

Worm: “ `They all have bureaus here, anyway.’ Is that like saying, `Oh, they sure wouldn’t have any bureaus in Springfield’?”

Tulley: “CNN has a bureau in Springfield?”

Worm: “No, but Chicago isn’t the center of the universe, y’know!”

Tulley shrugged and said, evenly: “The fact is, we have a lot more people up here to make news. Things are more hectic.” Then, with a gently teasing smile, as if trying to make peace, but not really: “We don’t have time for games like this `creamy thigh’ business of yours.”

“Or maybe you just don’t have the balls!” spat Worm.

Tulley dropped his smile and stared, waiting in vain for one of the women at the table to declare a breach of decorum. When no lifeline came, he rebuilt his smile with some effort, then said: “What, are you inviting us into the bet?”

“If you got the money, c’mon in,” goaded Worm. “Two-hundred bucks.”

Tulley: “And the bet is what?”

Worm: “ `Creamy white thighs,’ whoever gets it into a story first wins. Straight news only.”

Tulley looked around the table for consensus from the other Chicagoans and, again finding no allies, shook his head. “No copyeditor in his right mind is gonna let that in,” he said.

The Worm pounced: “Oh, so now you’re going to claim Chicago has copyeditors in their right minds!”

“I’m in,” announced Carla. She might as well have lit a firecracker in the center of the table. Tulley stared at her, looking betrayed. He studied Worm a moment, then said: “I’m in, too.” The gates open, the other Chicagoans poured through.

The brown squirrel on the power line was silent now, sitting and flipping its tail down at the audience, resting between acts. Loose knots of protesters milled in groups up the block, separated from the reporters and the Dexters’ property by yellow police tape. The police officers lining the curb looked nervous, as if there were more people here than they had expected, and Garrick thought they must have been naive to have expected any less. The surrender of Baby John had drawn reporters from all over the country, and Garrick supposed it made sense: It wasn’t every day that a kid was scheduled in advance to be removed from his family in public. “A court-ordered kidnapping,” the Chicago Herald columnist Bob Brown had dubbed it that morning. Some of the cameramen, having nothing better to do as they awaited the arrival of the Ukrainian biological parents, took footage of the protesters, who were standing around sipping coffee from white foam cups but who immediately got back into character when the cameras came on and began chanting and yelling.

The bulk of the protesters were supporters of the adoptive family, judging from the signs they carried: Leave John Alone, and Home Is Where The Heart Is. A few others carried signs that designated them as backers of the Ukrainians—Blood Is Thicker Than Lawyers, said one—but they were vastly outnumbered. By the cusp of the Millennium, it seemed, the nation had seen enough of the injustices that biological parents were capable of inflicting upon their own children, and the result had been a rethinking of the previously unquestioned sanctity of biological parenthood. Home Is Where The Heart Is, said the nation, and if the best home, the one in which small children weren’t to be hurt or neglected, happened to be with people other than their biological parents, so be it. The gray old judge who headed the Illinois Supreme Court hadn’t seen it that way—his shopping-cart analogy had been slung all over the nation’s airwaves for two days now, to the point that his office put out a rare written statement trying to clarify what he meant by the comment, which only led to additional criticism that he was backpedalling. Tipple’s name figured prominently in several of the protesters’ signs. Garrick listened to the pieces of conversation and thought he caught the starch of a British accent.

He was still surveying the crowd when he turned and found Kyle “Spock” Harpinger standing next to him, his jeans baggy and faded, his feet sandaled, his fingers poking at some diminutive electronic device in his hand. Garrick couldn't have been more startled if he'd stepped out of his own shower to find the “blogger” standing there with a towel. Harpinger generally wouldn't walk the twenty steps to the Blue Room for a news conference, so enmeshed was he in the fabric of cyberspace there in his glass-walled cubbyhole office with the bare desk and the mysterious framed newspaper article. The notion that he'd driven the three hours to Chicago to chase the story everyone else was chasing, out here in the physical world, was nothing less than surreal. Garrick said, warily: “Hey.”

Harpinger, not looking up from his palm: “ 'Sup, Iceman?” His bare toes peeked out from the shroud of tattered denim around his feet.

“So,” asked Garrick, “you came up for this?”

“This is news, bro,” said Harpinger, tapping at his palm. “This is people. Not like that paper bullshit in the Capitol.” He punched the buttons, with emphasis, at news, people, and paper bullshit.

Garrick pondered an anomalous anger rising in him. Paper bullshit? All that they covered, everything they did? This, from the “blogger”? Who did he think he was, this disheveled techno-hippie with the bare toes and the phantom readership, denigrating a tradition of printed words that stretched back to Gutenberg? It was an unusually righteous anger for Garrick Martin, and he found himself enjoying it a bit, though he also found himself not examining it too closely.

Claire stood on the other side of the crowd, talking to two police officers and taking notes, her magnificent eyebrows furrowed in concentration. Garrick fought the urge to move into her line of sight. They had reached their own milestone of sorts the night before, after leaving the Billy Goat Tavern and walking along the lake with the Chicago skyline behind them, and he didn’t want to ruin it now by sauntering up and talking about the weather.

Midnight had passed, they left the bar, and Tulley and some of the other Chicagoans had. joined the Springfield reporters at the lake. Without planning it, Garrick and Claire took a separate walk along the cement shore. Garrick’s silence all night had been an issue of consternation with everyone, and Claire hadn’t been very talkative either, and it wasn’t shaping up to be a great conversation. They walked silently, scanning the skyline, watching the black water sloshing below them and looking up at the lights of the night sky, though mostly obscured by the lights of the city. Claire pointed. “That’s Venus,” she said. “My dad taught me how to find it. It’s the only star I can name.” Garrick thought to correct her—Venus is a planet—but he said nothing. A dozen steps later, Claire turned to him and said suddenly, Mrs. Janovik-like: “Did you know I had a sister who was murdered?”

Garrick again said nothing, this time out of shock. What was it about him, he wondered, that made people want to tell him about their murdered relatives? “I didn’t know that,” he finally managed to respond, sounding less like he was talking than clearing his throat. Then the whole story came out, Claire telling it stiffly, as if reading off cue cards: the little apartment, the coroner’s gentle explanation, the funeral, the newspaper stories.

There was more walking and silence after that—what did one say? “I didn’t know her very well,” said Claire. “But it still makes me wake up sometimes and realize the world isn’t the rational place we pretend it is.”

That part Garrick understood. For him, the world had stopped being a rational place not long after Mrs. Janovik started talking about Albert, though he hadn’t realized how much the story had affected him until he saw her lying in the hospital bed, eyes closed, the monitor beeping nearby. Looking at her, he realized, all at once, that he had spent months trying to reconcile the story of Albert with the world he saw around him every day, and failing. The small children who crossed Garrick’s path usually were tourists, school kids walking through the Capitol in meandering lines, chattering like squirrels, popping their chewing gum, slapping their gym shoes on the marble floors, oblivious to their teachers’ monologues about the three branches of government, oblivious to any issue beyond the small dramas and comedies of the moment—playing on the shores of imagined islands, slaying sea monsters. It was inconceivable that there could be a world in which such children could find themselves dragged to their doom by armed soldiers. Yet there was Albert, waiting by the pungent coffee every morning. Mrs. Janovik had said: “Children should be off-limits,” and looking at her in the Springfield hospital bed, Garrick understood how true that was—yes, completely off-limits, no exceptions, to hell with rational arguments about the tide of history. He’d looked at the oval shape of her old head and thought: Albert’s in there, the last picture of his face locked away in a vault that was now damaged, perhaps beyond repair, with no way to open it.

It wasn’t long after Garrick had arrived in the hospital room that Mrs. Janovik’s eyes popped open and she asked, inexplicably, about the wedding. Her own wedding, in memory? Garrick’s, in the future? Albert’s, in her dreams? She didn’t precede or follow the question with any explanation. She looked around the room, then studied Garrick’s face. She smiled weakly, and said: “Oh, hi dear,” making it clear that she didn’t remember his name—she had always called him by his name. Garrick smiled back and asked how she felt, and they talked about how nice the room was. After more silence, during which a decision was made, Garrick leaned forward and spoke to her in a guilty whisper, knowing it was wrong to test her as if testing a lock but unable to stop himself. “Mrs. Janovik,” he whispered, “tell me about your brother.”

She looked at him as if he had just appeared. Then she said: “Oh, hi Garrick.”

Garrick, smiling: “Yes, it’s Garrick. Mrs. Janovik, can you tell me about Albert?”

Silence.

Silence.

Mrs. Janovik, finally breaking her silence, said: “I can’t seem to remember where I put the blender, Michael. Could you find it?”

Garrick didn’t know who Michael was. One of her sons, maybe? A moment later, one of the sons walked in—Garrick recognized him from a family portrait he saw every morning on a small table in the front entryway of Mrs. Janovik’s apartment. He looked at Garrick and Garrick stood up quickly. He considered trying to explain what he was whispering to her about—Well, you see, I was trying to determine if she still remembers anything about your dead uncle—but he decided against it. “I’m Garrick, I’m one of her tenants,” he said, a sliver of the story.

The son, a surprisingly old-looking man with graying hair thinning on top, nodded in response, then turned to his mother. Mrs. Janovik smiled politely at her son, like one would smile at a stranger. Her son stared back with an look of profound worry. Garrick suddenly felt like an intruder. He said goodbye and, without getting any response from either of them, started out the door. Before it closed, the son said: “Are you the one she has coffee with?”

Garrick, after sifting through the question, answered: “Yeah.”

“You’re the one who goes on the roof?”

“Um—yeah.”

“That’ll have to stop. It’s causing leaks. She didn’t want to tell you.”

Garrick told Claire none of this as they walked along the lake, her talking about her dead sister, him listening. Then silence descended. He felt both opportunity and obligation to open up to her, and he actually opened his mouth to say it: I go into my landlady’s apartment every morning and we have coffee and talk about life and death and politics and religion and the past and the future and the stars and planets and her brother Albert who was killed by the Nazis in Poland when he was six—children should be off-limits, by the way—and she’s the only person I ever talk to about things that matter, my link to the world outside the Mural, and I might be the only person she ever talks to about anything and now we can’t talk anymore and I miss her and Albert so much I feel like crying but how do you tell anyone about your landlady being sick, doesn’t that just invite shrugs? But he didn't say any of it. He just nodded and gasped at the appropriate times during the story of Anna, a story he had no right to hear, as he wasn’t unveiling his own. A sister who wasn’t close and a landlady who was—surely the irony alone allowed a way into the conversation, but Garrick was unable to start it and he finally gave up. Instead, he just answered the story of Anna with: “I’m sorry,” which was true, if inadequate. Claire didn't appear to be expecting anything more from him—the point clearly had been the telling—and when they rejoined the others, she gave him a smile that said, Thanks, and maybe a tiny bit more, or maybe he was just imagining that part.

Now, in the sunlight, Kyle “Spock” Harpinger drifted off into the crowd, still looking down at his palm. Garrick, feigning politeness, asked after him: “Where will your story be tomorrow? If I want to read it?” It seemed as good a way as any to get at the real question: What the hell is it that you do, anyway?

Harpinger stopped and looked directly at Garrick for the first time. “ `Tomorrow’ this will all be yesterday,” he said, as if it should have been obvious. “My story's going out right now, Iceman.”