A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago Part 40

GRa.s.s FIGURES

You will sometimes notice when you sit on the back porch after dinner that there are other back porches with people on them. And when you sit on the front steps, that there are other front steps similarly occupied. In the park when you lie down on the gra.s.s you will see there are others lying on the gra.s.s. And when you look out of your window you can observe other people looking out of their windows.

In the streets when you walk casually and have time to look around you will see others walking casually and looking around, too. And in the theater or church or where you work there are always the inevitable others, always reflecting yourself. You might get to thinking about this as the newspaper reporter did. The newspaper reporter got an idea one day that the city was nothing more nor less than a vast, broken mirror giving him back garbled images of himself.

The newspaper reporter was trying to write fiction stories on the side and he thought: "If I can figure out something for a background, some idea or something that will explain about people, and then have the plot of the story sort of prove this general idea by a specific incident, that would be the way to work it."

Thus, when the reporter had figured it out that the city was a mirror reflecting himself, he grew excited. That was the kind of idea he had always been looking for. But at night in his bedroom when he started to write he hit a snag. He had thought he held in his mind the secret of the city. Yet when he came to write about it the secret slipped away and left him with nothing. He sat looking out of his bedroom window, noticing that the telephone poles in the dark alley looked like huge, inverted music notes. Then he thought: "It doesn't do any good to get an idea that doesn't tell you anything. Just figuring out that the city is a mirror that reflects me all the time doesn't give me the secret of streets and crowds. Because the question then arises: 'Who am I that the mirror reflects, and what am I? What in Sam Hill is my motif?'"

So the newspaper reporter decided to wait awhile before he wrote his story--wait, at least, until he had found out something. But the next day, while he was walking in Michigan Avenue, the idea he had had about the mirror trotted along beside him like some homeless Hector pup that he couldn't shake. He looked up eagerly into the faces of the crowd on the street, searching the many different eyes that moved by him for a "lead."

What the newspaper reporter wanted was to be able to begin his fiction story by saying something like this: "People are so and so. The city is so and so. Everybody feels this and this. No matter who they are or where they live, or what their jobs are they can't escape the mark of the city that is on them."

It was after 7 o'clock and the people in Michigan Avenue were going home or sauntering back and forth, looking into the shop windows, with nothing much to do. The street was still light, although the sun had gone. Hidden behind the buildings of the city, the sun flattened itself out on an invisible horizon and spread a vast peac.o.c.k tail of color across the sky.

In Grant Park, opposite the Public Library, men lay on their backs with their hands folded under their heads and stared up into the colors of the sky. The newspaper reporter stood abstractedly on the corner counting the automobiles that purred by to see if more taxicabs than privately owned cars pa.s.sed a given point in Michigan Avenue. Then he walked across the street for no other reason than that there were for the moment no more automobiles to count. He stopped on the opposite pavement and stood looking at the figures that lay on the gra.s.s in Grant Park.

The newspaper reporter had been lying for ten minutes on his back in the gra.s.s when he sat up suddenly and muttered: "Here it is. Right in front of me." He sat, looking intently, at the men who were lying on the gra.s.s as he had been a moment before. And his idea about the city's being a mirror giving him back images of himself started up again in his mind. But now he could find out what these images of himself were. In fact, what he was.

Whereupon he would have his story.

Being a newspaper reporter there was nothing unusual in his mind about walking up to one of the figures and talking to it. For years and years he had done just that for a living--walked up to strangers and asked them questions. So now he would ask the men lying on their backs what they were lying on their backs for. He would ask them why they came to Grant Park, what they were thinking about and how it happened that they all looked alike and lay on their backs like a chorus of figures in a pastoral musical comedy.

The first figure the newspaper reporter approached listened to the questions in surprise. Then he answered: "Well I dunno. I just came into the park and lay down." The second figure looked blank and shook its head.

The reporter tried a third. The third figure grinned and answered: "Oh, well, nothing much to do and the gra.s.s rests you a bit."

The reporter kept on for a few minutes, asking his questions and getting answers that didn't quite mean anything. Then he grew tired of the job and returned to his original place on the gra.s.s and lay down again and stared up into the colors of the sky. After a half-hour, during which he had thought of nothing in particular, he arose, shook his legs free of dirt and gra.s.s and walked away. As he walked he looked at the figures that remained. The arc lamps on the park shafts and on the Greek-like fountain were popping on and the avenue was lighting up like a theater with the footlights going on.

"Funny about them," the newspaper reporter thought, eyeing the figures as he moved away; "they lie there on their backs all in the same position, all looking at the same clouds. So they must all be thinking thoughts about the same thing. Let's see; what was I thinking about? Nothing,"

An excited light came suddenly into the newspaper reporter's eyes.

"I was just waiting," he muttered to himself. "And so are they."

The newspaper reporter looked eagerly at the street and the people pa.s.sing. That was it. He had found the word. "Waiting." Everybody was waiting. On the back porches at night, on the front steps, in the parks, in the theaters, churches, streets and stores--men and women waited. Just as the men on the gra.s.s in Grant Park were waiting. The only difference between the men lying on their backs and people elsewhere was that the men in the gra.s.s had grown tired for the moment of pretending they were doing anything else. So they had stretched themselves out in an att.i.tude of waiting, in a deliberate posture of waiting. And with their eyes on the sky, they waited.

The newspaper reporter felt thrilled as he thought all this. He felt thrilled when he looked closely at the people in Michigan Avenue and saw that they fitted snugly into his theory. He said to himself: "I've discovered a theory about life. A theory that fits them all. That makes the background I'm looking for. Waiting. Yes, the whole pack of them are waiting all the time. That's why we all look alike. That's why one house looks like another and one man walking looks like another man walking, and why figures lying in the gra.s.s look like twins--scores of twins."

The newspaper man returned to his bedroom and started to write again. But he had been writing only a few minutes when he stopped. Again, as it had before, the secret had slipped out of his mind. For he had come to a paragraph that was to tell what the people were waiting for and he couldn't think of any answer to that. What were the men in the gra.s.s waiting for? In the street? On the porches and stone steps? They were images of himself--all "waiting images" of himself. Therefore the answer lay in the question: "What had he been waiting for?"

The newspaper reporter bit into his pencil. "Nothing, nothing," he muttered. "Yes, that's it. They aren't waiting for anything. That's the secret. Life is a few years of suspended animation. But there's no story in that. Better forget it."

So he looked glumly out of his bedroom window, and, being a sentimentalist, the huge inverted music notes the telephone poles made against the dark played a long, sad tune in his mind.