The summer of 1933 was the hottest anyone in Chicago could remember, and also the poorest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Those two things had a way of going together \u2014 heat and poverty \u2014 as if the sky itself had decided to pile on. The breadlines stretched around corners that used to have storefronts, and the storefronts that remained had a hollow, provisional look, like they were only staying open out of stubbornness. Men in good suits who had been somebody two years ago now stood on corners selling apples for a nickel, their eyes carrying the particular shame of people who had believed, completely and without question, that America rewarded effort, and were now in the painful process of revising that belief.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Franklin Whitmore III did not stand in breadlines. His father was one of the twelve men in the city whose money had found a way to survive the Crash \u2014 not unscathed, but intact enough that the Whitmore house on Lake Shore Drive still had three staff, a working telephone, and a cook who made real coffee every morning, not the chicory substitute that most of the neighborhood had switched to and stopped complaining about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Franklin was eleven years old, dressed in a three-piece wool suit that his mother had bought at Marshall Field’s in better times, wearing a fedora that had belonged to his grandfather, and was absolutely, profoundly miserable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Danny Kowalski had nothing that could be itemized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
No suit. No Lake Shore Drive. No cook, no telephone, no father who had made the right investments. His father had worked the stockyards until the stockyards cut half their men, and now worked odd hours at a loading dock on the South Side for wages that required his mother to take in laundry and his older sister to work the counter at a five-and-dime and Danny himself to sell newspapers on the corner of Madison and Dearborn every morning before school, which he attended irregularly and brilliantly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He was eleven years old, wearing a newsboy cap that had belonged to his cousin and a jacket two sizes large and shoes with cardboard inside them where the left sole had separated, and he was \u2014 by any reasonable measure \u2014 one of the happiest people on that particular street on that particular July morning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This was not the performance of happiness. This was not the grim cheerfulness of someone pretending. Danny Kowalski was happy in the real way, the deep-rooted way, the way that has nothing to do with circumstances because it comes from somewhere circumstances can’t reach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It drove certain people absolutely crazy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They met because Franklin’s automobile broke down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
More precisely: the car his family’s driver, Harold, was using to take Franklin to his summer enrichment program at the Newberry Library lost a fan belt on Madison Street, and Harold, who was sixty-three and took automotive failures as personal insults, got out to assess the situation with his hands on his hips and his jaw set, and Franklin got out because sitting alone in a broken car in the July heat was its own particular misery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He was standing on the sidewalk, conspicuous in his three-piece suit, sweating with the dignity he had been trained to maintain, when a voice beside him said:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“You look like you’re melting.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Franklin turned. The boy in the newsboy cap was grinning at him with the unguarded friendliness of someone who had not yet learned that you’re supposed to assess a person before you smile at them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“I beg your pardon,” Franklin said, because that was what he said when he didn’t know what else to say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Your face,” Danny said helpfully. “It’s all red. You want some water? Mrs. Petrowski lets me fill my bottle at her shop. She won’t mind.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Franklin stared at him. In his world, people did not offer things to strangers on the street. In his world, transactions were formal and friendships were vetted and generosity was a check written at a dinner table.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“I’m fine,” he said stiffly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“You’re not,” Danny said, with complete pleasantness, “but that’s okay.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The fan belt took Harold forty-five minutes to source and replace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In those forty-five minutes, Franklin Whitmore III \u2014 against every instinct his upbringing had installed in him \u2014 sat on the curb of Madison Street with Danny Kowalski and learned more about the city he had lived in his entire life than he had learned in eleven years of living in it from the inside of automobiles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Danny knew everything. Not book everything \u2014 Franklin had that kind \u2014 but street everything, real everything, the city as a living system of people and their arrangements. He knew which restaurants put out good scraps on Tuesday nights. He knew that Officer Halloran on the north beat would look the other way for kids but Officer Stills on the south would not. He knew that the woman who sold flowers at the corner of State had once been a concert pianist in Poland and sometimes, if you asked her right, she would tell you about it, and the way her face changed when she talked about it was worth the asking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He knew his neighbors not as problems to be managed or causes to be charitable toward, but as people \u2014 complete, dignified, specific people \u2014 in the way that only comes from actually living among them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Franklin listened. He could not have explained why he didn’t leave, why he didn’t stand up and put the appropriate distance back between himself and this boy with the cardboard in his shoe. Something about the directness of him. Something about the way he talked about the world \u2014 not as something happening to him, but as something he was fully, unreservedly part of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When Harold came to tell him the car was ready, Franklin stood slowly. He felt, obscurely, that he was leaving something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“What’s your name?” he asked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Danny. Danny Kowalski.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Franklin put out his hand. Formal, the way he’d been taught. “Franklin Whitmore.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Danny shook it without ceremony and grinned. “You want to see something tomorrow, Franklin Whitmore? Something you won’t see from that car?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Franklin should have said no. Every lesson of his life said no.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Yes,” he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"