The Moviegoer

random like monuments on a great windy plain. And the Lake. The Lake in New Orleans is a backwater glimmering away in a pleasant lowland. Not here. Here the Lake is the North itself: a perilous place from which the spirit winds come pouring forth all roused up and crying out alarm.
    The wind and the space—they are the genie-soul. Son of a bitch, how can I think about variable endowments, feeling the genie-soul of Chicago perched on my shoulder?
    But the wind and the space, they are the genie-soul. The wind blows in steady from the Lake and claims the space for its own, scouring every inch of the pavements and the cold stony fronts of the buildings. It presses down between buildings, shouldering them apart in skyey fields of light and air. The air is windpressed into a lens, magnifying and. sharpening and silencing—everything is silenced in the uproar of the wind that comes ransacking down out of the North. This is a city where no one dares dispute the claim of the wind and the skyey space to the out-of-doors. This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground. One other thing I remember: my father took me down into one of these monuments to see the pool where Tarzan-Johnnie-Weissmuller used to swim—an echoing underground place where a cold gray light filtered down from a three-story skylight and muscular men wearing metal discs swam and shouted, their voices ringing against the wet tile walls.
    Some years later, after Scott’s death, we came my father and I to the Field Museum, a long dismal peristyle dwindling away into the howling distance, and inside stood before a tableau of Stone Age Man, father mother and child crouched around an artificial ember in postures of minatory quiet—until, feeling my father’s eye on me, I turned and saw what he required of me—very special father and son we were that summer, he staking his everything this time on a perfect comradeship—and I, seeing in his eyes the terrible request, requiring from me his very life; I, through a child’s cool perversity or some atavistic recoil from an intimacy too intimate, turned him down, turned away, refused him what I knew I could not give.
    Prepared then for the genie-soul of Chicago, we take the city in stride at first and never suffer two seconds of malaise. Kate is jolly. Straight to the Stevens to register for rooms and the Cracker Barrel—there is Sidney standing by the reception table, princely-looking in his way of standing not like the others in friendly head-down-to-listen attitudes, but rared back in his five and a half feet, hand in pocket and coat hiked open at the vent, forehead faceted and flashing light.
    Sidney fastens a plastic name card to my lapel and, before I know it, has hustled me off upstairs to a blue ballroom, leaving Kate and Margot to trail along, somewhat stony-faced, behind us.
    â€œWhat is this, Sidney?” I say dismayed and hanging back. I begin to sweat and can only think of hitting the street and having three drinks in the first bar. Trapped in this blue cave, the genie-soul of Chicago will surely catch up with us. “I didn’t think there were any doings till tomorrow.”
    â€œThat’s right. This is only the Hot Stove League.”
    â€œOh Lord, what is that?” I say sweating.
    â€œWe get acquainted, talk over last year’s business, kick around the boners of the funds. You’ll like it.”
    Sure enough, there in the middle of the floor is a ten-foot potbellied stove made of red cellophane. Waiters pass by with trays of martinis and a salon orchestra plays “Getting to Know You.”
    The delegates are very decent fellows. I find myself talking to half a dozen young men from the West Coast and liking them very much—one in particular, a big shy fellow from Spokane named Stanley Kinchen, and his wife, a fine-looking woman, yellow-haired and bigger than Sharon, lips curling like a rose petal, head thrown back like a queen and a tremendous sparkle in the eye. What good people they are. It is not at all bad being a businessman. There is a spirit of trust and cooperation here. Everyone jokes about such things, but if businessmen were not trusting of each other and could not set their great projects going on credit, the country would collapse tomorrow and be no better off than Saudi Arabia. It strikes me that Stanley Kinchen would actually do anything for me. I know I