CHAPTER 5
Christmas in Milwaukee
Her name was Tracy.
It snowed all afternoon and into the evening in Milwaukee, and the snow was still coming down. According to the forecast, it would keep coming down through the night and well into the morning. The weatherman warned everyone the previous night that a blizzard was coming in from the northwest and, for a change, he was right. This one was a consequence of lots of humidity from the west and lots of cold air from the north—way north—from the Canadian plains up above Lake Superior and down the express lane called Lake Michigan. This combination always delivered a blizzard. It was an easy forecast to make.
Big storybook snowflakes and a lot of them, hour after hour, made for a couple of feet of freshly fallen snow in a matter of hours. And it kept falling, covering everything in a crystal white blanket and burying all the sounds of normal city life with it. The city’s fleet of snowplow trucks was out pushing their monstrous metal plows, which clanked and rattled as they scraped the street. The salt trucks followed them, with the clicking and whooshing of their salt spreaders. They were clearing the way for cars filled with people who, like me, were on a mission. Most of the cars drove with the thunk-a-de-dunk jingle of the chains on their tires, which added to the snow-muted cacophony of the city’s blizzard-ensnared traffic that was unique to northern cities in winter.
In downtown Milwaukee, the trucks had run out of places to push the snow, so the only way to get rid of the overflow was to dump it in the Milwaukee River. Dump trucks ran all night, making drops into a river that meandered through the heart of the city. This was more complicated than it sounds because the surface of the Milwaukee River was frozen, so it’s not as if the snow was carried out to Lake Michigan; it was piling up on the ice and burying many of the docking pylons. It was a small miracle that anyone could get around in that weather if, that is, they chose to. Most people stayed out of it. At the moment, I was an exception, one car among many trucks, looking for a parking place at midnight so that I could get to the Harp Bar, the designated party place for the last stop in a string of parties on the day after Christmas.
Unusually heavy amounts of snow had fallen in the previous two weeks, so there weren’t many open places for the plows to push the freshly falling snow to get it out of the way of traffic. They resorted to cramming it into parking places and anywhere else. It wasn’t just a knee-high mound of snow in those spaces either. Some blocks had walls of six feet of compacted snow running through all the parking spaces and overflowing onto the sidewalks, making the street a virtual canyon. Parking meters were completely buried and so were a few parked cars that didn’t get out in time. All I could say to the owners was, “Good luck digging them out, and I hope you don’t need your car until spring!” Snow was everywhere. There were indoor garages for the flow of traffic in the day, but at night, many of them were closed. They weren’t twenty-four hour operations because Milwaukee wasn’t a twenty-four hour town. I cruised the street, like a prowler, looking for an opening, and I would take anything I could get.
The blizzard-driven night had a certain surreal beauty about it. I took it all in with wonderment and awe at the overpowering whiteness of a snowfall that was so steady, so relentless, and so heavy that it occurred to me that the city would be completely buried, maybe forever, by morning. Buildings more than three blocks away were barely discernible, and nothing could be seen above the trees lining the sidewalk, as if a white ceiling hung at their very tops. There was no sky, just falling snow, one giant snowflake after another.
The walk to The Harp from my parked car was three blocks and, en route, I saw only one other solitary soul, going the other way. He was walking down the middle of the street, like I was. We waved a half arm at each other but passed in silence, focused on our feet to get us to our separate destinations. The sidewalks were buried under the snow, leaving the streets as the only route for both cars and foot traffic. I pushed through the thin carpet of snow that had accumulated since the last plow truck had struck. It covered rifts of sloppy slush created by the salt trucks. The recently plowed street was rippled with mole-like runs from the ribbons of freezing slush left in the tracks of the trucks. My feet stayed dry, laced up in my ankle-high rubber and leather L.L. Bean boots. My jeans flowed over the high tops and kept the snow from getting into my socks. I had a full length Chesterfield coat on, one with a black velvet collar, which was my favorite winter coat. I purchased it before Thanksgiving at Brooks Brothers in New York, the one on Madison Avenue and Forty-fourth Street, across from where I worked.
I lived in Manhattan, on the Upper East Side, where I worked at an advertising agency as an Assistant Account Executive. It was my first fulltime job out of business school. My father had died of cancer the previous summer, so I decided to fly back to Milwaukee to be with my mom at Christmas and spend time with my hometown friends.
I loved my friends. Seeing them was guaranteed fun, so I was jazzed about my visit. However, my parents’ life over the past several years had not been fun. They went through some rough times, rougher than I care to remember in any kind of detail. Two years earlier, my father had been diagnosed with cancer of the throat, this on the heels of twenty years of a greatly diminished working capacity due to a debilitating stroke. Before the stroke, he had been a practicing surgeon as an eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist. Following his stroke, his life as a surgeon was over, and the family began a slow, painful downward spiral from the high life.
The previous spring, right after I completed graduate school, I saw my dad for the last time, although I didn’t realize it would be the last time. He spent the last year of his life in a hospital and finally died fighting cancer with desperately high radiation treatments, a latent outcome from fifty years of smoking Camel cigarettes, the kind without filters. In the summer, sometime in the course of his hospitalization, my mom was forced to sell the house and everything in it and move into a small apartment on the other side of town. I remember the day she called me in New York and asked if there was anything I wanted as a keepsake before the estate sale. I said, “No mom, sell it all and get what you can get.” It was tough to take, but for years I saw it coming, like an unstoppable tidal wave. I focused on the future because the past disappeared. Like a wave receding back into the water, the proof of my childhood receded into memories.
The night after Christmas at The Harp was all about friends, not family. It was about the good times at the moment and the good times we expected in the future. It was a night of promise and excitement, as we shared stories of our recent progress in the world of our new careers and flirted with the endless possibilities that came with our new-found independence. We were upbeat and animated in sharing our hopes and dreams, and heady about the prospects of life. For us, life was looking as fresh as the blanket of new snow that covered Milwaukee that night.
The Harp was an old Irish bar in downtown Milwaukee, right on the river and off the railroad tracks that ran alongside the Schlitz Brewery. More importantly, it was a bar that had never carded us when we were underage drinkers. It was a working man’s bar that was taken over that night by Milwaukee’s well-bred children, who were being groomed as the next generation of civic leaders. We were mostly from affluent families on Milwaukee’s north shore, from homes in River Hills, Mequon, Bayside, and Fox Point. The atmosphere at The Harp was loud and festive, and the beer flowed freely in copious amounts, like the conversation.
The Christmas spirit was in full bloom, and on that night, not a soul in the joint worried about anything. A life-size hollow plastic Santa, lit up from the inside, stood in the corner by the door, wearing an Irish Donegal tweed hat. Strings of small white Christmas lights ran the ceiling boundaries of The Harp and up and down the liquor shelves above the bar. Outside, big bulbs of multi-colored lights, already coated by the swirling snow, created colorful, crystalline orbs of diffused light in their snow encasements. Three days earlier, I had been at Rockefeller Center, awed by the beauty of the giant Christ
mas tree towering over the skating rink, but being at The Harp was better. Friends make the difference.
There were probably twenty of us in all at any one time, with the number rising and falling as friends surged in and departed. When last call was announced, I was seated at a table with Jeff, Karey, Charlie, Richard, and Tracy. We were all volleying three conversations at one time in a game of catch up and what’s next. Jeff and Karey were recently married and in the vanguard of the connubial tsunami that would be coming to Milwaukee in the summer. The rest of us were single. I knew everyone at the table really well except for Tracy, a good-looking brunette who worked at M&I bank, the local financial powerhouse. We had met a couple of times over the past few years because we had a lot of mutual friends, but we didn’t know each other very well.
I spent much of the time at The Harp getting to know Tracy better. Like a bee collecting pollen, I kept going back to her for more conversation. By last call, we were sitting next to each other, elbow to elbow, completing the circuit of electricity that was starting to run through us. Occasionally we’d lean within inches of each other to exchange a whisper over the din of rock-and-roll coming from The Harp’s super juke box. We didn’t really say anything that required a whisper, but I couldn’t resist whispering in her ear every once in a while because her perfume was so intoxicating, and I liked my nose in her hair. She didn’t mind the whispering either, for her own reasons. I knew she was interested in me; she kept touching my upper arm to make a point or get my attention. It was contact, and we both felt the electricity surge every time she did it. An attraction had formed on the threshold of closing time; we just had to decide what we were going to do after The Harp closed its doors, to put us on the next threshold.
At two in the morning, The Harp closed up, and most of us were partied out and now faced the somewhat daunting challenge of finding our cars and getting home through the mounting drifts. Tracy would get a ride home from me, a decision that was made over an hour ago when the friends she came with checked with her before they left. She and I weren’t partied out. The only thing we could think of was to go back to her place, which also was the only thing we wanted to do. We walked the three blocks through a glass snow globe to my rental car. After a little spinning on the rear wheels, I pulled off the snow bank on the passenger side and moved into the middle of the slush-streaked street, where Tracy was waiting for me in no fear of other cars.
When we walked into the upper level of her duplex, her Christmas tree lights were on, along with a few other insignificant lights, but a single lamp by the couch in the living room seemed to be the beacon that beckoned the way. At her command, I made myself comfortable on the couch and waited for her to return from her offer to get us a couple of beers. A minute later, she sat down next to me with two bottles and passed one to me. We clinked their necks with a “Merry Christmas!” toast in two-part harmony.
She set her bottle on a waiting coaster and got up to put some music on, as an afterthought. It was a good afterthought. The Moody Blues came on, opening with “Nights in White Satin.” It was a great make-out album. We worked through our first beers with an exchange of very brief personal histories of our families and growing up in Milwaukee, something we hadn’t covered at The Harp. I could feel the electricity between us arcing. I learned that her father was also gone, although it happened many years before my dad died. It was a bit of a sad moment for both of us, and it caused us to move a little closer to each other in mutual empathy, which triggered our first kiss. The Moody Blues were so right for more kissing—kissing that quickly got a little steamier, as my lips moved to an ear and then down the side of her neck—a neck that felt like warm silk, as my lips moved lower and lower. Her perfume had come alive, and so had I. The electricity wasn’t about to be contained.
Tracy gently pulled back and slowly stood up.
“Why don’t you grab a couple more beers out of the fridge while I change into something a little more comfortable?” She said this suggestively and walked away, presumably into her bedroom, as I rose to go to the kitchen, with the expectation that the evening was getting more interesting by the minute.
I returned to the living room, set a fresh bottle down for Tracy on the coffee table, and with mine in hand, wandered past the couch and into the den. The desk light was on, and what it was on stopped me in my tracks. It was on my father’s desk—the one he had presided over in the den in the house I’d grown up in. I approached it, and there was no doubt; it wasn’t a look-a-like. I was sure of that. I knew the wood, the scratches, and the patina. It was the desk I had used for all my phone calls when dad wasn’t in the den. It was my favorite place for private calls to my buddies and those special calls to girlfriends. It was a part of nearly every telephone conversation in my life that mattered. Of course I knew that desk. I pulled Tracy’s chair away from it and stood over it, running the fingertips of both hands over the top, connecting with the texture that I knew intimately, as if receiving extrasensory emanations of its history. It was mesmerizing, and I was suddenly lost in a world of sadness when Tracy walked up behind me.
“It’s lovely, isn’t it?” she asked, making more of a statement of fact than a question. I didn’t turn around but remained transfixed in my sudden melancholy.
“It’s really something, Tracy,” I said as I stared at it. “Where’d you get it?”
“I got it at an estate sale in Fox Point last summer—for a song.” She paused. “I loved it the minute I laid eyes on it.” She continued, as I was in no mood to talk. “It has so much character.”
I didn’t say anything. I turned around to face her and got my second surprise of the night. Tracy had changed into a femme fatale, now dressed in nothing but a short, loosely wrapped, silky red kimono. I towered over her and could easily see her bare breasts separated by a very alluring cleavage. She managed to put her arms up and lace her hands behind my neck, maybe to kiss me. Standing tall, I didn’t make it easy for her, and she sensed my sudden aloofness and looked at me and called me on it, “What’s up?” she purred, “You don’t like my outfit?”
“I’m sorry, Tracy,” I said, “You are fantastic. I just…,” I stammered and sighed, “I just flipped out over your desk.” She looked confused over what I had just said, understandably. I continued, “That desk was my father’s. You got that at my mother’s estate sale.”
Tracy bit her lower lip and looked into my eyes—first one, then the other, then back again. “You can have it,” she said sweetly. “You should have it.”
I knew she was sincere. “No,” I said, softly in my new found sadness. “That’s very sweet of you, but it’s your desk now and,” in a weak attempt to diffuse her very kind offer, I added, “I wouldn’t know what to do with it.” She looked at me and said nothing. I didn’t think I was very convincing, so I said, “Besides, my apartment in New York is too small. It’s all right.”
“I’m sorry, Tom,” she whispered sympathetically.
“I know. I am too. It just kinda caught me off guard.”
Wanting to salvage the moment, she asked, “You want to go back to the couch and sit down?”
“You know, Tracy, I probably ought to go. It’s really late. I should leave.” The electricity was gone; we both knew it. It was short-circuited by my father’s desk.
Tracy closed her open kimono and tightened up the sash, making sure the front stayed closed. I could see she understood my feelings, so rather than dwelling on my sudden disconnection, I said, “Goodnight, Tracy,” and leaned into her for a quick kiss, “and Happy New Year.” I sidestepped her and walked out the door, traveled down the stairs and back into the blizzard with my own blizzard of emotions. I’d be back in New York tomorrow, back to my new life, back to what I called my home, one that already had a desk.
∞