There Used To Be A Hotel Here

A "resort" hotel, still in the city, but far from a bustling downtown Chicago 

It all started last year when my daughter Elaine got pregnant. I found myself taking strange routes home from my job downtown, stopping in the city, sometimes twenty miles from where I live in the suburbs. Talking to strangers on the street, on park benches. And it's been about a month since I started coming to this street - this neighborhood where I grew up.

Today I'm sitting at the end of a not-so-new, faded green bench. At the other end sits a woman in a greasy, blue parka. I stare at her. At her weathered face, her beet-red cheeks. I could tell her what I know about this area. That there used to be an elegant hotel here, right where we're sitting. And just behind, the beautiful Lake Michigan.

Now she returns my stare, with deadpan eyes.

"There used to be a hotel here," I tell her, like she was someone I met on a bus, or in a restaurant. I'm acting crazy, I know. "And in the back of it, right here, dazzling white sidewalks. The most beautiful people in the world strolled by."

She puts a grimy, sunburned hand on the edge of the grocery cart at her side. A cart piled high with old magazines, seat cushions, and tightly wrapped plastic bags.

The hotel? The Edgewater Beach. Long gone, of course. Does she know it was demolished over three decades ago? That its front faced a wide Sheridan Road on the west?

But this is where I would come long ago, when I wanted to dream. From childhood to teens, it was my security blanket.

Those dreams about my future. How well I remember that. Staying outside or in the posh passageway that linked the two buildings. I'd sit in an enormous chair, with ornately-carved legs, very Moorish I now think. Watching ladies whose hair was swept up and held by jeweled combs. Strolling arm-and-arm with elegantly-dressed gentlemen. Sometimes, if I was close enough, I'd hear, "Will this war ever end?"

And when the war did end, and the next one started, I still went there to dream. Even when the old homes in the neighborhood were going down, and I was already a teenager, I went there.

************

A half-hour has gone by. I'm six blocks farther north, at the corner of Thorndale and Winthrop, right in front of Swift Grammar School. It looks the same and yet it doesn't. Much smaller yard. The El tracks - so close.

The drugstore is still across the street. God! That day when Mom caught me downing a chocolate malt there. "What are you doing here, Donna?" she shouted. In front of everyone. "Tonight is Passover. You're supposed to be home, helping me do last minute things."

Tonight is Passover, too. Only, it's the nineties now.

My cell phone rings. I jump, not used to this thing yet.

"Where are you Donna?" my husband Larry asks.

"Out," I say, almost bumping into a dark-haired girl with a jewel fastened to the side of her nose.

"Well, come back, dolly. We are supposed to be at the Seder in two hours."

We are going to his brother's for our small family gathering. Sad that I was an only child, he has only the one brother. Our parents gone.

"Did you call Elaine?" he asks.

"Yes, from work. They sent her home, false labor."

Elaine, my baby, you're too far away. San Francisco. Why are you having your first baby so far away? My first grandchild. So far away.

"Give me a little more time, Larry."

"Donna!'

"I'm doing something."

A pause. "Hey, Donna, what's wrong?"

"I'll be home soon, okay? I won't even change."

**************

It's Friday. Cold, but sunny.

I can't believe I'm back here again. I should be home, packing. Elaine gave birth last night. A preemie, he is. Well, three weeks is not so serious. She's named him Jason. Our one-day-old Jason.

But instead of going home, I go to that park behind the hotel. I'm zonked, couldn't sleep. Told my boss I had to leave. "Just go," he said, "do what you need to do."

I try to picture Jason. Elaine said his hair is dark, like our side. Who will he look like when he grows up . . . . .?

"The old geezer probably had a heart attack," the paramedics said the day Daddy died, as they swept up the stairs to our second-floor walkup. Even at age eleven, I knew that a forty-nine-year-old man was not an old geezer. I cried and cried. And later, I ran...

***************

I want to think of Mom and Dad, before it ended, before that terrible day.

They came to this country in the thirties, before I was born. They might have had dinner right here. Behind me, in the Marine Dining Room. Maybe planning, dreaming about a future, looking at the water. Young, laughing, planning their future together. Talking about their dreams, most of which would never come true.

I should tell Jason about it. About the good things. I will tell him. Maybe tell him about what his gramma Donna was like when she was little. He should know about his great grandparents, too. And, the old neighborhood.

I stand up. One leg is asleep, both of them numb from the cold.

Jason may think I'm silly when I talk about the hotel. About the sunlight, and moonlight on the water. And the beautiful people from another age. I'll make it a good story, though. I'll try.

Dolores Greenberg is a resident of the Selfhelp Home, a Senior Living Community in Chicago.