Elevator Rides

The last thing our father said before leaving the house for work that morning—he was a vice president of something or other for John Hancock and went all the way to Boston every day—was the same thing he said to us every other morning. So long, men, see you at the top. Then he swallowed the last black bits of his Sanka and drove for fifty-five minutes in slow, snarled traffic on the two-lane highway that connected the western suburbs with the city, parked his car in one of those lots where they squeeze twenty vehicles in an area meant for ten, and stopped at a corner kiosk to buy a Record American newspaper. He walked down the street in bright sunshine with the thick paper tucked just so under his arm, heading east on Boylston, east into the dazzling sun, until he suddenly fell to the sidewalk as though struck by a bullet, or so witnesses said. Some people even scrambled for cover, diving behind cars and crawling into the recessed doorways of office buildings and storefronts. This was April 1964, not quite six months after the Kennedy assassination, and people were still pretty brittle about those kinds of things.

Two policemen tried to resuscitate him right there on the street—Officers Dixon and Capobianco. An ambulance was called. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation methods as we know them now were not widely disseminated and practiced, and it’s hard to say whether or not Dixon and Capobianco performed the most efficacious lifesaving techniques—for example, did they do hard, fast downward pushes in the center of the chest? I’ve always preferred to give them the benefit of the doubt. I mean, they did what they could, they were products of their times. While they were working on him a small group clustered around the scene and one of the standees said she recognized the victim as a man who worked in the Hancock Building—a mathematical probability since more than half the gray-suited men who took that sidewalk worked there. She said she often rode the elevator with him in the morning. He was “definitely from seventeen,” the woman stated unequivocally, according to the police report written up and filed later that day. He “always smelled good.” He was “a real gentleman.” Quotes all. Before the day was done, they returned the personal effects to my mother, including his dark navy suit and heavily starched white dress shirt with all the front buttons ripped off. Then there was the red tie, white boxers, black wing tips, monogrammed briefcase, wallet, watch, and the neatly folded newspaper around which someone had thoughtfully slid an elastic band to keep all the pages together. At the end of that day I sat on my bed, unfurled the paper and stared at the headline: “Strangler at Large, Hub Locks Down.” I locked my bedroom door and hid under the bed all night.

For pretty much the rest of his life, our German shepherd mix lay at the top of the stairs in the late afternoon with his paws crossed and his heavy head resting atop them, looking down at the front door. It wasn’t like you could pull him aside and explain that his master wasn’t walking through that portal anytime soon. Then again, it’s hard to compare your own mourning with a dog’s. Theirs is always going to be purer than anything you can come up with, less mixed with contaminants and little pieces of regretful junk floating around inside it. He kept at it day after day, year after year. A human is not equipped to keep up with that. The only dilution to the vigil I could ever detect was a gradual sagging in his haunches, which suggested a secret knowledge embedded somewhere deep in his circuitry that bounding down the stairs to greet his master was not in the offing.

Then one afternoon when he was ten, the dog went missing. He wasn’t in his usual solitude-seeking spots in the house. He wasn’t in the yard. He was a graybeard...