MARSHALL FIELD'S OTHER WINDOWS

Marshall Field’s, the Chicago department store about to lose its name to Macy’s, has long been known for its windows. Each year, the ground floor display windows fill with elaborate winter scenes: leaping nutcrackers, Santas and elves, princes, skaters and ballroom dancers. They glitter, shine and mesmerize shoppers on pilgrimages from Decatur to Indianapolis.

This is a tale of Field’s other windows.

The ground floor of Field’s flagship State Street store is a several story high atrium, stretching above the rooms in curlicued plaster. When my father was a young college student working as a stock boy at Marshall Field and Company, his job included opening the windows. Another young man, a student like him, trained him to do it.

My father would stand on a narrow catwalk and push the windows open one by one. When he recounts this episode, he gestures outward with his arms. I can’t tell if he used bare hands or poked them out with a pole.

Then, he decided he wanted a day off. He can’t remember why. A summer day? A ball game? My father lived for baseball as a youth, his one heartache: his own father refusing to sign a farm league contract with the Cubs because my father was too young.

On that obscure day off, the day my father didn’t work, the other young man took his place—creeping along the catwalk, pushing open the windows. On that day, the day my father didn’t work, the other boy pressed the windows wide, leaned forward and fell. He plunged to his death.

Fifty-eight years later my father remembers the young man’s funeral. My father didn’t introduce himself to the parents, didn’t say it should have been him, that he should have been working that day.

He tells this story at the holiday table, on the eve of Field’s own demise. It’s a grim tale and I forget to ask if he ever did it again, ever returned to work, ever crawled along the catwalk, poking out the windows, ever whispered to his coworkers of that lost young man. For whatever he did, he did it safely enough to quadruple his years, to bring me into this world and to make me mourn and remember a nameless young man I never have met.

STANLEY ELKIN'S MAGIC

Mom and Dad and Dianne Schramm are in a car with Stanley Elkin around 71st Street on the south side of Chicago. It's a busy area back in the 1940’s. While someone is in a store, Stanley decides to try to hypnotize Dianne. He moves his finger back and forth, and she follows it with her eyes. She goes under. It's the first time he's successful with hypnosis.

Okay, he says. Now I am going to bring you out, he says.

He snaps his fingers. Nothing.

He claps his hands. Nothing. She won't come to.

He tries every trick he knows to reverse the spell. Still, nothing works. She's under.

She sleeps, does Dianne Schramm, whose picture I will find in my parents' photo album decades later. After Korea. Who will marry Morty Haberman, who will divorce him, a man now dying of esophageal cancer.

All these years later, after Dianne's trance, my parents will still know Morty. They will spend New Year's Eve 2004 with him, watch as he chugs morphine before each bite of food to kill the pain.

But she, Dianne, can't read that future, or the titles of Stanley’s future books, or his Multiple Sclerosis and death, or Morty’s doomed esophagus, or at least says nothing about them. Instead, she sleeps, oblivious to Stanley's imprecations, his attempt to bring her back to that present, before my past even begins.

She sleeps a long while, waking with a headache in her own time, says nothing about what time, what future or present she's glimpsed, and whether it's fate that's given her a headache, or Stanley and his clumsy, novice technique.

I don't know if he ever hypnotized anyone again, at least without a pen.