The Waiting Room
By John O'Toole

It was a neighborhood of old apartment buildings, mostly brick, organic browns and yellows, a few of limestone pale as baby-puke, with here and there a wood frame house squeezed in like a stifled child amid grim adults. David Lake had lived here briefly as a very young boy, with his parents and sister in his grandparents' flat, until his father could find them a place of their own. Possessed of this autobiographical fact, though without the slightest recollection, David, now a grown man, passed the bile-dark triplex that his grandparents had long since vacated in death, and crossed Arthur Avenue, on the opposite corner of which sat the multiunit, liver-colored building, apartments to let, that was his evening's destination.

Its entrance flanked by tubby concrete planters, home to various spiky desert plants quite in contrast to the indigenous elms and maples of that quiet Chicago street, the rounded, drab, forties-style Buick out front in similar conflict with the Civics and Accords, a few BMW's, that lined the shaded avenue.

In the tiny vestibule, woodsy and varnished, its bathroom tile-floor alive with mop tracks, slick with Lysol, David pushed the doorbell underneath a nameplate reading "Axel Propak" and, waiting to be buzzed up, gazed at the antique moth trap of a light fixture, a spiral of dead moths waiting to be flushed into the vortex of sixty watt light.

The staircase, zigzagging up three stories, each flight creaking under spongy Persian runners, smelled of boiled cabbage and cigar smoke, an olfactory relic that all at once entered David's vague memory like some boorish house guest barging into an occupado bathroom. The German family, his grandparents' next door neighbors, their sauerkraut suppers, their papa's Panatelas. David, slightly winded now (having grown into a sedentary, 50-something slug) reached the third floor landing to the sudden strains of cello music, not exactly muted, mid-distant though, from someone's fussy, furnished, highly breakable living room. One more memory, intrusive, not boorishly so, the sinuous music insinuating itself, tickling his ears with palms blessed at church. The Ambroses? Lived below his grandparents. Childless. Husband taught music at De Paul University. None of this remembered in a clean line from the source, more as family lore, his mother's odd nostalgia for this dark and unsettled postwar blink of their existence.