Chicago, The Windy City on Lake Michigan
The dream of Julie's father to be successful comes true, as well as the dreams of the south to breathe free. Not bad for a Fuller Brush man, door-to-door Electro-Lux vacuum cleaner salesman and purveyor of the Encyclopedia Britannica with the new, heavy wooden shelf that comes with it.
Freeing himself and his daughter from the drug cartel, he finds a fine desk job with Sears Catalog in Chicago, finally working inside -- out of the vagaries of the weather. He buys himself a lemon yellow Corvette and a Panhead Harley, and celebrates with his new girlfriend, Chun-hua, a Chinese-American law student from the University of Chicago, the first girlfriend since the death of his wife.
Our novel begins with a description of Vincente Bonaventura's Chicago of the 1950's. This description can properly be placed here as well. See and feel the Spirit of the Times -----
"Evenings in suburban Chicago were dusky like only the late 1950‘s could produce. There were very few nuclear plants, only one or two experimental ones here and there. Instead, the brilliant pinks and yellows streaking across the mid-west horizon at sunset were from the nearby coal burning electric plants. In rural Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois, a thick, sulfuric, rotting smell rolled across the cornfields before the sky turned to indigo in the evenings.
Toyota did not exist as a compact car manufacturer. Rambler did. There were not very many compact cars in America. Gasoline was about fifteen cents a gallon. Most cars were V-8’s, vinyl-upholstered and the size of a small pickup truck. The heater coil was usually broken on used vehicles -- giving passengers the stark, icy thrill of a freezer unit on the coldest days of winter. The plastic bench-style, non-bucket seats were like sitting on a frosty, crackling, plastic mattress that time of year -- waiting to sear your bare legs raw in the heat of the summer. Moving around in the summer on one of those plastic bench seats in a pair of shorts was a lot like ripping a large piece of duct tape off the back of your bare thighs.
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Vincente Bonaventura took the Chicago commuter train on the Burlington Northern line to work. He rode from the station near his new home in the suburbs to Union Station on Canal Street in downtown Chicago. Then he hopped a city bus from there to his job at the Sears building in Hyde Park, near Chicago’s South Side. His job was to paste up parts of the Sears Roebuck mail order catalog and type copy. All of his business machines were manual. He worked in a hospital green partition with a frosted glass top and sat at a huge gray metal desk. With his white shirt sleeves rolled up past his elbows (and in one of his satin vests), under the ubiquitous green glass glow of his desk lamp, he could type on his manual Royal upright as fast and as accurately as any female secretary.
__________
Eight years before that Vincente and Julietta Bonaventura began their journey to the north alone with a small dog, but without their twenty-some family members surrounding them, protecting them and interpreting the world for them. They were running. Running away from the love that Vince once knew with Emma, Julie’s mother, his wife. Running from the memories.
Running to? A bright, new future. A different kind of chance for his baby daughter?
A curtain opened slowly, revealing a beckoning, deep light as they drove towards Charlottesville. What will be? Will it be good -- or will it just lead them back to Louisiana?
Que sera sera…"
Freeing himself and his daughter from the drug cartel, he finds a fine desk job with Sears Catalog in Chicago, finally working inside -- out of the vagaries of the weather. He buys himself a lemon yellow Corvette and a Panhead Harley, and celebrates with his new girlfriend, Chun-hua, a Chinese-American law student from the University of Chicago, the first girlfriend since the death of his wife.
Our novel begins with a description of Vincente Bonaventura's Chicago of the 1950's. This description can properly be placed here as well. See and feel the Spirit of the Times -----
"Evenings in suburban Chicago were dusky like only the late 1950‘s could produce. There were very few nuclear plants, only one or two experimental ones here and there. Instead, the brilliant pinks and yellows streaking across the mid-west horizon at sunset were from the nearby coal burning electric plants. In rural Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois, a thick, sulfuric, rotting smell rolled across the cornfields before the sky turned to indigo in the evenings.
Toyota did not exist as a compact car manufacturer. Rambler did. There were not very many compact cars in America. Gasoline was about fifteen cents a gallon. Most cars were V-8’s, vinyl-upholstered and the size of a small pickup truck. The heater coil was usually broken on used vehicles -- giving passengers the stark, icy thrill of a freezer unit on the coldest days of winter. The plastic bench-style, non-bucket seats were like sitting on a frosty, crackling, plastic mattress that time of year -- waiting to sear your bare legs raw in the heat of the summer. Moving around in the summer on one of those plastic bench seats in a pair of shorts was a lot like ripping a large piece of duct tape off the back of your bare thighs.
----------------------
Vincente Bonaventura took the Chicago commuter train on the Burlington Northern line to work. He rode from the station near his new home in the suburbs to Union Station on Canal Street in downtown Chicago. Then he hopped a city bus from there to his job at the Sears building in Hyde Park, near Chicago’s South Side. His job was to paste up parts of the Sears Roebuck mail order catalog and type copy. All of his business machines were manual. He worked in a hospital green partition with a frosted glass top and sat at a huge gray metal desk. With his white shirt sleeves rolled up past his elbows (and in one of his satin vests), under the ubiquitous green glass glow of his desk lamp, he could type on his manual Royal upright as fast and as accurately as any female secretary.
__________
Eight years before that Vincente and Julietta Bonaventura began their journey to the north alone with a small dog, but without their twenty-some family members surrounding them, protecting them and interpreting the world for them. They were running. Running away from the love that Vince once knew with Emma, Julie’s mother, his wife. Running from the memories.
Running to? A bright, new future. A different kind of chance for his baby daughter?
A curtain opened slowly, revealing a beckoning, deep light as they drove towards Charlottesville. What will be? Will it be good -- or will it just lead them back to Louisiana?
Que sera sera…"