Free Soup, Coffee & Doughnuts

Last month I was passing through Chicago on a Sunday morning when I found the diner.

No sign out front worth mentioning. Just a small place on South State Street with fogged windows and the kind of smell that makes you stop walking without deciding to.

I went in.

The woman behind the counter was maybe seventy years old. Small. White hair. Eyes that suggested she’d seen enough of the world to find most of it amusing.

I ordered a coffee and a slice of pie.

She brought the without writing anything down.

I looked around the place. Something about it felt old. Not run down old. Lived in old. The walls had a history they weren’t volunteering.

“Nice building,” I said.

She looked at me the way people look at you when you’ve accidentally said something true.

“You know what this place was?” She asked.

I didn’t.

She pulled up a stool on her side of the counter.

“1930,” she said. “My grandfather stood outside this door every morning for three weeks. Coat pockets empty. To proud to admit he needed what was inside.”

I stopped eating.

“Al Capone opened a soup kitchen here. November 1930. Right here at 935 South State. Fed two thousand people a day. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. No questions asked.”

She let that sit in.

“The line stretched past the police headquarters.” She smiled. “Men shuffling past the cops to get free food from Public Enemy Number One. My grandfather said it was the most Chicago thing he ever saw.”

I laughed.

“Three weeks he came. Every morning. Every lunch. Every dinner. Never spoke to anyone. Just ate and left.” She paused. “Then one Sunday a new girl stated serving breakfast.”

“White apron. Dark hair. She handed him his coffee and smiled like she meant it. Not the smile you give strangers. The other kind.”

I put my coffee down.

“He forgot he was hungry.”

She shook her head slowly.

“He kept coming back. Coming early. Getting in line twice. Pretending he forgot his roll.”

She smiled. “Years later he still denied that part. My grandmother told me everything.”

“How did he finally talk to her?”

She laughed.

“Thanksgiving 1930. He’d been working up the courage for weeks. Had a whole speech prepared. Something meaningful. Something she’d remember.”

She paused.

“Then the turkeys disappeared.”

“The turkeys?”

“Someone stole a thousand turkeys from a department store nearby. Capone panicked – thought he’d get blamed – switched the whole menu last minute. Turkey dinner became beef stew.” She shook her head. “My grandmother was running around that kitchen like the world was ending. No time for anything.”

She leaned on the counter.

“My grandfather stood there holding his beef stew watching his moment disappear. When she finally slowed down and looked at him – he panicked.”

Three weeks of waiting. Three weeks of rehearsing something meaningful to say.

And what came out was a joke about tomatoes.

I stared at her.

“Three tomatoes walking down the street. Pap Tomato. Mama Tomato. Baby Tomato starts lagging behind. Pap Tomato goes back and squishes him and says – Ketchup.”

She looked at me.

“That was it. That was the speech.”

I started laughing.

“She stared at him,” the old woman continued. “He waited to die. Then she groaned. Then she smiled. The real kind.”

She was quiet for a moment.

“He waited outside when she finished work. November in Chicago. One hour in the cold. When she came out she looked at him and said – that was a terrible joke.”

“I know,” he said.

“It made me smile anyway,” she said.

“I was counting on that,” he said.

They were married eight months later. Sixty one years. He outlived her by four. Never really recovered.

The old woman stood and refilled my coffee without asking.

“I bought this building thirty years ago. My family thought I was crazy.” She looked around the room slowly. “Same address. Same corner. Same building where she handed him that first cup of coffee.”

She straightened up .

“We still serve breakfast, lunch and dinner.”

“Every Thanksgiving beef stew goes on the menu.”

“Nobody in my family orders turkey.”

I left a big tip.

On my way out I noticed a small photograph on the wall near the door. Black and white. A young man and a young woman standing outside this very building. Winter coats. His hat slightly crooked. Her white apron still on like she forgot to take it off.

Both of them smiling.

The real kind.

Some buildings remember things that people inside them have forgotten.

This one remembered everything.

– WiseGuy The Speakeasy – Goodfella Gifts