PART 2 — THE LEDGE
Laura pulled a folded Chicago Tribune clipping from her purse as her seven-year-old climbed down from his chair and walked straight into Stans lap.
This past April, she said, we were staying at a hotel on Michigan Avenue, up on the thirtieth floor. I turned my back for a moment and my son got the window open and started to climb out onto the ledge. Thirty floors up. I could not reach him in time.
There was a man on a scaffold washing the windows. He saw my boy on that ledge, swung his rig across the face of the building, and caught him by the arm just as he slipped. He held my son against his chest until he could pull him back inside.
The man Gregory mocked for cleaning bird poop off his windows had swung a scaffold across a skyscraper to catch a child slipping from the thirtieth floor.
The newspaper wrote about it, Laura said, but they never got his name. I have carried this clipping for months. Then she looked at Stan, with her little boy already in his arms. Greg, your sisters son is alive because of the man you called a joke.
Gregory, the commodities trader on the fiftieth floor, could not speak.
Stan just set down the carving knife and held the boy and said he only did what his harness let him do. But Laura shook her head and said most men would have frozen. He swung out over nothing to catch her child.
My son hangs off the building, his son-in-law had joked. One April he swung across it to catch a boy slipping thirty floors up. That is the man on the scaffold.