Saturday was gorgeous in Chicago, the temperature in the 70s, sunny, with that kind of limpid blue sky that mocks you with the foreknowledge that soon snowflakes will be blowing horizontally past your window on the wind out of Canada. And as I walked up Inner Lakeshore Drive, I saw that the Empresses were holding court.

            Whenever it's nice, and frequently when it's not, the Empresses are out, sitting on folding chairs of some sort, backs straight, chins inclined upwards, hands resting lightly on the tops of their canes as if on scepters. Their faces are heavily made up with spots of bright red at the vertices of their cheeks so that they resemble kachina dolls, or perhaps sacred masks from their native land. One imagines that a heavy wind off the Lake could blow their makeup whole from their faces, leaving them naked, pale and imperious. I can hear their accents when they murmur as I pass, and can tell they are from somewhere in Eastern Europe, but, though I have an ear for accents, I cannot tell from where, or even what region. Their bearing is regal, as if they were deposed Habsburgs or Romanovs, now reduced to ruling over a small stretch of the sidewalk on the Inner Drive. They do not deign to pay attention to the passersby in their small realm, the neighbors and Cubs fans and tourists whom they allow to traverse their territory. They never smile or laugh, for their conversation is of serious matters, matters so serious that a lifetime of conversation cannot get to the heart of them; like Talmudic scholars or quantum physicists, the Empresses are always discussing, always penetrating further to the heart of things, but never getting any further than they had been when they started. If they did, that would become the topic of their conversations.

            Their free hands, those not resting upon their canes, flutter about as if blown by breezes, a movement subtle and careless, but, like all they do, freighted with meaning.

            They do not pay attention to the passersby, the Empresses, but they do not fail to notice anything. Even the little children hiding behind their seats are not beneath notice, and woe betide anyone who dared to try to harm these the smallest of their subjects; the Empresses know how to bring a man to the gallows with barely a twitch of their grey and perfectly-trimmed brows. They pay no more attention to the children than to any of the others. But nothing escapes their notice.

            They are sophisticated, the Empresses. Ours is a neighborhood in which a significant portion of the population is gay. The Empresses might have chosen to rule anywhere: a suburban mall, perhaps a white ethnic neighborhood in the city where no one not of their own nationality would ever set foot except by dreadful mistake and from which all the gay men and women would leave for my neighborhood or someplace equally accepting of their nature. I do not doubt that the Empresses know that boys will do boys (and girls likewise), and I believe it delights them that those boys and girls add color and flair and life to our neighborhood. But they pay them no attention either.

            I know that the prostitutes and homeless people in our neighborhood do not delight the Empresses. I am sure they think, If only my realm were wider, I would do something about this. If they ruled a vast nation, there would be care for the men and women mumbling to themselves in their inner hells, there would be places for a person to go so that her choices do not narrow to selling her body or dying. But the Empresses accept the limits of their domain as they accept everything that is, with stoic bearing and serious murmurs. I am guessing at their feelings, of course. The Empresses' makeup does not betray their facial expressions to the passing mob. For a monarch to reveal too much of her inner life would be...unseemly: caviare to the general.

            When it grows cold, the Empresses will retire to their winter palace, hidden within the walls of their condominium on the Inner Drive, and the city will sleep in white, dreaming of their return.