by Jane Steen
I looked at Tess, uncertain whether she would insist on coming with us. She wasn’t as robust as I was and caught colds and such easily. The thought of taking her into a jail where disease of all kinds must run rife was alarming. But all she said was, “You’ll tell Martin I pray for him every day, won’t you? And give him all kinds of good wishes.”
I nodded, relieved, and smiled at Mr. Salazar. He didn’t return the smile, but leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees.
“I have to warn you that Martin may not thank me for this. He may also not seem very pleased to see you. His spirits have been very low lately. To be honest, I'm proposing this visit more for his sake than yours. I’m hoping that you’ll be able to comfort him in some way—or at least provoke him out of his mood. He said once that you’d probably find a way to see him contrary to all sense and propriety. I wonder, sometimes, if his refusal to let you near him doesn’t contain a seed of hope that it’ll have the opposite effect.”
“I’m going to take this chance to see him whatever he thinks,” I said.
“Yes,” said Mr. Salazar, smiling at last. “I thought you would.”
19
Jail
The guard at the Harrison Street jail was dressed neatly enough. His coat and collar were buttoned, the wool of the coat carefully brushed. Yet the smell of confinement was on him, and I could see that areas of his coat were stiff with repeated perfusions of sweat. I wrinkled my nose at the sour, musty aroma as he accompanied Mr. Salazar and me to a barred door and turned the key in the lock.
It was six thirty in the morning. Mr. Salazar’s driver had, at his behest, stopped the landau at Taylor Street so that we could walk the rest of the distance to the Harrison Street police station. Mr. Salazar had a large canvas bag in one hand. We were joined halfway along by a keen-eyed man who didn’t introduce himself nor ask who I was. He did most of the talking as Mr. Salazar and I stood in a bare, dismal room inside the enormous station building while the official behind the desk argued that no visitors were allowed at this hour.
I couldn’t be sure that money had changed hands, but at some point in the proceedings, the flow of argument seemed to die down and the keen-eyed man melted away. Mr. Salazar and I were led through a maze of corridors, each more depressing than the last. Eventually, we came to the lockup. The official spoke to the guard on duty, who had been sitting in a rocking chair opposite a row of barred cells, dozing. He searched the canvas bag Mr. Salazar held but otherwise didn’t seem all that concerned about our presence.
The smell increased in intensity as we stepped into the area of the holding cells. The guard caught the look on my face and grinned.
“Bad, ain’t it? You should try it when it’s cold out and we let the bums sleep down here. Hoowee, sweetheart, you’d hold your pretty nose then.” His chins folded down onto his coat front as he leered at me. I was wearing my plainest clothes from Kansas, not wishing to draw attention to myself, but I couldn’t do anything about the color of my hair. I fervently hoped there’d be no journalist later inquiring about visitors. People tended to remember my hair.
“That’ll do,” said Mr. Salazar quietly to the man. “The lady doesn’t need to hear your chatter.”
“Lady.” The guard snorted in derision and gave Mr. Salazar a long, hard stare. “She’s not too fussy about the company she keeps, Jew-boy.”
With that insult, he turned his back on us and went back to the lockup’s barred door to talk with another uniformed man through the bars.
“How do you put up with that?” I asked Mr. Salazar, who shrugged one well-dressed shoulder.
“He’s an ignorant Irish clown. Chicago’s full of them.”
I followed him down the corridor, reflecting that prejudice was a two-sided affair. But my heart had begun to beat in rapid, heavy thumps. I barely took in the men who sat or lounged on the bare benches that served as both seat and bed. One man, incongruously wearing a curly brimmed bowler, tipped it at me with the grave courtesy of a gentleman receiving a polite introduction. I took a deep breath of the fetid air to steady my nerves and then wished I hadn’t.
“Whore!”
I jumped and stepped back a pace. We had come close to the bars of one of the cages. A dark, lean man directed the word at me from his position of watchfulness, his forehead jammed against the metal in a most uncomfortable-looking fashion. He reached a hand through the bars to make an obscene gesture and spewed forth a descriptive account of me in such disgustingly lurid language that I only understood one word in three.
“Leave her alone.” The words were spoken quietly, but the man pulled away from the bars and let his cellmate guide him back to his bench.
“For God’s sake, Salazar, why did you bring her here?” The second man turned back to us, and I realized it was Martin. Unlike the other men, who wore street clothes, he was wearing a uniform of coarse striped cotton, presumably from the county jail. His hair had been cropped all over his head to around a quarter of an inch. A three-day stubble of near-white hairs stippled his cheeks and chin. But he was in one piece, and not sick as far as I could see. My heart did a whole series of somersaults as his eyes met mine despite the unwelcoming sternness of his face.
“He brought me here because I’ve been fretting over you every day for the best part of a month, and he’s a merciful man. Don’t be angry at him.” I moved forward with the impulse to wrap my arms around him, bars or no bars—but he moved a step back. The small rejection stung, but I refused to allow him to see that.
“I know you don’t want me here,” I said as steadily as I could. “I understand your reasons. But I can’t bear leading a normal life as if you weren’t sitting in a cell.”
Martin said nothing, and I couldn’t read his expression. He was able to do that—shut himself off from all hope of being able to penetrate his thoughts—while my every emotion showed on my face.
Mr. Salazar broke the silence, opening up the bag he carried. “Cheese, eggs, apples,” he said, passing each item through the bars. “The apples are old, of course, but you need some fresh food. And Leah sends you mandelbrot.” He waited until Martin had taken hold of the paper-wrapped cake and then passed the bag itself through to him. “I was told they’d be far more lax here,” he said to me with a smile.
The dark-haired man had risen from his bench at the sight of the bag and edged toward us. Spotting me as if for the first time, he spat a word—the same word, repeated several times—in my direction. I thought I knew what that one meant.
“I’ll give you something later if you’ll shut up,” said Martin, glancing briefly at him. “If you keep insulting the lady, I’ll eat the lot while you watch.” He didn’t sound angry or even surprised. His cellmate, with another glance at me followed by one at the food, merely let a little saliva dribble down his chin before returning to his bench.
“I don’t think I can get this through the bars,” Mr. Salazar said, indicating the stoppered bottle he held in his hand. “It’s cold tea. Can you manage?”
Martin’s eyes lit up as he watched Mr. Salazar flip the stopper out of the bottle’s neck. He reached through the bars to hold the bottle, swallowing thirstily. “Now this you can bring plenty more of,” he said with a slight gasp after a few gulps. “Tea, lemonade, anything that’s not coffee. I don’t trust the water.”
I’d been staring at Martin as if I were dying of thirst myself and he was a fountain. I hadn’t seen him in four months, and every change in him mattered. The leanness of his throat and the way his Adam’s apple bobbed as he drank, the shadows under his eyes, the slight greasiness of skin that didn’t get enough soap and water, the dirt under his normally clean fingernails. He eventually caught my eye, finished drinking, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“I didn’t kill her,” he said in an undertone.
I felt faintly indignant. “I had managed to come to that conclusion myself.”
“How’s Aldine Square?” There was a beseeching look in his eyes. Sat
isfied that I was sure of his innocence, he clearly didn’t want to talk about Lucetta.
“We all love it. Thank you for making it possible,” I said.
He swallowed hard, and a corner of his mouth quirked up in the nearest thing to a smile I’d yet seen. “Thank you for saying that.”
The heaviness on my heart lifted a little, but then Martin looked over me at Mr. Salazar. “Don’t bring her again, Joe.”
“Honestly, Martin.” I made myself sound crosser than I was so as not to betray how sorry I felt for him. “Anybody would think you weren’t pleased to see me.”
Martin considered that last remark for a moment, a small line deepening between his eyes. When he spoke, his voice might, to the casual observer, have held a note of levity. To anyone, that is, who didn’t know him well enough to hear the desperation that lay behind his carefully ironic phrasing.
“You know, Nell, I was looking forward to welcoming you to Chicago, despite the . . . circumstances. I anticipated with pleasure the immense impression I would make, a man bestriding the empire he’d built with his own hands. Strange to say, I’m hardly edified by being obliged to receive the woman I love in a jail cell, with a madman for company. You’ll excuse me if I’m unable to express delight at your visit.”
His cellmate chose that moment to lift the lid from the enameled bucket in the far corner of the cell—its eye-watering reek did not improve the air—and relieve himself into it with a loud groan of satisfaction. Martin moved his body between me and the sight, coming closer to the bars, and I reached out to touch his hand. But he anticipated the movement, folding his arms, a look of raw distress in his eyes even as he kept his face carefully immobile.
“I’m sorry.” I looked down at my boots, not wanting to see Martin’s eyes anymore. “You’re right, maybe I shouldn’t have come. This doesn’t seem to be helping you. I just—I wanted to see you so much.” The last words came out in a hoarse whisper, and I blinked hard, willing myself not to cry.
“Nellie.” The word was spoken in a tone that made the ever-considerate Mr. Salazar remove himself instantly from my side and turn his back on us, pretending to inspect the strip of sky visible through the high, barred window across the passageway. I looked up at Martin, my jaw clenched.
“Don’t think I haven’t been longing to see you, even as I’ve dreaded the inevitable moment when you arrived,” Martin said. “I didn’t imagine that even a jail cell, a murder charge, and my express wishes would keep you away forever.”
At last, he reached his hands out to me between the bars, and I noticed that Mr. Salazar’s position also blocked the turnkey’s view of us. I took his hands, feeling his long, warm fingers wrap around mine, the solid smoothness of his palm under my thumb. “I’m frightened for you,” I said.
“I’m frightened for myself at times,” Martin admitted. “Not as to the outcome of my case, although that last judge was clearly hostile. I did wonder for a while if he would hang me for the size of my bank account.”
“Then what are you frightened of?”
“Of not being able to forget. Of spending the rest of my life dreaming of that room. Of the press getting hold of the idea that I have a mistress for whom the removal of my wife is highly convenient, and hounding you to death.” The words came out in a rapid torrent, and Martin shook his head as he took a breath, as if to rid himself of his thoughts. “You won’t come and see me again, will you? Unless—well, if things should happen to go badly for me, I’d like you at my side then.” He let go of my hands and moved back.
“Don’t talk such nonsense.” I dug my fingernails into my palms. “You won’t—they won’t hang an innocent man.”
“There’s a gallows at the county jail, did you know that?” The words rushed out of him, and I bit back my retort. If it helped Martin to share the burdens of the last month, I could put up with the horrors of such thoughts too.
Mr. Salazar moved back toward us, his back still turned. “Fatty’s shaking his keys at me in a significant manner,” he said. “We’ll have to go.”
I knew it was no use trying to touch Martin’s hand again. I could see it by the way he held himself, as if warding off contact. I tried hard to control my voice.
“I can’t bear to leave you here.”
“We don’t have much choice, do we?” It was almost humor. “I’m sorry I can’t offer you more optimism, Nellie. I seem to have lost it somewhere.”
“You need some work to do,” Mr. Salazar said to him, taking my arm. “I’ll try to oblige you with a long list of questions about the running of the store.”
“Bribe the jail keeper not to mention your visit,” was Martin’s only rejoinder. He turned away from us and picked up the canvas bag, placing the foodstuffs he’d laid on his bench into it under the watchful eye of the madman.
Mr. Salazar and I were silent as we followed a younger man back through the corridors and out of the building. The Chicago air, redolent of soot, horse dung, and onions, if not worse aromas, seemed ambrosial after the jail.
“I’m not his mistress,” I eventually said as we turned south again. “You do know that, don’t you?”
“I didn’t ask, but I’ve never believed Martin to be the kind of man who would keep a mistress. I knew that he loved you though. He’s never said a word about you, but a man doesn’t constantly reread the letters of a mere friend.” Mr. Salazar’s smile lit his face.
I tried to smile, but it wasn’t a very successful attempt. “I don’t know what you must think of us, Mr. Salazar.”
“I think that . . .” Mr. Salazar hesitated and then shook his head. “Our lives cannot be always ordered as we wish them. I think Martin’s a good man. And—would you call me Joe?”
I said nothing while he guided me expertly through the puddles and horse apples as we crossed Clark Street, looking at his face in profile. “Joe,” I said at last, this time really smiling. “Martin couldn’t have a better ally—or friend. Please call me Nell, and thank you for looking after me as well as Martin. And his store—I suppose you find time to do that.”
He grinned. “Oddly enough, the store is the least of our worries. The customers are still coming in, and the takings are even slightly up. Besides, Martin makes more money out of his private investments than he does from the store, as you know. The store fulfills some other part of his nature than the need to make money—his creative side, I suppose. But I’m glad enough to be a part of it.”
“Do you think I’ll lose him?” Somehow Joe’s words had freed the question that had been waiting to be asked. He let the silence stretch out between us for a few moments as we walked on, bathed in a sudden onset of sunshine that felt almost springlike. He didn’t protest that Martin would be released from jail soon or point out that Martin had, in the end, admitted he wanted to see me. He knew what I meant. He saw the same danger that I did.
“Not if you have the patience to wait for him to find himself again.”
But how long would that take?
20
Employment
“You did what?” Joe Salazar had looked surprised enough when I presented myself at his office door a few days later, once more in the everyday clothing of a woman of lesser means. Now his eyebrows rose toward his crisp, dark hair.
“I obtained a post at Gambarelli’s this morning as a junior assistant in the millinery department,” I repeated. “It was surprisingly easy.” I motioned for Joe to sit down, as he had risen to his feet when I entered. “I employed a minor subterfuge to see you. I said I was a friend of your wife’s family and wanted to give you this for her.”
I held out a small parcel wrapped in brown paper. “It’s hat trimmings—the best I could find, as I’d be happy for her to use them. I bought them at Gambarelli’s, of course.”
“The lady who’s fond of putting herself in danger,” Joe murmured. “Martin returned from Kansas in December telling me he’d had to rescue such a lady from the clutches of an adventurer. I quickly put two and two together and d
educed the lady was the Mrs. Lillington of the letters. He seemed so happy upon his return that I deduced other things—but the happiness didn’t last.”
He was speaking in a hushed tone since his door was open, and I dropped my voice to match his. “He realized that he couldn’t divorce Lucetta without dragging my name into it, and he wouldn’t do that.”
“And yet you came to Chicago.”
“Because Martin wanted me to. He felt that he could at least help me start a new life.”
Joe stared steadily at me for a moment, and I felt the heat rise to my cheeks. “I’m almost certain I could have started that life. And besides, I didn’t know where else to go after Kansas.” I hesitated but then plunged on. “I’m not sure if this job at Gambarelli’s isn’t as much for myself as for Martin. I don’t know as much about millinery as I do about dressmaking, but at least I’ll have something to do.”
Joe smiled. “I’m trying to imagine my Leah wishing to do anything other than run the house and raise the children—and do good for other people. She loves to bake, even though we have a cook. She visits the poorer Jewish communities three times a week to deliver her cakes and bread. The visits allow her to indulge her other passion, which is binding up small wounds, literally and figuratively. She combines a little physicking with finding solutions to the other small problems of life.”
“She sounds quite saintly.” I couldn’t help grinning, and Joe smiled back.
“She’s bossy and talks too much, as do her mother and mine. I accept those faults in return for never having to lift a finger the moment I walk through my door. We all have to make compromises in love, especially when we’re tied together for life.”
“I feel that remark was directed at me,” I said.
Joe shrugged his shoulders. “Martin has his demons. You’ll have to make peace with them, especially now.”