“And yet George and I can’t live where we want to,” Margaret said.
“So you don’t want to live here?” Harriet stood in the dining room, where the eight-arm chandelier floated over the table like a glass octopus. George had never imagined in all his years that he would live in a house this grand.
“It’s fine,” Margaret said. “But why does the good daughter get so little and the prodigal son so much?”
“Do you really get so little?” Harriet asked. “If I were you, George, I’d take offense at that comment.”
Margaret laid a hand on her husband’s shoulder. “I meant nothing against you, darling. But sometimes the world just isn’t fair.”
September 13, 1906. He would always remember that date, his twenty-ninth birthday. A Nuvolia representative named Richard Trumbull had come from New York to review the Performance Department and report back to his bosses. Lazar, Kennison, and the chief accountant had spent the morning with the client behind closed doors, and when George asked his father-in-law during a break between meetings why he hadn’t been invited, why in fact he hadn’t known about Trumbull’s visit until that very morning, Lazar said, “You must not have seen the latest numbers. We’re going to be making changes with this account.”
“But Nuvolia has been my client for years,” George said. “Shouldn’t I have a place at the table?”
“We can talk about this later.” Lazar steered him out of his office toward Kennison’s, where the Mountie and Trumbull were taking in the view of Dearborn Street. “George, be a good man and take Mr. Trumbull on a tour of the city. Show him the sights. It’s a glorious day.”
Trumbull crossed the room and shook George’s hand. A large man with a teetering walk, he had thinning hair of a silvery brown that matched his wool sack jacket.
“The Thomas Flyer is waiting out front,” Lazar said. “It’s the 1906 model, just came in last month from Buffalo. Four-cylinder. Fifty-horsepower, d’you understand? It’s the only tonneau in the world that can be owned and maintained without a full-time chauffeur.”
“I hope you’re not putting Willard behind the wheel,” Kennison said. “Have you ever driven a car, George?”
Lazar laughed, and George could only shake his head.
“I’m glad to hear you’re retaining your driver,” Kennison said. “There’s the rest of the fleet to keep in mind.”
“Are you a car man, Mr. Trumbull?” Lazar asked.
“I don’t own one myself, but a man can dream.”
“I’ve heard rumor around the racetrack that an engineer in Detroit is working on an automobile for the masses. Could be the future.”
“Imagine. A car for every curb,” Kennison put in. “And we’ll be first in line to sell it.”
George gave an inward groan—at his rival’s relentless need to impress, and at the sense he kept having of being left in the dust, too slow to adapt to the times.
Soon he was snug in the button-tufted seats of the Thomas Flyer, crowded into a corner by the ursine Mr. Trumbull. “Where to?” asked the chauffeur, a stoic veteran of the Spanish-American War named Virgil Reed.
“A fine question. Let me put it to our guest.”
“How about the stockyards?” Trumbull said. “Isn’t that what everyone wants to see in Chicago? The pure spectacle of it?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” George shielded his eyes from the sunlight, which beat down on the macadam and the black leather seats. “On a hot day like this, with the wind coming in from the west, you can smell the place from here. I wouldn’t recommend it.”
“Half the city’s business ties back to the stockyards. It’s the biggest game in town.”
“Have you read The Jungle?” George asked. Upton Sinclair’s novel had caused a sensation when it was published earlier in the year. People were horrified at the stories of exploitation, of workers falling into rendering pots and getting mixed into Pure Leaf Lard.
“Who’s to say it’s not all bunkum?” Trumbull put in. “Tubercular beef makes headlines. That doesn’t mean the claims are true.”
“I’ve been to those cattle pens and killing floors, and I’m not surprised by the accounts. With all due respect,” George said, “there’s nothing appealing about the world’s largest slaughterhouse.”
“Well—” Trumbull sat back in his seat and produced a pack of Beemans Gum from his jacket pocket. “Take me where you like, then. I can see the yards on my own time.” He tucked some gum into his mouth, then put the pack away without offering any to George.
Virgil, the chauffeur, had been a Buffalo Soldier, serving in Cuba under Pershing; he had papery skin and the countenance of one who had seen it all. “Where to?” he asked again, and George suggested Lake Shore Drive. The Thomas Flyer sputtered into motion, and as they inched toward the lake through midday traffic George remembered the time, six summers ago now, when his father came in on the train for a visit—one of only three in the whole ten years—and how, the very morning of his arrival, he had insisted upon taking the commuter rail to the stockyards.
It was a hideous place, with holding pens and ramps, smokestacks and brick buildings as far as the eye could see, and muddy, rutted streets and a katzenjammer of terrible sounds that Tom Willard talked right over. “It’s an assault on the nose, but I could live with the profits. I heard the Armours are worth some sixty million. Can you imagine, George? What would you do with sixty million?”
They were waiting in line at the slaughterhouse on the grounds of the Armour plant. A tour guide stood at the entrance under a sign—We Feed the World—and all around them train tracks brought in cattle and pigs and sent out beef and pork, day after day, around the clock. At the time George was the golden boy at the Alfred J. Lazar Agency. He’d been given a raise and an interior office and creative freedom on his first big contract, but he had never entertained the idea of one day earning millions, hadn’t pictured himself among the Armours, Palmers, McCormicks, and Lazars. He still dreamed of becoming a writer then, so when his father asked what he’d do with all that money, the first thing that crossed his mind was to pause his life and revisit the people and stories that had once so stirred his imagination. But Tom Willard, who thought only of business, would never understand. So George turned a mirror on the question and asked, “What would you do with sixty million?”
The tour guide announced that the doors would soon open; please enter single file and stay to the left.
“Do you really want to know?” George’s father said, all too happy to talk about himself. “I’d tear the New Willard House down. I know what you’re thinking—what would your mother have wanted? But I’ve put my life into that place—and a king’s ransom, too. I can’t go on fixing a few rooms here and there, trying to keep up with the maintenance. If I had sixty million I’d build a grand hotel on the site, with a big staff and all new everything. And I’d call it The Elizabeth, for your mother, that’s what I’d do. People would flock there for parties and conventions. And I’d give the better part of my fortune to Winesburg, for a new library, opera house, historical museum, and parks full of fountains and flowers. Our town would be the new Saratoga. Resorts would line the road straight up to Lake Erie. Everyone would know Tom Willard, then, and with that kind of influence I’ll tell you what: Sandusky County would finally send a Democrat to Congress. What would you think of your old man then?”
The doors opened. The tour group entered the slaughterhouse. Squeals and shrieks rang through the room. George had no reply, only wished that his father would go on and not stop talking. The smell burned his nostrils, made him light-headed, coated his tongue with a repugnant glaze. The tour guide’s mouth was moving, but George couldn’t hear. In the near distance, the pigs entered the slaughterhouse one at a time. A man in the final pen looped a chain over the rear leg of each pig, jerking the animal into the air and pinning it upon a revolving wheel. When the pig was upside down, a hook at the top of the wheel moved the animal onto a trolley, then along to a butcher who ended it
s life with a ready stab in the throat.
George tried to look away, but the scene fixed him in stunned horror. He’d been a townie so had spent little time around animals, though he did occasionally wander down a back alley where the day laborers of Wines-burg lived. Women in calico dresses washed dishes at kitchen windows. Children raced around ramshackle houses, and pigs rooted in small, grubby yards. George had always thought all pigs were the same, but as each one approached its execution he realized he’d been wrong. Some lowered their heads, resigned to their fate; some scrambled backwards and put up a struggle; some huddled close to their companions, shivering, sniffing the air; some kept silent; and some let out terrified screams, sounds that if he closed his eyes George would swear were human.
Later it would occur to him that if no two pigs went to their deaths the same way, then each pig must be an individual. And if being an individual was the essence of being human, then what could be said of pigs? Of the steer that took a sledgehammer blow to the skull, then dropped through the pen’s false bottom into a trolley bound for a meat locker?
These questions were taking shape in George’s mind when he sat down with his father for dinner at the Stockyards Inn. They had finished the half-day tour, witnessed the slaughter of pigs, cattle, and calves, and seen women in white hats and aprons from Greece, Lithuania, Poland, Germany, and every other corner of Europe package the by-products of the operation that Phillip D. Armour had boasted uses “everything but the squeal.” George had no appetite, and the very idea of sitting down to a steak brought bile up to his throat.
The inn was an island of opulence in a sea of gore. The half-timbered building contained beautiful antique furniture and china, and the restaurant teemed with traders and cattlemen toasting their yield. Scanning the tables, set with crystal and white linen, Tom Willard proclaimed, “Now this is my idea of a proper dining establishment.” He filled the air once again with his unreachable dreams, and George wished his father would stop talking when the moment called for silence and say something when the moment called for conversation.
Tom Willard ordered a sirloin and marveled aloud at the efficiency of the workers, the choreography of the slaughterhouse line. This was before The Jungle, before the true working conditions had made the papers. George knew that something was wrong, could feel it in his senses—in the smell of the place, the way the livestock met their ends, and the effect the yards had on the people who worked there. Pushing a potato around his plate, he thought of the man who killed the pigs, his paleness, the detached look in his eyes. The animals had more life in their final moments, and George wondered if each plunge of the blade made the butcher a little paler, a little further adrift from the shore of his humanity.
The experience at the stockyards had marked George to this day, and it bothered him that Richard Trumbull seemed to be sulking on the car ride along Lake Shore Drive. Perhaps the Nuvolia representative should have been forgiven for wanting to see where soap comes from, but George was not in an accommodating humor on this hot day when his father-in-law was treating him like an errand boy and his father had returned in memory, dismaying as ever. When Virgil pulled over beside a lagoon near the end of Lake Shore Drive and asked, “Where to now?” George’s snap reply was, “Take us to Hull House.”
“Are you sure?” Virgil asked.
“Is it such an odd request?”
“Hull House?” Trumbull said.
“Wouldn’t you like to meet the extraordinary Jane Addams? I hear she receives visitors right off the street.”
“I hear she’s a socialist.” Trumbull mopped his brow with a handkerchief.
“Perhaps you should take your coat off,” George said. “We’re getting no break from the sun.”
Trumbull returned the handkerchief to his pocket. “I’ll be fine, thank you.” He sniffed.
Virgil steered the Thomas Flyer south and west through Old Town and across the river at Kingsbury Tract, then straight down Halsted into the Nineteenth Ward.
“Nothing like the taste of coal smoke on the tongue.” Trumbull fished out another piece of Beemans and snapped the gum between his teeth. “And I thought New York was bad.”
They had entered an industrial neighborhood of long brick factories and simple wood-frame houses that crouched beneath the level of the street. Sooty-cheeked children played on sidewalks while their mothers glowered from sloped porches. “This car’s going to need a good wash and tightening,” Virgil said as he rumbled along Halsted’s jagged grooves. “Did you tell Mr. Lazar you were coming down here?”
It was true there weren’t many cars in the Maxwell Street district, and certainly no luxury cars owned by one of the city’s millionaires. “We’re going to the most famous settlement house in the world. It should be on all of our tours. These people—” George gestured around the overcrowded neighborhood, “could be our future customers, the future inhabitants of Tidy Town.”
“They don’t look so tidy to me.” Trumbull shifted in his seat.
“They work around the clock for pennies,” George said. “Some union men I used to live with told me whole neighborhoods on the south and west sides are without plumbing. There are places where the city refuses to pick up garbage, and if a horse dies on the street it’s left there to rot.”
“Looks like your run-of-the-mine immigrant neighborhood to me,” Trumbull said. “Dirty Slavs, dirty Armenians, dirty Italians, dirty Bohemians all stacked on top of each other. It doesn’t matter who they are or where they’re from, you can bet they haven’t had a bath since one of their kind shot McKinley. Anarchists and flunkies. And they just keep on coming. Doubling in number every year. If we don’t say enough is enough we’re going to lose this country.”
George had seen this kind of talk in the papers, but had never experienced it firsthand. He knew he shouldn’t say another word, since this man held a brief for George’s most important contract. Though he had only a general understanding of the squabbles between the Liberal Immigration League and the Immigrant Restriction League and all the other entities fighting for or against the new arrivals, his sympathies lay with the bottom dog. “I have no issue with immigrants,” he said.
“So you stand with the outcasts of other nations?”
“They work as hard as you and me.”
Trumbull pointed to a peddler hawking iron from the back of his wagon, then a ragpicker diving for salvage in an overflowing garbage box. “They come from the ghettos of Europe and make slums out of our neighborhoods. They’re the weakest of the weak, and they’re dragging us down.”
Beyond a billboard for Edelweiss Beer, the vista opened up to a large complex of brick buildings surrounding an Italianate mansion. Virgil parked the Thomas Flyer at the curb and climbed out to open the door for Trumbull. When the visitor from New York hesitated, a gale of worries swept over George. Perhaps he should have taken Trumbull where he’d wanted to go and kept silent like the model employee he used to be. And what if Jane Addams was indeed home, just inside the entrance? Did George want a scene, one he himself had set in motion? And then there was Helen White, the very reason he’d asked Virgil to drive into the Nineteenth Ward in the first place. What if she really did work at Hull House? What if she were looking out one of the arched windows right now and recognizing the younger man in the back of the luxury automobile that was drawing so much attention to itself?
“We don’t have to go in,” George said. “We can go to the stockyards, anywhere you’d like. Virgil—” he began, but Trumbull had already delivered himself from the car and was making his way up the front walk.
George thanked the chauffeur and told him keep the motor running, then hurried toward the open doors of Hull House.
9
I made a habit of bringing my father lunch, and throughout much of that winter could count on his being away until one o’clock. I’d arrive around noon, on my break, put his food in the fridge, have a sandwich at the kitchen counter, then poke around his apartment in search of the elusive
Book of the Grotesque. I looked in every closet, bookcase, cabinet, and drawer, cast my eyes over every Xerox and index card, turned the place over with the thoroughness of a forensic investigator. But I found nothing. Less than nothing, in fact: the title page, fragments, and folders were gone.
I usually managed to leave before my father’s return, but when I couldn’t get out in time he seemed unsurprised to see me, deliverer of his midday meal. Flushed and out of breath, he’d set down his cane and battered valise and lower himself onto the camelback sofa. Wing would come out of hiding and hop onto my father’s lap for a scratch behind the ears. I’d bring out lunch, ask where he’d been, and the answer would always be the same: Out to take the air, as they used to say.
By the end of March I had searched the entire apartment and could no longer stand not knowing what had happened to the evidence I’d seen of my father’s novel. I’d been watching his valise, which he carried everywhere, but it never seemed full enough to contain even a partial manuscript. So one day I got an extra key from the building manager to my father’s storage cage on the twentieth floor.
The cage was empty but for three cardboard boxes. The first two were marked “CRBC” and were full of old books including, I noticed, the Spoon River Anthology I’d shelved in his apartment a couple months before. Most of the books were fiction titles by Sherwood Anderson’s contemporaries, including Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, John Dos Passos, Hemingway, and Faulkner. I didn’t think much of the books at the time; they looked like any number of editions I might have pulled from the Lakeside Library stacks or stuck under the robotic scanner.
Of greater interest were the contents of the third box, marked “BOG.” Book of the Grotesque. I sat on the concrete floor, lifted out the pages and note cards, and went through them piece by piece, careful to leave the arrangement as I’d found it. Once again the title page sat on top, and beneath it the same fragments and manila folders I’d seen before. Below that, inch upon inch of more notes and folders: Chicago Barons of the Gilded Age; Street, Rail, and Waterway Maps; The Panic of 1907. Since I didn’t have all day and worried that my father might stumble upon me at any moment, I flipped through the stack quickly. I did pause to skim some of the material, like firsthand accounts, dated 1906, of a day at the Union Stockyards, or biographical sketches of the advertising kings of a hundred years ago, their objectives little different from those of my colleagues at Imego.
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