Bright and Distant Shores

by Dominic Smith

  “This is just the beginning, gentlemen,” Hale said. “Think of this building as our totem pole. Our chief advertisement up in the clouds. Tourists will flock to the observatory. They’ll try to spot their houses and neighborhoods, pointing this way and that. We’ll rent them spyglasses and hand out policy pamphlets and lemonade in the elevators.” He moved to the tent entrance and drew back one of the canvas flaps, letting the daylight blanch their faces. “And each night when the clock tower stops chiming and the beacon comes alight, they’ll remember that we stand for permanence and fair-mindedness. Something beyond the grime and gristle.”

  Owen pictured the galley slaves in the typing pool, the filing clerks perched on their stepladders like steeplejacks. He stood up from his chair, feeling the pull of a breeze and a tumbler of gin somewhere outside the canvas furnace. Hale Gray let him pass without a word but was soon upon him, an assured hand at his back.

  “Mr. Graves, when all these niceties are over, I have a business proposition for you.”

  Owen’s hangover had receded behind an inebriate hum in his chest. Hale was making them another drink and embarking on a voyage of uncommon knowledge, clipping his way through a flotsam of historical totes and trinkets. Something about the deadbeat escapement of Old World clocks and wasn’t this preferable, to separate the locking mechanism from the impulse, to let the pendulum swing continuously? Owen had no opinion on the subject of clockworks. Besides, he was taking in the display cases that covered an entire wall of Hale’s enormous office. It was a private museum, a thousand artifacts resting on velvet. Japanese woodblock prints, Chinese rhinoceros-horn cups, Malagasy beaten brass, Hopi funerary bonnets and sashes, obsidian knives, canopic jars, scarabs, Pacific Island clubs and tomahawks, a haft imbedded with shark teeth.

  Owen’s hands ghosted up to the glass. Ever since those boyhood days spent razing houses with his father, his lust for objects had been unceasing; by age ten he’d assembled a scrapyard museum of fixtures and architectural flourishes. Long before he’d ever been to the Field Columbian Museum, he’d felt the libidinal pull of cold, dead things. Now he studied the filigreed edges and native brocade work and felt something like object-lust. It was a desire to look at the carvings and whittlings of people long dead, to witness the lasting sediment of their minds. Owen thought of the policy files some floors below, the wooden towers reamed with paper, or the pneumatic tubes that carried addendums to Hale Gray’s desk for signature. It was a different kind of collection—a living museum of riders and annuities, the typewritten odds of a man’s decline. Owen heard the president click across the floor with his cane. Even his walk was tightly coiled, a metronome of calculated steps.

  Owen turned and received a glass of gin from his gently drunk host. Hale moved for the east-facing windows and Owen followed. Dusk was hardening over the rooftops. The yellow lights of schooners stippled the blackening lake. An office worker— bent in lamplight at his desk—could be seen through the window of an adjacent building.

  “You must be the first one in the city to see sunup,” Owen said. He was aware of their reflections in the windowpane, the glimmer of Hale Gray looking north toward Canada. The whiskey gave Hale a pawky, speculative air. A few of the westward windows were open and a draft came up from the street, carrying the metallic sound of the El grinding into a turn.

  “What do you think of my collection, Mr. Graves?”

  “Very impressive. Is that a Papuan skull?”

  Hale raised slightly onto his toes. “Good eye. See the engravings. But why? Why engrave a geometric pattern on a human skull?”

  “Some kind of ceremony. Funeral rite perhaps. I’ve heard them lecture on it at the Field.”

  “What a lot of tweed and chalk dust they burn through at the museum these days. Wasn’t one of the curators trying to measure the ears of Chinamen not long ago?”

  “I didn’t hear that.”

  “Yes. He wanted to prove a correlation between ear length and philosophical disposition. It came to him while standing in front of a portrait of Lao-Tze in a New York museum. Now picture him chasing Mongols down Clark Street with a tape measure and all the Oriental merchants running like bandits.”

  Hale shot out a laugh that took them both by surprise. A cloud of breathy vapor fogged the glass pane in front of him. Owen smiled and held a swallow of gin in his mouth, nodding in afterthought. When would the wolfhound get on with it?

  Hale turned his back to the skyline and gestured with his drink to the sitting area. His tumbler led the way, a steady prow cutting across the room. A dim and smoky portrait of Elisha Edmond Gray hung above the mantel—the great man in repose, floating through the woody pall of an English manor. He sat waistcoated by a hearth, hound at his side, slightly ablaze in the cheeks, as if he’d rushed indoors from a pheasant hunt.

  Hale sat, looked up at the portrait, nostalgia pursing his lips. “Leadership skips a generation, that’s what I’ve come to believe, Owen.”

  The sound of his Christian name seemed oddly misplaced, as if a coin had dropped from Hale’s pocket onto the hardwood floor.

  “Jethro, my son, is back from college in New England and I suppose I should be finding a place for him at the firm. But, to be frank, I have elevator boys who show more shrift. At Harvard he studied natural science and art and dickered about for four years. I hope to have my portrait on that wall someday and for Jethro to be sipping single malt in this very seat. The problem is one of— what?—character and preparation I suppose.” Hale crossed his legs and removed a speck of something from his pant leg. “Tell me about your Pacific trading voyage from a few years back. I’m partial to sailing myself.”

  “Let’s see . . . A stint in the South Sea Islands. A circuit of trade, mostly.”

  “What did you bring back?”

  “All sorts of things. We also dropped off a cargo of trepang in Shanghai.”

  “I’m not familiar.”

  “Sea cucumber. They cure it and sell it for epicures in the Orient.”

  “Any mishaps?”

  “The ship ran aground and had to be rehulled in Queensland. A seaman ran off and married an Australian girl.”

  “Too much sun. A tropical fever, perhaps.”

  “Being at sea for months can turn a man.”

  “And did you sell your items to the Field Museum when you returned? Not long after they opened their doors after the fair I noticed one lunchtime they had a whole batch of new tribal weapons from the Pacific.”

  Owen touched the rim of his glass. “I’ve heard that there’s some old rivalry between you and Marshall Field. That you’re trying to outdo the museum.”

  Hale persisted: “Did they pay you well? I heard not. Then again, those were hard times. We’re just now rounding the bend.”

  “I’m sure they thought it was a fair price.”

  “They say the Pacific is fast running out of artifacts. That you can more easily find good curios at Jamrach’s in the East End of London than on Thursday Island. That first cargo load in the Christy Museum was all because of the sandalwooders, God bless them, and now that’s done it’s slim pickings. Time is of the essence before someone drains the whole bathtub.” Hale took out an envelope from his breast pocket and placed it on the low table between them.

  Owen noticed there was a bloom of moisture—probably Hale’s sweat—trailing one edge.

  “I like to make proposals in writing. Consider it an underwriter’s old habit. You’ll find a list of categories I’m interested in and a sum specified for delivery. A percentage up front plus funding for the voyage, the remainder upon return. There are also a few special conditions, should you decide to enter into the contract. Taking the railway to San Francisco and contracting a ship and crew out west would be the most cost-effective, I believe. The ship should be arranged before you leave, of course. Naturally, have your lawyer look the contract over if you like.”

  Owen had never spoken to a lawyer, let alone retained one. “I look forward to reading it.” He pic
ked up the envelope and placed it inside his jacket.

  Hale got to his feet and Owen did likewise. They walked out through the double doors, a paternal hand now on Owen’s shoulder. Hale stopped and pressed a brass button on the wall of the landing. “Elevator’s on its way up.”

  “Congratulations again on the magnificent new building. It seemed to go up overnight.”

  “The glaziers’ combine didn’t finish my sheet glass on time. Half of it had to come from Canada, some from Mexico. I’m no friend to price fixing and union organizing, let me tell you. A man needs to count on certain things. Are you married, Owen?”

  “No, sir. Being in trade makes it hard to settle.” In fact, he’d been on the verge of asking Adelaide Cummings to marry him for four years. But he’d been waiting for a more solid livelihood, a chance to make his way before asking for her hand. Adelaide, he knew, was fast losing patience with his delays. And now another voyage.

  Hale opened one of the doors and Owen stepped out into the corridor.

  “Well, there’s no shortage of eager women in this building as of tomorrow. Take one to lunch sometime. City girls with silt still on their hands. Honest and hard-working. You could do worse.”

  “Thank you for the hospitality today.”

  “Will you be all right on the elevator? You looked squeamish earlier.”

  “I think I have the hang of it.”

  “Good night, then,” Hale said, returning to his office.

  Owen stood on the landing, aware of the air whistling in the elevator shaft. He took the envelope out of his pocket and broke the seal with his penknife. The typewritten document was thirty pages of minuscule font, separated by headings that indemnified against acts of God, payments to subsequent heirs, delays and failures, et cetera, et cetera. It was hard to tell exactly what the contract proposed. The elevator arrived and the attendant sat slumped on his stool. He gave a cursory nod to Owen and the doors closed. Gone was the ceremony of earlier hours; the pomp had been reduced by the hordes to something shuffling and miffed. Owen was glad for the silence and the light coming from the elevator ceiling. He positioned the contract and traced a finger over the elliptical text. The car swayed downward, stuttering here and there in the windy shaft. The gist of the proposal was buried in the addendum. Jethro Hale Gray to enlist in the voyage as “ship’s naturalist,” under the direct protection of Owen Graves. An itemized list of desired cargo: shields, canoes, painted masks, tribal weapons, adornments, textiles, et cetera, and there, listed like a handmade artifact or a woven skirt, was the phrase a number of natives, preferably related by the bonds of blood, for the purposes of exhibition and advertising. A single dotted line awaited his signature at the bottom of the page.

  I

  OWEN

  1.

  Owen’s love of objects first began with afternoons spent prospecting in the rubble of his father’s trade. Ada, mother and wife, had died in the Great Fire and Owen had only a dim recollection of her—raspberry leaves pressed into a hymnal and braided chestnut hair. Porter Graves kissed his fingertips every morning and touched her daguerreotyped face on the way out the door. Graves & Son Wrecking & Salvage, the two of them on the box seat, riding to another falling tenement or warehouse. Porter bellowed through a bullhorn at his crew while Owen, aged about twelve, helped pry wainscoting or de-nail floorboards. Brawny men labored with crowbars and sledges, loosing bricks from the lime mortar, hurling debris down a shaft that had been hewn clear through the center of the building. They plied pickaxes, wrecking adzes, pneumatic guns. When all else failed, a stick of dynamite bored into a wall of solid masonry. The heady cocktail of nitric and sulfuric acids, glycerin mixed with porous clay, all of it blended and wrapped in brown paper like an orphan’s Christmas present. Dynamite was Nobel’s gift to the wreckers of the world and there was no better moment in Owen’s short childhood than standing with his father and the men after the fuse was lit. Dusty silence followed by a sonic clap; runnels of smoke and billowing clouds of falling plaster. The bite of gunpowdered air. And for fifteen minutes the men relaxed, waited for the all-clear from Porter, for it was the boss himself who inspected the aftermath. They rested on crates and haunches, smoked cigarettes, spoke of wives and girlfriends, recalled pints of ale in neighborhood watering holes and mythic accidents in teardowns. A grand piano falling six stories down the shaft and landing on a mason doubled at his work, the crazed arpeggio of splintered wood and warped notes ringing out for twenty city blocks. Or the mechanic who fell into a side chute, tumbling into a skip of broken glass. They spoke to Owen as an equal, a fellow destructionist and rubble-maker, and he could feel their respect for his father as Porter came back from his inspections with the steely demeanor of an artillery specialist, two thumbs in the air.

  They salvaged as much as they could: pipes, fixtures, beams, marble and granite, trim, even plate glass wrapped in muslin. The scrap wood was bundled and sold to immigrants for kindling. The granite was recut for tombstones. Secondhand-brick dealers carried off an endless bounty. Owen wasn’t allowed within twenty feet of the shaft and he worked the trim and fixtures with a hammer and chisel. And it was here that he made his private discoveries. Every building harbored secrets, tiny embellishments that would never show up on a set of blueprints. Stone-carved figurines above a mantel or hand-painted tilework; gargoyles and stained-glass windows of despairing saints; architraves with messages encoded on them. Hidden chambers and forgotten strong rooms replete with pistols and tinned cherries. Owen began to assemble a salvage museum in the back of his father’s scrap-yard. He labeled and catalogued his finds, writing down building names and the dates of demolition onto pieces of cardstock, attaching them by string, a thousand toe-cards in a morgue of objects.

  At the end of each workday he came away with something new. It could be as small as a Spanish coin or as large as a Gothic window. Porter indulged his son’s appetite for collecting, saw it as an adolescent flurry of seriousness that might someday pay dividends. He knew that although a life of junking could be profitable there had to be a passion for the science of destruction. Times were changing. Penalty fees and late clauses, the men demanding better wages. The beginnings of steel-frame, multistory construction would mean more labor, a hundred men snapping the heads off rivets and boring them out with drift pins. Derricks and steam shovels and power winches—all of it would increase his overhead. Let the boy find some speck of delight in all that razing.

  After work they rode home through the Loop and assessed the office buildings with a wrecker’s cold regard.

  “I could fell that one in thirty days if it came down to it,” Porter said, angling his chin up at a new ten-story offering.

  “Top to bottom. Sixty-man crew,” Owen affirmed. He re-knuckled the reins, making sure his father saw he had a tight grip.

  Porter smiled and lit a cigarette, looking off into the storefronts where clay mannequins modeled the latest tweeds. “You have the eye for it. Just like me. You walk past a building and can’t help gauging the brickwork and lintels, figuring the way it might topple.”

  Owen felt his father’s pride like a wool blanket around his shoulders. It was dusk and people were heading to restaurants and theaters in their frocks and tails. The pedestrians eyed the wagon with its ramshackle load and Porter tipped his hat. They ignored him, eyes down on a fastened glove or a pair of tickets. Even then Owen knew that he and his father lived apart from polite society. They ate soup and bread for supper and pork sausages on Sundays. They weren’t much for religion but believed in shaping one’s destiny through honest work. There was grease under their fingernails, cinders in their hair. Owen could read and add numbers but didn’t know how to ride a bicycle. What Owen thought now but did not tell his father was that he never noticed bricks or lintels when he walked by a grand building. He never thought about its demolition and the thousand man-hours it would require to level it. Instead he wondered about the artifacts it might contain, the remainders of other people’s lives. What did a
man keep in the concealed compartment beneath the floorboards? Whose initials had been engraved in the handle of a forgotten pistol?

  The summer of Owen’s thirteenth birthday, a collar beam dislodged during one of Porter’s post-dynamite inspections. The beam dropped without warning, bringing part of a stone wall and several rafters with it. Helpless, Owen watched from behind a barricade of rubble as a cloud of mortar dust mushroomed then fell away. In the chalky air he could make out his father’s prone form, pinned beneath rafters and limestone. Porter’s work boots, still attached, faced in opposite directions. The wreckers charged forward and began working the pile, prying beams and plumb-lifting massive sheets of stone, all the while calling to Porter as if he stood a chance. Owen knew his father was dead by the angle of the boots and the depth of the pile. Nonetheless, the foreman led the son away when, an hour later, three men removed the final ceiling joist and picked off the smaller, covering debris. Owen stood at the edge of the demolition site, numb, but also filling with dread. He saw the wreckers doff their helmets and bow their heads. Someone covered the body with a canvas tarpaulin, leaving only the scuffed boots exposed. Owen broke free from the foreman’s grip and ran forward but the wreckers held their circle as he tried to take hold of the canvas. The foreman, the oldest of the crew, came up, panting: “You can remember him whole or broken up like he is. It’s your choice, but trust me, he wouldn’t want you to see what’s underneath.” Owen looked into the men’s faces, their eyes averted, and let the foreman lead him out by the shoulders. He waited on the street until it was near dark and the coroner arrived by carriage to take the shrouded body away. Behind the lighted windows of nearby apartments people were eating supper. Owen heard the men talking as they came out into the falling night, already reliving his father’s death, formulating the cause, naming the linchpin joist or beam, inducting Porter Graves into the pantheon of fallen wreckers. Owen paced in the half-light of the street and watched the coroner’s wagon disappear from sight. He heard the foreman utter the word orphaned to a stranger, an official of some kind, and it was the cold finality of the word that struck him. He withdrew into an alcove, away from the wreckers, and gave himself permission to weep into a grease-smeared handkerchief. A building could be razed or felled and a child could be orphaned. Like an old house, life was waiting to topple.