Bright and Distant Shores

by Dominic Smith

  Owen said, “I take back my earlier comment about the savagery of lady cyclists. I would trust these women with my life. That one there is attaching a first aid kit to the handlebars. Fit for an expedition.”

  Adelaide turned. “They’re coming from a lecture at the Woman’s Building. It’s one of the best halls if you haven’t already seen it.”

  This surprised Owen. He’d assumed the Italianate building was full of exotic draperies and tapestries.

  She said, “One of the building’s benefactors is Mrs. French-Sheldon.”

  “Ah,” Owen said. He had no idea who that was.

  “She led a caravan through eastern Africa, unattended by any of her sex, bartering and trading in the Arab coast bazaars.”

  “Yes, of course. And what did she come back with?”

  “It’s all on display in there. Weaponry, brass beads, that sort of thing.” Then Adelaide began a summary of the speeches she’d heard inside, from Lady Aberdeen to a Russian princess and Swedish baroness whose names Owen could not hear above the pealing of bicycle bells. Something about leagues and temperance unions affirming the rights of women. Adelaide raised her voice to be heard: “The vote . . . not as a privilege, you understand, but as a right, Mr. Graves.”

  Her formal tone bothered him and he found himself thinking about the midway, about the Hungarian wine they poured into goblets over there. Adelaide turned north again, walking back along the lagoon, past the Illinois Building. She stopped in front of the Fisheries Building, a baroque arcade of taxidermied fish and living sea dwellers in glass tanks. Despite his interest in seagoing, Owen had avoided the exhibit earlier in the day. With its high-blown façade, its colonnades and flags aflutter, the building seemed to be full of cheap, touristic novelty. To top things off, it was fronted by the North Canal, where a merchant navy of singing gondoliers—South Siders trying to pass for Venetians in their striped shirts and broad felt hats—ferried couples from one concrete shore to the other.

  “It’s closed but I know one of the night watchmen. Come on,” she said, trotting up the stairs, her skirts flaring.

  He had no choice but to follow and feign enthusiasm. Adelaide struck up a conversation with a certain night watchman— avuncular, smelling of some exotic supper—who said that they could have thirty minutes but not to touch anything or it would be his hide.

  A few sconces lit the way and they passed through trapezoids of light and shadow. The rooms and annexes twisted and burrowed, smelling of fish-bloat and iodine. Owen walked behind Adelaide, watching the way her hair hit her shoulders as she walked, barely noticing the maritime marvels—floating luminous eggs in a wall-side tank, dried fish strung like silvered sheets of paper; specimens of the deep, cured, salted, or stuffed in wooden box frames. A series of nets, traps, and lobster pots was accompanied by odes to Yankee enterprise. They stood beside the articulated skeleton of a sperm whale. She walked around it slowly, touching the alabaster ribs in the underwater gloaming.

  “He said not to touch anything,” Owen said.

  “He won’t know the difference. Isn’t this something?”

  “The whole place is something.”

  She paused, turned to him, wiped her hands down her skirt, muttered forgive me, then carefully lay beneath the suspended skeleton on the floor, looking up into the giant rib cage. She did this with ladylike precision, as if she were reclining on a gurney for a renowned physician, modesty intact. She made it seem like a perfectly natural thing to do on a Sunday evening. Palms down, she closed then opened her eyes, her braided hair coiled beside her head.

  Watching her, prostrate on the wooden floor, he said, “Have you been swallowed whole?”

  “Like Jonah. You could fit a house in there. Do you want to see the view?”

  “I’m terrified of whale stomachs.”

  She laughed and sat bolt upright. She crouched and came out. “You must think I’m deranged.”

  Owen extended his hand and she took it as if alighting from a carriage. She straightened her skirts.

  “I’m sure you’re not the first one to do that.”

  “I bet not. Shall we see the rest?”

  Owen put his hands in his pockets and followed her into the adjacent building. It was even more elaborate than the last, with porticos and loggias, a basilica for fish. They went inside and found themselves in a room of glass tanks. Spandrels of moonlight braced the high windows of the central dome. In the diffuse light Owen could barely read the placards let alone see the inhabitants lurking behind the glass walls. Supposedly there were catfish from muddy western rivers, halibut and cod from the Atlantic, king crabs and lobsters prowling the sandy bottom.

  “Come over here,” Adelaide said.

  She was standing by a large tank, her face pressed to the glass.

  “I can barely see a thing,” he said.

  “Your eyes will adjust. They brought these three by railcar. Can you imagine?”

  He stared at the tank. “Still nothing. My father used to tell me stories of them bringing live lobsters by railcar for the downtown oyster houses. I never believed him until he took me there one day and showed me. They were all crawling around in a tank and you could walk up to one and tell them to throw it into a boiling pot.” He saw a looming shape inside the tank. Then another.

  “You have to come right up to see in this light,” she said.

  He could see the whites of her eyes.

  He hooded his gaze and peered into the watery gloom. He could hear her breath against the tank wall. His elbow was up against hers and she made no effort to move it. He blinked, squinted, then the gray maw of a shark passed just inches away, teeth serried and hinged, eyes inscrutable and white. The animal hit the tank with a thud and Owen jolted back, his hands raised in front of his face. A view of flared gills flashed by as the shark recoiled and turned. Adelaide had a hand on her breastbone, awed, stifling a panicky laugh. She had to steady herself against the wall. They stood three feet from the tank and watched the sharks for ten minutes, neither of them talking. The sharks’ marbled gray flanks were flecked with white and a dozen tiny parasites clung to the sandpapered skins, dangled and swayed like wilted flowers of the deep. Every now and then there would be a thud against the glass—were they blind or trying to escape?—and Adelaide grabbed his arm each time, anchoring them in place. Of all the foreign and exotic encounters at the fair, these creatures seemed the most far-flung to Owen. Barely of the planet, Darwinian relics, as unlikely and apocalyptic as some sightless, mud-dwelling griffin. How did he and Adelaide appear through those cold, lightless eyes? Was there something in there looking back, by turns curious and appalled?

  When they left the Fisheries Building it was almost nine. Owen offered to buy Adelaide a late dinner but she declined. He insisted on buying her a cherry-flavored soda and listened to her hiccup all along the Grand Basin, past the orb-bearing goddess of the Republic. The belching was retribution for the terror of the sharks, he told her. He walked her back to the Anthropological Building where Professor Putnam’s assistant, Franz Boas, was waiting to escort her home on the streetcar. They stood outside for a moment.

  “When are you on brain watch again?” he asked.

  “It changes every day. It might be the psychology experiments tomorrow.”

  “But always the same building?”

  She nodded, tightened her shawl.

  “You can tell Putnam and Boas that there is no need for the tomahawks. You’re in one piece.”

  “For now,” she said, turning, dashing up the stairs. He added the word now to his mental catalogue of the day. It lay wedged between the sight of her prostrate beneath the whale skeleton and the otherworldly stare of the sharks. More than amulets and bamboo tinderboxes it was these moments that would stay with him, something in the way they hovered just beyond the grasp of plain reckoning—like apartments glimpsed from the El at night. The strange orbit of other lives. He walked back through the fairgrounds and bought a hamburger at the first place he could
find. He sat on a bench in front of a bandstand, not far from where he’d witnessed the bloody Sun Dance, and ate with abandon, like an invalid back from the brink. He was sure his two-year slump was about to end.

  They fell into a steady rhythm of afternoon walks and early suppers, working around her schedule at the fair. Over meals in which Adelaide described her charity work—teaching immigrants to read at Hull House, taking an elderly neighbor to church each Sunday—Owen marveled at the way she ate soup, bowl tilted carefully away, spoon idled and de-dripped at the ceramic curb before making its ascent to her lips. He could watch her do this for hours. The long, pale line of her neck was something he thought about on the streetcar or crossing the street. She was so remarkably decent and kind and her refinement came off as care—even grace—rather than privilege. Owen felt himself pulled by the promise of future shared meals, by the thought of loosening her braided hair so that it spilled—smelling of rosehips—over her delicate collarbone. He had to remind himself of his seagoing ambitions, of the need for a livelihood and the tin shed squalor in which he lived. Forcing himself to be practical, he asked her for voyage leads. She told him about the men who showed up at the ethnographic exhibit with bones and artifacts in burlap sacks. Word that a Chicago museum was forming had traveled far and wide. They came from all over: German copra traders, New England clipper mates, brig captains. They’d forged careers in the South Seas, hauling sulfur, felling teak, ferrying sugarcane recruits, but most of that had given way to wool and transport. They traded with the islanders for ethnographica as they went. A fathom of calico, a sack of glass beads, a steel-bladed knife, each of these could buy fine native weapons or artifacts. Owen listened and took notes, mesmerized as much by Adelaide’s mouth as by the words spilling from it.

  In search of a hiring captain, Owen frequented the barrelhouse saloons in Little Cheyenne, the levee district. Some of his father’s men had come here on weekend benders—the grand tour they called it—spending their way from saloon to dance hall to brothel. They hocked wedding bands and fob watches at pawnshops and posed for midnight portraits with street waifs in tintype galleries; they ate oysters from the shell and bought virility potions at voodoo apothecaries. One Saturday morning Owen found Otto Bisky, a crapulous German clipper captain, breakfasting on eggs, sausages, and beer in a saloon eatery. He supported his head with one hand, holding a stump of bratwurst at bay with a fork in the other. A folded newspaper lay beside his plate. His face was sun-ravaged, his lips blistered, his complexion ruddy. Each time he took a swig of beer or bite of wurst his face turned increasingly sour, as if he were eating a lemon by the rind. Owen sat two bar stools down and ordered a shot of whiskey. He wanted to get the German’s attention but Bisky failed to take his eyes off his newspaper or his eggs. Eventually, Owen asked him about the list of names he was tracing with a finger in a column of newsprint—Argo, Nemesis, Peregrine, Industry, Aramac. Beneath a heading of Shipping Intelligence, the names appeared under the banner Wrecks and Casualties. Bisky thereby began a bleary-eyed lament for all the ships he’d ever captained in the Pacific and the Atlantic, and their fates. He detailed each ship’s peculiarities, the way she acted in a squall or the way she took in wind and water in high swells or smelled like baleen in her lower reaches, before giving the exact nature of her demise. Scuttled, hogged-up, reefed, run aground, he gave each word a throaty, Germanic inflection. He discussed the quirks of his current ship, the Paramount, which was being repaired and due to set sail in the morning, eventually making for the South Seas. Then Bisky began a diatribe about the wretched state of the Chicago River and its bridge-opening schedule, the humid weather, the many hazards of falling asleep in a brothel. It was during a brief pause that Owen asked him outright for a job.

  Bisky turned on his stool, sized Owen up while tonguing a morsel of food, pushed some air between his lips, and finally said, “You look more idler than able-bodied. Can you cook for two dozen men hungry enough to slit your throat if they miss a meal?”

  The vision of preparing countless fishy meals at sea hovered before him. “What about ship’s carpenter?” he asked. “I have experience and my own tools.” He knew from his years in the library stacks that a ship’s carpenter made general repairs and kept the masts in good condition. That seemed easy enough.

  Bisky said, “Do you have a bevel gauge?”

  Sensing this was a trap, Owen said of course and waited for the captain’s reaction.

  Bisky drained his mug of beer, folded the newspaper, and said, “We leave tomorrow at dawn.”

  This was not exactly what Owen had in mind, but he shook Bisky’s calloused hand, received the details of the dock, and went out into the street. On his way back to the wrecking yard, he stopped in a hardware store and bought a bevel gauge. The salesman said it was the perfect tool for replicating pieces that weren’t square. Owen arrived home and penned a letter to Adelaide in his finest Tabernacle cursive.

  He tried to be brief but something poured out of him in the kerosene lamplight, his collected spoils spread before him, everything ordered and arranged, none of it seen by another person since his father’s death. What was the point of all these objects? A private rummage; his solitary childhood labeled, filed, boxed. He wrote of his mother’s daguerreotype, his father’s death, his desire to find his place in the world. She was the loveliest person he’d ever known and he prayed for her forgiveness. The word pray felt like a falsehood—he hadn’t communed with God in years—but within a month he was doing just that. Bunked down in the idlers’ deckhouse of Bisky’s clipper, his hands smelling eternally of tar and brine, he floated prayers out to the white stars, to the ocean mounting against the groaning ballast, even to the Holy Ghost. He prayed for land, for a steak medium rare, for the sight of Adelaide tilting her soup bowl in the wan light of a café.

  Somehow, while he was at sea learning the petulant ways of the old clipper from stem to stern, Adelaide had forgiven him. He was gone a little under a year and the exchange of letters—three on each side—took on a life of its own. Entreaties and dispatches from San Francisco, Hawaii, and Sydney, all by commissioned mail steamer, each of his letters blotted with sealing wax stolen from Bisky’s cabin. Whenever he got the chance, Owen fled the fusty nooks and fetid warrens below deck, the fishy brume in the cookroom, and climbed onto the foredeck to pen what he saw: the bruised green in the troughs between swells, the seabirds riding high on the trades without so much as a wing flap, the iron blue of the sky before a storm. He did not mention the debauchery that went on in the forecastle, the flagons of grog, the fist-fights in the spiritroom, the pornographic reminiscences in cabins and bunkrooms. Owen drank with the seamen, spoke of women as sport when required, but used his station as carpenter to live on the periphery. He reported directly to the captain and shared quarters with the other idlers—the bosun, the sailmaker, and the cook. Because he did not have to stand watch like the ordinary and able-bodied seamen, he found time to read, write letters, and try his hand at trade whenever they anchored.

  Adelaide began her letters a little stonily, describing the move to the new museum without much flair or affection. She kept to the facts—meals, weather, appointments, errands, books read in the buzzing light of the cable car. But by the time she responded to Owen’s second letter, in which he reiterated his sincerest apology and stated his desire to be with her upon his return, she was warmed through. Not only because of those simple declarations—underlined with Indian ink—but because his letter was full of exotica and anthropological sightings from island ports: baskets made from sedge, a jew’s harp made from bamboo, native boys surfing waves on rough-planked boards, women’s girdles stripped from bark, the sight of missionaries from the Society of the Divine Word playing cricket beside a volcanic beach. She was won over by such details and showed parts of his letters to colleagues at the Field Columbian Museum. They asked her to write and express the museum’s interest in buying certain objects upon his return. Owen kept this to himself and used his wages,
such as they were, to buy calico and tobacco for trading in the islands. He made a deal with the cook and kept his tribal artifacts in flour sacks in the messroom larder.

  By the time he received her third letter he was a few months from being home. While the stationery smelled of jasmine, the letter spoke of hard times. Eighteen ninety-four saw striking mobs in the railroad yards, runs on wildcat banks, the homeless sleeping in City Hall and precinct police stations. Adelaide continued to volunteer at Hull House, prepared meals and taught immigrant children how to read, sat on the porch alongside Jane Addams, the great social reformer herself. After a long day of service they listened to street orphans singing Slavic hymns. With the distance and perspective that came from nearly a year at sea—so many nights in the brimming stomach of the brig—Owen suspected that at least part of Adelaide’s interest in him was sociological. On her father’s side she came from New England brahmins, men with high-bridged noses, honorary degrees, and a blue-blooded zeal for philanthropy. Adelaide had come west to strike out on her own, type memoranda and take dictation at the museum by day, improve the lot of the poor in her off hours, petition for women’s rights, but all the while receiving a monthly stipend from Boston that was wired to the downtown post office.

  Perhaps, Owen thought, he was one of her causes. The orphaned son of a housewrecker, partially raised and educated by South Side nuns, a little unrepentant and raw in his scuffed blucher boots, he fit the profile for Adelaide’s wider mission. But surely the parents back east did not condone a romantic alliance with someone of Owen’s prospects and parentage. And yet Adelaide’s letters unfurled suggestions for future plans—going to worker concerts in the park where men in coveralls would eat pork sandwiches while listening to Brahms, standing amid the dotted brushwork of the Impressionists at the Art Institute, attending one of the Friday lectures or poetry readings at the Chevron Tea Room on Michigan Avenue. It was clear to Owen that she wanted to refine him, to bear him up. And though he preferred the subterranean charm of a poolroom to a lofted lunchroom, a pitcher of stout to a carafe of burgundy, a midnight platter of ribs in Little Cheyenne to a midday bowl of chowder in some downtown clam house, he was willing to go partway along with her vision. She was a missionary of the plainspoken and practical kind, moved to service not so much by God but by some inherited belief in humanism and the common plight of all. It wasn’t the Bible that had been read aloud during her childhood, but the musings of Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson. Owen would go to the lectures and concerts, attend the Christmas pageants at the houses for the poor, but he’d also keep a racetrack form guide in his back pocket or a ticket stub for a curio museum where a bearded lady farted and belched on demand. The truth was, he trusted Chicago’s armpit more than her jeweled fingers.