Bright and Distant Shores

by Dominic Smith

  V

  BEYOND THE STRANDLINE

  20.

  The word crizzel passed among the window-washers of the First Equitable. A nineteen-year-old Norwegian named Anders had spent time in a St. Louis glassworks and said it was the proper name for it—an opaque roughness on the surface of the windowpanes. “Clouds its transparency like a filmy eyeball,” he said to the others. “Cheap windows with too much sand and not enough flint. They brought the plates in from Mexico or Canada on account of the American glass combines. No doubt about it.” He was holding forth at the lunchtime gathering of workmen in the sub-basement room they called the cave. It was a staging area for repair work and for storage, but each noontime it was their clubhouse, the head janitor presiding with a metal rod as his scepter of office. They sat on nail kegs and broken chairs and barrels, eating from their tin pails as each man gave his opinion on the topic at hand—evolution, electricity, magnetism, airships, the merits and burdens of marriage, the tariff on tinplate. Today it was the building’s imperfections. Subordinate janitors, window-washers, elevator men, steamfitters, gasfitters, electricians, stokers, carpenters, the sign-painter, thirty men who tended every aspect of Hale Gray’s colossus. For many of them, the building was a living thing—the pneumatic arteries that carried paper instead of blood, the electricity that passed blue and silent through the thin walls like nervousness in human skin.

  The building was fickle, they all agreed. Now that winter was nearly upon them, the windows frosted and jammed and the elevators ran slow on cold mornings. Design flaws, they said. They knew her like an intimate. The lairs and crannies, the architectural hollows that were a wink from the draftsmen to the workmen, the cavities for smoke breaks and a hand of cards, the hidden nook inside the rooftop clockworks that was just wide enough for a mattress. A fifteen-minute nap, wedged between churning clock gears and the quarter-hour bells, was better than nothing, they all agreed. And since the bells stopped pealing at dusk, a man on the outs with his wife could spend a restful night directly above Hale Gray’s office, 350 feet above the dime flophouses of Van Buren.

  Thirty-four hundred sheets of plate glass, Anders said, and half of them faulty. The blend of soda, lime, and silica botched and now baked into the terracotta walls. The window-washers were being blamed for the murkiness. The eldest window-washer, a Swede, got up to acquiesce. They risked their lives, he told them, strapped themselves in with a leather surcingle not much more than the girth strap on a horse saddle. It was criminal, he said. The scummed double-sashes were ruining his reputation in the city. The reflection of city and sky was glimpsed in the windows as if on the surface of a millpond instead of an alpine lake.

  Hale Gray had assembled a panel of experts to determine whether the building was settling into the blue clay beneath Chicago’s streets so soon after its construction. A structural engineer, the architect, a soil expert, a geologist, none of them could agree. He sat at his cherrywood desk each afternoon, in the bleak Canadian light, waiting for a definitive sign. Part of him expected to feel the slippage, as if a few inches—that was the disputed figure—would register as a mild earthquake, a gentle tinkling of glassware. He watched the inkbottle on his desktop, waiting for a miniature black tide to ebb toward him. But none came.

  On Fridays he made his habitual descent to the basement strongroom for an inspection of the various deeds, policies, and treasury notes that made up a good part of the company’s assets. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust bank vaults, but rather that he was comforted by the thought of a stanch of his wealth lying in the core of the building, the beating heart of the enterprise like a boiler in the iron hull of a steamship. The strongroom, the latest Chubb, was made with foot-thick walls of steel-reinforced concrete and a wafer of explosives wedged inside in the event of drilling. As an insurance man, Hale kept abreast of the trends in larceny and bank heists, knew that safecrackers boiled dynamite and skimmed off nitroglycerin to pour into the hairline cracks beside safe doors. Chubb, like Otis and his elevators, assured him that all design flaws had been eradicated.

  Benny Boy took him down in the express elevator. The sub-basement required an elevator key and Hale watched the operator produce a brass keychain from his breast pocket. He liked Benny for his conversational instincts—he knew when to keep quiet and when to hazard a joke.

  “Seems slow today, Benny,” Hale said, glancing at his fob watch.

  “Some wind in the shaft, sir. Maybe ten seconds off.”

  “Not so bad. Will you wait for me while I check the week’s takings?”

  “Happy to, sir, take your time. I’m here till seven.”

  The elevator rocked to a stop and Benny held the door for Hale. He passed along a narrow corridor of thick brown brick. Down here the building’s secret commerce could be seen plainly and Hale always felt he was walking backstage. The walls were girded and massive, the heating pipes clanked, and the tradesmen’s shops were littered with repairs. The subterranean world smelled of mechanic’s grease and burning coal. The strongroom was next to the little room where the workmen met each lunch-time. Hale knew about these ragtail proceedings, knew they called the strongroom the chapel out of deference but also as a dig at the hallowed money of the Grays. It was all right. Let them have their little broomstick parliament. A man was won over by degrees and Hale suspected even his vice presidents sometimes fantasized about throwing him out a top-floor window. He would take respect and fear over chummy regard any day of the week.

  He used a small brass key that was attached to a lanyard around his neck and opened the outer door, passing into the next chamber. He applied the combination to the second door—the scrambled birth date of his grandfather—and went into the inner chamber. The smell of paper and gold was as unmistakable as iron railings after a rain. It was the smell of safety, something sacramental: yes, let them call it the chapel. He opened the wooden box of policy duplicates and fingered down the stack alphabetically. The company’s chief accountant brought them down each Friday in preparation for Hale’s ritual stocktaking. It would have been easier, but not as satisfying, to read a tallied sheet of newly added policies. But one of the lessons learned from Elisha Edmond Gray was to treat the business, no matter its size, like a corner shop or lunchroom. Touch the money and paper receipts yourself, keep your fingers on the till and lockbox. For this reason, every one of his employees, from typing-pool girls to his top salesmen and managers, received a personalized, signed card on the anniversary of their joining the fold. Make the business personal was Elisha’s advice. He counted 162 new policies—most of these for life coverage. The economy was on the rebound and men wanted to prepare for the next catastrophe. He clasped the iron box and returned it to the shelf. The fire had taught him the virtues of catastrophe-proof record keeping. The goldenrod triplicate of every policy was sent off site to a brick warehouse.

  He stood in the strongroom, a lion’s share of his assets on the steel shelves flanking him. Somewhere in a file was the deed to the ancestral estate in the north of England, a piece of property that had been in the Gray bloodline for three centuries, but also his marriage certificate and last will and testament and the carbons of every dismissal letter he’d ever written. He heard the low rumble of the La Salle Street tunnel and he closed his eyes, listening. Chicago may not have had catacombs like Paris but it had cable car tunnels and sewers, a network of basements set in the clay bed below the lake. The city’s root cellar was the janitor’s store and the furnace room. He listened to the building whirr, clatter, breathe. None of it sounded like three hundred feet of bridgework steel sinking into an ocean of blue clay. He opened his eyes. He believed in Providence, in timing. This was his time. A stranger could see it in the cuff of his pant leg or feel it in the consular handshake he reserved for acquisitions and mergers. He’d built them a vertical city, a tower of Babel for the Bohemian mail boys and the prairie girls in cotton dresses. Pullman might have built his railway workers a town out on the plain with varnished municipal bandstands
but Hale had built a cathedral of glass.

  21.

  At her father’s funeral, Adelaide couldn’t help thinking about Indian burial customs, about certain letters Franz Boas and George Dorsey had dictated to her at the museum. There were tribes along the lower Columbia that built hutlike structures for the dead on little river islands. The body was wrapped in a blanket and lowered into a shallow pit, sometimes in a sitting position, then covered with slabs of wood and bark. Sitting would have been a better position than supine for her father; he’d spent his life reading in armchairs or settling accounts and drafting correspondence at his Wooton desk. Part of her wished that Episcopalians favored an open casket. Perhaps the sight of his silver halo of hair, the drawn cheeks pinked with mortician’s rouge, perhaps these would have brought her into the room and the moment of his death. He’d died midwinter, in the dormer nook with the window cracked, basset hound at his side, a view of the river slurried with ice.

  The cascade of bright flowers in the chapel and the organ grinding below the Twenty-third Psalm, not to mention the eulogies for a man she’d never known, someone glimpsed through a barrage of civic business and committee work, all these felt decorative. Where was death itself? There was Gerald Cummings the occasional philanthropist, the business owner, the churchgoer, but no one spoke of the man who recited sonnets to his dogs, a lineage of hounds all named Peggy, one after the other, and who vowed a day of silence when Lincoln died. Wrap Gerald Cummings in a blanket and lay him in the stony cold ground, she thought. Let someone wail over his body. Adelaide held her mother’s black-gloved hand as the pallbearers shouldered the casket out into the wintry day. They followed the coffin and she felt Owen’s absence in the sharp, cold air. They buried her father beside his own parents and one brother lost to the Civil War. Adelaide didn’t break down until she threw a handful of dirt down into the pit. She saw that the coffin was the exact same hue of briarwood as the pipe her father smoked after dinner each evening.

  A week later Adelaide returned to Chicago with her mother. They came by railcar, a library of inherited books—all of them rife with marginalia—trailing in the luggage compartment. Adelaide had been named the sole beneficiary of Gerald’s bookish dominion and she was delighted, even if she had nowhere to store the thousand volumes. Her father had given her the courage to annotate a poem or novel directly on the page, to fill the Doric-like columns of white space with penciled musings. Join the conversation had been his entreaty; never worry about how daft and sophomoric those notes will seem ten years hence. But she was sometimes appalled to come upon some nugget of her own supposed insight—marriage imminent scrawled in the middle pages of Austen or inner turmoil in the conflicted tailings of Eliot or Hardy—and on several occasions she had erased the entries altogether, wearing the paper gutter to a carbon smudge.

  Adelaide was surprised to find that her mother, Margaret Cummings, was a strangely stoic widow. If anything, she seemed angry, put out. Margaret watched the fields and streams flit outside the carriage window, saying, “It seems quite absurd that your father is lying in the ground in his best suit . . .” She said it with a tone of disappointment, as if Gerald had done something inconsiderate. By the time they reached Chicago, she had found distraction in devising plans for the wedding. She said she planned to spend a month in the city and Adelaide saw a vision of her bustling between dressmaker and stationer, killing off the hours and weeks, pouring her stunted grief into lace and cardstock selections.

  They sent the crated books to a railway warehouse for storage and took a hansom cab to the ladies’ entrance of the Palmer House. Margaret, who had traveled to Europe and Montreal, seemed to find the hotel lacking. The barbershop floor was tessellated with silver dollars, the dining halls were gilt-mirrored and marbled, but everywhere came the foot pounding of telegram boys and beery guffaws from the men’s smoking lounge. Almost thirty years after the Great Fire—which had destroyed the original hotel just thirteen days after its opening—there were still signs claiming the Palmer was the world’s only fireproof hotel. “Like they discovered iron and brick,” Margaret said dismissively.

  The bellhop showed them the third-floor room and drew the curtains. The uniformed boy waited next to the door, eyes up, waiting out his tip. Margaret handed him a coin and lay back on the bed, exhausted. She closed her eyes then opened them. “The room’s stifling.”

  Adelaide stood by the window and opened it slightly. “You have a view of State Street.”

  “So much noise,” Margaret said, her voice almost a whisper. “You should be getting married in Boston . . .”

  Adelaide turned but said nothing.

  “Your father, on his deathbed, had an idea.”

  “He was full of ideas. Which one was this?”

  “That you should buy a house in your name before the wedding. It would be yours to bring into the marriage.”

  She was offended by this notion but forced her voice to remain even. “We’ll be buying a house together.”

  Margaret took out a handkerchief and dabbed her eyes, but Adelaide mistrusted this sudden display of tearfulness.

  “It was your father’s wish. After all, we’ve never met this young man.”

  “You’ll meet him soon enough.” Adelaide looked out the window. State Street was its usual chaos of wagons and imperiled pedestrians. “I’ll leave you to rest, Mother. I have to be at the museum tomorrow.”

  Her mother sat up. “But I thought we would begin the preparations. I made some lists on the train.” She began ferreting through her purse.

  Coming toward the bed, Adelaide said, “I can meet you at lunchtime tomorrow and then we have all day Saturday. The museum is busy at the moment.”

  Margaret looked into her compact mirror and gave a considerable sigh. “Tomorrow at noon, then? I’ll wait in the lobby.” She looked around the room. “I expect I’ll take my dinner here tonight.” She raised a hand. “Do you feel that? No fresh air at all. On the way out, ask the porter to send up dyspepsia tablets, if you don’t mind. All that buffet car food . . .”

  Adelaide leaned at the bedside to kiss her mother on the forehead. Without looking back, she said good night and went out into the carpeted hallway. She took the stairs for the sound of her own footsteps and to avoid a polite exchange with the elevator operator. She found a porter and delivered her mother’s request for dyspepsia tablets and was then out the door. Any daughter of merit would have stayed for dinner but she felt the weight of the funeral and the train trip and the endless days of conviviality. There was an hour of reading in a hot bath in her future. She had kept aside a dozen of her father’s books for immediate consumption, had carried them apart in a brown paper sack, and more than the verse and prose itself, she wanted to feel Gerald Cummings’s mind written into the page margins.

  At noon they soldiered through the department stores, Margaret taking notes on fabrics and ribbons and lace. She stopped in the cutlery department of Marshall Field’s for no other reason than to admire the sharpened, gleaming knives. Kitchenware was something that held her imagination. She questioned haberdashers and seamstresses and wholesale buyers, cross-checking and verifying prices. Pursuit of a deal demanded that they obtain prices and quotes by the yard from three stores.

  Margaret seemed to find the stores pleasant enough—Tiffany-domed, windows as big as swimming pools—but she winced when they got out to the curbstone. There were snowbanks turning to ponds of browning slush, crippled girls cupping for nickels, street preachers bawling with apocalypse. She pulled Adelaide into each store, barreling through the heavy storm doors to get away from so much motley need.

  Adelaide trudged behind her, trying to spot the store detectives in the press of shoppers. There had been a rash of shoplifting, and if she believed the papers, the mink-stoled woman trying on the diamond ring at the jewelry counter was about to turn and make a dash for the exits. Adelaide had been at the museum all morning, typing letters and cataloguing while the curators uncrated a new collection. Ap
parently, in the three weeks she’d been gone, no one had typed or filed a letter. It was a miracle the museum men knew how to make a cup of coffee without her. She was prepared to let her mother battle against the dressmakers of the world so long as it all passed without incident. When Margaret was bent on a task there was no use getting in her way. And she was clearly avoiding her own grief with her infantry tactics. As the housewives marauded around them, as the world blurred with ruffles and corsets, all Adelaide could think about was Owen’s return in the coming months. She gave her mother a thin smile at the proffered bolt of white satin, white—the color of surrender—but she was thinking about their last night together in the junkhouse emporium, about the oily dark smell of grease and metal as Owen kissed her neck and shoulders before snuffing the light.

  They moved down State Street with tied packages. It was snowing, a light glitter off the lake. On La Salle Street they hit a wall of wheat brokers and secretaries coming off their lunch hour, bundled and cinched with wool scarves, bounding along in the brittle air. Like an army of madmen, Margaret was saying, and all I want is to find the stationer the head porter recommended, did you know, Adelaide, that head porter is quite a lucrative position in the better hotels and the man at the Palmer told me something curious, George or Bernie if I recall, that all the hotels have housecats and the bigger ones have a cat on every floor. Brings them luck, he told me. They walked under an awning and Adelaide realized they’d come upon the First Equitable. She’d taken to crossing the street to get away from its self-involved splendor, but here it was, reared up before her. Through the big frosted windows she could see a cigar stand with a carved Indian standing sentry and salesmen having their shoes blacked in the aura of blown lights and brass. The clerks and typists were filing in through the double doors, in from the cold, their faces falling a little. She’d half believed that they weren’t allowed to leave the building during daylight, that management patrolled the cafeteria for jailbreaks. At the far end of the building’s endless frontage hung a large sign that killed her stride. Two native men stood on a beach with spears and very little clothing, facing each other as if in battle. Below the image: