Bright and Distant Shores

by Dominic Smith

  It was a Monday morning and there was no welcoming party at the train station. This was Owen’s doing—he’d neglected to telegraph the details of their arrival, either to Hale Gray or to Adelaide at the museum. He suspected it was an oversight, but perhaps it was by design. He wanted to first see his fiancée in private and the memory of the Gray family during their departure was still fresh in his mind, the convoy of teary aunts trailing behind Jethro’s mountain of kidskin. That same luggage was returning in tatters, cankerous with salt and little starbursts of sea-green mold. The son had not fared much better. From the platform, Owen watched him step gingerly down from the hotel car, the fencing glove on his left hand, an insomniac and drawn look on his face. His face was sun-scalded and the eyes, coldly distant, held the febrile blue of childhood illness. The dandy’s nerves were shot and Owen suspected a loud handclap might send him over the brink.

  There was a distance of a hundred yards between them and Owen had no intention of bridging the gap. He had intervened on Jethro’s behalf, brokered a treaty at considerable expense with the manic captain, in return for the heir’s cooperation. There would be no divulging to Hale of the native siblings’ true station in the tribal world, that the brother, outside a few faltering phrases, spoke a scholar’s English. Jethro moved uncertainly down the platform toward the baggage compartment, apparently to oversee the unloading of his specimens. The porters hefted the boxes and cases and tanks, began lugging them onto dollies and carts. Suddenly animated, Jethro scolded them to be gentle with his cargo. The artifacts, along with the canoe, were packed in a separate compartment so that Owen could avoid standing beside him. Argus and Malini alighted in the exhausted flow of immigrants and they joined him on the platform, already shivering in the cavernous station.

  Owen arranged for all the artifacts, the canoe, as well as Jethro’s taxidermied spoils to be transported to the insurance building. He would find a hansom for himself and the siblings, but Jethro could fend for himself. Owen was hours away from completing this colossal errand—receiving payment and getting a foothold on a new life—and he was suddenly impatient to be unyoked from the feckless son. He would simply tell Hale that Jethro was in good health, perhaps a little fatigued, and would be along shortly with his seaweed albums and bottled seahorses. That ought to get a single-malt chortle out of the old baron.

  The hansom pulled into the frenzy of the streets and Owen couldn’t help feeling as if he were crossing a threshold. A native son to this city, he was returning under changed circumstances. By the end of the week he hoped to look at houses where he and Adelaide might live after the wedding. The trade payment would put a sizable dent in a mortgage, especially if they found a fixer. His own house. He did not take up the thought of her father’s possible death or the threat of a looming inheritance. Instead, as they rode into the din, he thought Here comes Porter Graves’s kid, raised as much by doormen and demolitionists as by his own father and the whey-faced nuns. He missed that time, longed for communion with the boy who, at age thirteen, had a smoker’s consumptive laugh and was a confidant to dog fanciers and druggists airing grievances out on their stoops. Adultery, larceny, gambler’s remorse, nothing was held back from their confessions to the orphan on the lam. Could a man pray to his boyhood self, send back worship like a telegram, reassure the little sniveler that all would end well? A pretty wife, a promising house on a third-acre plot, take heart. He was drunk with his own return and wanted to launch a Sioux cry out the window of the cab. He loved this town in a way that confounded him, caught in the back of his throat—the bawling, mongrel side streets, the midwinter offerings of the curbstone vendors (meat, hothouse flowers, blankets), the singing blind man hawking pencils from a tin box on Washington, the big-bayed windows of State Street, as if the city couldn’t get enough of her own brash reflection. He turned to see if some of this wonderment was lit into the faces of the native brother and sister but he saw nothing but cold and wincing confusion. He pointed his stupid grin out the window to let them have their moment of bracing contact.

  Argus felt sick riding into the wall of noise and traced it to a wedge of cheese he’d eaten on the train. Cow’s milk didn’t agree with him, he knew that now, and he would have to develop a tolerance. Perhaps a constitutional piece of cheddar each night before bed, just the way the Reverend Mister had taken sulfonal for wakefulness. Owen sat next to one window and his sister had the other, so everything Argus saw of the chaotic city was above dreadlocked, black hair or crowned around a felt hat. He looked at his shoes when a wave of nausea threatened to brim the banks of his stomach. He counted his breaths, first in English, then in Poumetan, then in pidgin. The cold ached in his bones and he wanted to bathe. He’d spent six years hearing about distant lands and imagining cities, but there were things he could never have guessed—dogs on leashes, dray horses feeding from nosebags, bicycles dusted in snow, placard advertisements for dentists and undertakers nailed to tree branches, the view of the enormous lake choked with ice, the clay-red buildings as tall as cliffs, their hundred postage stamps of windowlight. He couldn’t discern, for now, what was beautiful and what was ugly but knew that it all moved too quickly and with too much noise. Malini had her hands over her ears as a delivery wagon blocked the way and their own driver incited a tirade in the street. Every driver and pedestrian within a half-mile radius began screaming blue murder at the wayward wagon, an assault of such profanity and violence that Argus feared someone might actually get killed or injured, feared pistols and bloodshed, but then there were big guffaws and belches of belly laughter from the box seat above their heads and ridicule came hurling with laughter from open windows on all sides. Even Owen leaned out his window to lend a hand in the humiliation. He pulled his head back inside, wild with good humor—Welcome to Chicago!

  First Monday of March and Hale Gray was getting his monthly shave-and-trim in his office. The white-smocked barber, a man with the demeanor of a jeweler, of someone who spent hours bent at close work, went at the ruffle of unsightly neck hair with something like religious devotion. The straight razor made a few scratches at a time before being wiped free on the hand towel. Hale was in his singlet, the doors were closed, his face still stinging with the ablutions of a hot lather shave. This tradition of ushering in the month with personal grooming always made him hungry for a substantial lunch, a steak so rare it made him consider his own mortality. Insurance was a great, pragmatic philosophy to Hale; a wager against God but also an acknowledgment that death could come hurtling through at any moment, bloody or benign, slow and grueling, or, with tremendous luck, merciful and swift. He had his head down to let the barber razor his collar line, eyes closed, the smell of lather and tonic a bit thick for his liking—was he being embalmed or barbered? When he opened his eyes he saw them enter under the shambling auspices of his frumpy new secretary—Owen Graves and two savages buttoned up in wool coats, eyes averted, the lot of them, as if this ritual of barbering were a single rung above bloodletting.

  “You’ve caught me in the throes of the monthly trim. Don’t worry. We’re almost done here. Please have a seat and I’ll be right with you. Fetch our guests some coffee and cake would you, Miss Ballentine?”

  The underwriters called her type a lumpy dresser and Hale watched her shuffle out of the room. Could an Iowa girl with a first name of Lulu be trusted with company letterhead? Some scrolled papers arrived for signature, the document capsule thucking in the pneumatic tube behind Hale’s desk.

  The sound reminded Argus of a dog clearing its windpipe.

  Hale continued to study the savages and on several occasions the barber had to adjust his head back down. “I take it we’re all in one piece?”

  “All things considered, we’re in fine shape, sir. Your son is tending to some details at the train station and should be along shortly.”

  “Very well. How did he fare?”

  “At the very least, he had an adventure.”

  “Did him good, no doubt. And tell me of the collectibles
.”

  Owen produced a handwritten inventory from his coat pocket and brought it forward.

  Hale took it and began reading, head still down, the paper in his lap. He made a series of nods and murmurs before speaking in a cryptic tone: And how am I supposed to get a canoe into my office, Mr. Graves?

  Owen shrugged, stalling.

  The barber wiped Hale’s collar line with a steaming towel, dried it briskly, made some whisking motions with a neck duster before releasing the insurance baron to a standing position. Hale buttoned up his pressed shirt with a half-turn away from the black girl. Tucked in, buoyed, and close-shaven, he shook Owen’s hand with slow, emphatic movements. “This is something,” Hale said, pumping. “You’ve bettered the Marshall Field collection and then some. South Seas ethnographica is now my niche, I would imagine. Maybe I’ll turn the whole building into a museum. Ha! I knew you were a top-notcher when I laid eyes on you the day of the opening. Picture me in that chief’s canoe on the sooty river in June. Or down at the yacht club for the commodore’s amusement. No, it’ll be preserved and hoisted somewhere. Bravo!” He still had hold of Owen’s hand as he directed his attention to the siblings, their stiff woolen backs turned at the glass-fronted display case. Behind the glass doors Argus recognized some tribal weapons from the island of Poumeta.

  Owen pried himself free as Hale continued: “Now, let me get a good look at our guests. Will they take their coats off? Never mind. Must be chilly for them, no?”

  Argus and Malini turned to face Hale but kept their coats buttoned. Owen introduced them by name and said that Mr. Gray was Jethro’s father and the man who funded the voyage. Argus nodded, smiled, but knew better than to shake hands. Malini was surprised by the old man’s solid build and athletic bearing; he was nothing like the fence post of a son. Hale deliberated, took a few paces toward them like a theater director about to dispense insight to thespians, then stopped short: “I assume there are, what, grass skirts and loincloths, that sort of thing?”

  Owen couldn’t bring himself to answer and the room fell quiet, the slate sky darkening the high windows. Miss Ballentine returned with a cart of clattering refreshments and Malini thought again of the train, of sitting on her backside for days without end. She was beyond hungry and would eat whatever they offered. The curdled feeling she carried in her stomach from the elevator—a flying room not much bigger than an outhouse—was beginning to subside. In the slight commotion of tinkling spoons and china and water glasses, Hale seized the barber’s scissors from a metal tray and caught Malini off guard. Lulu Ballentine brought the cart to a full stop, asked whether the darkies drank tea or coffee, but as she did so they all turned to see Hale holding one of Malini’s dreadlocks between thumb and forefinger, raising it in the air like a kitchen mouse. Stunned, they watched Hale take the dreadlock over to the barber to ask his professional opinion. Not exactly lustrous, was the quip he offered, but very sturdy and thick. A second later Malini crossed the room to snatch back her stolen hair, gripped by the idea of clayskin sorcery, by the memory of the old man’s son counting and measuring her teeth to what end she couldn’t tell but knew it to be dark. Hale arched his freshly pruned eyebrows, then shot Owen a glance. Again, as on the ship, Owen was the intermediary. “Sir, the natives don’t like their bodily parts touched, especially the hair. Has to do with black magic.”

  Hale folded his arms as Malini returned to her brother beside the display case. “Ah, I see, then, well, should we have our refreshments and take a tour of the exhibit I’m building on the rooftop? I think you’ll be pleased. The first of May is the scheduled opening. Should be a spot warmer by then. Black magic, you say?”

  And then, with his own kind of black magic, the barber packed up his shears and straps, the ivory combs and unguents, all of it cinched neatly into a leather case, like a physician’s bag, and with such precision that Argus couldn’t help thinking of customized luggage, of how much he wanted a Gladstone bag with his own monogrammed initials blazed in gold. The barber took a piece of cake for the road, holding it in a paper serviette with his free hand—“In a month, Mr. Gray, just like clockwork.”

  Hale turned to his guests and gestured to the sitting area. “Most barbershops are underground in this city and I refuse to be lured into their dank lairs. I gave Bart a concession and storefront in the lobby and he’s played it up strong. Our clerks and managers get a discount, of course. He comes up here by special arrangement. Cake?”

  They drank coffee in cups that sat on little white plates. Malini had a second piece of cake and didn’t regret it—it tasted of nuts and honey. The coffee, on the other hand, was so strong it felt like a wasp was trapped and buzzing in her chest. The white men were talking about the weather in Chicago and in the islands; snow and typhoon were two of the English words she knew. Her brother sat quietly, studying the things in the big glass case, pretending not to know anything. After a while they were taken to the roof of the tall building, this time on a staircase. They were outside again and the sky was so low she could have touched it with her fingers. There was a policeman walking around, shoulders up against the weather. Again the cold; it felt like her bones might shatter. She squinted against the snowy glare. The hair thief was pointing this way and that, yelling to be heard above the wind—a monsoon bearing ice instead of rain. When she widened her eyes a little she saw something that resembled a bamboo hut, made poorly and tied with twine instead of rattan or sennit. The roof sagged and there were no eaves. Some brownish wet sand, clumped with snow, had been piled outside and above it all was the biggest clock she had ever seen, a pale moonface rimmed with giant numbers. Weather and time; she was beginning to understand that these were two of the clayskin gods. And then the way her brother started poking around the bamboo hut and gesturing to the white men as if he were a Kuk clansman gave her to understand that this was why they’d been brought here. This was the job. Live in a hut that looked as if it had been built by a child—a stupid one at that. In Poumetan, her brother told her that for now they would be living in rooms in the tall building. He said the sun would be out in two months and that’s when they would be moving to the hut. She told him that they had better make a decent hut first, with separate rooms, and that the sand smelled like cat piss. He turned back to the whitefellas and a second later the son appeared on the rooftop. Her whole body shuddered. She couldn’t hear or understand what they were saying. The father and son shook hands and Jethro took off his glove to display his mutilated fingertip.

  They all walked over to the place where the sky began. Malini had been aware of the high, churning air in her peripheral vision but walking toward it she felt her legs blunder at the knees. She had been on top of volcanoes many times but for years had lived among the nearsighted Kuk, in a village where a thirty-foot clearing constituted the horizon. If you wanted to see the ocean you had to climb to the uppermost branches of a teak and only the children bothered. She slowed and let the others go ahead. They stepped up onto a wooden platform and Argus showed off by taking two connected glass tubes, one for each eye, and looking through them, as if the unpeeled sky and the stony chasm weren’t close enough already. They beckoned to her with smiling faces but she stayed put. As it was she looked up and felt an unbroken thread between her stomach and the swirling clouds and then, moving her gaze out toward that sea they called a lake, she felt the dream where she was out of her body but somehow walking across the ocean floor. She felt the heaviness of deep water. The wind blew hard against her face; the sky was going to fall on her and she wanted to be inside again. Another piece of cake might do the trick. The wave of dread pinned her in place as she remembered, with clarity, the son’s breath hot in her mouth and ears, the bruises he pressed into her wrists, the wavering candlelight and the burning shame that followed as she got up, trembling with poison, to clean his salt from between her legs. All the while he had sobbed on the floor as if he’d been the one wronged. She felt the weight of this memory like a stone lodged in her mouth.

&nbs
p; According to Jethro there was a small glitch in the delivery of the specimens and artifacts. Owen had to hear all the variations of excuse as they rode down in the elevator. He’d made the mistake of letting the heir speak with the deliverymen. Jethro motioned and explained beside his father, trying to get an empathetic word from the tycoon, but Hale was all business, eyes front and center, done up in his Prince Albert coat and derby hat, warning Jethro that he’d better not be late for lunch at the club. Every now and again, as if to ignore Jethro by degrees, Hale exchanged a remark with Benny Boy, on the order of the day and the league team developments and elevator running times top to bottom. Owen suspected that Hale found it hard to look directly into his son’s eyes, and he hoped to get his check before some State Street physician shone a light into that dead-blue stare.

  “The deliverymen ignored my instructions,” Jethro sputtered, “and they were very explicit, down to the letter. Workingmen with delusions of independent thinking, as if we need any more of that.”

  So far he had made good on his word to keep quiet about the savages. That was something at least. Was the check in Hale’s breast pocket?

  Malini pressed into the corner of the elevator, but Jethro was still close enough that she could smell his chalky breath. She wished him dead; it came to her with the simplicity of a pebble in her palm.