Bright and Distant Shores

by Dominic Smith

  Without turning: “Oh, just fine, Father.”

  “Are you keeping the carpenters in line? They’ll build a fruit stand if you don’t watch their work.”

  “Yes, it’s coming along. I gave them some diagrams to work from.”

  “Excellent. Anything else?”

  The boy stood there, staring into the velvet lining. “I’ve been thinking about Pythagoras.”

  This did not bode well. Hale took a nip of whiskey to settle his mood. How long did it take to fetch a pail of ice? “I see.”

  “We know so little of him. All those volumes of philosophy destroyed and mostly we have his work with triangles. Supposedly he lived in a cave and took vows of silence.”

  “Best to keep off the books just at the moment. You have work to do.”

  “Do you know what I was thinking?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “We should have a wunderkammer in the lobby, right next to the display cases.”

  “A what?”

  “You know, a cabinet of curiosities. A room of wonders. I got the idea from reading—well, from remembering Rudolf, King of Bohemia. He had the most marvelous collection of natural specimens, minerals and gemstones, mechanical objects, freaks of nature . . . that sort of thing. I could arrange my collection in there. Show strips of film—I did manage to take moving images at sea. Perhaps I could use the vacant cigar shop? Just for the summer. Taxidermy shouldn’t be mingled with artifacts, you know.” He finally turned from the display case, rubbing his bloodshot eyes with both thumbs. “I think I may need a doctor.”

  Hale swallowed, felt a smoky trickle of whiskey ease down his chest. “For the finger? Yes, by all means. Go see Dr. Jallup on Clark Street. Careful he doesn’t bleed you, though. He’s a bit Greek on that front. An old-schooler.”

  “No, it’s something else.”

  Hale refused to ask.

  Jethro clutched one elbow, his shoulders slumped. “I’m afraid I don’t feel well. In my thoughts. Something happened on the ship. And now I can’t sleep at night, even when I take the laudanum.”

  “Ah.”

  “I’m being punished it seems.”

  Miss Ballentine trundled into the room with a silver pail of ice. They watched her in silence as she set it on Hale’s side table. The ice gave off a slight vapor and Hale wondered why he always craved ice, even in winter, why he always wanted to snuff part of the whiskey’s heat. Constitution, no doubt, but also because it was elemental. He did it for the same reason he lit his own fires, stacked the kindling in the hearth, even though the house was teeming with servants. He looked at his son, the tremulous hands and vacant eyes; whatever he’d hoped the voyage would achieve had failed. The Gray line had ended. What stood before him was the bitter end of a frayed rope. Now it was a matter of riding it out, of planning for an eventual public sale, singling out a successor from the vice presidential ranks. Retirement seemed out of the question. Then there was the matter of keeping Jethro harmlessly engaged. Maybe he should be sent back east, let the boy take another useless degree in those ivy-ravaged lecture halls. Miss Ballentine withdrew and he looked at his son. “As I say, go see the doctor about your finger. Now, if you’ll excuse me, Jethro, I have some telegrams to read.”

  Jethro said, “And the wunderkammer, Father?” He sounded eight years old.

  “Very well. Use the cigar shop but keep the renovation costs down. Talk to the master carpenter. And just for the summer. I want a new tenant in there come August.”

  “Excellent,” Jethro said, brightening. “You won’t be disappointed. Thank you.”

  “Yes, but as I say, watch the budget. We may go public one day and the first thing a shareholder wants is thrift in management.”

  The boy grinned, oblivious.

  Jethro walked out of the office, closed the door, and went to wait for the elevator. From somewhere above his head, unseen, the big clock made its baritone call for afternoon.

  Dinner with Margaret. Owen took the streetcar from the South Side, his face stinging with aftershave, a new suit on his back. He met them in the Palmer House lobby, a vault of marble and chandeliers. His first impression of Margaret was of a sturdy woman, slightly guarded but also chatty, free flowing with opinions on practical matters. They were shown to a secluded table in the dining room and by the time the salads had been brought out Owen knew how lime water kept eggs fresh—one pint coarse salt, one pint unslaked lime, one pailful water—why New England rum was a first-rate shampoo, why honey mixed with pure pulverized charcoal was still the best recipe for cleaning teeth. She’d grown up poor, she told him; they made their own candles with mutton tallow and beeswax. Adelaide slumped in her seat, picking through her greens. She couldn’t get a word in. Was Margaret prattling from grief? Owen wondered. Was it a sort of nervous distraction? In a nonwidow it would have been charity to allow the woman to go on like this. The merits of Makassar oil. The dangers of oversleeping. Margaret seemed afraid of silence, wary of conversational drag. She let the waiters fuss over her; she had been there more than a month and it showed in the way they brought her, unprompted, a cup of warm water with lemon—a digestive for her bilious stomach.

  “I’m sorry to hear you’ve been feeling poorly,” Owen said.

  “It’s this city,” she said, letting the lemon-scented steam rise to her face. “Puts me on edge.”

  Feeling emboldened by her prattling, Owen said, “Well, it won’t be long before you’ll be back in Boston.”

  She eyed him through the candlelight, slightly imperious—an old girl with rum in her hair. She’d married well, that was all, he thought. The blue blood was on the father’s side; Owen could see it plainly. Margaret regarded him slowly, taking him in like a burgundy of uncertain vintage. Owen reckoned she’d drink blackstrap if it came down to it, if the posh establishment suddenly ran dry of claret punch and lemon wedges. The disliking was, at first, instantaneous and mutual. They had come from similar workaday roots, only she’d turned her bleak childhood into a series of quaint and folksy tidbits for the amusement and edification of others. It appalled him that she left food on her plate. Probably ate on the hour and couldn’t remember the ache of real hunger. He suddenly felt cruel. She had lost a husband of many years.

  She said, “Yes, I suppose I’ll be home soon enough. But I will come back once a year just to check up on you, Mr. Graves.”

  She turned the solitaire ring on her wedding finger so that the big diamond was crowned in candle flame, a corona of gem light. She was telepathic as well, apparently, because Owen could feel the ring box bulging in his trouser pocket. After the bank, he’d spent most of the day traipsing between second-rate jewelers and glorified pawnbrokers, consulting arthritic men with loupes on their foreheads, one eye magnified to Cycloptic proportions as they talked prices and installment plans. He’d settled on a middling ring of dubious provenance. Whether it had been stolen or not, he didn’t know, but it fit the bill—big enough to get attention but not so brash it would leave him broke or offend Adelaide’s modest tastes. He still had enough for a down payment on a house with promise.

  He drained his glass of wine.

  Margaret launched another stare through the fifteen-watt dusk above the table. Owen swore that the electric lights flickered every time his future mother-in-law opened her mouth, which was to say they never ceased flickering. She was just protecting her daughter, he thought, for herself and on her dead husband’s behalf.

  Adelaide said, “I’m so glad you two have finally met.”

  An eon of silence and eating.

  “Me as well,” Owen said, smiling. “I regret we haven’t met until now, Mrs. Cummings.”

  “Well, you were gone such a long time at sea.”

  Owen could tell they were headed for a conversational abyss. She would skewer him, sentence by sentence, word by word, one folk remedy at a time, one slight against the city at a time, until he’d feel offended and become territorial as a junkyard dog, a stray pissing on lampposts. He’d l
eap to Chicago’s defense, act as if butter wouldn’t melt in the old rube town’s mouth, all because she’d rile and back him into a corner. There was only one way to stem the tide of the inevitable. He got to his feet, slightly drunk. Why did he only overindulge in the company of temperance? He’d practically been an abbot at sea, a saint amid the ribald, and here he was, sloshed, about to slur his good intentions to Adelaide’s mother, promise his undying love and affection for her daughter. An errant thought flashed through his mind—may God grant Adelaide grace in old age—and then he got to one knee and fumbled the ring box from his trouser pocket. All eyes turned to him, the whole dining room drawn in. Suddenly it was theater and the waiters were ushers.

  “Adelaide, I know we’re already engaged but there has been something lacking. I feel ashamed thinking about our engagement without this formality. Will you take this ring and continue the promise of becoming my wife?”

  Adelaide turned a delicate shade of fuchsia, nodded, kissed him to get him off the floor.

  But Owen stayed in place and turned to Margaret. “And Mrs. Cummings, let me say how honored I am to be entrusted with your daughter. I can assure you I will do everything in my power to take care of her and our family. And let me say how deeply sorry I am for your loss. I hear Gerald was a tremendous man.”

  The dining room fell into sighs and then congratulatory chatter—look at him on his knees, asking for her hand in front of the widowed mother in epic peach silk.

  Margaret thawed and became tearful. She ordered champagne and was laughing through her tears and nose in no time. They toasted Mr. Cummings and Adelaide’s unborn children. Before dessert was out she was calling him Owen and son and they parted with genuine affection, Owen pulled into her bosomy embrace, a full bear hug that defied custom and dignity and left him dazed. Her final tipsy words of the evening were a recipe against offensive breath, whispered like an oracle—Peruvian bark. . . in lime-water—and then she was off, toddling, waving gallantly as if from a warship, dabbing at her blotched face with a white handkerchief. Owen decided he liked her after all; underneath all that folk wisdom was a rather fragile woman. She kept the world and all its brimming action slightly at bay with chatter but he’d managed to topple her. All it took was humility and sincerity on bended knee. He tipped a smirking bellhop to get Margaret back to her suite before turning to Adelaide. She was looking down at her finger. The ring was slightly old-fashioned, a sizable diamond raised above white gold and a series of swooped engravings. She thought it was beautiful but found herself saying, “It’s too much.”

  “I can take it back if you like.”

  “Don’t you dare,” she said.

  They held hands and went outside, into the blue glitter of an unseasonably cold night, the diamond, possibly stolen, enfolded between their fingers.

  31.

  The big day out was redolent of spring, brilliant with late March sunshine, the gutters awash in snowmelt. They set out from the First Equitable a little after nine, Adelaide in front, the siblings abreast, a Tribune reporter following behind with his notebook. The magnate would meet them at the museum in the afternoon and had sent word to Marshall Field that he was finally taking up his offer of an official tour. This ought to make its way into club lore—that sunny spring Friday when Hale Gray finally crowned the years of reading room skirmish with a decisive victory, when he whacked it free and clear with a St. Andrews full swing.

  Malini liked the sun on her face, however mild. As they moved down the street she saw fat women staring at her from behind smoked, round glasses, their hats piled heavy with wooden fruit and stork feathers. There were pigeons everywhere, she noticed, defecating on stone ledges and swooping down for crumbs. She recalled the taste of roast squab and wondered if they ate these birds or whether they just let them shit on their heads all day. People walked quickly, shoulders up, elbows out. Men in suits slowed to gawk, unabashed, cigarettes smoking in the pale sunshine.

  Into the big house of goods where all the world’s objects had been poured into one place. Did people live in here, sleeping and eating in the roomfuls of furniture—chairs made of feathery plush and strange oiled woods, beds as big as reef heads, a jumble of clothes whose use she could not fathom . . . Miss Cummings took her aside and tried to teach her about underwear. Bustled into a tiny room with a curtain, she put on flimsy silk dresses, then more layers, then whalebone brassiere cups that pressed her breasts hard against her ribs. She knew about mission girls who strapped and mashed their susus until they got rashes from allday cotton heat. But it was cold here so maybe there would be no cotton rash; she would try the brassiere for a day. No breathing, she said, handing back the girdle . Miss Cummings smiled and laughed, threw the contraption on the floor like it had just bitten her. The silk felt cool then warm against her skin and the woolen dress went all the way down to her ankles. Here was a cashmere scarf, gloves, a hat without feathers or painted wooden fruit. She went out into the hard light of the store, bundled, dimly aware of her body swimming beneath all that fabric; she had been wrapped and bandaged, mummified like an effigy. But she also liked the way she felt swaddled, as if the world could barely graze her through all that wool and silk. She held her chin forward to keep the itchy collar off her neck but every now and then, as if to compensate, a wave of silk warmed up against her bare thighs. Argus came out dressed in a dark suit and a tall, boxy hat. He had a new walking stick and an important expression on his face. White people dressed by rank and Malini wondered what position had been assigned to them with these clothes. Did the height of the hat on her brother’s head mean something? Did the length of her dress? The reporter made a sketch of them standing together while a crowd of shoppers looked on.

  Out into the river of people, the amazed stares. It was sport of a kind, to see the native girl with dreadlocks and a cashmere scarf, walking stiffly along, as if in damp clothes, and the black fellow strutting out like a duke of the underworld, that Malacca cane rowing him down the thawing sidewalk. They got cheers and whistles, welcomes, racial epithets, scowls. They passed through the shadows of the terracotta cliffs, the towering façades tilting down on them as the siblings looked straight up, into the heaving, abyssal blue. Argus gave in to the street’s curiosity and spread his coat on the ground so that he could lie down, faceup, arms across his chest, casting his eye up one of the endless stone walls. They applauded this, though he couldn’t think why. From this angle the parallel lines converged upward, reaching out to the big blue vanishing point, as if craving the benediction of heaven. There was a time, he remembered, when his sketching had been free from perspective, free from the lines that did not meet in life but appeared to merge on paper. That was another person now, the boy who’d seen the world rioting without pattern, flushed against a single plane. He got up and dusted himself off, received several pats on the back for his timely display of awe.

  Adelaide took them to a lunchroom for morning tea and they ate slices of hickory nut cake. Fellow diners watched as Argus sliced up his cake with knife and fork, aping a fastidious Briton they thought, both utensils in hand. Malini spread her cake with apple butter and ate it like a sandwich. She wanted to take the whalebone and fabric cups off her breasts so she could eat without sighing between bites. Argus had already noted the way that Americans favored the fork, as if the knife were merely an accomplice, only to be used in a pinch, for navigating the outskirts of a steak or breast of chicken, then promptly set down. He imitated this style, putting down his knife and attempting to use the business end of his fork like a shovel. But then he noticed the reporter looking askance and he suddenly remembered that he’d been discovered in the wilds! He fumbled the silverware, picked up the cake with both hands. The reporter wrote something in his notebook and the neighboring diners looked away now that everything was in its place.

  Back outside, into the mellow sunshine, a small attachment joining the entourage as rear guard, a few tourists from Kansas and a couple of housewives loafing on State Street. Adelaid
e let them tag along, no harm done, so long as they gave a wide berth. Adelaide took them into a venerable old Loop bookshop, Hardwick’s, a book depository that resembled a rail depot with its iron and glass-block landings and wooden benches, seating designed to keep potential customers on their feet. The shop was presided over by a slovenly monastic, a man who’d spent his life in bookish pleasure, and it showed by the way he ate with his mouth open, spitting crumbs, working his sack lunch while deliberating on sonnets and obscure European novels. He sat behind a rummaged desk on a raised platform, like a judge, interrupting his private reading to dispense literary justice. Adelaide had been coming for years, at least once a month, and each time he made his recommendations and pronouncements anew, calling her young lady and sending her into the hinterland of wood-rung ladders for a particular volume or translation. If she didn’t return within sixty seconds to the register with said edition he was on his feet, indignant, chewing, telling her to hop out of the way. Today he stood watching the native boy climb in search of hardbacks. Some new books of marginal interest came down—A Students’ History of the United States (cloth, with maps, $1.40 net) and Where the Trade-Wind Blows by Mrs. Schuyler Crown-inshield, a novel set in the Spanish West Indies, for $1.50. Hardly Hardy, the book monk pronounced, seeming to enjoy the hard H up against his glottis. Adelaide saw the reporter study Argus as he perused the books so she moved the party to the register. “I’m going to teach him how to read,” she said to the proprietor, loud enough so that the reporter would take note. Argus wanted to stay and linger in the fusty pong of endpapers; he hadn’t even been allowed to enter the scripture section, an entire alcove walled in by kidskin.

  They moved up along Michigan Avenue, the broad plain of Grant Park to the east, softening the enormity of the lake. They came to the new public library building and entered from Washington. It was a mausoleum dedicated to books, that much Argus knew, devotion worked into the Bedford bluestone and granite like faith itself, the Tiffany domes and Romanesque portal, the mosaics of Favrile glass and mother of pearl, the chief librarian, a supplicant with a hushed voice, giving the tour himself. They padded across the cork floor, noiselessly passing into the reading room with its oak tables and lamps. Argus was allowed up into the iron stacks and when no one was watching he opened several books in a row, bringing each up to smell its faintly fungal loins. The act was almost sexual in pleasure. He fingered the leather spines, thumbed along the parched bookblocks. One day he would have a library card and use the catalogue, use the saving shelves set aside for scholars. He would spend long hours in the reference room working on sermons—they were open thirteen hours a day, Sundays included—studying the history of knowing and loving God, yes, but also centuries of literature, history, art.