Bright and Distant Shores

by Dominic Smith

  He took the elevator down to the lobby and Benny Boy, as usual, knew when to keep quiet. A sixth sense for other people’s woes—Hale had half a mind to give him a clerking job. After the summer, perhaps he would. Meantime, keep the darkened shafts flowing, Benny Boy, bring up the suburban uninsured by the carload. He patted him on the back, tipped him a quarter as the doors slid wide. Less than twenty people milled in the lobby, smudging their hands along the display cases, glancing casually up at the suspended canoe. They moved in single file, couples and families of four, the husbands in front, bellying up the line of tomahawks, hands clasped judiciously, as if slowed by knowledge or recognition, then composure plundered as the mandatory joke was offered, grinned back, something about scalping the misbehaving eldest or getting even with an offensive brother-in-law. This was Hale’s proof against trying to culture the masses. Stand them mute in a concert hall, agape in front of marble sculptures, it didn’t matter which. He could have put lumps of coal in the display cases for all they cared. They were here for the ice cream and the view, already sidling for the elevators, ignoring the Cabinet of Curiosities entirely. Maybe Dad had visions of some native cleavage up above. So be it. As long as a few of them—say 10 percent— signed on the parsed line, felt some pang for self-protection.

  He crossed to Jethro’s storefront. What had been a respectable cigar shop—brass fixtures, humidors, a carved wooden Indian— was now a darkened grove of specimens and curios. For a fleeting moment Hale hoped there was a mob of awestruck tourists tucked away in there, but instead he found Jethro running the small projector from a stool while a single terrified child looked on. Jumbled images rushed in, the island world in miniature, flecked onto a white bedsheet: bell jars of salt water, the sucking armature of a starfish, the eye of a snake at close reveal, the ether of a cloud, the beak of a honeyeater, the woody grain of a ship’s mast. His son’s mind unspooled frame by frame, while all around, arranged on cigar shelves and workbenches, were corollaries to the filmstrip: obscure animal parts bulging behind optical lenses, dissected plants, beetles and bees pinned in formation. More than anything, it was the look on his son’s face that disturbed him. Jethro watched the images play out, rapt, oblivious to his single audience member. The boy’s father came to the door of the darkened lair just then, stared up at the bedsheet long enough to see the protruding genitals of a tropical drake, muttered Jesus Christ, and took the unblinking child out into the lobby by the scruff of the neck. The paltry crowd is a blessing, Hale thought to himself as he backed out of the store. He went to find a watchman so the storefront could be boarded up before dinnertime.

  By the time the last, near-empty elevator went down at ten o’clock, Argus and Malini were exhausted. They’d been on display for twelve hours, acting in the dumb show of island life. Argus had thrown fishnets into the shallow lagoon, whittled pieces of sandalwood, flinted a fire, eaten more yams and coconuts than he ever thought possible. Malini had kneeled by the coral oven for hours, looped twine with shell beads until her eyes blurred. They went into the makeshift hut without speaking, retiring to their separate quarters. Argus read one of his new books by candlelight, traced a finger over a Civil War map, while Malini lay down on her woven mat in a quiet fury. Everything that had gone wrong in her life, she was suddenly sure, could be traced back to her brother’s decision to go off and become a mission houseboy. And then to his decision to return. There was no one back home she could even imagine telling this story to. It was beyond telling. They paid us money to pretend to fish and eat yams while clayskins watched and ate frozen cow’s milk. They made us live in a rickety hut perched high above the town with a balloon tied above our heads. She heard the attendant folding up the balloon silk and stowing it in the clock tower. Daylong he’d been barking Bird’s-eye View, Savages and City, Fifty Cents! It repeated in her mind as she closed her eyes and hoped for sleep.

  That hope was interrupted when she heard a commotion out on the rooftop. Sometime after midnight she yawned in the doorway of the hut and saw Jethro with his collecting creel and a folding stool. Argus stood beside her. The folding stool kept collapsing and Jethro seemed incapable of setting it right. He finally left it collapsed and slumped down near the edge of the observation platform. Malini returned to her mat, her insides churning. No matter how she tried she couldn’t erase his image from her mind—tall, spectral, sobbing with self-pity and remorse. She sometimes woke to believe that he was breathing somewhere in the room. She heard Argus go out in his slippers. Now that night had fallen, her brother had exchanged his loincloth for fleece pajamas and tartan slippers. She covered her head with a pillow—an extravagance, like cake, she could not imagine ever living without.

  Argus stepped onto the platform and Jethro smiled good naturedly, keeping his gloved hand in his lap.

  “Please, sit with me,” said Jethro. He motioned with his good hand.

  Argus did so. The wind rose from the north. They sat quietly for a stint. The stippled expanse of the lake reminded Argus of night fishing, of wading into tidal pools and looking below into a faintly glimmering world of polished stones. He watched barges and scows bob, a hundred crowns of yellow and white.

  “How is your sister?” Jethro asked.

  “Very well, thank you. We remain grateful for your assistance on the ship. For protecting her.”

  Jethro did not look at him.

  “What are you doing out here, if I may ask you?”

  “Ah,” Jethro said, gesturing across the void with his chin, “seems there is a nest of roosting falcons over there. On the northern lip of the top ledge. I’ve been coming up here with my binoculars the past few nights. The parents, the haggards, are teaching the fledglings to fly. Takes about a week. They’re called eyas. Singular. Eyasses plural.”

  “Who is called this?”

  “The young birds.”

  Argus drew up his knees, squinted down at the building opposite. A hundred feet across the stony, gaslit valley was an eighteen-story office building, a few of its windowpanes illuminated from within. Human shadows in lamplight, above desktops, accountants or underwriters no doubt because the whole street, Argus had been told, was involved in finance, from bargaining on wheat at one end to betting against God up the canyon walls. On the top ledge he could make out birdlike shapes hopping about in the light of a window. Jethro handed him the binoculars and he brought the falcons into view—did they think it was daylight because of the lamps? They were shambling about on the ledge, the eyasses, three of them, prodded along by one parent while the other swooped overhead. Jethro fetched the tourist field glasses from the table at the other end of the observation platform and came back.

  “Would you like these back?” Argus asked.

  “Now we both have a pair.”

  They squinted, mouths open, watching the fledglings wobble near the edge.

  Jethro said, “I want to see who’ll take flight first.”

  A bird at the front of the line of siblings lifted a leg, flapped its wings, squawked. The circling parent alighted on a flagpole, shrieked, waited. This continued for some time—a sort of call and response—before the fledgling flapped once, squawked again, and made a flailing descent to a window ledge three floors below. Jethro smiled, applauded, leaned forward.

  “How will he get back to his family?” Argus asked in a whisper.

  “The female will bring him a snack down there if he gets stuck. Maybe a whole mouse!”

  Neither of the remaining eyasses looked set to aviate. The wind continued to blow off the lake and Argus felt his ears growing cold. He got up to leave, handing back the binoculars.

  Jethro said, “Is everything all right?”

  “Yes. I’m tired. Eating yams all day made me sleepy.”

  Jethro made no reply and Argus wondered whether he’d heard the joke.

  The heir looked down at the newly initiated falcon. “My father has closed the wunderkammer. Boarded it up. Only I can be in there now and I have to clean it out for the new ciga
r shop tenant. I suppose there is no Cabinet of Curiosities without the curious. People believe what they see and I had great hopes for the miniature to reveal layers of Nature. If only they could all sit up here with us. Watch a falcon take its first flight. What effect would that have? I see now that taking birds as trophies was a crime, perhaps against God. A sin, really. I feel horribly ashamed of some of the things I did on that voyage. I see myself during that time like a tiny ship in a bottle. Somehow part of me was set apart, as if my soul stood inside the glass the entire time, breathing different air.” He waved a hand in front of his face, as if to dismiss the idea.

  Between the wind and the elliptical speech, Argus had trouble following Jethro’s train of thought. He said, “Some weeks ago I sent a letter to the archbishop asking for employment. Do you think he will write back?”

  Again, Jethro didn’t seem to hear.

  Finally, Jethro turned, saying, “Present tense. Does this give you any trouble in English? When I learned German and French the tenses vexed me a great deal. And false friends. The what? The false cognates. Evildoers! Maybe we would all be better off if we just stayed at home.”

  “Good night, Mr. Gray.” Argus stepped off the observation platform and headed for the hut. From the tiny verandah he turned to see Jethro leaning back against one of the railings, a leg swinging freely, back and forth, over the side. Despite the dizzying height, from this angle it seemed like a natural thing to do— the carefree gesture of a boy fishing beside a swift river.

  The day after the opening a big crowd manifested in the streets, but not for the First Equitable. A throng gathered in front of the Tribune Building, beneath its bulletin boards, eager to learn more of the American Navy’s victory over the Spanish fleet just off Manila. Longtime residents said they hadn’t seen such a mob since the end of the Civil War. Hale responded by running a full-page advertisement in the Tribune, declaring that life insurance was a brand of patriotism.

  At the prospect of his own death, every man must decide in what condition to leave his family. Saddle them with debt and obligation, and you help to tamp down the American economy, not to mention the wellspring of your sons’ ambitions. Carry a prudent policy and the dividends will resound across the generations, leaving our nation richer by decree.

  That last word was supposed to be degree but Hale liked the way the Tribune’s typographical error gave an air of assent by Providence. Below the short essay was a sketch of the many amusements to be found in the First Equitable. The grace note of the ad, Hale thought, was the tear-off coupon for the cafeteria lunch special—the Commodore Dewey Sandwich with potato salad and a complimentary pickle spear.

  37.

  No amount of advertising could bring in the crowds. The siblings mounted their tableaux of island life before groups of four and six while the lobby stood empty, save for a handful of tourists and a bustle of clerks heading out to lunch. Hale was genuinely baffled. The building’s inauguration had drawn multitudes, thousands, but perhaps that had been due to its status as world’s tallest building. He had added another jewel to the city’s crown. But now First Manhattan Life & Casualty was rising by the day, thirty-one, thirty-two, the pipes and windows and elevators already run into the upper floors, the mounting steel like the vertebrae of a dinosaur in Hale’s troubled mind. Was the city bored by spectacle after the Columbian Exposition? Had the fair ruined her appetite for the exotic and foreign? Was the city shunning the First Equitable now that her title was about to be eclipsed? Were they ashamed of her?

  Life did not come undone in stages; it came undone all at once. Hale felt the veracity of this thought as he looked at brochures for Swiss sanitariums, the next stop in Jethro’s itinerary. After the summer was spent, his son would be taking a trip to Europe with his mother and her sister. It was either that or let the lad end up yammering his life away at Dunning Asylum. There had been madness in the Gray family some generations back, Hale recalled— somebody who’d let a penchant for obscure omens mushroom into full-blown lunacy. Life was grim. It was not for the faint of heart or mind, not for sleeping children, as his father used to say. In the span of a month, he’d lost a son and heir, and none of the vice presidents seemed up to snuff. Then the financial statements began arriving in the pneumatic tubes, little warships bearing bad news like ensigns. Despite a buoying economy, underwriting was down and the balance sheet was thinning. Then came estimates for replacing the faulty windows and squaring up the foundation—an astronomical figure on both counts. It was time for action. He would begin by reducing the rank and file. Better to be prudent than be caught off guard. He hollered for Miss Ballentine to bring him some ice and take dictation. She trundled into the room, smelling of iodine and peppermints, without the ice pail or dictation pad, staring at him glumly from the doorway, and in her dim-wittedness, her doe-like stupor, in her creed of desk-drawer sandwiches and tinned peaches, in her perennial tardiness and general lack of comportment, Hale saw his first retrenchment. Once the memo had been drafted, indicating that each business division was to cull 10 percent of its staff, Hale would send Lulu packing, handkerchief in hand. His own hands would be tied, of course. These are difficult times. He knew all the rejoinders to the teary protests. How could you tell a person that they were being let go because they were a lumpy dresser, walked too slowly, ate peanut butter before meetings? (She was guilty on all three counts.) She fetched her dictation pad, breathing loudly, and came back. Her face seemed transformed, even stricken, it seemed to Hale, as if she knew what was about to happen.

  On Pentecost Sunday Argus thought he saw the Archbishop of Chicago standing before the rooftop lagoon, a man in a dark suit and somber hat. In the dazzling light, it was hard to see his features, but Argus recognized him from the portrait in Holy Name Cathedral—the Irishman’s kindly eyes, the gray hair that touched his collar, the high-bridged nose. Had he come to respond to the letter in person? The hat obscured part of his face with shadow. It was absurd to think it was him, especially on a holy feast day, but there was something ecumenical in the man’s posture and bearing, the pale, soft hands, the pious regard.

  Argus went about his business, flinting a fire from coconut husks. If nothing else, he wanted to appear hardworking. Adelaide and Owen had come to lend moral support amid the sparse crowds, more for the siblings than for the building, and, like the other sightseers, felt coy being there, as if arriving at a slighted party. Owen had been working on the new house sixteen hours a day and had flakes of bottle-green paint under his fingernails. The wedding was only a few weeks away and Argus thought they looked very happy together. He wanted to go and talk with Miss Cummings about books and shake Owen’s hand, but instead he had to stack yams into the hot oven. His fingertips were scorched from days of stocking the hearth. He hadn’t had a conversation of substance in weeks. The desiccating winds and the glare of the sun made him thirsty all day long and he was forbidden from wearing a hat.

  Hunched over the hearth, he watched the man in the somber hat enjoy some chilled coconut milk. Argus could tell he was a priest of the people, just from the way he chatted freely with those around him. Perhaps he took in the city after Mass on Sundays, walked among his flock. And today, fifty days after Jesus had been offered on the cross, each year and eternal, was surely an occasion for fellowship. Argus recalled that the Whitsundays and Pentecost Island had been dear to his very own Reverend Mister, being namesakes for the descent of the Holy Spirit on the apostles, Whitsun being Old English for White Sunday. The islands were named for this exact feast by the Quaker explorer Cook, Argus remembered, who’d gathered coral atolls and volcanic shores for the British crown like so many loose stones. What an auspicious plan if—beyond all hope—his new master had chosen this day to begin Argus’s period of service. It was a sham to think so. Vanity at its worst, that a gentleman of such religious rank would seek him out. Looking at the elegant man, Argus remembered the Pentecostal sermons of the Reverend Underwood, the way he recounted St. Peter’s famous sermon withi
n his own each year, a lacquered box of jewels, the reverend would say, within his own tattered trunk of Glaswegian brimstone. He could laugh at himself, the reverend, remained humbled by the task of converting wild souls from the bamboo pulpit, of handing out cigarettes from the back verandah after each service.

  On their lunch hour, a trio of clerks came larking up from Underwriting, bored and listless. They played cards at a picnic table and surreptitiously peered up the skirts of a young woman being helped into the captive balloon basket. They made bets on whether her underwear was black, gray, or white, loud enough to earn the contempt of several bystanders. A policy salesman guffawed and the girl in the balloon became mortified as she ascended above them. The clerks waved and bowed to her, the victor holding a dollar bill in his hand, saying white is right. Argus looked out into the small gathering, sun-dazed, hoping that Owen would correct the situation. But he and Miss Cummings were taking a turn on the observation platform—everyone wanted to see with the binoculars the newly aviating falcons. Then the clerks turned their attention to Malini, leering at her as she bent to her shell work. One of them called, “What’s for supper, wifey?” and another said, “How ’bout a stroll on Halsted after quittin time?” Before Argus knew it he was standing on the edge of the sandy spit, a yam in hand, telling them to be quiet. What he actually said was: “Would you mind stopping that?”

  Which was met with quizzical tilts of the head, then murmurs, in the crowd of twenty.

  “Looks like darkie knows some English,” said one of the clerks.

  Argus fell back and exchanged a look with his sister.

  In Poumetan she said, They smell like pigshit. The clerks knew the sound of derision in any tongue and one of them plucked back with, Maybe they’re not brother and sis after all, in which case we might see a savage baby up here one of these days. I’d pay good money to watch her suckle a baby born in captivity! Argus had no idea how to respond to this but the trio looked satisfied with the fallout of the comment and turned for the elevators. A gong announced the end of the first lunch shift but it dispersed even the nonemployees. The onlookers moved away, including the candidate for archbishop. Argus was painfully aware of his naked chest, of the sun in his eyes, of the humiliation scouring his insides. He reached for a piece of broken yam, about the size of an apple core, and when he thought no one was watching, hurled it after the clerks, pelting one in the middle of the back. A turmeric-colored smear appeared on the back of a jacket. They turned in unison, grim-faced, and Argus saw that he’d found the correct target. He put his hands on his hips and the pelted clerk charged the lagoon, swinging his jacket in the air, trying to get one shoe off at a time, blaspheming, fists balled, wading in with a splash. He stalled out about halfway across and fell face-first into the shallow, indigo water. An outbreak of laughter and Oh dears got Owen and Adelaide’s attention and they crossed from the platform. The clerk was up again, wild with rage, swinging, trying to get purchase and make the sandy bank. Fifty feet above, the girl in the balloon applauded for his misfortune. Argus took Malini by the arm and retreated to the bamboo hut. Within seconds, one of the guards was stomping into the water. He grabbed the clerk by the collar, trawling him back to pant and swear among the excited spectators. It was the first thing of note to happen all day. The clerk was taken away to cool off.