“I take it you like it,” he said.
She kissed him on the mouth.
They went inside and he locked the solid front door—revived from a South Side inn, its brass fixtures something from a medieval keep. Owen told her to go on up and began extinguishing the lights—his new neighbor had been kind enough to keep an eye on all those burning lamps while the nuptials were going on, just so he could have the house ablaze when she first saw it. Married, he thought, dimming the living room. He laughed to himself when he saw the Malekula effigy, standing sentry beside the fireplace, a few feet beneath his mother’s portrait. How could she have missed it? He had made them a house of such burnished detail that she would have no choice but to let him keep the monster where it was, in all its spiderwebbed and human-haired grotesqueness. Maybe he’d hide it when guests came over. Technically pilfered from the coffers of Hale Gray, the effigy was Owen’s now and it would get pride of place. It was his grim reminder, he thought, climbing the darkened stairs, a candle in hand, his shadow spilled on the wall. It stood for all that waited beyond the brink. All that could arrive without invitation. He reached the top landing and turned into the hallway. In the bedroom she was already in her negligee, lying with her hands behind her head, looking up through the skylight. He’d made them a stateroom, no less well-appointed than the one on the burning ship. He closed the door, undressed, lay beside her under the bedlam of stars.
With Margaret safely back in Boston, they killed off days in bed. They made love in every room, picnicked on chocolate and cherries in the gnarled orchard. She read him overblown poetry and deliberated about furniture while he reclined in the bathtub, blowing bubbles of protest. They came upon each other in the hallway and for minutes at a time pretended to be strangers, asking about the other’s biography before undressing. Owen thought it was obscene, this degree of contentment. The morning sun flashed off the lake, filling the empty rooms, and for hours they sat behind the Gothic church windows, amid the courtroom fixtures and theater doors, watching the day burn itself up.
Eventually, Adelaide dug her heels in, plucked up some resolve, and began to make garden beds in the back. She planted flowers and herbs. They ventured into the city—dazed and slow, as if leaving quarantine—to pick out furniture. With each new arrival, each chair, table, and rug, the house began to fill out, the echoes retreating to a spot above the stairs. On warm nights they slept outside on the verandah, to the puzzlement of their neighbors. They listened to the lake, its murmurous lappings buoyed above the tree crowns, the bellow of an occasional barge rising above the braying of the lions at the zoo.
They learned each other’s annoying domestic habits by the end of the first week: Owen crumbed and cluttered up the kitchen counter and Adelaide never blew out a lamp. She said nothing about the effigy and knew this was the sweetest kind of revenge; her martyred, quiet disdain for this hideous intruder. They fought ardently and briefly, forged truces within the hour. They took walks at night, holding hands, around the neighborhood, into the brewery district that smelled of hops and yeast. They happened upon the Presbyterian Theological Seminary, just a few blocks from the house, where they would come back during daylight to make enquiries on Argus’s behalf.
Some afternoons they walked over to the zoo, where the foxes had shed their winter coats and yipped at the perimeter of their enclosure, where rival circus lions—who’d been fallowed at the zoo all through the cold months—roared at each other through blacked-out fences. They became regulars at the zoo, before the noon rush, and were given a discount on admission. They were shown into a back room where, in a dry goods box, five black wolf whelps twitched and slept. Owen hadn’t seen that particular smile of Adelaide’s face in a long time. Unguarded, an open embrace to everything alive. He wanted to grab her hand and run her back through the streets to their little wooden fortress. She said she wanted a dog and then, weeks later, just as the orchard began blooming, just as knobby stone fruit bulbed in the upper branches, peaches and apricots, she told him she was pregnant. They told no one at first, not even Margaret, and the discussion of furniture became a discussion of first and middle names, boys on the left, girls on the right, the candidates penciled on a kitchen wall that would be painted fresh when the Graves kid finally arrived.
Then one night she asked the question that had been idling beneath the surface ever since his return—“Will you go to sea again?”
They lay in the hand-chiseled bed, the skylight blotted with cloud. Owen had extinguished the lamps and the room was nothing but silhouettes and half-light. “I wondered when we would have this conversation.”
“We have plans to make. Nine months will go by quickly.”
He breathed. They heard the wind blowing through the orchard.
He said, “In the islands I had good luck. Hale was delighted with the artifacts and his payment reflected that.”
“Good.” Her voice sounded brittle, even to her.
“But looking back on the trip I can’t help feeling like it was just that—luck. I worked hard and knew what to look for, but it’s becoming more difficult to find good artifacts. The natives want money and guns these days and they had me beat a lot of the time. Argus was a lifesaver on that front. The collecting era, the days of trading tobacco for some savage war mask, might just be over. It may have been over a long time ago.” Until he spoke these words, cast his suspicions above their heads, he hadn’t realized just how true this was. For weeks it had left him feeling vacant about his future. There would be no reason to go to sea and anyway it would be criminal to leave a pregnant wife or, later, a new baby and mother. As he’d worked to restore the old house, fitted doors and windows from teardowns, he’d been considering his prospects. The premise of more voyages, of trading stints, had been part of his mental landscape for years, since those days of reading travelogues in the library, so that giving it up felt like defeat. Then something had cleared and he found himself unable to conceive of being gone six months at a time. Whether it was the finality of marriage or, now, a child on the way, he couldn’t say, but it struck him that he would have to be his own person on land. For the foreseeable future there would be no more sabbaticals, no more jaunts at sea in which to grasp his life in profile. He was up along the treacherous coast of daily happiness, had surrendered to it some time ago and was just now letting himself know it.
“What will you do?” she asked.
He could hear the relief in her voice.
He sat up and leaned against the headboard. “I have an idea for a business venture.”
“Should I be nervous?”
“You’ll be pleased to know that it doesn’t involve travel.”
She sat up as well. “I am pleased. Go on, tell me.”
“I don’t want to jinx it.”
“Out with it.”
“I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed working on this old house. I’m thinking of taking the trading money and starting a construction company. We’d specialize in restoration and refurbishment. I still know a lot of men in the trades. Who knows, maybe someday it’ll be called Graves and Son Construction and Restoration. That would put a smile on my dad’s grim face. His little demolitionist nailing things together instead of busting them apart. What do you think?”
She heard the note of tenderness in his words, the same tone he’d used to describe the proposition of breathing new life into the weather-beaten house. The transformation of objects was one of the things that gripped his attention. A childhood of loss, of tearing things down, had somehow merged with a life of searches. The right object, the house with hidden promise, the vacant lot with noble aspirations. She had been reading too much Emerson and Henry James of late, her father’s handwritten insights skewing her own reading, but she felt that it made perfect sense. Owen Graves wanted to bear things up to their rightful place. She leaned close to kiss him in the dark.
Summer got a proper foothold by late July and the rooftop continued to draw crowds. Argus delivered his sermons and
hymns, wood-backed and pious in his celluloid collar. He tilted his shoulders, projected from behind a bamboo pulpit on the spit of sand. He spoke of redemption and damnation, the twin faces of the gilded coin. The lapsed and the devout alike found something to admire; even the nonbelievers couldn’t help marveling at his showmanship. Rooftop revival meetings was the phrase in the press. He took his meals with Alice Binns and they talked about God’s grandeur while watching processions of clouds bulk over the lake. Argus did not know if this was marriageable love but suspected he would know when the time came. Malini slept in the hut each night and took English classes twice a week in the second-floor library. Hale sent a photographer to capture her sitting at one of the desks, her hand raised in the air. She recited verbs and nouns and greetings lying on the grass mat while Argus, two stories below, knelt and murmured his prayers beside his bed. They waited for job offers but none came. Argus visited the Presbyterian Theological Seminary near the Graves house and the head clergyman encouraged him to apply for admission. He would have to take exams to verify his education level and perhaps enroll for college extension classes, both of which made him nervous. What if the Reverend Mister had neglected entire aspects of his education? Did he know enough mathematics? Would that be a requirement? What he mostly knew was scripture, history, and literature, specifically writers named Dickens, Kipling, and Stevenson. He had to trust that God’s plan did not waver and every time he saw Jethro in the upper floors at night, wandering around like some dead penitent, he gave praise for all his good fortune.
40.
The day of the First Equitable suicide, Jethro was on the rooftop watching the fledgling falcons. It was late in the evening and through the haze of the Bayer tonic he sensed a sort of communion with the birds and with the ethereal lights on the lake. The visitors had mostly left the native pulpit and the city had resiled itself to smoky slumber. The El rattled far below and he thought of an anchor chain mooring a ship in place. I have found bottom and am tethered, he thought or said to himself. His finger, the throbbing briefly subsided, felt heavy in the open air. He saw one of the fledglings make a sortie to a lower ledge—a clumsy burst of wings followed by a scattered landing. It pleased him to think of the young birds striking out on their own. Would they find another rooftop on which to roost or would they go further afield? He wanted them to fly away from the city, to retreat to some stand of untainted woods where Nature could reclaim them as her own.
A pale man, dressed in a suit, a double Windsor snug around his neck, appeared from the alcove. The only note of discord that Jethro detected was in the man’s shoes—the laces were untied and they were spattered with vomit. He remembered the ordeal of going aloft on the ship, of retching from the crosstrees while the brimming ocean spun far below.
Coming forward, the man said, “Didn’t think the night watchman would ever leave.”
Jethro smiled but said nothing. The man had a meticulous manner about him, but also a heaviness, something gruesome and wholly private. He came to the observation platform and stared out at the city and the lake. He swallowed hard. Jethro imagined the stranger was surprised by what he saw, by the city’s roughened beauty, the little diamonds of light winking up through the soot.
“Up with the clouds,” said Jethro.
“Three hundred feet,” said the man. He peered over the edge of the railing. “God Almighty, my tongue feels like leather in my mouth.”
Jethro held up his pair of binoculars. “You can see them better with these.”
The man stared down into the pit of La Salle.
Jethro said, “The fledglings have their wings and should be off soon. Any day. Worked their way up from dragonflies and soon it will be pigeons for the taking. Can you see them over there?”
The man ignored him. “The coppers are posted at all the favorite haunts—High Bridge in Lincoln Park, the south side of the Rush Street Bridge, and now patrolling the skyscraper roofs. Is this still a free country?”
Jethro could see that he was shivering badly, his hands white-knuckled against the railing. “Would you like my jacket?”
“To jump in?”
“You look cold.” Jethro got to his feet. Poor fellow was freezing to death.
“Stay over there!”
“Very well. I’m right here.”
The man looked down again. “This makes sense to me . . . It’s my birthday.”
Softly, Jethro said, “Happy birthday, then.”
A rush of wind. Jethro saw that the man was going to jump and he would be left watching. The fellow wasn’t shivering from cold; he was racked with nervous fear. He noticed the suicide wasn’t wearing a belt, that he’d forgotten it, and this turned Jethro’s mind to the act of knowing, to the notion of how one really knew anything at all. Slowly, absently, he said, “I would be jumping with you if I weren’t such a coward.”
“You can jump from that end. Leave me be.” The man shoved off his jacket and yanked his tie free and put them both on the platform. “I can’t breathe up here!”
The clock struck ten and they stared at each other.
“You’re going to jump, I know. It’s fine. I’m not going to stop you.”
The suicide rubbed his eyes and hawked a line of spit over the side. They watched the thread of saliva lengthen, silver-spun, into the void.
Jethro said, “Have you done terrible things?”
The man winced. His face was burning up.
Jethro took a step forward. “Do you see that hut over there?”
The man began humming to himself.
“There is a native girl in there. Very beautiful. Skin the color of caramel. In the islands, I had my way with her. Took it, you understand? I’m telling you this so you’ll know. I would take it back but now there is no way to make amends. So it’s fine if you jump but take that with you. Will you please take that confession with you?”
The suicide said, “You take one more step in this direction and I will bring you with me.”
Jethro turned his palms up, as if warding off a stray. But the suicide was within reach.
The man raised one leg and then the other, rested the seat of his pants against the railing. Here it was. Jethro saw the man’s vomit-splotched shoes on the stone ledge, the frayed laces above the chasm. There were pedestrians walking jauntily along La Salle, down there in the summer evening, their hats passing far below like acorns on a stream. The man blinked and took a folded piece of paper from his pocket. As he held it out, Jethro felt something thickening in his throat, tasting the man’s oblivion. He heard a cable car grind into a turn as he unfolded the note and read the words:
My name is Theophile Lewcynski and I have chosen to leave this world at my own hand. Some persons prosper but most suffer and I cannot find a way back. It was five years ago that they were killed in cold blood and when I came to this country. I am the one at fault, not this land. Anna, Jakob, Lucja, Roman. Please, God, let me see them once through the gates of hell. I am sorry to those who read these words.
The man stood on the narrow ledge, his eyes clenched shut. Jethro extended his good hand to him but then Theophile stepped above La Salle, without flourish, as if alighting from a train onto a platform. Jethro saw him rake his way down, a diver in the phosphorous depths. The image repeated in his mind, the white shirt ripped apart at the buttons, winged up, fluttering. A report of pedestrian screaming shot up the building façade and for a few seconds Jethro contemplated jumping himself. But then he felt strangely moved by what he’d witnessed, as if he’d known the truth of another mind in its final seconds. One of the falcons, a haggard, darted after a pigeon from the upper ledge across the way. Midair, it folded its wings, stooped, and brought the stunned bird back to the waiting raptors.
Jethro felt oddly invigorated in the days that followed the suicide and for several nights he slept soundly in his old bedroom on Prairie Avenue. He wanted to believe that his confession to the suicide had absolved him in some measure, but then his finger pulled him awake. He t
ook up a magnifying glass from his desktop and reached for a birding scalpel. Carefully, he made a small slice in the purpled, fleshy tip, to ease the pressure. A stream of yellowed blood pulsed out and the smell was immense. The poison was in his mind but it bled from his finger. He took a long sip of Bayer tonic and returned to bed, wrapping a corner of his bedsheet around the finger as a bandage.
In the coming days, the finger began a whole new process of infection, which he described in one of his field journals—suppuration is irregular and viscid, puts one in mind of geological processes, the siphoning of magma from hidden chambers beneath the earth . . . He hid away in his room, refusing to come out for meals, until finally one of the maids reported the bloody bedsheet to Mrs. Gray. Within the hour the Grays were in Dr. Jallup’s waiting room, Hale consoling his sobbing wife and her sisters, Jethro in the surgery suite, etherized, going under while the doctor hummed Brahms as if from a distant, atonal shore. Jallup removed the finger below the first knuckle. Lucky to keep that hand, the doctor said when the patient came to. Jethro felt a florid telegram of pain travel up his arm as he looked down at his bandaged hand. The white-cottoned nub was spackled with tiny islands of blood. It was clearly and definitively gone—a finger-shaped void. “I want to take it with me,” he said after a time. The doctor let out an asthmatic sigh and placed the jar on the table. Jethro watched the finger turn slightly on its axis and said, “Just like a sea horse in its own bottled ocean.”
41.
Bright and Distant Shores Page 42