Make Me a City

by Jonathan Carr

  As Mr. Sage makes for the front door, a goose comes hurtling around from the back of the house, squawking and flapping. It goes straight for his legs and he freezes, cowering against the door. “Sir?” He looks imploringly at John.

  John drives the goose away with his cane. He should leave at once. He has a dozen better things he could be doing.

  “Thank you,” says Mr. Sage. “I have never been at ease with geese.”

  The door opens. An attractive young lady stands there, dressed in a green silk pelisse with a matching bonnet that barely holds in her luxuriant dark curls. From her attire, she is a lady who looks more suited to the Exchange Coffee House on Wabash Avenue than this modest dwelling on Kinzie Street.

  Mr. Sage introduces him. John tips his hat. “May I present Miss Aureka Atkins,” says Mr. Sage. “She is a cousin of Mr. Jearum Atkins.”

  With lowered eyes, she addresses him. “I do apologize for the goose, sir. As Mr. Sage knows, I have tried and failed to teach him good manners.”

  John smiles. This visit might be a waste of time, but Mr. Atkins’s cousin is a charming surprise. “It would be no small achievement if you could. You look as though you are leaving, Miss Atkins,” he says.

  “No, no, sir,” she says, coloring slightly. “You are most welcome. Please come in.”

  He removes his hat as she leads them into a small, dark kitchen with two doors leading off it, both of which are closed. There is an earthen water pot in the corner, some embers on the hearth, a blackened kettle sitting lopsided on top. A pile of logs is stacked to the side. Peeled potatoes lie in a basin of water. The room is stuffy, and smells of smoke and cabbage. Beside a shuttered window two upright chairs are pushed beneath a small table. It is dismal. The most noteworthy item in the room—and it looks out of place—is a handsome chamber set with a blue porcelain basin for washing.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” says Miss Atkins, “I was not expecting visitors.”

  John tells her there is nothing to apologize for and remarks on the basin. “I have one identical to that at home. It is very pretty.”

  She holds her arms down in front of her, fingers intertwined. “Thank you, sir.”

  Someone shouts from behind a closed door. “Who is it?”

  Miss Atkins answers. “Mr. Sage, Mother.”

  “Coming for breakfast now as well, is he?”

  There is a moment’s awkward silence. John wonders whether this is a second misjudgment of Mr. Sage. Is he also the kind of man who exploits another’s hospitality? Mr. Sage looks embarrassed, as does Miss Atkins. She taps on the other door and pushes it ajar. “You have visitors,” she calls out.

  “I’m busy. Tell them to come back later.”

  “I think it would be better,” John tells Mr. Sage, “if we returned another time.”

  “It’s Mr. Sage,” Miss Atkins explains through the door, “and a gentleman.”

  “Albert? Why didn’t you say so? Tell him to come in.”

  John, following Mr. Sage inside, looks around the room in astonishment. He has never been anywhere like it. True, there are some familiar enough features. There are items of furniture: a bed with a big board table beside it, a couple of upright chairs, and what might be a chest of drawers, over which a large horsehair blanket has been thrown. An open window looks out onto the street but the room is still smelly and airless. He catches an unpleasant whiff from the chamber pot. But that is where the resemblance to any ordinary room ends.

  The walls and the ceiling are covered by drawing paper. All the pieces pinned up are perfectly aligned. On every sheet is a geometrical design, many with symbols and sums and numbers at the bottom. They are drawn in pencil, their subject matter ranging from the most futuristic-looking machines with arms or wheels and even wings, to simpler diagrams that show only a section of something, a valve, a mechanical joint, the arch of a building. Dotted around the room, like sculptures on show in a museum, are half a dozen wooden models of strange contraptions. At first glance, John has no idea what any of them are supposed to be. Arranged on the table beside the bed are some tools—a file, a hammer, a chisel—and a pile of timber offcuts. Residing at the center of it all, propped up on pillows and lying on his back in bed, is Mr. Jearum Atkins. He is a severe, pale-looking gentleman with frizzy ginger hair, a straggly beard and, if John had to guess at his age, he’d say he was probably, like him, in his late thirties. He is writing with his left hand on a large sheet of paper pinned to a board propped on a stand that, rather ingeniously, leans over him.

  “I’d like to introduce,” says Mr. Sage, “Mr. John S. Wright.”

  Mr. Atkins tilts his head toward John. His gaze is intent, and his voice sounds strange. It takes John a few moments to realize that he uses almost no intonation. His speech is flat and expressionless. “Who is he again?”

  “Mr. John S. Wright,” repeats Mr. Sage.

  John steps forward and, awkwardly, shakes his hand. He says he is delighted to meet Mr. Atkins and what marvelous creations these are. He gestures around the room.

  Mr. Atkins’s eyes narrow. “You know about mechanical things, Mr. Wright?”

  “I am not myself an engineer,” he admits, “but I know men who are. I own a factory that manufactures the Hussey reaper.”

  “You own a factory,” he says, “but you don’t understand how its products are made?”

  “Naturally, I have a broad understanding, but my point is that I am not, by training, an engineer.”

  “Then may I ask what you have trained in, Mr. Wright?”

  Mr. Sage intervenes. “Mr. Wright’s Hussey reaper competes with the McCormick.”

  “That’s correct,” says John, exchanging a glance with Mr. Sage. “We compete very hard with him.”

  “Remember how Mr. McCormick laughed when I showed him the iron man, Jearum?” adds Mr. Sage. “He said it wasn’t possible.”

  Mr. Atkins takes a moment to reflect on this while continuing to eye John suspiciously. At length, he says, “Do you want to see the iron man, Mr. Wright?”

  “That is why I am here.”

  “Albert?”

  Mr. Sage crosses the room and pulls the blanket off what John had assumed to be a chest of drawers. It is, though, another curious contraption that stands about four feet high and resembles a toy reaper. But if it were really meant to represent a reaper, surely the blades to cut the wheat would be behind the wagon? This one has the blades attached to the side of the driver’s seat, beneath a platform. Above this platform is a baffling assortment of metal limbs.

  “Will you be the horse, Albert?” says Mr. Atkins.

  Mr. Sage moves the worktable away from the bed. He wheels the model over and scatters wood chips on the platform at its base, to represent the cut grain.

  “Ready, Mr. Wright?”

  John watches in amazement as, from his prone position, Mr. Atkins pulls a lever and the simulacrum of a human arm descends, complete with a joint at the elbow. In place of a hand are two pincers that, when they near the platform, bend like fingers, scrape the wood chips into a pile and lift them up in a bundle.

  John claps his hands. “Extraordinary,” he says.

  “The iron man can do the work of two human beings, Mr. Wright,” says Mr. Atkins. “And where reaping is concerned, it will be quite as fast and efficient as a McCormick.”

  What a boon this will be for farmers. What a sensation. John can already imagine the kind of sentences he will write. As every farmer knows, it takes two men twice as long to rake and collect the grain as it does to cut it. This is hard, backbreaking labor. As farms are hit by the continuing exodus of our young men to California, let us welcome with cheers and outstretched arms the “iron man” that has come to our rescue.

  He sits down on a chair. He feels quite emotional. Miss Atkins has brought coffee.

  “I arranged for a friend to bring a McCormick reaper here,” Mr. Sage is saying, “so that Jearum could study through the window how it worked.”

  “And then?” ask
s John, still not really comprehending.

  “That’s all,” says Mr. Sage.

  “If it will not work here,” says Mr. Atkins in his monotone, tapping his brow, “it will not work anywhere.”

  John gestures, rather helplessly, around the room. “So all this, everything here, has to work first inside your head?”

  Mr. Atkins nods.

  “I see.” He is feeling distinctly strange. Mr. Sage told him earlier that Mr. Atkins had rarely gone to school because his parents could not afford to send him. And yet he has done all this and who knows what else too? He is struck by a sense of his own inadequacy, of the frivolity … how that word grates … the frivolity of his existence. He hears his mother’s voice. Why can’t you put your energy into doing something serious, something useful, John? In front of him lies a man to whom the ordinary pleasures of life he takes for granted have been denied for the last ten years. Mr. Jearum Atkins, forced to suffer whatever indignities being bedridden must involve, has nevertheless designed a machine that will transform the lives of farmers across America.

  Then may I ask what you have trained in, Mr. Wright?

  There is only one other person who has made him feel inadequate, though in a different way, and that was many years ago. Miss Eliza Chappell was also someone of strong will and a sense of purpose. Maybe his mother is right. Sometimes, it feels as though he is always flitting from this to that, onto the next new thing before he has finished the last one.

  The moment passes. He returns to business.

  “It is important, Mr. Atkins,” he says, “that the name of any new machine should not only seize the imagination but also convey a sense of its unique and remarkable capability. This is the secret of marketing in today’s world. I would therefore suggest that your invention be sold as the Automaton. This captures the way in which the iron arm simulates the workings of its human equivalent. Or perhaps, better, it should be the Atkins Automaton.”

  “You have trained in marketing, Mr. Wright?”

  John laughs that away and says that one day people really might be trained in marketing. His factory, he pledges, will make a working model of the Automaton in time to demonstrate at the first important agricultural exhibition of the season in Geneva, New York, opening on July 20. He also commits to taking the model, in person, to all the other major agricultural shows. He will file for a patent for the Automaton in their joint names and will replace the Hussey reaper in his factory with the Automaton. When he finally leaves, he has no idea how long he has been there. He feels quite exhilarated.

  * * *

  That evening, after he has played with Maria and read another Potawatomie myth to Augustine, John spends the first part of the evening with Kitty, making the final arrangements for her departure in the morning to Virginia. As promised, he makes one last attempt to persuade her not to go, but he cannot put his heart into it. He knows it will make no difference.

  When she prepares for bed, he calls in to see if his mother is still awake. She is seated in her armchair near the open window, strands of gray hair escaping from her bonnet as she leans forward to catch the light from a kerosene lamp. She is sewing buttons onto one of his shirts.

  She looks up and smiles when he comes in.

  “I don’t know what you’d do with yourself,” he says, “if I stopped losing buttons.”

  “Or if I were caught again, putting them on.”

  “And were then caught ironing the shirt as well.”

  They share a look. There was a heated argument the last time Kitty found her doing her own sewing and ironing. That was what they had slaves for. “What would Molly think, if she knew what you were doing, Mrs. Wright?” Molly is Kitty’s favorite slave, who came with her from Virginia, and the laundry is her responsibility.

  Slaves, and Kitty’s insistence on keeping them, has always been a keen source of unease to John. He has managed to keep only an Irish coachman and his butler, Seamus, who are both paid and treated as servants. The rest of the house, to his chagrin, is run by Kitty and her slaves.

  “Does she still insist on traveling to Virginia?”

  “I tried, Mater.”

  His mother sighs. He knows only too well how she feels about her daughter-in-law’s refusal to find anything good about Chicago. “I don’t know what your father would have said.”

  “He would probably have prayed.” Deacon Wright has been dead for over ten years. He finds it touching, and a sign of her deep affection for his father, how often she wonders about his reaction to things.

  She nods, smiling thinly. “Yes, he would have prayed and said not a word to anyone about what he thought. Not the most forthcoming of men, your father. But a very good and thoughtful one.”

  “He was, Mater.”

  “I think he would have found a way to get along with Kitty,” she says.

  “Yes.”

  He is not so sure he would, and he is not sure his mother really believes this either, but it is something on which they like to agree. He knows she does not believe Kitty is right for him, though she would never say it.

  She lets the shirt drop to her lap. “I am afraid we had a disagreement today.”

  “Oh?” Kitty has said nothing to him about it.

  “She accused me of being ‘one of those awful Republicans’ because I support abolition.”

  John puts his head in his hands. Not that again.

  “She said she knew what I was thinking, but she would never allow me to take Molly away from her. Didn’t I remember what happened to poor Molly when she arrived in Chicago?”

  John shakes his head. “I’m so sorry, Mater.”

  It is one of Kitty’s favorite anecdotes. Some abolitionists “threatened” Molly in the street when she first arrived in Chicago by telling her she was free. Poor Molly was petrified. Of course, she was. “Leave me be,” she told them. “Miss Kitty owns me.” Did those horrible abolitionists ever give any thought to the plight of the poor Negroes? How on earth would they survive if they were freed?

  “She is a little on edge at the moment,” says John, “with the baby due, and the journey.” He hates himself for making these excuses on Kitty’s behalf.

  “It’s just that sometimes I feel she’s being allowed to get away with too much,” says his mother. “Do you know what I mean?”

  He nods. “I do, Mater.” He knows exactly what she means but he does not want to engage in this conversation. He can guess where it will go. From slavery they will move on to the question of schooling. How could he have agreed to send Augustine to a private school at Lake Forest instead of a Normal school? Did he no longer believe that an equal education should be made available to all children, regardless of their background? She had fought for this principle all her life, and so indeed had he.

  And from there, it would not be long before she found a way of mentioning the horse. It couldn’t just be any thoroughbred for Kitty, could it, but the most expensive Arabian mare in Chicago. And from the mare, she would move on to the portrait. It couldn’t just be a regular portrait, but a vast affair that took up one wall of the main salon downstairs. It does not help that he also finds the portrait vulgar and pretentious. Nor is he proud of the fact that he has never admitted to his mother that he approved of the idea himself. Indeed, he has found it easier to say: “You’ll remember I was in Washington at the time, Mater,” as though it was a surprise to him too, the way it turned out. Once, he had tried to argue that the portrait was modeled on a masterpiece by a famous English painter, a painting that Mr. Ogden had on display in his North Side mansion. But she remained unimpressed. Next would come the expense. “I do not dare to imagine how much it must have cost you.” It does not matter how often he tells her it was a gift from Mr. Ogden himself and didn’t cost him a cent. She pretends not to remember or not to hear or not to believe him.

  Oh yes, he knows what his mother is like. He does not want to give her the chance to start talking about abolition or education or the Arabian mare or the G. P. A. H
ealy portrait.

  “I had a very interesting meeting this morning,” he says, to change the subject.

  But she is not listening. She is now asking him about something else entirely. “Whatever happened to Miss Eliza Chappell,” she says, out of the blue, “after she married Reverend Porter? I’ve often wondered.”

  “I don’t know,” he says.

  “I liked her.”

  “Yes.”

  “She knew her own mind, but she was never proud or unreasonable.”

  “No.”

  There is a moment of silence.

  “Promise me one thing, John.”

  “Of course, Mater.”

  “Don’t spend the rest of your life trying to please her.”

  * * *

  Later, he does tell her about the Automaton and how useful it could be for farmers, without admitting that he has committed to anything. “Believe me. It would be hailed as an agricultural breakthrough, a sensation, a remarkable curiosity. And, Mater, one more thing. Remember that nothing would exist, not even Chicago, without farmers.” He recites the passage from the Lord’s Prayer about giving us our daily bread, which is perhaps foolish, given the demise of his breadmaking machine. He hastens on. “And for that reason alone you can be sure it would provide for a very safe, staid business for many years to come.”

  He did not mean to go that far. She is silent, and to his alarm he sees tears welling in her eyes. Without looking at him, she says, in a voice with almost as little intonation as that of Mr. Atkins: “You’ve already committed to it, haven’t you? Even though the man has nothing but a drawing, you’ve already told him your factory will drop everything else to make this new machine. It’s no good pretending you haven’t, John. I can tell.” He tries to interrupt, but she raises a hand. “Promise,” she says, “that you will concentrate on it.”