He and Betty had been married for over ten years. They met at work. He was a salesman, she was a cleaner. There had been no great romance. But she was sweet and pretty and he was doing all right in those days. She looked up to him. She thought it was fine to live in a German neighborhood, with the church only a block away and a pretty choir hall to the side. The fact that a beer garden was also nearby did not seem to concern her and she turned a blind eye to the drunken Germans who staggered past on their way back home every Sunday afternoon. She said Jack and Billy should learn some German while they were still young. Now, Betty thought the house was too small, that Germans were rude, and that they were all anarchists. Couldn’t he see this was no place to bring up children?
He raised his mug of tea. It was weak, more like hot water, but he pretended otherwise as he took a sip and licked his lips. “Tea in the morning, boys. One day, you’ll be tea drinkers too, I’m sure.”
A smiling ghost.
Betty had still not finished her toast. “How long will you be gone?”
“Oh, the usual,” he said. “Expect me back, if all goes well, in ten days’ time.”
“Why do you have to go?” asked Jack.
“Now come on, Jack. It’s not for long. You know very well why. Your pa has to work, that’s why. When you’re older, you’ll realize it’s a man’s job to make sure there’s food on the table for his family,” he said brightly, taking care to avoid Betty’s eye.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
He began to reel off some names in northern Illinois and Michigan. And then—it was as bad as a nervous tic—he could not stop himself mentioning St. Clair. “That’s an interesting one, boys. And I’ll tell you why. In the old days, St. Clair was so full of trees you had to fight your way through them to get to the river. Now it’s big open country. And do you know what happened to those trees? They came here, to Chicago.”
He told them that their own house had probably been built with white pine from St. Clair.
Betty stood up. Her arms were folded. “I thought you went to St. Clair on your last trip.”
Oh heck. He grinned at the boys. “You’re right, dear,” he said. “I nearly did. It was on my schedule, but they canceled the train.”
She went back into the kitchen without saying a word.
He cupped one hand and whispered to the boys. “One day, my young lions, we’ll leave the city and go live somewhere like St. Clair. Get ourselves a farm, grow our own food, pick our own fruit. You’ll walk across the fields to school every day, the same as your pa did when he was your age. Breathe fresh air. It’ll be a wonderful life. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
They looked at him, silent, mouths open.
“A wonderful life,” he repeated, biting his lip because he had a sudden, inexplicable urge to weep.
* * *
Around midday, Stephen gave up looking for work. He had scoured the advertisements in the Daily News and the Tribune but there was nothing new. It was not as though he was too proud, and circling only vacancies for a “salesman” or a “drummer.” He’d be happy if he never had to sell anything ever again. It wasn’t something he had wanted to do in the first place. Selling was just what he had fallen into. It was five weeks since the debacle in St. Clair and its humiliation still haunted him. There he was, scheduled to give a presentation at the town’s main hotel, when he had become too drunk to do so. He had been highly intoxicated often enough before, but he had never been incapable. The telegram from Mr. John Graves Shedd dismissing him from Marshall Field was delivered the next morning.
He should come clean with Betty. But more out of cowardice than in the genuine hope of finding work, he kept putting it off. He now knew that today would not be his lucky day after all, and that he would end up tonight at one of the cheap boardinghouses somewhere in the Nineteenth Ward where they’d serve cold tripe or half-cooked mutton broth on a plate rinsed in greasy water in a long, leaden sink. After trying to eat, he’d sit in a stifling parlor with strangers for as long as he could, until he was so tired that he had a chance of falling asleep when he went up to the dormitory. He rarely joined in a conversation, not unless someone produced a bottle, which was hardly ever. He’d stare into space or pass the time by, say, watching a line of ants transport crumbs from here to there, or counting how many times his fellow transients missed the spittoon. Staggering upstairs, he’d lie under an itchy blanket, coat and pantaloons folded beneath his head for a pillow. In the morning, it would start all over again.
He knew Betty suspected something. For one thing, his “trips” had become shorter. He had run out of friends on whom he could lean for a loan and he could not go, yet again, on bended knee to his uncle. Every time he did, old Jearum fixed him with a look and wanted to know whether he had stopped drinking. Yes, he always lied, absolutely yes, he had stopped. Then there would be the lecture, on how alcohol rotted the brain and drained a man of ambition.
He now owed money to everyone he knew. That was why he was prepared to work anywhere at anything—as a store assistant, as a bricklayer and this morning he had applied at three different hotels for any post that was vacant, from porter to dishwasher. But it was the same everywhere. He could tell—from the way they looked at him—that he had no chance. He did not fit the mold. He was too old, he had the wrong face, he had no experience of bricklaying or washing up or whatever it was.
He pawned his grip for $4 and bought a bottle of bald face. Taking a swig, he relished the familiar burn of whiskey down his throat. He was so weary. He hated this city. He had never liked it, not even when he was young, and the feeling of entrapment, and of being an insignificant grain of sand, had grown stronger in him as the city grew. It was especially bad now, with all the visitors in Chicago come for the World’s Fair. The streets of the city might be heaving with people and foreign money, but there was not so much as a dime that he seemed to be able to get his hands on.
It was a warm, pleasant summer afternoon. Time stretched out ahead of him, and that was the worst thing. He had no prospects, no ideas, no money to speak of and no energy, just time and time and more time. There was nothing to do and no end in sight. He should stop drinking. He knew that. He’d stopped in the past, for months on end. But deep down, he was no longer sure he could. He paused, leaning against a wall to take another swig. It was the hopelessness that hurt most. If only there was a point to this.
Wandering aimlessly, he found a cheap restaurant in a side alley off Randolph Street, advertising a plate of beans and batter for ten cents, with beef dodgers on top for another two. Pushing open the door, he was greeted by a fug of smoke and warmth and the crackle of fat frying on the stove. It was noisy. The tables were packed close, full of construction workers. As he went in, he looked down. He realized he had started doing that a lot these days, even though he had been trained not to: Look your fellow man in the eye, show him your confidence and sense of purpose. Let him catch a glimpse of your soul and you will have gained his trust forever. He’ll buy the world off you.—John Graves Shedd.
He was aware that, behind the sales patter he could still summon up, his confidence had gone. He feared it would prove hard to recover. He could not have explained everything that had happened since it began to go wrong, whenever that was, nor how he might have saved himself. But he did know he was down at a level to which he never thought he’d sink.
He took out Jack’s drawing and studied it. The likeness was frightening. Even the way in which the rigid smile on his ghostly face was unnaturally fixed. The boy was right, he thought. Nobody noticed him anymore. He did not matter.
He ordered a plate of beans and batter with beef dodgers on top.
* * *
Maybe it was the food that revived his spirits and encouraged him to use the afternoon, and what little cash he had left, to see the World’s Fair for himself. That way, he told himself, he would know his way around when he took Jack and Billy. Oh, and Betty too.
The floor of the Illino
is Central cattle car, which he boarded at the Randolph Street Station, was covered in straw and it still stank of livestock. The jolting motion upset the beef dodgers in his belly. After twelve unpleasant minutes (he timed it, an old drumming habit: Never forget that you’re a man on time, to whom time is precious—John Graves Shedd), the locomotive brakes began to squeal like a pig and he had to hold on tight while it came shuddering to a halt.
Blinded by the light, he stepped out of the car and followed everyone else down a flight of steps. Only when he reached the bottom, did he look up. The scales fell away from his eyes. In those twelve unpleasant minutes, he had traveled from one kind of city to another. His spirits lifted. Ahead of him, in all its splendor, stood the White City.
He made his way toward it. Everything here seemed to be for the best. The air was clean, the grass was mown, the inhabitants were healthy and well mannered and well dressed. The walkways were even and neatly signed and, as he moved in the direction of what was called the “Court of Honor,” along with the orderly crowd, he found himself gazing at a skyline dominated by magnificent white buildings, an identical and brilliant white stucco effect that shone like the marble it mimicked. High overhead, suspended on a series of arches, an electric train ran around the perimeter of the site like a planet orbiting its sun. Entranced by the beauty and perfection of what lay before him, Stephen forgot his problems.
He paused at one point to admire the scene. It was like one of those pastoral idylls over which he had fallen asleep at school, a scene from the classical world of gleaming temples set in verdant lawns and gardens awash with bright summer blooms, connected by wooden walkways and clear-watered canals and gracious bridges. Electric launches plied gently back and forth. There were even gondolas with ornately carved prows, reminiscent of ones he had seen in paintings of Venice in the Italian room at the Art Institute, in which elegantly attired couples sat on padded leather seats while gondoliers dressed as modern-day troubadours in baggy pants and bright felt hats propelled them sedately from building to building. Nobody looked unhappy or bored or poor. There were no vagrants, no dirt or trash, no dusty building sites, no horses, none of the noise or smells of that other city across the water.
But the truth was that by the time he arrived in the Court of Honor, he was already beginning to feel troubled. And when he caught his first sight of the turquoise blue waters of the Grand Lagoon and the giant golden dome on top of what (according to the map) was the Administration Building, a sense of fatigue was setting in. He loitered beneath a statue that resembled the Statue of Liberty, and gazed around the succession of vast buildings that flanked both sides of the lagoon, each flying a flag above its facade of colonnades, each with a flight of wide steps that led down to a velvety lawn dyed a deep shade of green. The White City was beginning to feel more like a mirage than reality. At the far end, as if to complete the illusion, stood the majestic centerpiece toward which all these frontages seemed to be paying homage, a massive fountain built in the form (they said) of Columbus’s ship as he first caught sight of America four hundred years before.
The fountain was impressively big, but was it anything more than that? He knew the White City had been built to celebrate Columbus’s arrival in America. But that did not explain what this was all for. He was in a city without houses or factories, a city without residents where nothing was made. To use Jack’s analogy, it was the smiling ghost of a real city.
* * *
It was true there were some extraordinary inventions to see. But by the time he had seen wonders such as moving pictures and drawings sent over a telegraph line, and had listened to a long-distance telephone call from New York, he was beginning to find it hard to concentrate. He entered the Electricity Building, housed on another gigantic site behind a facade of Corinthian columns, and filled with glass-roofed pavilions. It was lit by thousands of electric lights, of different colors and sizes, blazing away like a multicolored night sky. Just one of those lights at home and he could have read by it all night. He sat down on a bench. Squinting, he looked up at the Tower of Light, a pillar decorated by lightbulbs that stretched from the floor to the roof, the light flitting up and down, back and forth as if a genie were being relayed from bulb to bulb. At times, it was like a delicate shower of light, at other times like a streak of lightning.
“You know what this Fair reminds me of?” he said to the man seated next to him. He had just finished off the bottle of whiskey. Maybe it was the alcohol that made him want to talk. “Montgomery Ward’s Big Book. Do you know what I mean, sir? It’s like being trapped inside the Big Book, condemned to walk from page to page, back and forth like an automaton, your senses dulled because there’s too much to look at. And, if you’re like me, you get confused because everything under the sun looks to have been thrown together without rhyme or reason. At least in my line of work—I’m a drummer, sir, with Marshall Field—there are limits. We can only carry so much in a grip. And we still have old-fashioned contact with our customers. I would look you in the eye and if I had a couple of those bulbs in my grip I would tell you exactly how”—he pointed up at the Tower of Light—“the electricity jumps from one bulb to another. That’s my job. But the Big Book doesn’t explain a goddam thing. There are too many things and not enough space and nobody like me around to tell you. In fact, there’s simply too much for the human mind to comprehend. Do you see what I’m saying, sir? Even if you were a professor, there’d still be too many new inventions for you to understand them all.
“In fact, when I look around, what I see is not exactly a Montgomery Ward Big Book but a Progress and Science Big Book. But where are Progress and Science taking us?” He frowned. “In a hundred different directions at once, I’d say. See that chair over there?” He pointed to a large armchair set on a plinth, equipped with a plethora of wires that ran along the arms and across the seat and around the back. “As soon as I saw it, I thought to myself, now that’s a wonder. The electricity must make the chair light up. Then I discovered what it’s really been invented for. Shall I tell you, sir? Such a massive charge of electricity can be sent through those wires that anyone seated in the chair would be killed in a flash, so to speak. That’s why they’ve got the straps on the armrests, to hold the victim down. Why would anyone invent a chair like that? What’s the point? I have an uncle who’s an inventor, but his inventions are useful. That chair might fit in a twisted German fairy tale, but surely not in America at the end of the nineteenth century. If this is their vision of the future, a world in which I can buy in a mail-order catalog a chair that kills, then I—for one—want nothing to do with it. And you, sir? What about you?”
The man gave him an odd look, stood up and left.
* * *
Stephen spent the next few hours wandering along the Midway Plaisance. The anger he had felt earlier began to dissipate. The Midway was different from the main fairgrounds. Even though it felt as muddled, with one curiosity after another, and with no theme or order that he could see, it seemed more human. He walked through model villages from Egypt and Algeria, full of real Egyptians and Algerians. He circled a spiraling gold pagoda, he watched a boxing match where they wore padded gloves, he spent ten cents on a beer from a “traditional” English inn that tasted flat and sour. He listened to a Negro playing the piano in a way he’d never heard anyone play, with a rhythm that seemed to hop and jump. That made him realize this pianist was the only Negro he had seen here all day. A “white” city indeed.
At some point, he stood at the edge of a crowd gathered around an evangelist preacher who spoke with as much passion about God as Mr. John Graves Shedd used to speak about the art of selling. Listening to the rise and fall of those sonorous words, he was filled with admiration for the confidence with which they were delivered, even as they reminded him of his own failings. Conviction was required to speak like that, and he was not a man to whom conviction had ever come easily. It occurred to him that a man who does not believe enough in anything else, cannot believe in him
self either.
He paused at the base of the “Ferris Wheel,” whose top half he had seen over and over all day, making a graceful revolution through the sky. It was an absurd, outlandish creation. The iron axle at its base stood higher than a house. He raised his eyes and tried to count the number of timbered cabins that were making their slow way around. There must have been at least thirty, maybe even more. He was wondering whether to go up, when he felt a tap on the shoulder.
“Please, sir. Where does it go?”
He turned to find a group of four elderly Indians, wrapped in red blankets and with their hair in plaits, staring up at the wheel. Their long faces looked bewildered. He realized that despite being among crowds all day, this was the first time anyone had talked to him. He had not appreciated how lonely he was.
“The big wheel goes around and around,” he said. “First it goes to the top, then back down to the bottom. The notice says it costs fifty cents, and for that price they take you around twice.”
The Indians conferred for a moment in their own tongue. The sound of their speech went up and down too, full of soft sounds and long vowels.
Their leader addressed him again. “Who is pushing the wheel, sir?”
Steam, he thought. But he could not explain how. He wished he had listened better to old Jearum. One of his inventions had had something to do with steam. He began to explain what he knew about steam and pressure, but the Indians looked increasingly skeptical. When he had finished, they consulted together again.
Crossing his arms, the chief said, “We will go with you.”
The other passengers kept their distance, and that suited him fine. They occupied a corner of the cabin, the Indians huddled around him as if he were their guide. They held on to him when the car first began to move, they asked questions about what they could see, they uttered excited shrieks as they neared the top. For the first time since he had left home that morning, he felt happy. He was not sure why the Indians had attached themselves to him, but he was pleased they had. He told them the names of the buildings he recognized, he assured them the Wheel was quite safe, that the best engineers in the world had built it. But they did not seem as worried about safety as he was. They were Potawatomies, he learned, and they had received a special invitation from white chiefs to attend the Fair. As they were descending, their leader pointed to the view below of an arena where some horses were parading. He had seen the signs earlier, to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. He thought of little Billy riding his belly on the floor that morning, and it seemed an age ago. “You go there with us, sir, when the Great Spirit has brought us back down to earth.”
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