Make Me a City

by Jonathan Carr

  Before Mrs. Hunter can either question or caution him, Mr. O’Leary reaches into the bag at his shoulder and takes out a package, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. He drops it on Mrs. Hunter’s desk. “He told me to burn it. But I didn’t.”

  The next moment, he is gone.

  Mrs. Hunter considers opening the package there and then. But she decides, on balance, it would be safer to take it home, away from prying eyes in the office. She goes by streetcar and, after alighting at her stop, begins to walk home. That is when she realizes she is being followed by two men in dark greatcoats and slouch hats. She stops and confronts them.

  “We know everything about you, Mrs. Hunter,” says one of them. “That wasn’t a good idea, to meet with Mr. O’Leary behind the back of the boss. Don’t do it again.”

  “Take a message to Mr. Brody,” says our doughty heroine (for we can all agree that this is what Mr. Winship has turned her into). “Tell him he won’t get away with this.”

  “Is that all, Mrs. Hunter?”

  “No, that is not all. Tell him that I don’t care what Old Conn said. I shall make d____d certain that what runs in people’s talk is the truth. Is that understood?”

  The bravado, readers! Mrs. Hunter watches as her two would-be assailants stroll off along the macadam into the darkness, in boots that “clip the road like crackers.” Her legs, she then realizes, are trembling. She turns to go home, breaking into a run, to seek comfort from her husband.

  She is so distraught, in fact, that she does not even remember to open the package given to her by Mr. O’Leary until the following morning. When she does, she finds a ceremonial baseball bat inside, smashed in two, signed by Cap Anson. The bat is stained with what she decides, in her wisdom, resembles dried blood.

  In that afternoon’s Tribune, she sees a notice.

  Man dies in streetcar incident

  A man was run over by a streetcar at 5:13 p.m.

  yesterday afternoon in an incident at the junction

  of Clark and Kinzie Streets. The 56-year-old

  gentleman was pronounced dead on arrival

  at St. Isidore’s Hospital. He has been named as

  Mr. Dermot O’Leary, resident in the 18th Ward.

  Alderman Brody has expressed his condolences

  to the surviving members of Mr. O’Leary’s family,

  and has undertaken to provide flowers at the funeral.

  That same evening, Mrs. Hunter is working at home, finalizing the column for the Tribune on her predictions for the twentieth century, when a brick is thrown through her window. Tied around the brick is a message.

  You’ll end up like him. No more wornings

  A reviewer, however strongly he holds a point of view, must also have the manners to stand back on occasion and act as an impartial referee. By this stage in the narrative, when the reader is beginning to feel doubtful that the author can ever find his way back to those twenty-eight miles of canal, there is a welcome shift toward the light. The first sign that it may be forthcoming is to be found in the quantity of verifiable facts that have begun to impregnate the text. Even though these facts will only be confirmed to the ordinary reader at the very end, there would seem to be no harm done, for illustrative purposes, in mentioning them now.

  Fact—Mrs. Hunter was indeed in possession of a “Cap Anson” baseball bat, broken in two.

  Fact—Mr. O’Leary died in a streetcar accident, as indicated in the Chicago Daily Tribune notice.

  Fact—Mrs. Hunter produced a receipt from a glazier, dated December 31, 1899, for the emergency replacement of a window at her home.

  Fact—Burner Brody’s spelling can sometimes be erratic.

  Fact—Sanitary and Ship Canal Trustees will be tipped off that the state of Missouri is preparing a court injunction to prevent the opening of the Canal, scheduled for January 19, 1900, claiming that the reversal of the Chicago River will pollute their own water supply.

  Fact—To beat the injunction, a top secret private opening of the Sanitary and Ship Canal will be arranged for dawn on January 2, 1900, on the basis that the Canal, once it is open, will be impossible to close.

  Fact—Mrs. Hunter will be one of only two reporters invited to the secret opening.

  Before we attend that opening, there is one final stop to make. Mr. Winship insists that we return to the séance room and listen to more flights of fancy from Mr. Hunter.

  “My guess,” he says, “is that Burner Brody gets a tip-off there’s going to be an inspection. He takes along one of his precious baseball bats as a gift to bribe the inspector. For Gus Swanson, this is just another day, another dangerous, illegal construction site he will have evacuated and sealed off before a tragedy occurs. He’s up there on the roof making notes for his report. Brody appears. Maybe they exchange a few words. Brody probably hails him: “Top of the morning to you, Inspector! How is your report coming along? Everything in order?” Perhaps Swanson looks up and greets him, before returning to his notes. Maybe he doesn’t look up at all. The point is that Brody recognizes him, but Swanson doesn’t recognize Brody. And that merely exacerbates the problem.

  Whatever happened between them in the past was so unimportant to Swanson that he’s forgotten about it. Being on the receiving end of something is always more memorable, though, isn’t it? Brody doesn’t just remember, the memory makes him absolutely furious, so furious that he picks up a brick or a hammer or…”

  Mrs. Hunter shakes her head. “Nobody holds a grudge that deeply,” she says. “And nobody in his position would act so impulsively.”

  “Not unless he’s a psychopath.”

  End of séance. Curtain falls.

  * * *

  Good news, patient reader. We have negotiated the maze of Mr. Winship’s concluding chapter and arrived at “a little-known, little-visited, section of the Sanitary and Ship Canal in South Chicago on the bitterly cold winter morning of January 2, 1900. It is beginning to get light. About a dozen men, doing their best to keep warm, are gathered around an upturned hand cart whereon stands Mr. Wenter, president of the Board of Trustees of the Sanitary and Ship Canal.” From this cart, claims Mr. Winship, Mr. Wenter is delivering exactly the same speech that he would make two weeks later at the official opening to thousands of grateful, cheering citizens.

  “This is the most important day in the history of Chicago,” declares Mr. Wenter, “the most important day since the land was first settled in what is now the last century.” [laughter] “We have built the finest city in America, gentlemen. Over 1.5 million citizens now live where, one hundred years ago, there were none. We are second in size only to New York. We are more than twice as big as St. Louis.” [cheers and applause] “The Sanitary and Ship Canal is an engineering marvel. It is the largest excavation project ever undertaken by mankind. It will reverse the Chicago River. Welcome, gentlemen, to a new age of fresh air, of clean water, of good health.”

  The speech continues for some time in this vein. “When Mr. Wenter’s stock of rousing adjectives and adverbs has been exhausted,” reports Mr. Winship, “he approaches the flimsy dam that holds apart the waters of the Chicago River and the new Canal. He raises his hat, a signal for the two men at the base of the dam to light their fuses and scramble back up their ladders to safety. Mr. Wenter hurls a bottle at the dam wall that, ominously, fails to break on impact. The fuses below fizzle about like skittish cigarette butts until the powder catches. Blast follows blast, clouds of smoke billow forth and the odor of gunpowder fills the air, temporarily overwhelming the putrid stink of the river. They wait expectantly for the sound of sighing timber and the rush of breaking waters.

  “To no avail. When the smoke clears, the dam becomes all too visible again, scalded here and there, but otherwise very much as it stood before.

  “There is no more gunpowder. Everyone is bitterly cold and wants to go home. Nobody knows what to do next. The injunction from Missouri to prevent the opening could be delivered at any moment. This is the situation that pre
vails when, to Mrs. Hunter’s surprise and unease, Alderman Burner Brody appears. She neither knew he was there nor that he had any involvement with the Canal. The alderman mounts the upturned handcart. He raises his hands for quiet. ‘Gentlemen, gentlemen,’ he calls out. ‘Fellow trustees. Your attention, please.’”

  * * *

  Mr. Winship’s unwieldy epic is drawing to a close. I said I would go to the bitter end in this review but, on reflection, I fail to see the purpose it would serve. What happens after Alderman Brody mounts the handcart, as related by Mr. Winship, has never been proven in a court of law. Dear readers, you have been warned. You venture into the final pages at your own risk.

  Instead, I ask you to step back from the brink and consider the slant of Mr. Winship’s presentation. Mr. Wenter is making the magnificent speech that would be heard by thousands and reported across the world at the official opening a couple of weeks later. But what is Mr. Winship’s setting for its delivery? An upturned handcart, a frozen audience of a dozen (albeit a distinguished dozen), a dull and ordinary section of the Canal, an unsociable time of day, a screen of secrecy, a failed attempt to blow up the dam. In a word, ignominy.

  Having plowed my way through the thousand-odd pages of this “Alternative History,” I am wise by now to the authorial techniques at work, so this damp squib of an ending to the century comes as no surprise. Mr. Winship has a tendency to shy away from celebrating civic achievements and, as soon as a situation arises that is soured by unanticipated setbacks, however minor and inconsequential, he stands ready to exploit them.

  Everything in this account, therefore, must be treated with a large dose of salt. His only source for what happened at the secret opening is his favorite female journalist—Mrs. Hunter. Mr. Winship is doubtless an intelligent man who is fond of Chicago. Why, then, does he not unreservedly applaud the remarkable triumph of engineering and mastery over Nature that the Sanitary and Ship Canal represents? Why not bring our extraordinary first century to a close with the gay crowds, the flags and brass bands and ticker tape parades of those joyous celebrations staged on January 19, 1900? Would that not have been the proper thing to do? Is it asking too much, to tell the truth? Is it beyond him to furnish future generations of Americans with the historical record they deserve?

  Instead, Mr. Winship chooses to direct our attention away from that large, colorful canvas and take us into yet another of his little cul-de-sacs of intrigue, populated by the minor characters he prefers, spiced up with the kind of séance talk that has no place in a serious work of history. I rest my case.

  Let me just say this. If we entrust our past to the likes of Mr. Winship, we shall never know the truth about anything. And that is not only intolerable, it is also, like so many of the tales in his “Alternative History,” quite preposterous.

  Readers, I urge you to avoid this book.

  1900

  MY LIFELONG OBSESSION

  Extract from Chicago: An Alternative History 1800–1900 by Professor Milton Winship, University of Chicago A. C. McClurg & Co., 1902

  “WHAT’S WRONG WITH fire?” roars Burner Brody from atop the upturned handcart. “We can burn down that d____d wall!”

  There is a round of “Here, here” and “Bravo Burner!”

  He gives orders. Firewood is to be brought from the nearby pine cabin settlement and spread along the base of the wall. It will then be doused in kerosene.

  “Mrs. Hunter!” he calls out.

  Despite the fact that she has been stalked by Burner Brody’s henchmen, and recently threatened with the same fate as Mr. O’Leary, she steps forward. Plucky, seasoned reporter though she is, even Mrs. Hunter can have no notion of what lies in store.

  Burner Brody announces that this is “my good friend from the Tribune, Mrs. Hunter.” Perhaps his fellow trustees do not know that yesterday, in the Tribune, Mrs. Hunter predicted that we are embarking on a “century of clean water,” thanks to the Sanitary and Ship Canal. His words prompt an outbreak of applause. Mr. Brody suggests it might therefore be fitting, given Mrs. Hunter’s public support for the project, that she be invited to light the fire that will bring down the dam and open the Canal.

  His fellow trustees find him charmingly, engagingly persuasive. Of course, they agree. It is a capital idea, Burner! An all-fired notion! Darned appropriate!

  Mrs. Hunter, on the other hand, is rendered unusually mute. She would like to declare that the man beside her is responsible for murder. She suspects that Burner Brody ordered the assassination of Mr. Swanson, that he was responsible for the deaths of eighteen immigrants who were also his employees, and that he was behind the “streetcar accident” that killed his old associate Dermot O’Leary. She wants to say these things, but as yet she lacks hard evidence.

  Burner Brody takes her by the arm. He leads her across the frosty earth toward the dam wall. She feels nervous and vulnerable as she stands beside this huge, bearish man in his long black coat and high boots and wide-brimmed hat. It is exposed up there. The wind goes through her coat. The early fog is lifting to reveal a featureless prairie landscape beyond the far bank of the Canal. The sky is spanned by a dull, gray light. The dam itself surprises her. It is nothing more than a wall of planks nailed together, about thirty feet across and twelve feet high, supported by a dozen or so lengths of timber, pitched at an angle in the bank of earth that separates the two bodies of water. The men sent down there look as though they have almost finished placing stacks of timber along its base. She turns the other way, toward the river. The surface is still, covered in a yellowish scum. The stench, even at this frigid hour, is revolting.

  Burner Brody says he hopes there are no hard feelings, that as far as he is concerned the misunderstandings between them are now in the past, and as long as she doesn’t make any more “mistakes” he is happy to consider everything else to be water under the bridge. “I admire your work, Mrs. Hunter. That is why I made special representations to the Board, that you should be one of only two reporters allowed to come here today.” He only did that, she knows, to show he can fix anything, that he’s untouchable. “Remember I told you, Mrs. Hunter, how my father dug the first canal with his bare hands? How proud he would be, don’t you think, if he knew his son was a trustee.”

  He takes off his hat and waves it to the men below as a signal to pour on the kerosene.

  Mrs. Hunter turns toward him. His bare head seems to be glowing. “What happened to Mr. O’Leary?” she asks.

  “It was most unfortunate and out of character,” he replies, “that he should step in front of a streetcar like that. Between you and me, I have wondered whether it might not have been deliberate, in the light of what has since become known about his affairs.”

  She gives him a “speaking look.”

  “You didn’t know?” he says. “Dermot was not only a crooked building contractor, he was also the owner of the tenement building that collapsed on West Sixtieth Street.”

  With her fingertips, she touches the copper necklace she is wearing. “Mr. O’Leary did not own that building, Mr. Brody. You do. You can’t deny it.”

  He grins. “Oh, but I can, Mrs. Hunter. If you care to look at those records again, you’ll discover that the facts have changed. Poor Dermot bought the building off me shortly before he began—recklessly, in my view—to add those new stories.” He gestures toward the dam wall. “And now, shall we…?”

  She holds his look. “I’ll get you in the end, Mr. Brody,” she vows.

  “Oh, please, Mrs. Hunter. Surely you must know by now that life isn’t a game, like baseball, where you can win by keeping to the rules. It’s more complicated. There are events, not rules. We could be struck dead by a lightning bolt at any moment. A gust of wind could knock us off balance into the river. In life, anyone who sticks by the rules will lose.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Mr. Brody. When we play by the rules we may drop the odd game, but I can assure you we will win the series. In the end, people like you will be disqualified. And pe
nalized.”

  He shakes his head. “What a dark humor you have, Mrs. Hunter. I am afraid, though, that this is a conversation we must continue another time. Are you ready?”

  “I know why you did it,” she says.

  He frowns, in his lidless way. “I said I was prepared to put this behind us. Now. Are you ready, Mrs. Hunter?”

  “I know everything, Mr. Brody.” To her surprise, she hears herself repeating her husband’s ideas. “You were going to give the inspector the Cap Anson bat as a bribe, weren’t you? Until, that is, you saw who he was.”

  “Be quiet.”

  “You recognized Gus Swanson, and that made you angry. And what made you even more angry was that when you greeted him, he didn’t know who you were.”

  He is staring straight ahead, pretending all is well, that they are having a pleasant chat. But she can sense his hackles are rising.

  “And when he told you to close down the site, you picked up a brick or a hammer, and you hurled it at him. Pity you missed, and that Mr. Swanson didn’t even notice you’d done it. He just kept on making those stupid notes. And that made you mad. You lost control of yourself, didn’t you, Mr. Brody? You hated Swanson that much, because of what he’d done to you.”

  He has gone deadly quiet and still. She glances sideways at him. His eyes are wide and bloodshot. And he is rubbing the scar above his eye, the same scar that was not included, it occurs to her, in the portrait on his office wall.

  That inspires Mrs. Hunter. She goes even further than her husband. “Yes, that’s what he did to you, isn’t it? You’ve had to wear that scar for life, but he was not even scratched. He didn’t have to suffer, the way you’ve had to. In fact, he’d forgotten he ever did it to you. It was that insignificant to him. And now the ‘feckin’ Scandi’, as Mr. O’Leary called him, is going to close down your building. It’s too much, isn’t it? You don’t know what you’re doing anymore, except that the bat is in your hand and you’re beating his head and there’s blood everywhere and when the bat is smashed in two but he’s still alive, you push him over the edge. Then you tell your friend Dermot, who’s watched everything from the start, to burn the bat.”