Shadows of the White City

by Jocelyn Green

  “Well, no.” Sylvie hesitated. “That’s not— You’re important for exactly who you are, not just because you were born right after Louise died.”

  “But Mama needs me to make her happy again. Just like you need Rose, or else you’ll be too lonely.”

  Sylvie sucked in a breath. The way Olive phrased that made it sound like it was the child’s responsibility to fill in what was missing in the parent. But that was too much pressure for any child, and backwards. It was the parent’s job to provide what the child needed, not the other way around.

  “Who told you that?” she asked Olive, then reached for her mug again.

  “I already knew it about myself. But Rose told me that you needed her, too. Because you never married and so you couldn’t have your own children, you wanted her to keep you company. She said that having her made you feel important.”

  Sylvie nearly spit out her coffee. Recovering, she asked, “She said that to you? What else did she tell you?”

  “Lots.” Olive climbed into the chair her mother had vacated and nibbled at the Berliner still on the plate. “She has always hated small men.”

  Sylvie searched her memory, grasping for context for such a statement. “Do you mean the novel Little Men?” She had read that to Rose after reading her Little Women. Those quiet times together ranked among her most cherished recollections. She’d never thought to ask if Rose had enjoyed those stories, too.

  “Yes. She hates that book.” She tipped forward Meg’s coffee mug, then set it back down, nose wrinkling.

  “Did she tell you why?”

  “No. Why?” Olive looked at her as though she were being quizzed and Sylvie already held the answer.

  She didn’t. It was one more blank in a growing list of things Sylvie didn’t know.

  Kristof was stuffed, again. Laying one hand on his stomach, he held up the other to ward off the oncoming bowl of potato salad. “I couldn’t eat another bite, Anna, truly.”

  She beamed as though he’d just paid her the highest compliment.

  “I don’t know where Gregor is dining this evening, but I’m certain he couldn’t have eaten better than I have.”

  Sylvie murmured her agreement.

  Karl downed the last bite of Wiener schnitzel and let his fork clatter to his plate. “Your brother isn’t home much, is he?” He wiped a smudge of jam from the corner of his mouth.

  “Not more than he can help,” Kristof admitted. “From his perspective, there are far more exciting things to see than the inside of our apartment.” He only hoped that didn’t include a gaming table. Gregor had promised he was through gambling, but he’d broken promises before.

  “What is the latest on the orchestra, son?” Karl asked. “Must you wait until November for steady work?”

  Kristof pressed his fingertips together. They were sore from the hours of practice he had put in today, a soreness he wouldn’t feel if he’d been playing regularly. He’d been rusty in some sections, too, which unnerved him. He was first violin, after all. The standard was perfection. Anything less, and he wasn’t worthy of his position.

  “A lawyer has taken up our case with the Exposition officials, since they broke our contract,” he said. “We should hear on Monday what the decision is.”

  “You played at the Midway Ball last night, didn’t you?” Anna asked. “How was that?”

  Kristof caught Sylvie’s eye. “Stranger than you can imagine.”

  After a brief description of the ball and those who attended, Sylvie rose and began clearing dishes. “Stay, Anna. I’ll take care of it,” she said when Anna stirred as though to help.

  Kristof watched her. Purple crescents hung beneath her eyes, and she had barely touched her food. They hadn’t spoken about Rose during the meal, since no one wanted to broach distressing topics while eating. But once dinner was over and Sylvie had poured coffee for the four of them, it could no longer be avoided.

  When Sylvie resumed her seat, Anna laid her blue-veined hand atop Sylvie’s thin shoulder. “Any news on our Rose?”

  Sylvie unfolded a paper and passed it to the Hoffmans. “We found this note when we arrived home from the ball early this morning. All her things are gone now, too. So is her cat.”

  This was news to Kristof and clapped his ears like blocks of wood. The finality of this information weighted his shoulders. No one needed to point out that if Rose was planning to return soon, she wouldn’t need all her belongings, and especially not the cat.

  He reached across the table and enfolded Sylvie’s hand in his. Her fingers, far too cold for a summer’s evening, squeezed his before she withdrew them to her lap.

  “Well.” Karl’s voice was gruff with emotion. “We thank God for keeping her safe, ja?”

  Cupping her hands around her mug, Anna’s mouth pursed. “We can’t know what she’s thinking, and it’s clear she doesn’t want us to. But she knows you love her, dear. She knows you have a home for her to come back to. We’ll keep praying for her, and for you. Perhaps that is all we can do?”

  “She could be anywhere,” Sylvie said. “Now that she has all she needs. She could have left the state and might be on her way . . . anywhere.”

  “Or perhaps she is still here in the city,” Kristof said.

  Sylvie’s eyes flicked to his, so hungry for hope that it startled him.

  He cleared his throat. “I learned something today.” With as few words as possible, he relayed what Tiny O’Bannon had seen Rose do after her violin lesson on Monday. “So I went to the train terminal this afternoon and questioned the men in the ticket booths for all the lines. One of them remembered a young blond lady carrying a violin case. She bought a ticket and boarded a train alone. The elevated train. It was only headed to another station in Chicago.”

  “So she’s still here in the city.” Sylvie sat up straighter, leaning forward.

  “It’s possible. That’s as much as we know for now.”

  She bit her bottom lip. “But how did you come by this information?”

  Kristof shifted in his chair. He didn’t want to tell her the truth, but he refused to lie. “I talked to someone who followed her.”

  “Ivan Mazurek? The young Polish man? He told me he didn’t follow her into the fairgrounds.”

  Sun slanted across the table, gilding dust particles that danced in the air between them. “Not Ivan.” He pinched the pleats of his trousers where they fell away from his knees. “Gregor owed a man some money after gambling and losing to him. When we couldn’t pay it all back at once, a man followed us, and another man followed Rose.”

  “Why?” Sylvie nearly shouted. The color rushed back into her cheeks. She appeared as though she were on fire on the inside.

  “I can only imagine that if we failed to pay the debt, they would have—” He hated the words before they even formed on his tongue. He brushed schnitzel crumbs from the yellow tablecloth into his hand, then didn’t know what to do with them. He stuffed his fist into his pocket. “They would have held her to make sure we did.”

  Anna gasped, and Karl muttered an oath in German.

  Sylvie’s eyelids flared. “My daughter was in danger because of Gregor’s gambling? That doesn’t make sense.”

  “The man in question saw me talking with you the night of the fireworks on Wooded Island. He thought I cared about you, and about Rose.” He swallowed. “He was right. And it didn’t take much sleuthing for him to learn that we live in the same building. He was taking a precaution, but he never touched her.”

  “You believe him?” She was out of her chair, pacing the small kitchen, twisting her hands together.

  “I do. He only wanted the money he was owed, and now he has it. Plus a little extra for sharing what he saw Rose do.”

  “You paid him extra to tell you that?” She rounded on him. “How do you know he didn’t make it up, just to get the payment? He could be stringing you along for his own benefit and holding her just the same.”

  Kristof tilted his head, absorbing the wil
dness that had flooded her eyes. “Because I talked to the man at the train station. And before that, I talked to the ticket booth employee for the steamship that runs out of Casino Pier. Both of them corroborate his story.” Slowly, he stood, careful lest he startle her further. “I know it isn’t much to go on, but it’s more than we had before.”

  Sylvie pressed shaking hands to her head and bent forward, rocking just slightly. If she’d felt as though she were coming undone at the ball, apparently he’d just unraveled her further. It was a blow, seeing what his words had done to her.

  Anna reached up, placed her hand on Sylvie’s back, and rubbed a slow circle.

  “Ja,” said Karl. “You know that Rose spoke with someone she knew. You know that during the one-hour boat ride, that someone may have convinced her to board a train that went somewhere else in Chicago.”

  “But after that she could have gotten on another and left the state. She could have . . .” Sylvie was pacing again, out of the kitchen and into the parlor, then back.

  Sympathy for her sharpened Kristof’s helplessness. She had been exhausted as it was before dinner, and now she was coming unglued. And it was he who had brought this on.

  “Look.” He stood in front of her so she would face him. Strands of hair had slipped from their pins and framed her careworn face. Silver streaks shone at her temples, more than he’d noticed before. “There are a lot of question marks. But the one thing we know for sure is in that note. We know she’s safe.”

  She crossed her arms. “But do we?”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  After dinner, Sylvie returned to her apartment and pulled Rose’s diary from her parlor bookcase. She scoured the pages for secrets, for clues, and found both. Olive’s words—“She has always hated small men”—hung like a banner in the room as Sylvie happened upon mention of the novel, in an entry written when Rose was sixteen.

  I think I know why Mimi likes Little Men so much. In the story, an orphan named Nat comes to stay at Plumfield School with Mrs. Jo, and he completely forgets about his own parents and never talks about them again. But that isn’t how it works. You don’t just forget where you came from. You don’t just trade an old life for a new one like you’re swapping out a wardrobe. My parents loved me, and I miss them both. They are woven into the fabric of who I am.

  There are twins who live at Plumfield, too, a boy and girl, but they aren’t orphans at all. They just like being with their aunt and uncle, who run the school. If my parents were still alive, there is no way I wouldn’t live with them. Only when the twins’ father dies do they go home to stay with their mother. Mimi cries at that part, but it serves those two ungrateful children right. If they loved their father, they wouldn’t live anywhere else! Pinocchio is a much better story. There’s a boy who had sense enough to try to get back to his father.

  I do love Mimi with all my heart. I know she loves me with all of hers. She says I’m all she needs, but what if she’s not all I need? I can’t tell her that. It would break her heart. But someday I’ve just got to find more. I’ve got to get out of here. Her love for me is so constricting that sometimes I feel like I can hardly breathe.

  Sylvie stared at the page, stunned. She read the passage again and again, as if torturing herself would atone for the mistakes she’d made with Rose.

  From her pocket she withdrew the note left for her after the ball. The handwriting was the same. Only this time, Rose declared, I have everything I need now. Everything she needed did not include Sylvie.

  She wondered who Rose’s new life did include. Her most hopeful thought was that she’d moved into the apartment building that housed the Jane Club. Tessa had said she hadn’t seen Rose at all, and Sylvie believed her. Rose wouldn’t have put Tessa in that position, to have to lie to her employer about her daughter’s whereabouts. But there were five other apartments with Jane Club girls.

  Do not come looking for me, Sylvie read from the note again.

  Ridiculous.

  FRIDAY, AUGUST 18, 1893

  After a haunted night and a distracted day giving tours at the Fair, Sylvie pinned her hat in place, hooked the net below her chin, and left Corner Books & More.

  Insects rattled the heavy evening air. Hoofbeats clip-clopped on the street, and her heels clicked over the sidewalk as she hurried east on Randolph Street. One-horse cabs and hansoms waited, empty, outside the six-story Sherman House at the corner of Randolph and Clark. But the coins in Sylvie’s pocket felt light. It would cost a dollar fifty to get to Beth where she lived at the Hull House and back again, not to mention the time lost in rush-hour traffic, making the almost two-mile trip seem much longer.

  Veering away from the cab, she entered the grey sandstone Sherman House instead. Stores and offices lined the first floor of the building. A sign beside the elevator indicated that the public telephone was straight ahead.

  Her footsteps echoed on the tiles as she made her way past a haberdashery and a cigar shop to the Chicago Telephone Company station. She paid ten cents for five minutes, stepped into a narrow booth, and closed the door while she called the Hull House. When Beth came to the phone, Sylvie filled her in on everything from the Midway Ball to the note Rose had left in place of her belongings.

  “Rose isn’t staying with Tessa,” Sylvie added, “but maybe—”

  “I’ll check,” Beth cut her off to say. The Jane Club building was just around the corner from Hull House. “I know all the young ladies there. If Rose is staying with them, those harboring her will have to answer to me for making you worry like this.” Her voice crackled over the wire. “Give me an hour or so. I’ll call you back at the Sherman House exchange and tell you what I learn.”

  An hour felt like three. At last the phone rang, jarring Sylvie’s nerves, and the telephone company agent sent the call to the phone in the booth for her.

  She held her breath while listening. Beth had been inside every apartment, searched every closet, and inspected the upholstery for cat hair, God bless her.

  “She isn’t there.” Beth sounded almost as defeated as Sylvie felt. “I talked to Tessa, though. A couple of weeks ago, Rose told her that she wanted to prove to you that she could make it on her own. Maybe that’s really what she’s doing.”

  Silence buzzed on the line while Sylvie tried to make sense of this possibility. If Rose wasn’t proving this point with the Jane Club, where else could she be? And if her goal was to demonstrate she could be on her own, why wouldn’t she want Sylvie to see for herself? The pieces of this riddle scattered through Sylvie’s mind, none of them fitting together.

  “Sylvie? You still there?”

  “I’m here.” She rubbed the grooves on her forehead, then remembered to ask if Beth had learned anything from the Hull House Players.

  “Nothing, or I would have told you. Apparently, they barely spoke to her when they weren’t rehearsing lines. They accepted her acting—no one could deny she was gifted—but resented that she had so much more privilege than they did.”

  Sylvie swiveled slowly on the stool on which she sat. No wonder Rose had written that she knew what it was like not to belong. And yet . . . “I thought Rose was friends with a girl named Gita.” She’d talked about her more than any of the other players.

  “Gita Górecki? She told me Rose had been to her home a few times but was more interested in her mother than in her.”

  Górecki. The woman Rose had mentioned in her diary. How had Sylvie missed that she was Gita’s mother?

  She pressed the handset tighter against her ear. “I need to talk to her, then. Gita’s mother.” She glanced at the clock on the wall outside the booth. They were running out of time.

  “Bring your translator,” Beth said, presumably referring to Kristof. “Gita was the only one in that household who spoke English, and she just traded her job at the knitting factory for a trial as a live-in domestic on the other side of the city. Or you could wait until Gita comes home on her half day off in a week or so.”

  But Sylvie couldn
’t wait.

  SUNDAY, AUGUST 20, 1893

  “Watch it.” Kristof glared at the stubbled young man who had elbowed Sylvie without bothering to beg her pardon.

  “Are you kidding me?” he shot back in thickly accented English, one lanky arm stretched over his head to grip a leather loop hanging from the electric streetcar’s ceiling. Between his suspenders, his shirtfront was halfway untucked from his trousers.

  “Do I look like I’m kidding?” Kristof replied in Czech.

  Surprise flitted over the man’s face before he stumbled toward the rear, bumping into more folks as the car sped along the street.

  “It’s a trolley, Kristof, on a Sunday afternoon,” Sylvie said with a small smile, swaying with the car’s rocking motion. “It’s crowded.”

  The August heat stuck to his skin. “You hate crowds.” His feet planted wide, he held the grip beside hers and angled himself to shield her from the press of bodies behind him.

  He’d gone to the bookshop yesterday afternoon to check on her, content to wait while she steered patrons toward recommendations that led to sales. Between customers, she had told him about her telephone call with Beth. After sharing that she wanted to visit a Polish woman on DeKoven Street, she’d said, “I need to bring a translator. I want to bring a friend.”

  A friend, indeed.

  Sylvie was still gazing at him. Wind puffed through an open window, sweeping a curl of hair across her neck. “Thanks for coming,” she said. With a sudden glint in her dark eyes, she reached up and tugged the brim of his hat, rotating it off-center.

  Hiding his amusement, he straightened it. “I ought to bump your hat askew and see if you don’t cry . . .” Drat! The expression was on the tip of his tongue. Cry what? Not wolf, that was completely different. “Chicken?”

  Sylvie’s brow twisted before releasing in a burst of quiet laughter. “So close. Cry foul.” The trolley jolted, and she steadied herself with a hand against his chest, then smoothed his lapel before tucking the errant strand of hair behind her ear.