Shadows of the White City

by Jocelyn Green

Kristof shook his head. “I’d have an easier time remembering your idioms if they made any sense.” His English mother had never said things like this.

  “F-o-u-l, not f-o-w-l. It’s a baseball term, I think, or maybe sports in general. Short for ‘foul play.’ You know, something out of bounds, off limits. Not fair play. As in, if Rose knew I had Beth search the Jane Club apartments, and that you and I are going to talk to Mrs. Górecki, she’d cry foul.”

  “For Rose to tell you she’s safe with no other details and ask you not to look for her—that’s foul play. You’re doing the right thing. This isn’t a game.”

  The streetcar slowed to a stop, and they got off, transferring to a southbound horse-drawn streetcar. After Sylvie slid onto a wooden bench, Kristof sat beside her.

  “How often did Rose visit Mrs. Górecki?” he asked.

  “At least a few times.” Sylvie seemed to be guessing. “Judging from the address Beth gave me, she lives near the Mazureks, whom Rose and I have visited in the past. Mrs. Mazurek has been ill, so we’ve brought her bread and honey, a few tins of tea. A few times Rose went back to the Halsted Street neighborhood with Tessa after work to visit Mrs. Mazurek before Hull House Players’ practice. It may be that she visited Mrs. Górecki, as well.”

  At the next stop, Kristof gave his seat to an elderly woman and remained standing. When it was time to disembark, he guided Sylvie to the exit, then hopped out first to help her down. Then, instead of drawing her gloved hand through the crook of his elbow, he simply held it and waited to see if she’d withdraw from his touch, as his own mother had.

  She lifted her face toward his, surprise flashing for a moment before she smiled and gave his fingers a gentle squeeze. That was all, and yet it was enough to release the cinching in his chest.

  They said little as they skirted the Maxwell Street market. Fish gleamed silver from ice-topped barrels fitted with pipes that fed wastewater into the street. Near them was a long table bearing prunes, raisins, nuts, soda water, candles, matches, and cakes covered with black flies. Smells of raw chicken and fish mingled with those of ripening fruit. The air crackled with haggling, with neighborhood dogs barking and begging for scraps, and with children shrieking in play.

  “This way,” she said. They took a side road, then another until they reached DeKoven Street. A train chugged by a few blocks away. Though the factories and sugar refinery were closed today, the atmosphere remained thick with their fumes.

  Sylvie nodded toward a steamship ticket agency edging up to the potholed road. “Beth said she lives above that.” Greasy newspaper sheets blew across their path as they made their way to the alley’s narrow stairs.

  The hallway outside the door held the odor of the privies in the backyard, along with dill, caraway, and paprika from someone’s cooking. Kristof knocked.

  A woman he assumed was Mrs. Górecki answered with a baby of about four months on her hip. Three more children, all under the age of eight, streamed out from behind her and clambered down the steps. From below, a door squeaked on its hinges as they barreled outside to play.

  “Mrs. Górecki?” Kristof gave a little bow and tipped his hat before introducing himself and Sylvie in Polish, adding that Sylvie volunteered with Hull House, and that her daughter, Rose, was in the Hull House Players with Mrs. Górecki’s daughter, Gita.

  Suspicion shadowed the woman’s features as she bounced the fussing infant. “Gita isn’t here.”

  “We understand Rose paid you a few visits. Would you mind if we speak with you about those?”

  Sylvie laid a hand on Kristof’s arm. “Tell her we don’t need to come inside. She’s probably wary of needing to feed us if we do.”

  At this, the woman visibly relaxed, shifting her baby to the opposite hip. Strands of fading brown hair escaped a red kerchief, framing a face lined by years of care. Still, she was clean, her fingernails trimmed, and her skirt and shirtwaist, though faded, were in good repair.

  “There isn’t much to tell.” She swiped at a spider web in the corner of the doorframe and wiped it on her apron. “One day, I mentioned that I knew her father when he lived in the neighborhood. After that, she started coming with apples or cheese for us, books for Gita to borrow, but she asks all kinds of questions. Rozalia acts like we ought to be friends, wearing my poor Gita out with all the translating.”

  Kristof shared this with Sylvie. From the street below, a medley of Bohemian, Polish, and Italian voices rose and fell.

  “She wanted to belong,” Sylvie said quietly, and Kristof repeated it in Polish. “I’m sure of it.”

  The baby whimpered, and Mrs. Górecki gave him a damp, twisted rag to suck on. “Well, she doesn’t. Not here, and I told her that. She wanted to learn Polish cooking, Polish traditions, the language. Here I am, bending over my laundry tubs, the baby screaming, and she thinks I have time for all that. Me! Teach her! Her in her fancy clothes, with her shiny hair that smells like flowers, her perfect teeth and soft white hands. She’s had better schooling than I ever had, and she comes in here like I could give her something she doesn’t already have. ‘Go on with you,’ I finally told her. ‘If there’s one thing I know about Nikolai, it’s that he wanted your life to be better than this, and it is. You’re not one of us, you’re American. So be happy, and go on to your acting practice with Gita, where you can really pretend to be someone you aren’t.’”

  Sylvie stepped a little closer to Kristof, almost as if bracing against the tirade. “Leave nothing out. Tell me every word she said.”

  So he did. He understood where Mrs. Górecki was coming from, yet still ached for Rose and Sylvie both.

  “Oh. Oh no.” Sylvie’s nose turned pink, but she bridled the emotion pulsing just below the surface. “I wish she’d told me.”

  “She didn’t want to hurt you,” Kristof guessed, then wondered what would have happened if Rose had confided in her. Most certainly, Sylvie would have tried to comfort her. But would Rose have accepted it or resisted it as counterfeit, hurting both Sylvie and herself?

  Kristof knew what that was like. He’d done it himself.

  He thought again of his own mother. When he was thirteen years old, he’d gone with his family to hear a Viennese symphony orchestra playing in Budapest. He had been so moved by the sublime music that he had reached for his mother’s hand. She had startled, shocked. Glowering, Father had leaned forward, hissing that he was too old for “such nonsense.” The music had played on, though for Kristof it had been ruined by this humiliation. Then small fingers found his, and it was Kristof’s turn to be surprised that four-year-old Gregor had filled the emptiness his parents would not.

  But he hadn’t wanted his little brother, already a prodigy, already usurping Kristof in his parents’ affections. He’d wanted his mother—and not even very much of her. Just a moment, just one beautiful shared experience. So he’d pulled away, hurting Gregor in exactly the same way his parents had just hurt him.

  He still regretted that choice. He hoped Rozalia would not do the same to Sylvie.

  All of this flashed through his mind in the time it took to brush a loose thread from his jacket. Then Sylvie’s hand pressed his once more, anchoring him to the present.

  “Mrs. Górecki, did Rose ever talk to you or Gita about wanting to leave home?” Kristof asked. “Did she express any interest in becoming a domestic like Gita?”

  “No.” The woman chuckled. “She gave Gita her condolences, actually, over leaving me and serving in another household. Rozalia would never do the same.”

  Waiting in the doorway while Kristof filled Sylvie in, Mrs. Górecki gentled her swaying to a rhythmic pattern. She began to sing a lullaby. “A-a-a, a-a-a, byly sobie kotki dwa . . .” The child’s eyelids fluttered closed, his dimpled fist tight on the rag in his mouth.

  “Is there anything else you’d like to ask, Sylvie?” Kristof murmured, trying not to disturb the baby’s drift to sleep.

  She stared at Mrs. Górecki. “That song. I’ve heard Rose humming it at home. She sai
d it was the lullaby her mother sang to her, but I only heard it for the first time a few months ago. Please, what does it mean?”

  Turning back to Mrs. Górecki, Kristof explained that he was going to translate the lullaby into English for Sylvie, if she didn’t mind. She didn’t.

  Kristof bowed his head closer to Sylvie’s and whispered the lyrics as Mrs. Górecki sang about two little kittens, both greyish-brown, who wouldn’t settle down for the night.

  Oh, sleep, my darling,

  If you’d like a star from the sky, I’ll give you one.

  All children, even the bad ones,

  Are already asleep,

  Only you are not.

  Mrs. Gorecki repeated the first verse, then ended with the last one, persuading the kittens to sleep because even the moon was yawning. The lullaby over, she continued to twist at the waist, one hand cupping her baby’s head against her shoulder.

  “Thank you,” Sylvie said through Kristof. “That was charming. Beautiful. We won’t disturb you further.”

  Mrs. Górecki waved a hand dismissively. “Rozalia asked Gita to teach her this song, too, the first time she heard me sing it.”

  Sylvie frowned. “Rose told me she learned it from her mother.”

  A shrug lifted Mrs. Górecki’s shoulders as she backed into the apartment. “Her mother might have sung it to her, it’s common enough. But if Rozalia learned it at all, it was from me and my Gita. Good afternoon.”

  The door closed.

  “The poor child,” Sylvie whispered. “She’s just a child, longing for her mother.”

  But that didn’t explain where she was.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  MONDAY, AUGUST 21, 1893

  It had happened over the weekend, this seismic shift within Sylvie that moved her toward a begrudging acceptance of the way things were. Rose wasn’t a child anymore; she was seventeen. She wasn’t living with the Jane Club girls. She hadn’t told Mrs. Górecki of any plans to leave home, and after Sylvie and Kristof talked to more Polish neighbors, they learned nothing else. Whatever her motivation, she was gone, and she wasn’t coming back.

  The sooner Sylvie adjusted to this, the better, and the only way Sylvie knew how to manage the grief of loss was to bury it under work. Which was exactly what she was doing right now.

  Fixing a smile in place, she regarded the group of five women, all English teachers from Indiana, who had hired her to guide them in a meaningful tour of the Fair, beginning with the Woman’s Building. For lunch, she would take them to the Great White Horse Inn, designed to be an exact reproduction of the inn Charles Dickens made famous in The Pickwick Papers. What they would see first, however, was even better.

  “Ladies,” she said, “we are about to enter what I believe will be the pinnacle of your experience in this building, and perhaps throughout the entire Fair.” After a dramatic pause, she announced, “The Library.”

  “Is it true every book inside was written by a woman?” A lady named Mildred adjusted her spectacles.

  “All seven thousand of them. I’m afraid you won’t be able to handle the volumes, but I’m sure you’ll be dazzled by the sheer number of them. In glass cases, you’ll see manuscripts sent from England, written by Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot, also known as Mary Anne Evans.”

  “Oh my.” A rotund woman named Mary dabbed a handkerchief to her nose. “To be so close to their genius, I just can’t tell you what it means to me.”

  Sylvie smiled. “Be sure to visit the cabinet devoted to Harriet Beecher Stowe. It holds a rare first edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, along with forty-two foreign translations.” All of this information flew from Sylvie’s tongue without thought. It was rote to her and required nothing of her to repeat it. “Let’s go in, and you’ll see for yourselves.”

  She followed her little flock of English teachers into the library and heard their gasps of awe, for it was the most beautiful room of the entire Fair. Above low bookcases, wainscoting of old English oak graced the walls, taken from a seventeenth-century French cathedral. The mural on the ceiling, painted by a woman named Dora Wheeler Keith, showed medallions and allegorical figures representing Science, Art, and Imagination, all enclosed in a border of Venetian scrollwork.

  The English teachers were visibly moved by the effect. But today, Sylvie did not feel their joy. She felt very little and was glad of it. She had prayed this morning to be numb.

  Sunshine lit the stained-glass windows and the gilding throughout the otherwise subdued room of deep blues and greens. While Mrs. Fanning, the presiding librarian, welcomed the teachers and pointed out the highlights of the room, Sylvie slowly strolled the perimeter, past busts and portraits. Reaching a green leather armchair, she gripped the back of it, forcing herself to remain standing when her body begged to sink into the cushions.

  Her mind winged over the White City, carrying her back to Mrs. Górecki’s apartment yesterday and the lullaby Rose had claimed as her mother’s own. Why would a girl so tender toward her mother’s memory also walk away from the woman who raised her? Rose longed for a connection to her past, but did that mean she had to sever the bond she’d forged with Sylvie? “Surely there is room in a woman’s heart for more than one person,” she’d mused to Kristof yesterday.

  “Is there?” he’d replied. His fingers laced with hers.

  He knew that Sylvie had been single-minded about caring for her own mother after Stephen came home from war, because no one else seemed to notice how Ruth struggled. After the Great Fire, Sylvie became Stephen’s primary caregiver, a role that lasted until his death. And then there was Rose, the little girl Sylvie loved to love, the precious child who filled her life so completely that she had no need for a suitor. Besides, how would a man in Sylvie’s life have affected Rose? No, carving out space for a man was far too complicated.

  But it hadn’t seemed complicated yesterday. Being with Kristof was natural and simple in the best sense. She was drawn to him in ways she was nearly ready to give up denying. But she didn’t see how he could possibly feel the same way about her. Holding her hand like that, maybe it was only another Hungarian custom, like the habit he’d had to give up upon moving to America of kissing both cheeks of anyone he greeted. Or the tradition of a man walking on the left side of the woman, because long ago men wore swords on their left side, and this way he would be ready to draw the weapon and protect her.

  Yes. Another Hungarian custom. That must be it.

  She frowned. It hadn’t felt like mere convention.

  “Is there?” Kristof’s voice echoed in her mind, entreating her all over again. One question, two words, an open door. At least, that had been her interpretation at the time. Was there room in her heart for him, and in a role that went beyond friendship?

  She barely had the words to admit to herself, let alone to him, that somehow, he was already at that threshold, or dangerously near it. All she’d been able to do was blush beneath the warmth of his attention, not trusting herself to read his intention right. Worried that something had been lost in translation.

  “If you’ll direct your attention to where Miss Townsend is standing.” Mrs. Fanning rescued Sylvie from further reflection. “Just behind her is a glass case of autographs you won’t want to miss.”

  Sylvie stepped out of the way as the English teachers beat a straight path to view the autographs. Mildred held out her hand, fingertips nearly touching the glass. Mary blew her nose into her handkerchief as the others read aloud each name.

  Catherine de Medici.

  Mary, Queen of Scots.

  “Sylvia Townsend.”

  She startled. “Jozefa,” she said. “Are you lecturing again today?”

  “No, this time I’m merely attending. You ladies have arranged such a fascinating array of topics, and I’m learning all I can. How are you?” The question was laden with meaning.

  “Rose is fine, I’m glad to report.” Sylvie forged a smile she didn’t feel. “I do apologize for not lett
ing you know earlier.”

  “Ah. That is excellent news. She’s returned home, then, I take it.”

  Home. Sylvie had no idea where home was for Rose anymore, but she knew it wasn’t the apartment above Corner Books & More. She hesitated. “Actually, she decided to move out on her own.” She might as well have announced, I have failed as an adoptive parent and have driven her away.

  Jozefa inclined her head, exuding grace and class. “Then I congratulate you for raising her to be independent enough to make that leap. The goal, from infancy, is always to guide children into adulthood so they can make their own contributions to society. That Rose is ready for this step tells me you have accomplished this. She is launched!” With a flourish, she flung out her arm as though releasing a bird once caged. Perhaps that was exactly how Rose had felt.

  Sylvie didn’t know what to say. She cast a glance at her tour group to see if they were ready for her again. They weren’t.

  Jozefa squeezed Sylvie’s hand. “I imagine this transition will be more difficult on you than it is for her. But don’t be fooled. You are free now, too.”

  “Free?” Sylvie didn’t feel free. She felt locked inside her regrets.

  “Singleness is a gift, dear, and so is being childless. Don’t waste it. Why, I’d never be able to do what I do if I were tied to a family of my own.”

  But Sylvie didn’t want to be free of family. If she had the choice between having her name read aloud in a list of accomplished women or on the lips of the people she loved most, she would far prefer the latter.

  “What am I supposed to do now?” she whispered.

  “My dear.” Jozefa leaned in, her floral-scented talcum powder choking the air between them. “Whatever you want.”

  Hacks and cabs lined Congress Street, arriving and departing with shoppers, businessmen, and tourists. Behind Kristof, above the alley between Wabash and State Streets, the elevated train roared along the trestle-like bridge, shuttling passengers to the Fair. Bicyclists zipped around omnibuses and streetcars.