Shadows of the White City

by Jocelyn Green

  “Not yet,” Sylvie replied quietly.

  At this, Meg paused. “How are you, really?”

  Sylvie brought a porcelain cup to her lips and savored the sharp taste before lowering it to the saucer. “Are you sure you want to talk about me? I’m more interested in you.”

  “Do me a favor and distract me from myself. Please.”

  Olive laid her dimpled hand on Sylvie’s arm. “Or we could talk about my birthday.”

  “Oh, darling, not now,” Meg pleaded. “Please, Sylvie. Anything else.”

  Sylvie squeezed her niece’s shoulder. But she understood Meg, too.

  There was no way she would discuss her experience at the Levee in Olive’s presence. But there were other things she could talk about. So in the briefest terms possible, she told Meg about searching the Polish community and hiring Lottie as housekeeper. But after sharing how the young lady was getting on after her second day on the job, Sylvie could tell this was not the sort of news that captivated Meg’s full attention.

  “I also—” Good heavens, her face flushed just thinking about this.

  Meg’s eyebrows arched immediately. “Yes? You what? Is it Kristof?”

  Sylvie gaped. “Why would you say that?”

  “Just hoping, I suppose.”

  Sylvie folded her napkin and smoothed it over her lap. “He’s conducting the Exposition Orchestra now, twice daily. I went to the noon concert today after finishing with my morning tour group. You should have seen him.”

  Kristof had been resplendent in his white bow tie and tuxedo. The way he sliced the baton through the air, using his other hand to cue, demand, and draw back the other sections of the orchestra was a language all its own, and one his musicians responded to. So had she. His entire body leaned into the music, guiding and leading, his expressions ranging from fierce to pure pleasure in the beauty of the piece.

  “What else?” Meg leaned forward. “Tell me everything.”

  Laughter swelled inside Sylvie, threatening to burst out. She covered her mouth to trap it.

  “Come on, Sylvie,” Meg pleaded. “Please tell me the two of you have come to an understanding.”

  “Not exactly, although he’s made his feelings clear.”

  Meg folded her arms. “I’ll say his feelings are clear. And if you don’t mind my saying so, yours are, too. To me, at least.”

  “Is that so? I’m all ears.”

  “You’re attracted to him but afraid to admit it. You’ve spent so many years convincing yourself you don’t need a man that you feel out of your depth now that you’ve—”

  “Wait.” Olive swiveled between her mother and aunt. “What are you talking about? Are you finally getting married, Aunt Sylvie?”

  “What? No, dear. It’s not that simple.”

  Olive’s brows drew together. “Why not?”

  “Yes.” Meg dropped her hands below the table, and Sylvie could tell by the flexing of her arms that she was stretching her fingers to combat the scar tissue. She was agitated. “Why not, indeed?”

  “Signing a marriage contract would be signing over all my property, relinquishing control over everything I’ve managed for decades. That’s no small thing.”

  “If you’re thinking of Beth Wright’s late husband—”

  “Not just him. Roger Bell only courted me for the property, not because he had any affection for me as a woman.”

  Meg laughed. “Roger Bell! You figured him out almost immediately and sent him on his way. The entire affair lasted less than a month. Now, tell me—in the years you’ve known Kristof, have you ever had the impression that he was anything like Amos Wright or Roger Bell?”

  “It’s not Kristof who concerns me. It’s the law.”

  “That’s an excuse.” Meg punctuated her verdict with an emphatic nod.

  It wasn’t just that, but Sylvie didn’t know how much more she wanted to share. She didn’t want to make Meg feel guilty that for fourteen years of her life, while Meg was having babies and raising children with Nate, Sylvie was bringing her father’s medicine to him, calming him after his nightmares, and supporting him on the days his courage failed him and he didn’t want to get out of bed, let alone leave the apartment to face a city of strangers.

  Sylvie also cherished warm memories of Stephen playing checkers with Karl by the fire while Sylvie and Anna kept them supplied with hot coffee. Of discussing Milton and Keats with him on the rooftop. Of rocking Rose to sleep while Stephen told the Grimm brothers’ stories. He always changed them to softer versions that wouldn’t terrify a child. Sylvie wouldn’t erase the years she’d had with him, even if she could.

  But after being tethered to Stephen for so long, she was reluctant to tie another knot, of any kind, to anyone.

  Sylvie sipped her tea. “I like my life the way it is. I’ve always thought that Kristof and I were like Jo March and Laurie,” she said. It was easier to believe when he wasn’t holding her in his arms.

  “You’re more like Emma Woodhouse and Mr. Knightley. You just don’t know it yet.”

  Breaking from her sister’s scrutiny, Sylvie leaned back in her chair and let her gaze travel the room of shoppers enjoying corned beef or chicken salad or evening tea. Some ladies scooped small bites of rose punch ice cream. Waiters at the perimeter of the room stood ready to refill drinks.

  “Rose,” Sylvie gasped. She gripped the edge of the table, wrinkling the linen. “There, four tables away. Her back is to us, but I would know that ensemble anywhere.” She had purchased it here in this department store. “Do you see her? Or am I going mad?”

  Eyes wide, Meg turned to look. “I see a woman wearing an outfit just like one that belonged to Rose, yes. But, dear, I don’t think that’s her.”

  There was only one way to find out.

  Without pausing to think it through, Sylvie rose and threaded between tables until she found herself standing, awkwardly, before a young lady who was not her daughter. “Oh.” Disappointment slipped from her like a sigh.

  “May I help you?” The young woman in Rose’s clothing stared back at Sylvie.

  “I beg your pardon. I just—couldn’t help but admire your dress and hat. Would you mind if I asked you where you acquired them?” A nearby palm frond swayed, its spear tickling her neck. The tang of recently watered soil scented the air.

  The young lady’s friend sniffed. “You don’t have to tell her anything, Gertrude.”

  The bodice didn’t fit Gertrude as though it had been made to her measurements. There was the ink stain, no larger than a pinhead on the inside of one cuff, where Rose’s careless gesture with a pen had left its mark. And the hat was exactly what she and Rose had requested be custom-made in the millinery department.

  These were Rose’s garments. Sylvie was sure of it. Dread spidered down her spine.

  A waiter nudged behind Sylvie with a full cart, and she edged closer to the table. She was in the way and in danger of making a scene. “Please, Gertrude. I have a daughter your age, and I’m sure she would like this.” It wasn’t a lie, Sylvie reasoned.

  “The tag says Marshall Field,” she admitted.

  Of course it did. “But is that where you got it? Did you find it in a pawn shop, by any chance? Or perhaps someone gave it to you—”

  “What kind of a question is that?” Gertrude interrupted. A few diners paused in their conversation, spoons suspended above chicken potpies. Listening. “Leave me in peace and do your own shopping. This store has everything your daughter could ever need, I’m sure.”

  Her face ablaze with shame, Sylvie returned to Meg and Olive. She was mortified. Was she taking leave of her senses?

  “What’s wrong?” Olive asked, and Meg shushed her.

  “Deep breath, Sylvie. Just drink your tea and compose yourself. It’s all right.”

  But it wasn’t all right. She wasn’t all right. “Meg, I am absolutely positive that girl is wearing Rose’s clothes. I just don’t know how to find out why without getting thrown out on my ear.”
r />   Meg looked dubious. “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.” Sylvie’s appetite withered.

  Olive reached for another treat, but Meg intervened, handing her one of the Five Little Peppers books she’d brought to keep her occupied instead.

  While Olive turned the pages, Meg pushed her chair closer to Sylvie. “Sometimes we see what we don’t want to see, and sometimes we see what we long for. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. I do it, too. So did—” She swallowed the end of her sentence.

  “So did Father,” Sylvie finished for her. A chill prickled her skin, leaving gooseflesh in its wake. “What are you saying, that madness runs in the family?” She hated even saying it. Father hadn’t been mad; he’d been wounded. It wasn’t the same at all.

  “I’m saying the mind and heart are complicated organs. Grief is even more so. We can’t begin to comprehend what it does to us. All I know is that it’s a full-body experience that doesn’t go away. Grief affects us in ways we don’t even realize.”

  “I don’t think this is grief, Meg.”

  “My jaws are sore all the time from clenching my teeth through the night,” she whispered. “I don’t even realize I’m doing it. I can barely see through my headaches sometimes, headaches that no doctor can treat.”

  An ache squeezed Sylvie’s throat.

  But her sister wasn’t done. “Mother had those nosebleeds all the time—all the time—after Father came home from war, because she was grieving the husband who would never return to her. And Father, well, you understand more about him than any of us.”

  That was true. After the Great Fire, Sylvie had developed some symptoms in common with him. Bursts of unaccountable anger, panic, anxiety, and fear. For weeks, nightmares had plagued her when insomnia didn’t.

  “This is different,” she said, silently begging Meg to believe her. “Father may have seen people who weren’t there, but I never did. That’s not what’s happening now. You can see for yourself, that girl is wearing Rose’s clothing. I’m not imagining this. This isn’t grief. It’s something else. Something very, very wrong.”

  And she wouldn’t rest until she found out what.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  FRIDAY, AUGUST 25, 1893

  It was nearly five o’clock when Kristof dashed into Corner Books & More after a full day of rehearsals and concerts at the Fair.

  Tessa greeted him from behind the cash register. “Miss Townsend is upstairs paying Lottie for the week.” Thunder rolled. “Can I help you with something?”

  Before he could reply, the rear door opened and closed, and footfalls announced Sylvie’s approach.

  “Did the accounts reconcile, Tessa?” Sylvie asked, then stopped when she saw Kristof. A smile softened her face, along with the most becoming blush.

  He tried to ignore the answering heat beneath his collar. She knew he cared for her and that his feelings wouldn’t change. The rest of their story was up to her. He wouldn’t push. Neither would he withdraw his friendship while she decided. Not now, while Rose was still missing.

  Not ever. Or at least not until she asked him to.

  “Kristof,” she said. “Just getting home?”

  “I am. And you’re going out?” She smelled fresh and clean, two things he was not. He couldn’t wait to trade his tuxedo for different clothes.

  “To the police station, yes. Beth has finally gotten herself arrested for marching for women’s suffrage.” The jacket Sylvie wore hugged her form and flared slightly over her hips, a style entirely too fetching for a visit to a jail.

  The thunder crescendoed, taking on the sound of indistinct voices melding into one. Another protest, Kristof realized, and crossed to the front window. Sylvie and Tessa came beside him as a mass of men rounded the corner and marched past the courthouse. Working men pumped painted signs in English, Polish, and Czech.

  Jobs!

  We want work!

  Decent wages for decent hours!

  They moved in groups of dozens, scores, hundreds. Kristof stopped estimating their numbers when he figured they’d reached the thousands.

  Other men inserted themselves into the throng, fists curled, teeth bared. “Communists!” one snarled. “If you don’t like the way capitalism works, go back where you came from!”

  This was going to get ugly fast. Kristof regarded both women. “Neither of you are going anywhere right now.”

  Sylvie agreed. “Yesterday a fight broke out on the City Hall steps. I don’t want you getting caught in any of that, Tessa. Ivan came to pick up Lottie, at least.”

  “If the two of you will wait for me, I need just a few minutes upstairs, and then we’ll see about getting you both where you need to go.” The crowd choked the street, spilling onto the sidewalks, and pressed close—too close—to the bookshop.

  “We’ll wait.” Sylvie backed away from the window.

  Upstairs, Kristof entered his apartment and began stripping off his tuxedo. Only after he’d rinsed off and dressed again did he think to check on Gregor. He’d gone straight home following their afternoon concert, complaining of his cold. He must have been feeling poorly indeed to give up a Friday night.

  But Gregor’s room was empty.

  If Kristof was exhausted, as he ought to be, he hid it well. He smelled of clean, warm linen as he walked beside Sylvie, and the faintest hint of balsam. Dusk gathered around them.

  “You seem unsettled. Is it the protest that’s bothering you?” Kristof asked above the sound of hacks and hoofbeats on the cobblestones. Now that they’d seen Tessa safely to the streetcar stop, they were on their way, at last, to the police station where Beth waited.

  “Yes, but not just that,” Sylvie admitted. “Meg and I went to Festival Hall this afternoon to hear Frederick Douglass speak in honor of Colored American Day at the Fair. Our father heard him once, and it spurred him to enlist.”

  “I would have been there if we hadn’t had a concert at the same time. So what troubled you?”

  Sylvie was almost embarrassed to tell him. “Some white people in attendance shouted the most terrible insults at this seventy-five-year-old man. Mr. Douglass took control of the situation, but it was so discouraging. Our Declaration of Independence says all men are created equal, but we still don’t treat all men equally, three decades after the Civil War ended. The Fair celebrates man’s progress in the four hundred years since Columbus’s arrival here. But we still have such a long way to go. Women want to vote. Immigrants want jobs. Black Americans want to be treated like full and equal citizens. These seem like such basic things.”

  “They are,” Kristof agreed. “And each one is worth fighting for. Do what you can in your areas of influence but remember that the outcome is not your responsibility alone.”

  She stepped around a crushed tin can. “When I see a need, I want to meet it, if at all possible.”

  Shadows from lampposts and telegraph poles leaned down the street. “We should. You do. Just keep in mind, for example, that you can give Lottie a job, but you can’t be the fiscal savior of that entire family, let alone their neighborhood. You can march for equal rights and speak up for the voiceless, but you can’t force everyone to agree with you.”

  The police station loomed before them, an old newssheet stuck in one corner of the stone stairs. “And I can bail Beth out of jail, but I can’t prevent her from getting arrested again.”

  He sent her a wry smile. “Exactly.”

  Gripping her reticule in one hand, Sylvie slid her other into the crook of Kristof’s arm and entered the building.

  An officer sat behind a wide, battle-scarred desk facing the front doors. Behind him, a door led to what Sylvie imagined were offices and records rooms. To either side of the lobby, short stone staircases led to wings buried half underground, each barred with an iron gate. From one of them came women’s voices. From the other, the deeper timbre of men.

  Sylvie was close enough to see down the stairs to a corridor that ran between a stone wall and a row of cages. The floor moved w
ith homeless men—toughs and decent out-of-works alike—getting comfortable for the night. Smells of tobacco, cigarette smoke, and liquor combined with that of the sanitation gutter she knew ran the length of the cells.

  After stating her business, waiting for a matron to bring Beth out was only a matter of paperwork, payment, and patience. In fifteen minutes, she emerged.

  At the sight of Kristof standing near Sylvie, Beth’s expression compressed into a hard knot of disapproval. “Now I see why you were too busy to come get me out of jail.” Untidy ringlets of hair pointed in various directions from her head. The matron returned to the women’s wing, and Beth jumped when the iron gate clanged shut, echoing across the tiled floor.

  Guilt needled Sylvie. “Beth,” she said, “I tried to come sooner—”

  Beth raised a hand while the policeman shuffled paperwork at his desk. “I see very well, thank you.” She smashed her hat back on and adjusted the wrinkled sash across her torso, emblazoned with Votes for Women. “I see I’ve been replaced.”

  Sylvie was too surprised to respond.

  “Come now, Beth.” Kristof’s polite tone was as brittle as glass. “I make a poor replacement for a friend like you. Isn’t Sylvie allowed to have more than one?”

  “I’ll thank you to stay out of this, sir,” Beth told him. To Sylvie, she said, “It’s been a long day. I could have used a friend on the streets and in that cell. Now I’d like to go home.”

  Sylvie squared her shoulders. “You knew I had to work this morning and that I wanted to hear Frederick Douglass this afternoon, and you decided to march without me. You knew, and I daresay hoped for, your own arrest. I imagine some of the other suffragettes kept you in fine company back there.”

  “They did. Until they were released hours ago by people who actually care about them.”

  Sylvie ignored the implication. This had far less to do with bail, she realized, than with Kristof. But she refused to bow to baseless insults. “We’ll walk with you to the streetcar, but first—”

  “We?” Beth blurted. “We used to mean you and me. Not you and a man. I have no interest in being the third wheel.”