Homeland

by John Jakes

  To Louise he said, “Thanks for the coffee, it was swell. My mother always made wonderful coffee. The best.”

  Louise gave her mistress a look. To the delivery boy she said, “Did you put the chops where I asked?”

  “Right in the ice chest. That’s a big pantry. We had a huge one at home. Half again as big, I’d say. Morning, ma’am,” he said to Ilsa, who gave him a smile and a nod although she was put off by his eyes. They roved the kitchen, jumping from copper pot to silver ladle as though appraising each for some unknown purpose.

  “What is your name, young man?”

  “Daws. Jimmy Daws.”

  “Louise tells me you are new with Abraham Frankel.”

  “Yeah, started two weeks ago.”

  “Mr. Frankel is a fine gentleman. Do you like the butcher trade?”

  “I guess,” the delivery boy said with a shrug whose lazy indifference annoyed her. “It’s better than selling papers or blacking boots on the street. I’ve done that and a hell—uh, plenty more.”

  “Is it your intention to be a butcher?”

  “I don’t know about that, I’m afraid I’d die of boredom. But a guy’s got to eat, don’t he? Well, good morning, ladies, I’ll be going now. Thanks again, cookie.”

  He left. Little Louise Volzenheim seethed. “Cookie, what kind of word is cookie? Impertinent young lout. I’ve met a few like him, always telling you they’re better off in this or that respect. Usually they mean worse.” She whispered again, although there was no one to overhear. “Frankel won’t keep him. He said the boy’s a malingerer.”

  Frowning, Ilsa stared at the heavy door to the back stair. “I don’t like his looks either. I can’t say why. Something about him … something suspicious.”

  Fritzi made her smile when she bounded breathlessly to her mother’s side in the formal parlor, moments after she clattered in from school.

  “Mama, I want to ask you a question. I must!” Ilsa smiled; Fritzi loved plays, actors, and actresses. Often she didn’t speak, but declaimed.

  “Ask, please,” Ilsa said with a nod.

  “I was talking with Gertrude Emmerling at school. We argued and I got mad because Gert said it’s wrong for first cousins to get married.”

  “First … ?” Ilsa stopped, realizing the import of it. She immediately banished even a hint of a smile. “Is that a subject on your mind, Fritzi?”

  “Well—” Fritzi squirmed. “Some. I’m just curious. It’s just a question, Mama.”

  Usa clasped her daughter’s hands in hers. “I’m sorry to tell you that Gertrude Emmerling is correct. Marriage between first cousins is generally frowned upon. In some places it’s actually illegal. I’m not certain of the law in Illinois—” She hugged her daughter. “But don’t worry, it will be quite a few years before you must think seriously about matters of marriage.”

  “I was just asking,” Fritzi cried, and dashed out.

  Ilsa leaned back and folded her arms. So Fritzi was smitten. Ilsa understood. She’d experienced several schoolgirl crushes herself. Fritzi would get over hers.

  15

  Joe Crown

  JOE’S ARGUMENT WITH ILSA upset him. it was well into the morning before he calmed down sufficiently to call Yerkes, something he didn’t enjoy even under ideal circumstances. They needed to discuss another reception of dignitaries for which their committee was assigned responsibility. The reception would be held at the Union League Club on Monday, the first of May—the opening day of the Exposition. The President would again attend. The Infanta of Spain was coming, together with a lineal descendant of Christopher Columbus. If anything, the celebration would be bigger and more lavish than dedication day the preceding fall. Joe had already decided to close the brewery on opening day. Many Chicago businesses planned to do the same.

  He and Yerkes talked for ten minutes. The connection was scratchy, and there was an intermittent whistling on the wire. These modern conveniences were far from perfect.

  Joe liked Yerkes no better than before. The man was a bandit, preoccupied with his personal fortunes. His civic duties were performed in a calculated way, as he revealed when he asked, “Are any of the papers aware of the work we’re putting into this?”

  “You mean have our names been mentioned? Not that I’ve seen.” Joe didn’t add that he didn’t habitually look for his name in the local columns. “Does it make a difference?”

  “Certainly it does. If we’re going to expend all this effort, we deserve recognition. Why don’t you get in touch with someone? Perhaps that gossip hound Gene Field at the Daily News.”

  “If it’s important to you, Charles, why don’t you? I have my hands full.” He spoke more sharply than he intended.

  “Very well, Joe, if that’s how you feel, I will.”

  With a click and another eerie whistle, the connection was broken.

  Joe hung up the earpiece and stepped away from the large wooden box mounted on his wall. He was profoundly annoyed for the second time that day. The annoyance brought him back to the argument with Ilsa.

  He understood her dislike of the brewery, but he resented it. Her feeling was emotional—quite human—but he also considered it unwarranted. He meant what he’d said to her. He ran Crown’s in an honorable and upright way. He had never engaged in some of the vicious practices common in the industry. Fixing of prices by a few men who met in secrecy. Selective price juggling in a chosen town or neighborhood, to hurt competitors. He didn’t allow or condone the Sternwirth, the drinking privilege, for his employees—as he had reminded her. He withdrew or withheld his beer from any establishment found to engage in prostitution, or any that allowed streetwalkers to solicit openly on the premises. He didn’t hire children.

  Some of his colleagues said he’d lost a lot of business that way. “Fine,” he would answer, “I don’t want business at that price.”

  And still it wasn’t enough for Ilsa—because of her father, and her radical female friends. Miss Frances Willard of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, Miss Jane Addams of the Hull House settlement, and that lot.

  Joe Crown was proud of his wife’s independence and intelligence. He only wished that independence, and all the churning forces of the new age—socialism and anarchism, free love, bimetallism, rights for women, to name a few of the worst—had not carried her so far.

  Modernity was fine for a man. For a wife, no.

  In the afternoon he shut his door in order to concentrate on a letter to Lotte. He wrote with black ink on a heavy sheet of paper with the gold crown embossed at the top. His handwriting was small, precise, and neat.

  My dear sister—

  I am remiss in not writing to you sooner. I wish to report that our nephew arrived safely. He is calling himself Paul Crown, which is flattering. Be assured that we will look after his interests.

  He thought a moment before writing the next lines, and he frowned unconsciously as he did so.

  We shall see about some further schooling for him. I sincerely hope you are in good health, that your Christmas was pleasant, and that the New Year will be a happy one. I shall write in greater detail when time permits. The family and I send you our love and thoughts.

  Your affectionate brother—

  He inked his pen again and, with a flourish, inscribed a large capital J at the bottom.

  He stepped into the busy outer office and pulled a colored postal card from a rack holding two or three dozen. All the cards were the same; a rendering of the facade of Brauerei Crown with American flags flying from its towers. Joe had paid a lot for the work of the commercial illustrator, and for the printing. He was proud of the card, which he considered useful promotion, given the worldwide craze for collecting picture cards of all kinds. Paul had added one of the cards to the already cluttered display board in his room.

  Joe enclosed the card with the letter, addressed the envelope and asked Zwick to post it by ocean mail.

  As he traveled home that night, relaxing in his carriage, he reflected on Paul�
��s presence in the family. Some of his worst fears had not been realized. The boy was accepted. Carl clearly admired him, no doubt because Paul was older. Joe had never imagined, however, that Fritzi would be romantically taken with her cousin. The only dark spot was Joe Junior’s reaction to Paul. Not resentment, exactly, but indifference; a cool remoteness.

  Paul was surely suffering over that. Joe Junior was closest to Paul’s own age, and Paul probably looked up to him, as Carl looked up to Paul. Joe Crown didn’t understand the reasons for his older son’s behavior, unless it was another example of his rebellion against parental authority.

  Ah, but who could analyze or explain the actions of a young man who was willful, and influenced by a man such as Benno Strauss? That Joe Crown himself had been willful at a similar age, and had set out for America against the objections of the timid and the envious, was no longer a consideration. He must speak to Joe Junior, he decided. He must do something about his son’s quiet rejection of Paul.

  That evening, after supper, he knocked on the door of Joe Junior’s room. A brusque monosyllable bade him come in.

  Joe Junior was sprawled on his bed in stocking feet, a book resting on his stomach. He closed it, keeping a finger at his place. To his disgust, Joe saw what it was. Progress and Poverty by Henry George. That scurrilous tract! Henry George was a radical who damned the concept of private ownership of land, as he damned those who profited from such ownership. He wanted them crushed under a burdensome tax. Henry George was poison.

  “Hello, Pop,” his son said.

  “Joe, I have come to ask a favor of you.”

  “Yes?” The old respectful sir, drummed into his children since infancy, was no longer part of Joe Junior’s vocabulary. Unconsciously, Joe’s hand came up to his vest. His thumb and index finger closed on the boar’s tooth hanging from the gold chain.

  “I would like you to spend some time with your cousin. Be more friendly.”

  Joe Junior sighed. “Pop, I work six days a week, remember? I come home so tired I can’t see. Just like everybody else who works at the brewery,” he added in a pointed way. Joe Crown’s thumb moved back and forth over the polished tooth.

  “Not too tired to read radical trash, I notice. You could spend time with Paul on Sunday.”

  Joe Junior’s eyes seemed to turn colder, a glacial blue. “Sunday’s my only day to see Rosie.”

  “Nevertheless, I’d like you to be more cordial to Paul. He’s a likable boy—”

  “Yeah, he’s all right,” Joe Junior said with a dismissive shrug. “Young, though.”

  “When the weather warms up, I wish you would show him around the city. Be his guide to interesting places. I don’t ask much of you, Joe, but I am making this a special request.”

  Their eyes locked in a test of wills. Joe Junior grew red-faced. He was the first to look away.

  “All right, Pop. I’ll do it if I can.”

  “Thank you, Joe. Good night.” He wheeled quickly, anxious to leave while he had his victory. As he shut the door, his son’s muffled voice startled him.

  “You may not like the things I show him.”

  With a muttered curse, Joe Crown stalked away down the hall.

  The breakfast table quarrel wasn’t mentioned when he and Ilsa got into bed together. Joe reached under the covers to grasp her hand. She pressed against him in the darkness, smelling of one of the creams she dabbed on her skin at night. She kissed his chin and touched it affectionately.

  “About Paul’s enrollment in school—”

  “At the end of the week I’ll speak to him. I am already making inquiries.”

  “Thank you, Joe.” She kissed him again, and in a few moments he heard the gentle susurrus of her breathing as she fell asleep.

  He was wide awake. The house creaked and cracked in the grip of the iron cold of the January night. He thought about Paul. His troubles aboard ship; the tragic fire in New Jersey; his frequently hazardous trek to Chicago. He couldn’t help contrasting that with his own emigration as Josef Kroner. He’d experienced hardship, hunger, and, on occasion, hostility. But his long journey from Aalen to Cincinnati in 1857 had never been violent. Certain parts of it had been thoroughly enjoyable.

  He recalled the first stage of his trip, on a coal barge down the Rhine. He’d paid the captain a pittance, and worked for his keep. He traveled in the early summer. On several nights he lay on the deck watching a thousand stars sparkle overhead. Once he’d seen a star fall, trailing fire; a spectacular sight.

  He left the port of Bremen on a vessel of the North German Lloyd Company. The steerage was spartan, but not unhealthy. The food was plain but plentiful, and the summer ocean was smooth all the way. In New York City, he landed at a place called Castle Garden, a vast, shedlike building with a conical roof, located in a pleasant park at the tip of Manhattan Island. Someone identified the park as the Battery.

  It took young Josef only three and a half hours to be processed by the brusque, badgering officials, and to be cleared by their medical examiners.

  He knew there were many Germans settled in and around a thoroughfare called the Bowery, which he found without too much difficulty before it grew dark. He drank beer and ate wursts and bread at a German saloon, then asked for work. He talked himself into a short-term job of helping the owner repair his roof. He needed money for passage to one of the heavily German cities inland.

  Still calling himself Josef Kroner, he finished the roof repair in two months. He then sought work elsewhere. Communication wasn’t hard; so many of the people in New York spoke his language. He had already purchased a little book of English grammar, and was studying.

  He found a job as a general helper at the large and gloomy Bowery Theater. The plays he watched standing at the back of the house featured frequent fist fights, knifings, pistol shots, and attempted ravishments of a heroine. The audience chatted and laughed and loudly insulted one another from the hard backless benches on the main level, called the pit.

  Those up in the cheap gallery seats were no better. Street urchins, prostitutes, and whole families tossed down coins and orange peels at actors who pleased or offended. Josef Kroner conceived a strong dislike of theater as he first saw it in America.

  As soon as he’d saved enough money, he planned to buy a cheap train ticket to St. Louis, a mecca for newly arrived Germans. The theater’s box office cashier happened to have a brother in Cincinnati who ran an ice company. The cashier liked Josef, and gave him a letter of introduction. “Forget St. Louis,” he said. “Cincinnati’s a whole lot prettier. Plenty of our people there, too.”

  How amazing, the small turns that sent a man down one road instead of another. But for the cashier of the Bowery Theater, he might have settled in St. Louis. Had he done that, he might not have apprenticed at a brewery, or envisioned his own brewery, or slaved to make it a success after he opened it in Chicago, with mostly borrowed money.

  He would never have met Ilsa, or known the faces of his own dear children, or given shelter and opportunity to his nephew, or found himself a rich though often troubled man in a new homeland …

  It was pleasant to contemplate all that in a warm bed on a cold winter night.

  Joseph Crown the man had been shaped by Josef Kroner the boy. As Josef, his earliest memories of Aalen were good ones. The smell of yeast, beer, bread baking. The lively chatter of colorful and worldly guests who occupied the ten rooms of the Hotel Kroner—the small brewery being directly in back. Young Josef played in front of the hotel on cobbled Radgasse, or romped in the surrounding hills with other boys of the town. He was excellent at his studies but impatient with the rigid routine of school.

  His father Thomas was a studious man with a perpetual frown. Thomas worried about politics, the ruthless nobility who controlled the land, the fate of Germany. His mother Gertrud was the practical one. She supervised the hotel and kept the books. She was exceptionally quick with figures, a trait Josef inherited.

  He didn’t understand the significance o
f the Revolution of 1848 until many years later. He only knew it was a terrifying time for the family, because his father rushed off to join the rebels, and then his older brother Alfred was seized by soldiers one night and thrown in jail. Alfred was nine years old; Josef was seven. Josef was lucky not to be snatched too. Gertrud hid him in a wardrobe. Alfred had been caught while dusting the tiny lobby.

  Alfred came home profoundly changed. He had been beaten and abused. He never walked normally again.

  Christmas, 1849, was one of the worst times of Josef’s life. Thomas Kroner was hanged in Stuttgart and then brought home to Aalen for burial. The first night the closed coffin was in the house, resting on trestles in the black-draped lobby, Josef came into the room trembling. He realized his father was lying inside the cheap unpainted box. He threw himself on the coffin, pounding on it, screaming his hatred and grief until he was dragged away by the family’s Lutheran pastor.

  The pastor hauled Josef up to his bedroom on the third floor while Gertrud stood by, too drained by grief to interfere. The pastor flung Josef into his room, slammed the door and turned the key. Josef screamed and beat on the door.

  A few minutes later he heard a scraping sound outside. Alfred, with his crippled bandaged foot.

  Alfred whispered to him through the door, trying to soothe him. Josef screamed again, louder than ever. Finally the key was turned a second time and the Lutheran pastor came in with a pitcher of cold water, which he dumped on the ranting boy. Josef was jolted to sanity by the dousing.

  He ran out of the room, and downstairs, and fell sobbing into his mother’s arms. He had never acted so crazily before. He never acted that way again.

  With Thomas Kroner in his grave, the little hotel and brewery fell on hard times. There was simply too much work. And Josef’s mother was a broken woman. First, in 1851 the brewery closed. The hotel grew dirty, acquired a bad reputation. Regular guests stopped coming. When Gertrud died of a heart seizure in 1853, family friends helped arrange a sale of the property. It fetched a very low price, barely enough to cover debts.