Homeland

by John Jakes

  Perhaps she imagined all this because he was an immigrant, with a certain exotic aura. Perhaps none of what she saw in him, save for the physical features, was real. She didn’t care, she had taken a liking to the boy. She wished they could become better acquainted.

  Nell Vanderhoff worked the hairbrush downward in a few more swift strokes, and the ritual was finished. She laid comb and brush aside; then, reaching from behind to touch her daughter’s cheeks, she regarded Julie’s face in the glass.

  “I have never seen your cheeks so red. Too much time in the sun, playing tennis.”

  “I love tennis, Mama.”

  “You overdo. Just as you overdo skating in the winter. Excess in either one is bad for the complexion, the circulation—the entire constitution. I’ve told you repeatedly, Juliette, girls and women are delicate. You must expect it. Deal with it. Guard yourself rigorously against the ravages of weather, of nerves, of—”

  “Oh Mama, I just don’t understand how fresh air can be bad for you.”

  “Nevertheless, that’s the case. Dr. Woodrow will confirm it—and please don’t be obdurate and suggest that you know better than a doctor trained at clinics in Switzerland. You grow more willful every day. It must be your age. A passing phase. Let’s hope it passes quickly, because dealing with it exhausts me. It simply shreds my nerves to bits.”

  She drew her hands back while continuing to look into Julie’s eyes. Her expression was always the same: sorrowful, disappointed, yet with flickers of anger. It always pierced Julie with guilt, a certainty that she’d failed, been found wanting, as her mother’s only child.

  “Mama, you know I never want you to feel bad because of me.”

  “I hope so, dear. I hope so.”

  The physical and emotional health of Mrs. M. P. Vanderhoff III were constant concerns in the family. Neurasthenia—prostration of the nerves and brain—was a recurring complaint for Nell. Many women of her class and upbringing were afflicted with it, but Nell’s was an extreme case, even Dr. Woodrow admitted that. Julie’s mother suffered from excruciating headaches, and problems with digestion and elimination. She often flew into shrill rages, or sank into long periods of morose silence. She spent many hours, sometimes days, in her bed, with the room darkened.

  She read periodicals incessantly, hunting for new nostrums. She flogged poor Dr. Woodrow to find and prescribe new cures. One month an iron tonic, the next a compound of rhubarb, or camphor, or mustard. She took sulphur baths; she wrapped herself in kelp. She forced Woodrow to bring his surgical implements to the house and bleed her. Regularly, these cures restored her energy and spirits. Just as regularly, gloom and suffering returned, and the cycle repeated.

  Nell had taught her daughter that such suffering was woman’s lot. That it was a result of the female nature and humors, and that Julie must not expect her life to be any different from her mother’s. Julie hated the inevitability of that, but it did seem to be true. She too was plagued by headaches, as well as profound and sometimes prolonged black moods in which she wanted to do nothing, see no one. Nor was she unusual. Many of her young female acquaintances were devastated by ills ranging from a high nervous state to a perpetual head cold, stomach gripe, catarrh, and the depression attending woman’s monthly curse. Julie had the idea that the health of young American women was generally bad, and wondered why it should be so.

  On the positive side, her health problems diminished whenever she exercised regularly and vigorously. In this she had to strike a balance, because Nell opposed sports for young ladies.

  Julie folded her hands in her lap and again gazed at herself. Her cheeks were indeed sunburned, but the color deepened even as she watched. She had a powerful, uncontrollable, slightly wicked longing to see the German boy again.

  Common sense quickly pricked that bubble. What she wanted was impossible; could never happen. The German boy belonged to the Crown family. Mama and Papa hated the Crowns, all of them.

  Well, what did it matter anyway? He probably didn’t remember her, she’d probably made no impression that afternoon they met.

  The sad thought quite ruined the rest of the day.

  30

  Paul

  AS FRIEDRICH SCHILDKRAUT HAD predicted, he learned. Because of the performance Schildkraut demanded from his men, he learned quickly.

  He learned the process, beginning with the soaking of the brewer’s barley in the malthouse until it germinated properly. Then it was kiln-dried, cleaned, ground, stirred into water in the great copper kettles. Cooking released the sugars, allowed the draff to settle to the bottom and left the wort. After cooling, the wort was boiled with the hops, the resulting mash cooled again, quickly, and piped into a fermenting tank where the yeast worked, transforming sugars into an alcohol content between four and five percent, depending on the formulation. Each batch, each beer, was the result of painstaking attention to ingredients, temperatures, cooking times, cooling times, fermentation and storage times. The senior men at Crown’s were always writing in their thick brewers’ books. No wonder Germans had taken to the profession; it required a total dedication to detail.

  Paul oiled and wiped the brewery machinery; helped with repairs. He worked on the huge mills that handled five hundred bushels of malt in an hour; on the pneumatic makers that regulated moisture and temperature of the germination bed; on the Baudelot coolers that lowered the water temperature with a mix of water, ammonia, and brine. In the subbasement, he stoked the fires under the brewing kettles.

  He didn’t mind the hard work. He was putting money aside every week. In a month he had enough saved in a jar to pay for skates as soon as Spalding’s restocked the shelves. Juliette Vanderhoff was always there to remind him that the drudgery had a purpose.

  The job toughened him; thickened his legs; built up his arm muscles. His beard was tougher too. He was still growing; changing; rushing swiftly to manhood.

  He soon learned something else at the brewery. His earlier feeling had been right. He, didn’t want to be a brewer all his life. There had to be a way to explore the new world of photography; there had to be someone else to teach him its techniques, now that Rooney had dropped from sight.

  As Schildkraut had predicted, he went home at night completely exhausted, muscles in arms and legs and back hurting hellishly. Sometimes he was so tired he nearly nodded off at the supper table. Once when Paul lifted his head with a start, realizing he’d dozed between bites, Uncle Joe gave him a quick, pleased smile.

  Finally Spalding’s stocked its winter equipment. Paul bought a splendid pair of racers like the ones the clerk had described to him. He was moving steadily toward a meeting with Miss Vanderhoff, but there was more to the preparation than just buying skates. Every night, when all he wanted to do was sleep, he drove himself through forty-five minutes of knee bends and other leg exercises. Joe Junior said learning to skate meant toughening your leg muscles and especially your ankles. He would fall into bed in pain, but it was soon relieved by visions of Juliette Vanderhoff’s delicate skin, rich ebony hair, lithe rounded body.

  On a warm Sunday in late September, Uncle Joe took all the family but Joe Junior to the Buffalo Bill Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders show. Paul’s cousin went out to Pullman to see his girl that day.

  Uncle Joe had booked one of the best front-tier boxes. Paul could barely sit still, watching a performance he’d only been able to dream about in Berlin. Colonel Cody, white-hatted and noble as ever, charged up and down on Isham, blasting blue glass balls to bits as assistants threw them into the glare of huge arc lights.

  There was a surprise in the much-anticipated Deadwood Stage number. The coach made a slow circuit of the arena and the mustachioed driver stopped here and there to point to a spectator—who was thus invited into the coach for the rest of the act. Paul almost collapsed when the driver pointed at him.

  He scrambled over the railing with his aunt and Fritzi and Carl calling encouragement. He squeezed between a fat woman and a man who smelled of hair oil. As
the coach rattled and swayed around the arena, the mounted Indians swooped down on it, brandishing lances and uttering bloodthirsty cries.

  A volley of pistol shots announced the arrival of Buffalo Bill and his cowboys. They quickly chased off the Indians and sent the coach around the arena once more, to discharge its delighted passengers at their seats.

  Afterward, Paul shook his uncle’s hand and thanked him effusively. “You’re welcome,” Uncle Joe said, already glancing elsewhere. He rushed away to greet an acquaintance leaving the show with his family.

  Uncle Joe’s reserve puzzled him. When Joe Junior came home that night, Paul spoke about it.

  “You mean you don’t understand the reason? Come on! You’re still Pop’s nephew, but now you work for him. You’re part of his property. Maybe you pal around with Benno—”

  “I am not pals with Benno, I do not like that man.”

  “Makes no difference to Pop. You’re on the other side of the fence. Not a union man, but the next thing to it. Nothing you can do about it, either. So watch your step.”

  Joe Junior had been shifted to the bottling house, so Paul didn’t see much of him during regular working hours. Usually they met during the thirty-minute break for lunch. While they ate, Joe Junior would expound his theories of labor and capital, which Paul assumed he’d gotten from Benno Strauss. In the evenings, after supper, Joe Junior would occasionally drift into his room to press a book on him.

  “Part of your education, you’ve got to learn these things, Paul.”

  There was an American philosopher, Thoreau, whom Joe Junior loved because his writings encouraged disobedience of unjust laws. There was a novel called Looking Backward, by Edward Bellamy. “A man falls asleep and wakes up fifty years later, in 1957, and the world’s a perfect socialist Utopia.”

  Joe Junior wanted him to read a local reformer, Henry Demarest Lloyd, an editor at the Chicago Tribune. “A real hell-raiser. He wrote a great book about the coal mine owners downstate who locked out their men because the men made a few basic demands. The miners practically starved. Lloyd’s just written a new one, it’s even better. Wealth Against Commonwealth. You know about Charles Darwin, don’t you?”

  “Heard of him, that’s all.” Paul was vigorously doing his knee bends while Joe Junior lounged on his bed.

  “Darwin had this theory that in the animal world, only the strongest survive. All the capitalists—the mercantile aristocracy, Lloyd calls them—they like to think it applies to them. They imagine they can chew up little men and spit them out because that’s how nature works. Lloyd crucifies them. That’s pretty radical for a newspaper editor who works for plutocrats.”

  “I would think he would lose his job.”

  Joe Junior grinned. “Except for one thing. Lloyd married the publisher’s daughter. I’ll get you his book as soon as you finish these,” he said, pointing to the small stack on the floor next to the bed.

  Paul also read more newspapers, picking up old ones left around by the brewery workers. He didn’t understand many of the terms in the front-page dispatches and editorials, so he bought a cheap pocket dictionary.

  Soon he perceived a pattern in the simpler prose of most daily journalism. Workingmen were almost universally hated, or at least considered dangerous. Paul saw that Joe Junior, for all his exaggeration, his antagonism toward his father, was perfectly correct about one thing. Chicago, and America, was riven by a struggle. Workers against owners, owners against workers. The struggle was full of poisoned words, hatred and, often, violence.

  Before he switched off the lights, Paul would sometimes sit gazing at the stereoscope picture of the lady Liberty, and wonder whether all she represented was as peaceful, pristine, and fine as he’d once believed.

  One sunny noontime he and Joe Junior went up to the brewery roof to eat wursts and bread from their paper sacks. Louise packed two sacks every day except Sunday. The sacks were the only evidence that Paul and Joe Junior came from a special, favored household.

  Benno Strauss and a half dozen of his cronies were already on the roof with their tin lunch pails. As usual, Paul felt daring to be up here with the socialists, in defiance of his uncle and Schildkraut.

  Benno was always friendly to Paul. If they chanced to meet in the brewery, he would offer some gruff greeting like, “Joey teaching you good, kid?”

  “Quite a lot,” Paul would answer. He really didn’t know yet how much the instruction was worth, and he wasn’t sure what to think of Benno. Benno was certainly fearsome to look at. And strong. Yet he was a blow-hard. Even those who liked him said so behind his back.

  Benno and his friends were eating and talking loudly. One man peered over the roof coping and made rude comments about the well-dressed customers enjoying dinner under the trees in the Biergarten.

  Paul and Joe Junior were sitting a short distance from Benno’s crowd. Benno was eating his enormous sandwich of salami and onion and garlic on black bread with the ferocity of a bear crunching the bones of prey.

  The moment he finished, he broke into someone else’s conversation and took over, as if by right. “When I was in Paris in the winter of eighteen and seventy-one, we wasn’t so lucky about food. Before the siege was all over and the enemy marched in, we was dining on broiled cat and roast rat. Believe me, I was happy to see the God damn Germans all over the place; we could slip around at night, cut some corporal’s throat and steal a knapsack to fill our bellies.”

  Skeptical, one of his friends said, “You were happy to kill Germans, your own people, when they captured the city?”

  “My own people was in Paris. The brave ones who set up the Commune in the spring of ’71. The Germans, they were just a pack of imperialist dogs.”

  Another friend waved good-naturedly. “Ah, blow it out, Benno. You were probably dead drunk with some chippy the whole time.”

  “Listen, I went to bed and went to the barricades. Wasn’t ever no time Strauss couldn’t fight one minute and fuck the next.”

  The men laughed; so did Paul and Joe Junior. Benno heard them. “Yeah, you better believe it’s true, you babies.”

  “Benno, let’s talk serious,” another of his friends said. “We’ve let up on the boss lately. Do you think that’s right?”

  Paul and his cousin shot looks at one another.

  “Nah, it ain’t right, but I’ve had things on my mind. We got to start pressing him again. Demand nine hours a day. Also one apprentice for every fifteen men, not twenty. Even if we ain’t got the union, that’s what the union wants.”

  Paul walked over to the group. “Mr. Strauss, may I ask a question, please?”

  “Sure, tell me what’s on your mind.”

  “I have asked questions of other people about this union of yours. I was told the union wants a maltster to be paid sixty dollars a month. My uncle pays seventy-five. Doesn’t that make him a good boss?”

  “Nah, don’t be fooled. Your uncle pays a little more here, a little more there, but he saves a lot more by keeping the sheep happy, keeping the union out. Stupid question.”

  Paul’s face reddened. “I am only trying to educate myself. To find out what is right—”

  “Hey, Paul,” Cousin Joe called. A warning.

  No longer genial, Benno lumbered to his feet and jabbed Paul’s chest with his thumb. “The union is right. Socialism is right. Your uncle, he’s wrong because all the capitalists are wrong. Look at what they’re doing to this town!” Benno slashed his hand toward the vista of rooftops, the river, the hazy silver lake to the east. “Hundreds of men out there ain’t got jobs. They got empty bellies, their wives and little ones are starving too—who cares? And the moment that gottverdammt fair closes, you’ll see ten times as many on the streets.”

  “Benno,” someone said in a low voice. Benno’s odd oriental eyes flicked toward the rooftop door. A nondescript little man in a checked suit sauntered out, working his teeth with a gold pick.

  “Afternoon, boys. Fine day. Enjoy it, we’ll have all that blasted i
ce and snow soon enough.”

  There were a few muttered greetings, but they weren’t cordial. The newcomer’s name was Sam Traub. He had a desk in the main building, he came to work every day, but his salary was paid by the United States Government. Tax laws required a revenue man on the premises of every brewery. Joe Junior said Traub was considered a spy for Uncle Joe and Mr. Schildkraut.

  “Why you worrying about the weather, Sam?” Benno said. “You’re always cozy at the boss’s fire, ain’t you?”

  His friends laughed. Traub too, but Paul detected an undertone of anger. “Ah, Benno, why the hell don’t you go back to your own country if you don’t like this one?”

  Benno hooked his thumbs in his belt, enjoying himself. “Because we got to reform this one.”

  “Don’t count on it. The coppers and Judge Lynch, they’ll reform you first. Good thing, too.”

  “Sam,” Benno said, “fuck you.”

  Two of his cronies applauded. Traub snatched the gold pick from his mouth. “Leave it to reds to ruin a man’s digestion.” The slam of the stairway door was loud as a shot.

  Benno chuckled and sat down on the coping. “Told him good, huh?” He stroked one side of his mustache with an index finger; noticed Paul frowning.

  “Something wrong with you, little boy?”

  “Just another question.”

  “Spit it out.”

  Paul knew he should keep quiet, but he wanted to know. “You talk, you’re always saying you have this plan, that plan, but you keep your job here—you draw your wages. You even let my uncle pay to free you from jail—”

  A thrill of fear went through him as Benno got up and stalked toward him. “Are you saying we’re a bunch of talkers—blow-hards?”

  “I’m saying—”

  Benno grabbed Paul’s shirt and leaned close, spewing fumes of garlic and onion. “You got the wrong idea, little boy. Joey?”

  Joe Junior jumped to his feet, almost like a dutiful soldier.

  “We got some more educating to do here. Can you and him get out of the house on Sunday?”