Homeland

by John Jakes

  Circulating in the crowd brought Nell and Julie near a stocky silver-maned gentleman with sparkling blue eyes and an impressive domelike forehead. Nell swiftly veered off to confront him with hand held out.

  “Potter.”

  “My dear Nell. And Julie. How charming you both look. Happy New Year. Thank you for coming.”

  “Would we miss it? Never, dear man. Where on earth can we find Bertha? There’s such a crush—”

  “Just in there, with our special guest from New York. The authoress.” Potter Palmer spoke to the Vanderhoffs in a friendly and relaxed way; because of the Kentucky connection, he knew them well. He had a bond with Pork too. Palmer was an Eastern Yankee who had sensed and seized an opportunity when Chicago was young. So had Pork, from Connecticut, and Field, who was from Massachusetts, and Armour and Pullman, both New York State men.

  Like them, Palmer had been born in the 1830s. He made fortunes in real estate, Civil War cotton, and then retailing. For some years R. H. Macy’s had annually sent representatives to study Palmer’s dry goods store, which was famous for its bargain sales, lavish window displays, and absolute dedication to customer satisfaction. Marshall Field and his partner Levi Leiter had built their own fortunes by buying out the Palmer store.

  “I never have time for fiction, but I presume you know the lady’s work, Nell,” Palmer continued to Nell and Julie, gently guiding them by their elbows to urge them on; others were waiting for a moment of his time. With a nod at Julie, he added, “It’s too racy for young girls, I’m advised.”

  With a simpering smile, Nell said, “Perhaps if I knew the lady’s name …”

  “Did I neglect that? Mrs. I. J. Blauvelt.”

  “Oh dear, really?” Nell fanned herself with a hanky. Julie felt several degrees warmer. Mrs. I. J. (for Isobel Judith) Blauvelt wrote the sort of novel meant to be smuggled under the bedcovers and read with flushed cheeks and palpitating pulse. Her books had about as much literary merit as a flour sack label, but no one cared. Mrs. Blauvelt herself was roundly condemned. “She crosses the frontier of prurience under the flag of naturalism” was the charge of one cleric. Her latest, The Spangles of Society, had nevertheless sold tens of thousands of copies.

  Julie loved Mrs. Blauvelt’s books, which she bought surreptitiously, or borrowed from acquaintances. They had a soothing sameness. The heroines were always chaste, always rich—and always had their virtue imperiled by fortune-hunting “cads” or “old roués.” Some poor but upright young man—a muscular deck steward; a snappy-talking journalist; a poet of unrecognized genius—came along toward the end to propound life’s true values and pull the heroine from the cad’s clutches, into a blissful final chapter of sunsets, doves, and flower-covered cottages. The stories were set in glamorous locales. A European spa; Saratoga in racing season; the mansions of Newport and New York. No Terre Haute, Laramie, or Palatka, Florida, for Mrs. Blauvelt’s thrill-hungry readers.

  In her liking for the cheap and racy novels, Julie joined a legion of women of all ages, shopgirls to grandes dames. What a coup to have Mrs. Blauvelt here! For a few moments, she quite forgot about Paul.

  Mother and daughter squeezed into the packed Louis XVI drawing room, the first of its kind in Chicago. It was a vision of gold and white, with specially commissioned wall and ceiling Frescoes depicting riotous roses and chubby pink cupids in flight. “Ah, there she is,” Nell exclaimed, waving. “Bertha!”

  “Dear Nell,” said Bertha Honoré Palmer, gliding to embrace her friend. She never rushed; she was confident others would wait for her. “How lovely to see you. And Julie. Have you met Judith? Come, you must.”

  Mother and daughter followed the woman who had bestowed upon herself the title of “the nation’s hostess”—not without some justification. Bertha Palmer was intelligent, a social leader with strong opinions and a vigorous program of philanthropy. She had important ties in the East. Her sister Ida was the wife of Fred Dent Grant, oldest son of the former President.

  She was also wonderfully assured and attractive, Julie thought. Somewhere in her forties, she had striking dark eyes and handsome features. For today’s reception she had chosen a lavish gown of her favorite color, blue, and put tiny pink rosebuds among the diamonds sparkling in her hair.

  “Yes indeed, I hit him with my parasol,” said the stout blond woman to whom Bertha led them; she was standing at the center of a dozen female admirers. “Three times! I won’t let some cheap journalist insult me. Not five minutes into our interview, he blandly asked if I consider my work to be trash. Trash? This is the age of new writing! The new realism! I am an artist!” Julie knew that was true, but not as it was meant. Mrs. I. J. Blauvelt was a former circus performer who had left the high wire to take up the pen, and thereby gotten rich.

  Members of her claque murmured and applauded her statement. Nell and Julie were introduced. “How do you do?” Mrs. Blauvelt said, visibly annoyed by the interruption of remarks about herself. She had a jaw like a horse, and eyes like agates. Her bosom was fashionably full; she looked much too heavy for the high wire.

  “We were discussing Gene Field, the fellow Isobel thrashed,” said an elderly woman, who Julie thought was a McCormick. She got the various McCormicks mixed up, but she believed this was the wife of Leander, Cyrus’s brother and partner. “His column may be popular, but I for one find him insolent.”

  “At least one can understand his English,” another woman said. “That dreadful Irish dialect of Dunne’s is incomprehensible.” This was a reference to Finley Peter Dunne’s Mr. Dooley, a mythical Chicago saloon keeper who dispensed philosophy and political opinion through a column in the Evening Post. Julie found Mr. Dooley droll, but she didn’t dare tell her parents. Pork Vanderhoff hated what he called “shanty Irish,” and everything about their culture.

  Julie liked the Daily News “Sharps and Flats” column by Eugene Field—no relation to Marshall—even more than she liked Mr. Dooley. Field hated pomposity and convention. Pork of course “loathed” Mr. Field. And Julie’s mother had once said, “How is it possible—how is it remotely possible for a man who writes verses beloved by children”—Julie had memorized and recited Little Boy Blue early in her school career—“to be so sarcastic and disdainful of those he knows are his betters?”

  Mrs. Blauvelt’s voice brought Julie out of her reverie. The author had resumed her autobiographical monologue of self-congratulation. At one point she compared herself to Gustave Flaubert and Émile Zola. She saw incipient boredom on the faces around her and immediately marched off to seek new listeners. The little group dissolved.

  Nell was waving to another acquaintance, but Julie didn’t want to spend the afternoon trailing after her mother, so she contrived to slip away as Nell rushed in the other direction. She wandered by herself through various rooms of the mansion. The Spanish music room, the English dining room, the Moorish passageway leading to the ballroom where the orchestra played.

  The ballroom was undeniably the focus of the party. Almost a hundred feet long, it was packed with guests helping themselves to eggnog and Madeira, chicken salad and escalloped oysters and other delicacies spread on long buffet tables. Various painted ladies and gentlemen gazed down from railed picture galleries at either side of the room. The small white-tie orchestra sawed away on a balcony at the far end. Great blazing Tiffany chandeliers lit the scene, whose splendor matched anything Mrs. Blauvelt might have imagined.

  Julie sampled the eggnog and wistfully wondered what Paul was doing this afternoon. Enjoying himself, she hoped. Alas, he’d never be invited to the Palmers’. She wished she were with him.

  She gazed around until she saw people she knew slightly. Charles Yerkes, the traction king, and his beautiful second wife, Mary Adelaide. Julie didn’t want to talk to them. Papa couldn’t stand the man. He said Yerkes had served time in prison for some kind of stock fraud. In Chicago he controlled a network of construction, operating and holding companies, and though Julie had no head for business, nor any interest in
it, she had ridden Mr. Yerkes’s defective cars, and knew of his gouging fares. Yerkes ignored all complaints. When the issue of overcrowding was raised, he’d replied with a sneering remark printed in all the papers: “It’s the straphangers that pay the dividends.” Julie’s father said of Yerkes, “If you’re going to be a God damn crook, you owe it to your loved ones to keep it a secret.”

  She worked her way around Mr. and Mrs. Yerkes, nodding and smiling when Mary Adelaide greeted her. She spied her father among a group of men and women intently listening to another gentleman. She didn’t recognize the speaker; she saw only his back.

  She circled through the crowd till she had a view of his face. Then she recognized him instantly. It was George Pullman, an imposing man in his sixties who wore a full and impeccably trimmed imperial.

  George Mortimer Pullman was another of Chicago’s giants; another who had left school early, like McCormick. He had started as a cabinetmaker in upstate New York, but his mind ranged to much larger objects and concepts.

  His fortune, his huge manufacturing plant, and the ideal workers’ town he built nearby all sprang from one invention. In the late 1850s, Mr. Pullman had remodeled two day coaches of the Chicago & Alton line, installing his patented fold-away upper berths hinged to the sides of the car.

  Passengers liked the prototype sleeping cars, but the railroads were skeptical and overly cautious. After Mr. Pullman perfected and patented a collapsible lower berth in 1865, he had to finance his own prototype car, Pioneer, which proved too large for existing stations and underpasses. But he wouldn’t change his design, which the public loved, so the railroads eventually surrendered to the Pullman Palace Car Company, and rebuilt their depots and their overpasses. Mr. Pullman had also invented the dining car, and the chair car, and the car with vestibules. Papa thought Pullman overbearing, but he was acceptable because he voted Republican.

  Mr. Pullman was speaking to his group without pause, as if expecting no interruptions. His gestures were broad, theatrical. The man did indeed radiate an unpleasant arrogance.

  Julie slipped in among the listeners, near Pullman’s wife Hattie. Pork gave his daughter a fishy blink of recognition and thoughtlessly twisted the tip of his little finger in his right ear, as if to dislodge wax.

  “They bay at me like a pack of hounds because I reduced employee wages. I did it simply because orders have been reduced. But I am castigated for making no similar cuts in the salaries of company officers and foremen. There you have a total lack of understanding of commerce and the American system.”

  “How do you mean, sir?” someone asked.

  “You don’t grasp it? If I cut the wages of my executives, I face the possibility of mass resignations. That would leave me with only a skeleton management when prosperity returns. Maintaining salaries for the upper echelons is imperative. So is continuance of our dividend. The public expects eight percent on Pullman shares, so we pay eight percent. It’s a matter of confidence.”

  “They’re simply vile, these people who hurl accusations at George,” Hattie Pullman declared. “We even have some malcontents who continue to draw Pullman wages.”

  “People who hold jobs and still speak against the company?” said a gentleman. “I can’t believe that.”

  “Absolutely true,” Pullman said. How smug he was, Julie thought. “However, I’m not without resources in that regard. I have a network of—let’s call them observers. They help me root out the worst agitators. When I discover one, his lease in the town of Pullman is canceled.”

  “It’s only just,” Hattie said. “George invested hundreds of thousands to build a model town. A town in which all that’s ugly and discordant and demoralizing is eliminated.”

  Julie hesitated but then raised her hand. “Mrs. Pullman, may I ask a question?”

  Hattie Pullman froze. “If you wish, Miss Vanderhoff.”

  “Really, it’s more a matter of not quite understanding something. The newspapers say that one of the complaints about the town of Pullman is that rents haven’t been reduced, even though wages of the renters have.” Actually she never read the papers; she’d heard about it from young Joe Crown.

  She made her statement with an innocence that anticipated a friendly reaction. She thought she was being logical, straightforward, and fair. She merely wanted the facts from Pullman himself. She was altogether unprepared for the stunned stare from her father, the withering look from Hattie Pullman, or the scorn and fury of the great man himself:

  “Miss Vanderhoff, must I count you among those ill-informed persons who know nothing about business? Pullman the manufacturer and Pullman the landlord are separate and distinct centers of profit. Do not confuse the two.”

  “But it doesn’t seem entirely right that—”

  “Juliette, where’s your mother?” Pork said loudly. “We must move on. George—Hattie—friends—a happy New Year to you all.”

  “And to you,” George Pullman said, without feeling. He glanced at Julie; it was the kind of look he might have given someone who was unclean and odorous.

  In the carriage, everyone was silent. Nell dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief. When Julie leaned forward to touch her mother’s hand, to explain that she’d really meant no harm, Nell drew her own hand away with a wounded look. She rested her forehead against the side window and shut her eyes. At home, she went to her room without speaking.

  Julie paced her bedroom, increasingly distraught. The door crashed open.

  “Papa—”

  “Don’t say anything. Not a damn word. You shouldn’t have spoken to Pullman that way. Everyone will hear about it. Didn’t you see them staring before we left?”

  Julie’s nerve broke. Tears came. “It was a fair question—”

  “Not from a refined young woman, God damn it. Your place is one step to the rear, listening and looking pretty. You dishonored your mother this afternoon. She’s in bed again, prostrate.”

  That night, in the darkness of the bedroom, Julie slowly sank into a darkness of her own.

  She fought it, recognizing it for what it was; the onset of a condition similar to Nell’s; a state of depression and immobility that could last for days, or weeks.

  She understood her feelings were probably a guilt reaction to the uproar she’d caused with one question. Understanding didn’t help her fight off the despair. Paul was forgotten. She pulled the covers over her head and drew her knees against her bosom and clenched her hands, and hid.

  Why not? Women were afflicted with delicate nerves; this kind of suffering was inevitable. Mama said so.

  37

  Paul

  ON A WARM MARCH day when the snow was melting, Paul paced the aisles of McClurg’s bookstore, a Chicago landmark located in an old brick building at Monroe and Wabash. The store smelled deliciously of book paper and leather bindings and the coffeepot kept hot on a gas ring near some rocking chairs in a rear corner. Cousin Joe said it was called the Saints and Sinners Corner; many of the town’s literary figures rocked and read and argued there. A man sat there now, with an open book. Paul had said hello nervously the first time he passed by. The man gave him a cheerful reply.

  Paul wondered if he was someone famous. The man was in his early forties, long and skinny. He slouched in the rocker, one leg thrown over the arm. He had pleasant, regular features, eyes as china blue as Cousin Joe’s, thin straight hair on his balding head, a large mole on his left cheek. His wrinkled sack suit was an atrocious plaid, brown, yellow, and green. A dented black derby lay underneath his chair.

  Paul paced up one aisle, down another, fretfully. He took care to go quietly at the back of the store, so as not to disturb the man reading. When Paul came near again, the man looked up suddenly, noticing something. His eyes flickered a warning.

  A second later Paul heard thumping footsteps. “Young man.” He spun around. It was the prissy clerk who’d eyed him when he walked in. “You’re wandering as if you’re lost. Do you wish to purchase a book?”

  Nervously,
Paul grabbed the nearest one. “I’m waiting for a friend, is that all right?”

  “It depends. Are your hands clean? If not, kindly don’t touch the stock.”

  Hastily Paul replaced the book. The man in the rocker called out, “Say, Simpkins, I spotted a snake back here.”

  “A snake? My God, where?”

  “Over in that corner.” The man got up; he was tall, slouching, round-shouldered. He pointed. His nails were badly bitten. “I saw it crawl behind that empty crate.”

  “We’ve never had a reptile in here—” The clerk rushed to the front, rushed back with a broom. He held it in front of him like a rifle as he crept toward the crate. The man in the corner winked at Paul.

  The clerk kicked the crate aside. Nothing there, except dust and a spider’s web.

  “Mr. Field, is this another of your practical jokes?”

  The man had an infectious smile. “Call it a necessary distraction.”

  “To what purpose, may I ask?”

  “Simpkins, don’t act so damned snotty. This is McClurg’s, not a finishing school. The purpose was to stop you from badgering innocent customers like this young lad. Have you forgotten a bookstore’s for browsing? That is its heavenly purpose. If you can’t remember that much, go chase snakes.”

  Simpkins marched off, livid. He glared at Paul as he passed. Still amused, the tall man sat down again. “I’ll have to speak to General McClurg about that worm.”

  Paul approached the rocking chair. “Allow me to thank you, sir.”

  “Sure, Dutch, and I’ll tell you how. Buy the Daily News. Don’t read anything else.”

  Paul decided the nickname Dutch didn’t sound so bad if someone said it in a friendly way. “Do you work for that paper?” he asked.

  “I write for it. Field’s my name. Go on, look at all the books you want. The worm won’t bother you again.”

  “Thank you. I am waiting for someone. She’s very late.”