by John Jakes
Back in Pullman an hour later, he said to Maritza, “I’m afraid Mr. Jablonec is getting pretty far under the weather over in Kensington. It was an exciting meeting, people all worked up. Mr. Jablonec had already drunk several wines when I left.”
“Oh my, where is he, Fanucci’s?”
“Yes. He wouldn’t leave.”
“I’ll have to walk there and bring him home. Rosie will fix you a bite of supper.”
He returned a grave nod as she rushed to find her shawl. From her chair at the kitchen table, Rosie treated him to a rapturous smile.
Joe Junior and Rosie tumbled violently into her narrow bed. In the times they’d been together, he had never seen her throw off her clothes so fast. He poked into her with all the speed and fury of long deprivation. He exploded inside her in less than a minute, and left her writhing and calling for more. He rested forty minutes and took her again, slower, with more heat and more sweat and more wild cries from her panting mouth when they climaxed together.
Afterward, propped on his elbow and fondling her white breasts, he said, “I hate going home after I see you. I hate living on Michigan Avenue when there’s so much fear and hunger out here.”
Rosie laughed. “You don’t want to go home to Michigan Avenue? I’ll trade places in a wink.”
“You don’t understand that it feels bad to eat off plates with gold rims when people are out of work? Starving?”
“I don’t care how it feels, I want to eat off plates like them. I want to own plates like them.”
“Those, Rosie. Plates like those. How are you going to better yourself if you can’t talk right?”
They’d joshed about this before. “It ain’t grammar lessons they’re after from girls like me, Joe,” she would say. This time she reached down for him, and squeezed. “I got ways.”
He rolled over on his back and gazed at the water-stained ceiling. A locomotive whistled somewhere. In the corner, a short candle burned in a dish. The gas had been turned off for nonpayment of the bill.
“I wish you wouldn’t make fun of things I believe in,” he said. “Maybe you wouldn’t if you understood them better. I could give you some books about—”
“For God’s sake, no books! You read too much yourself. That’s why you’re always stewing about poor starving people when you ought to be happy you got a warm safe bed to sleep in, plenty to eat—folks with a nice bank account. I wonder why you’re so messed up?”
“Maybe the name for what I feel is conscience.”
“Maybe the name for it’s crazy. Besides, I get a feeling a lot of this labor stuff is hot air.”
He rolled toward her again, little reflections from the candle showing in his eyes. “It isn’t.”
“Is that right. Well.”
“Don’t laugh at me. You’ll see.”
“Will I? When?”
He started to answer, then flushed so deeply the color spread to his neck. “I don’t know, yet. But when the time’s right, I’ll strike a blow to help the cause. I’ll strike a blow.”
“Oh, Joey, don’t talk like that, it’s stupid. If you start believing it—”
“I do believe it.”
“—you’ll get yourself killed, and that’s stupid. Throw your life away for some idea out of a book? Not me.”
“Rosie, let’s not fight.”
“I ain’t fighting, I’m just telling you, I take care of me first.”
He leaned over, kissed her roughly. “I’ll take care of you too. Maybe I’ll buy you some gold-rimmed plates for a wedding present, how about that?”
The tension broke; she laughed. “Don’t bullshit me, Joey. There are two kinds of girls, the kind men marry and the kind they screw. I’m the second kind, I got no stupid notions the other way. I know what I am. What kind of girl. A girl who learned to fuck and likes it. That’s all right, I can use it to get a nice life, a nice flat, nice clothes. I never expect you to propose marriage, Joey. If you did I wouldn’t say yes; I got bigger things in mind.”
She ran her hand down to his groin and closed it on him.
“I ain’t talking about this, either. Now come here, I’m ready again. Mama won’t be all that long coming back from Kensington. Put another one of those things on. I don’t want babies, yours or anybody’s. I’m going to get up and out of this dirty place or die. I’m going to eat off some man’s plate with a little gold rim even if you won’t.”
On May 7, a three-member grievance committee went to Pullman management to ask for reinstatement of regular wages. The executives listened with apparent sympathy and then restated the company’s position. Times were bad. Orders were down. Wage cuts were not 40, 50, 60 percent, as alleged; they averaged 19 percent. Further, Pullman was building cars at a loss to keep the shops open, and at least part of its work force employed.
The meeting ended amicably. Word quickly circulated in the community of Pullman that the three committee men who had approached the company were for the moment satisfied.
At midweek, each of the three received notice of an indefinite layoff.
On Friday, May 11, exactly at noon, thirty-one hundred men of the Pullman Palace Car Company put down their tools and walked out. They demanded lower rents in Pullman, cancellation of the wage cuts of 1893, and immediate reinstatement of the three committeemen.
Not all Pullman workers joined the walkout. Tabor Jablonec was among those who stayed. “I didn’t expect nothing else,” Rosie said to Joe Junior when she told him.
Tabor’s loyalty didn’t help him. On Monday, management laid off the remaining three hundred workers indefinitely.
39
Julie
AUNT WILLIS FISHBURNE ARRIVED during the second week of the Pullman strike. She never stayed long when she visited. She observed what she called her three-day rule. “After three days, fish and visitors quickly begin to stink.” Three days were quite long enough for driving Vanderhoff half out of his wits, but not nearly long enough for Julie.
Aunt Willis would soon celebrate her forty-eighth birthday. Unlike her sister Nell, she was a tall woman, with austere features. A long jaw; a long nose; sunken cheeks. She wore her gray-shot hair mannishly clipped and unadorned. Not for her the fuzzy curls, fat buns, heavy chignons of fashion.
Willis’s thinness was the kind sometimes called stringy. Her bosom was minimal. She resembled a woman from some back-country plantation in the South, where life was hard and generally unhappy. Until you noticed her eyes. They radiated warmth and mirth and cynicism by turns. They were windows through which you saw fireworks displays.
Aunt Willis arrived on Prairie Avenue in a depot hack. She spent longer than necessary chatting with the cabman, returning to him some kind of flask he’d evidently shared. She was dressed, as usual, in a costume designed to shock. Full oriental trousers under a short skirt and tailored tunic, low-laced shoes and red silk stockings with a diamond design.
Willis had studied the doctrines of Mrs. Amelia Bloomer of Seneca Falls, New York, the liberated woman who had pioneered hygienic dress in the 1850s. Once enlightened, Willis never looked backward. She scorned the layers of Victorian crinoline, the frills and flounces, the brutal bustles lashed in place. She said they caused a repression of normal and healthy female spirits.
Julie’s aunt was an authentic black sheep. She had run away from her Kentucky home when she was barely fifteen. A boy was responsible. A boy her parents loathed, Nell had confided to her daughter. There was more to it, however. Of all the Fishburnes, Willis had been the one infected by the disease of abolitionism.
As a girl, she read escaped-slave narratives and memorized whole pages of Mrs. Stowe’s inflammatory novel. She began to pay attention to conditions around her. This new interest put her at odds with everyone else in the Fishburne household. “I remember scenes, terrible ones,” Nell said. “She railed at Father about the evil of slavery, the madness of secession. She stood on a chair and pulled off her underdrawers because they were cotton, and cotton came from the slave South
. To this day my sister won’t wear cotton underthings, only silk.” Willis had become an embarrassment Nell tried to conceal from the world.
Fortunately Willis lived in New York. There she worked for causes that made her sister blanch. She consorted with whores at street missions, in order to put an end to their sexual exploitation. She wrote pamphlets demanding changes in one-sided divorce laws. She openly embraced free love and told Julie that a woman had a complete and absolute right to control her own body. No doctor had the right; no politician or prelate had the right; no man had the right—though they were always trying to assume it.
Two years ago Willis had lost the latest of her three husbands, each of whom had contributed to her state of financial independence. Nell preferred not to hear a syllable about any of them; the first was a radical, the second was dissolute, and the third was a Jew.
Willis’s first husband, the Reverend Chauncey Stone Coffin, was twenty years her senior. From his father he had inherited his Unitarian faith, as well as several millions from the family’s New England-based shipping line. He was a leading figure in the crusade for abolition and Negro equality. Willis met him in Chicago during the war. She was living alone and supporting herself with menial jobs, throwing herself into humanitarian work every free moment. She changed dressings and carried bedpans as a helper at St. Luke’s Hospital, where Union and Rebel wounded sometimes lay side by side. She went twice a week to Camp Douglas, the prisoner compound out on Cottage Grove, there helping to write letters for illiterate Southern boys, or just talking to them, holding their hands, sharing their pain at being locked up by fellow Americans hundreds of miles from home and loved ones. Toward the end of the war, the Reverend Coffin toured the prison camp, met Willis, and began his courtship.
He pursued her for two years, while she was attending Oberlin College after the war. At last his entreaties persuaded her.
The Reverend’s passion for black freedom and punishment of Southerners knew no bounds. Unfortunately neither did his passion for female members of his audiences. On one of his speaking tours after his marriage, he was discovered in a hotel room in St. Louis, embracing the altogether naked wife of a local church deacon. Willis heard about the affair, and Coffin left her a million dollars in return for secrecy and a quiet divorce.
She married her second husband, Loyal McBee, a few years later. He was an actor who succumbed early to the most dangerous temptation of his trade, drink. His talent was too meager for anything but secondary roles. He couldn’t keep a penny in his pocket, but Willis loved him madly and completely.
Their marriage lasted four years. On tour in Julius Caesar, he was playing Cassius to Mr. Booth’s Marc Antony in Detroit. He left the theater after a matinee, found a saloon, emerged an hour later and fell in front of a horsecar. His neck was broken. He died instantly. Not until a week later did Willis learn for the first time that Loyal’s family owned a huge flour mill in Rochester, New York, and had given him half a million dollars in a trust fund he couldn’t touch so long as he was in the disreputable profession of acting. Willis inherited the money.
Simon Mordecai Weiss was her most recent spouse. Weiss was a merchant prince; or, more correctly, an aging king when Willis met him.
Weiss had risen from his father’s junk trade to become America’s reigning monarch of wholesale hardware. He always had dirt on his knuckles or a smear of grease on his cheek; he examined major purchases for his inventory personally. He was a wonderfully kind man who had married and divorced two previous wives, both of whom he found greedy and vapid. He and Willis met by chance at a lantern slide lecture on the African interior presented by Mr. Henry M. Stanley, the journalist who thrilled the world by locating the lost Dr. Livingstone on Lake Tanganyika in 1871.
Willis and Weiss happened to have tickets for adjacent seats, and struck up a conversation. Willis liked the old man before she ever knew who or what he was. Two weeks later, he presented her with a simple and honest proposition. If she would marry him, and live and travel with him, engaging him in lively and intelligent conversation for the remainder of his life (it was her bright, rather tough manner which had captivated him), he would make her his sole heir. He had no family.
During his proposal he confessed that he had a weak heart and didn’t expect to live more than five years; he was seventy-seven at the time. Actually he lived fourteen months. The day after he died, his attorneys came to the widow with two different offers from competitors of the deceased. Weiss had often said he expected her to sell the firm after he passed on: she was too lively a woman to spend her life learning about bolts and screws and angle braces. She negotiated cannily, the rival bidders raised their ante several times, and she finally sold to the man who offered five and a half million. She cried every day for a month after she buried the kind and thoughtful Weiss.
Willis had never deliberately sought wealth in any of her husbands. Often she wondered if that was why wealth had found her.
Despite her advanced views and her involvement in less than respectable causes, Willis retained many of the virtues of a Southern woman. Unless hectored or outraged by stupidity, she was considerate of others, excepting of course boors and complete fools. Her brother-in-law qualified for both of those categories, but because he was family she tried to hold her tongue in his presence.
She wasn’t always successful. What seemed mere common sense to her was often unthinkable to her brother-in-law and Nell. Hence she usually managed to outrage them at least once per visit. This time it happened at supper on her first evening in Chicago. She finished her demitasse and lit one of her small dark brown cigars.
“On the train I was reading about Mr. Pullman and his differences with his workers. He sounds dreadfully arrogant. I hope the strikers hold out until they’re treated fairly. I hope they bring Pullman to his knees.”
“You would,” Pork muttered. Nell flashed him a look—Won’t you keep the peace? This will be over in three days. I know she’s crazy but she’s my sister.
Julie’s father seemed unresponsive to the signal. Julie herself was fidgety. She wanted to get Aunt Willis alone. Tell her about Paul. Ask her advice.
Willis tapped cigar ash into her saucer. Nell tried to hide her disgust. Julie’s mother looked especially peaked under the bright electric chandelier. Willis noticed.
“Are you not feeling well again, Nellie?”
“Well, I’ve been in bed for several days—”
“On the advice of that doctor with the choirboy face, I suppose.”
“Dr. Woodrow.”
“Who cares what his name is? Anyone who prescribes bed rest in the dark when the sun is shining is a quack.” Willis waved her cigar.
Nell looked like a hurt bird. “You wouldn’t call him a quack if you were afflicted. God made you a rarity, sister. A healthy woman.”
“Sister dear, that’s nonsense. I’m healthy because I live a healthy life. No encumbering garments. No sickrooms. Vigorous walking every day. Plenty of good food and drink—”
“And men,” Vanderhoff blurted.
Julie’s hand flew to her mouth. But the anticipated storm didn’t break. Willis smiled at her brother-in-law.
“True enough, Mason. I’ve had three splendid husbands. But I’ve decided I’ll never marry again. First, finding a man to match the others would be hard. Further, in this modern age it isn’t necessary, one doesn’t have to wear a ring to enjoy the opposite sex.”
Nell gasped. “Willis, that’s filthy.”
“Oh, I suppose you think so. I forget we’re rather in the middle of the Dark Ages here.”
“You mean here in Chicago,” Vanderhoff said. “Here on the prairie. In the provinces.”
“That’s it exactly, Mason,” Willis replied with her sweetest Southern smile. Julie wanted to giggle. She loved Papa, but it did amuse her when something inflamed him and he puffed up like a toad.
Anticipating a shopping expedition with Aunt Willis the next day, Julie spent a restless night and woke before
daylight. She and her aunt spent most of the day in Elstree’s and Field’s and the other large stores, then went to supper at the restaurant of Willis’s choice, the English Chop House. It was a racy, disreputable place on Gamblers’ Alley, popular with sporting men, painted women, big-bellied pols and fast-talking journalists. Amid dark woodwork, breathing air that was one part tobacco smoke, one part frying grease, one part whiskey fumes, Willis was at home.
“All right, tell me about it,” she said when they were seated and she’d lit another cigar.
Julie’s gray eyes widened. “About what?”
“Come, do you think I haven’t noticed the changes since I was here last? Your cheeks are full and red, but your eyes have a haggard look. Young women lose sleep over young men.”
She stretched her hand across the table to squeeze Julie’s.
“Tell me.”
Julie eagerly let it tumble forth—everything about Paul Crown, who was part of a family the Vanderhoffs loathed.
“You’ve been seeing him, however.” Willis gave it the slight inflection of a question.
“Every Sunday. Now that it’s good weather, we go cycling in Lincoln Park. He pretends to be my instructor. He’s very brash and daring. I think I love him, Aunt Willis.”
Willis was quiet for a moment. “How old are you, Juliette?”
“Why, you know that, you send me a beautiful present every year. On the twenty-eighth of this month I’ll be seventeen.”
“Yes, I do know that. But to mention it aloud is pertinent. You’re young. It’s possible this infatuation will pass.”
“It won’t. Besides, I’ve read enough to know that not so many years ago, girls much younger than I fell in love, married, had children by age fourteen or fifteen.”
“Yes, but they had good reason. They could expect much harder, and shorter, lives. They needed to hurry, you don’t. You have so many advantages—so much to look forward to. All I am doing is cautioning you. Be very sure.”