Homeland

by John Jakes

  “Oh God, Paul.”

  It was her rich friend Welliver.

  41

  Ilsa

  IN THE AUTUMN OF 1889, two young women named Jane Addams and Ellen Starr had sublet the second floor of a run-down mansion at the corner of Polk and Halsted streets. Mostly working-class people lived in the building, but memories of the mansion’s first owner, a real estate mogul named Charles Hull, remained. The place was Hull House forever.

  Hull House not only advised the poorly educated people of the neighborhood on practical matters of diet, child care, sanitation, managing a small budget, but also initiated programs to expand and enrich the mind. Chamber music groups performed at Hull House. Authors read and discussed their works. Painters gave demonstrations and instruction. Professors lectured on aesthetics and history and literature. Controversial speakers presented their social programs.

  But Hull House reached out far beyond the immediate neighborhood, into the homes of Chicago’s wealthy and influential women. There the purpose was to spread the truth about the plight of Chicago’s poor.

  Miss Addams and her friend Miss Starr were in certain ways typical of females of their class and generation. College-educated, they saw a life of purpose and good works as incompatible with marriage.

  “When I completed my degree at Rockford Female Seminary,” Miss Addams told Ilsa shortly after they got acquainted in the late 1880s, “I expected to travel and idle the years away in meaningless pursuits like many another young woman of comfortable circumstances. I toured Europe twice, and during the second trip I had an experience at a brewery in Coburg, Bavaria. I saw young women trudging back and forth from five in the morning until seven at night with huge casks of beer on their backs. The beer was hot. They were carrying it to a cooling house. The beer often spilled, scalding them. Disfiguring them for life, perhaps. Still they trudged. Fourteen hours a day, for one and a half marks. Thirty-seven cents. It was a terrible epiphany. I am not a saint, Ilsa. I am not spiritual, I view myself as a practical woman. But I knew in Coburg that I needed a lifetime mission, and that it had to be a mission of helping women in my own country who were beaten down by toil into a condition of hopelessness.”

  Before that conversation ended, Ilsa Crown pledged herself to work for Hull House. She knew her husband would object. The settlement had a somewhat radical cachet. She didn’t care. In this, Joe would have to bow to her feelings as a modern woman.

  In the troubled spring and early summer of 1894, Jane Addams convened groups of affluent women who supported her and urged them to use their influence in the matter of the Pullman strike.

  To a group of seven gathered around her parlor table on a Monday in late June, the day before the A.R.U. boycott was to begin, she showed a page of Harper’s Weekly. “Here the strikers are characterized as ‘blackmailers and brigands.’ ” She held up a Tribune. “Here is ‘Dictator Debs’ leading ‘the Debs Rebellion.’ To the press they’re all monsters. Yet I was out at Pullman again yesterday, and I’m convinced that the strikers are largely peaceable and decent people who have been abused by their employers.”

  “Will the boycott go on as scheduled, Miss Addams?” Ilsa asked. No matter how close the friendship, no one ever called her Jane.

  “I fear so. I spoke with Wickes, the vice-president charged with labor relations. He repeated the company position. There is nothing to negotiate. Nothing to arbitrate. But there’s worse news. As you’ve no doubt read, in anticipation of the strike widening into a boycott of all Pullman cars, the General Managers Association is bringing in one of its own, John Egan, to take charge. The G.M.A. represents the twenty-four railroads headquartered or terminating in Chicago. John Egan is general manager of the Chicago & Great Western. He’s opened offices and his men are already on the streets, looking for recruits.”

  “Recruits for what?” a woman asked.

  “A force of special deputies. They will be sworn in and used to move the trains Mr. Debs’s brotherhood refuses to handle. They will confront the pickets.”

  “Is that not a legitimate response?” Ilsa wondered aloud. “Or at least to be expected? The Attorney General in Washington, Mr. Olney, sits on the board of several railroads, and favors the owners. Would he not logically employ such tactics?”

  “That isn’t the issue, Ilsa. The G.M.A. is recruiting the worst element. Toughs, pickpockets, traffickers in women—any bit of scum that can be scraped up, armed, and issued a temporary badge. I ask all of you to speak to your husbands. Let them speak to officials they may know at the various railroads, or in government. Order must be maintained. We must not see a reign of lawlessness in the name of capitalism.”

  Ilsa did raise the issue with Joe at the supper table. He scoffed:

  “What’s wrong with preparing to defend yourself against a rabble? Nothing. If matters get out of hand, the authorities should call for federal troops. Altgeld is so pink, he would probably refuse any request for state—Fritzi! For the last time, put that away at the table.”

  She had been trying to pass around her latest treasure. It had cost her an entire dollar, saved from her allowance. The dog-eared autograph card was one of those traditionally handed out by legitimate theaters so patrons could get signatures of starring actors. What made it special was the autograph of the young player who had written his name in a large flamboyant hand. J. W. Booth.

  With a mournful sigh, Fritzi slid the card into the pocket of her embroidered apron. As soon as her father’s head was turned, she made a head scarf out of her white linen napkin. She held it under her chin and cocked her head this way and that, acting out some role.

  Vexed, Ilsa snatched the napkin off her daughter’s head. Carl concentrated on fitting the tines of two forks together so they would stand up in a V, balanced. He was trying not to snicker.

  “I’m entirely behind the G.M.A.,” Joe Senior declared. “That infernal Debs is building a personal empire on the backs of his dupes.”

  “Pop, that’s ridiculous,” Joe Junior said.

  “You think so?”

  “Yes, and I support the strikers.” From the breast pocket of his corduroy jacket he pulled a long white ribbon. Joe Crown tugged his half glasses lower on his nose and peered over them.

  “What the devil is that, may I ask?”

  “The Railway Union is passing them out to members and friends. Debs wants his people to be easily identified in a crowd, so no one frames them for some trumped-up criminal act. The ribbons show solidarity, too.”

  “Not in my house. Nor at the brewery.”

  “I’m sorry, Pop, this is a matter of conscience.” Joe Junior started to tie the white ribbon around his left sleeve.

  “Stop.” Joe Senior shot his hand out, palm up.

  “Give it to me, Joseph. Now.”

  “Pop—”

  “Now.”

  Their eyes locked. Joe Junior’s will broke. He dropped the ribbon in his father’s hand. Joe Senior crumpled it and whisked it out of sight.

  “You may finish your supper.”

  Ilsa sat like a stone, fearing to move, possibly worsen things. She knew young Joe was furious with his father’s iron discipline; probably more furious with himself for bending under it …

  “I don’t care for any more,” Joe Junior said. “I want to be excused.”

  “Go!” Joe Senior waved. “You spoil my digestion anyway, you and your radical nonsense.”

  “Joe, please,” Ilsa said. “Some of what your son is telling you is quite true.” Joe Senior dropped his hand to the boar tooth on its gold chain. “Miss Addams is of the opinion that the Pullman strikers are by and large peaceful. They—”

  “Miss Addams, Miss Addams—frankly, Ilsa, I’m sick of hearing the opinions of an aging spinster who has no grasp of reality.”

  “Oh, that’s unfair,” she retorted, her own anger rising. Joe Junior got up, muttered “Excuse me,” and walked out. Pauli looked troubled. Carl’s forks fell apart with a clatter. His father glared. Carl wilted.<
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  Joe Crown tossed back the last of his stein of dark Heimat beer. The stein was finely etched with the family emblem. “No wonder his mind’s poisoned against law and order. There are more anarchists in this city than in St. Petersburg.”

  Ilsa controlled her anger with great effort. “Wearing a ribbon isn’t such a terrible—”

  “It represents anarchy. It shames this family. I won’t have it. That’s the end of it.”

  Fritzi, Carl and Pauli were all watching with strained expressions; Carl actually looked frightened. For the sake of harmony, peace at the table, Ilsa reined her conscience and suppressed her anger.

  “Everyone eat, please.”

  She too had surrendered. She didn’t like herself for that. Or her husband for forcing it.

  The following day, Tuesday, after some further consideration of all Jane Addams had said, Ilsa decided she had a duty to convey it to others, no matter what Joe thought. She would do what she must, and say nothing to him.

  Although modern devices such as the telephone made her nervous, she nevertheless rang her neighbor on the south, Mrs. Sophie Pelmoor, to explain the strike from the workers’ perspective. Mrs. Pelmoor hung up on her.

  Surprised and dismayed, Ilsa made six other calls to acquaintances around the neighborhood. The reaction varied from indifference to outright wrath. Emmeline DeVore, whose husband owned a small insurance company, denounced the message, and then the caller:

  “We don’t need your kind in this neighborhood, Mrs. Crown. Go back to the Nordseid or whatever you call it. Better yet, go back to Germany.”

  Next morning Pete the yard man discovered that someone had thrown eggs at the house during the night. Joe Senior marched out to look. He stood with his hands on his hips and his lips pressed together. Then he said, “Ilsa, I ask you politely to stay away from those harpies at the settlement house. We don’t need this sort of thing. My business does not need this sort of thing.”

  Ilsa didn’t reply. Nor did he wait for an answer. He assumed she’d obey him. When he and everyone else had left for the day, she hid herself in her room and cried.

  That wasn’t her usual way of reacting to difficulties. Ilsa despised weepers; women who used tears as a crutch, a shield, a weapon of persuasion. But there was one night years ago, vividly remembered, when she had cried as if the world was ending …

  In Over-the-Rhine, north of the Miami Canal, she and Joe were struggling newlyweds. One spring Saturday in 1870, Joe’s employer, Herr Imbrey, gave him something the Crowns could never buy for themselves: a pair of tickets to a concert by the Maennerchor, Cincinnati’s oldest and finest singing society.

  For the special evening Ilsa decorated her hair the only way she could afford, with a sprig of lily of the valley picked wild. After the concert, hand in hand, she and Joe walked to Weilert’s on Vine Street and took a small table in the garden. Overhead, paper lanterns swayed in a strong breeze. On the white lattice behind her husband hung a lithographed portrait of Mozart. In the garden all was noise, merriment, punctuated by the dominant huff of the tuba in the little band.

  Joe was struggling hard these days. He spent every free hour at the Young Men’s Mercantile Library on Walnut, digging bits of knowledge from books on business and finance, stuffing his head with them in preparation for making his way on his own. Ilsa was wildly in love with her young husband. With his tenderness, his essential kindness, he had opened a whole world of physical intimacy to her. And she enjoyed it—which she would not have dared admit to her mother.

  Still, one large cloud troubled their horizon. She and Joe had not yet conceived a child. They wanted one desperately. Several, in fact.

  Joe ordered two lagers from one of the jocular waiters. The beer made him expansive, and a little garrulous. In the din of music and voices, he leaned forward, grasping her hand. “Is there any news?”

  “Yes, but I’m afraid it’s the same as last month.” She averted her eyes during this. It was not proper to speak openly of such matters, even to your husband. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Joseph.” She burst into tears.

  “Nothing, nothing’s wrong, dearest,” he exclaimed, jumping up to comfort her and in the process knocking over his chair. Bending down, he hugged her. Nearby patrons stared. “We must try again. We’ll succeed, I’m sure of it.”

  He righted his chair and sat down.

  “We’ll succeed because we must. Life and work amount to nothing without a family. Families are the glue of life, Ilsa. Our only immortality. The salvation of the world.”

  Ilsa apologized for her tears. But they were real, and there would be more before the long struggle ended and she conceived the child who was born and christened Joseph Junior in 1875, six long years after their marriage. No friend or physician could explain the delay, or why a similar problem didn’t occur with Fritzi and Carl, both of whom were conceived and delivered with relative ease.

  The long wait for a first child had a profound effect on the Crowns. It deepened their feelings toward their offspring. In its way it was responsible for the intensity of Joe’s anger at his older son. The anger was the other side of the coin of love.

  Ilsa’s tears on the morning in June were salutary; they mitigated her feelings of failure, though they didn’t banish them. She had failed Miss Addams, antagonized Joe and her neighbors, and behaved in a way she deemed both ineffectual and, at the crucial moment, cowardly. She dried her eyes and took refuge in her regular duties.

  Ilsa followed the weekly routine handed down by generations of dogged and efficient Hausfrauen. Monday was washday. Tuesday, ironing. Wednesday was devoted to darning, an almost undetectable repair of a garment being another of those hallmarks of the superior homemaker. Thursday was theoretically a day of rest, in preparation for cleaning the whole house on Friday, and baking for the coming week on Saturday. This was Wednesday, so the late morning found her in the rocking chair in her sitting room, with her strongest spectacles, her marble and wooden darning eggs, her pincushions bristling with needles, her caddy of spindled threads of all colors, and her basket of undershirts, drawers, stockings resting on the floor beside her footstool.

  At noon Joe telephoned from his office with a gruff apology. She apologized too. She asked about Joe Junior and Pauli. Yes, they had both reported for work as usual, there seemed to be no further signs of a revolt. Perhaps their son had calmed down, Joe said. Ilsa silently doubted it.

  “However, I have issued an order banning any display of white ribbons on these premises. Fred Schildkraut will discharge any man who wears one.”

  “I see. Is that all?”

  “Yes.” A considerable pause; then he cleared his throat. In a voice full of strain, he closed the conversation with his usual, “I love you,” and rang off.

  The A.R.U. action against all Pullman cars had started on schedule on Tuesday, June 26. So far there had been no fights or demonstrations by unruly mobs. Eugene Debs continued to insist the boycott would be peaceful. But the newspaper owners and editors remained almost uniformly hostile. A Tribune lying on a stand near Ilsa’s sewing table headlined Mr. Debs as THE CHAMPION OF ANARCHY, and mocked him in the subheadings:

  “Six Days Shalt Thou Labor”—Bible.

  “Not Unless I Say So”—Debs.

  Hearing loud footsteps on the stairs, she laid aside the suit of Joe’s summer underwear she’d been patching. Fritzi bounded in from school. Next week summer vacation began; she would be at home and underfoot all day.

  “Mama, I want to recite something for you.”

  “What is it?”

  “We have a new pledge to the flag. Miss Jacobs says it appeared in a magazine.”

  “Yes, but that was almost two years ago.” Ilsa nodded.

  “Starting in September we’re to say it every morning.” Fritzi appropriated Ilsa’s footstool, jumped up on it, clapped a hand over her heart. “I pledge allegiance to my flag, and the republic for which it stands. One nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
”

  Ilsa responded with the required applause. Fritzi jumped off the stool and curtsied. Then she dug in the pocket of her pinafore.

  “Look what I found, Mama. It’s a note. I think it belongs to Paul. He must have dropped it.”

  She held out the crumpled notepaper, a delicate powder blue.

  “If it’s Pauli’s, we should not read it.”

  “Oh yes, you must, Mama.”

  Humoring her, Ilsa smoothed the paper and tilted it toward the sunlit window. In recent years she’d begun to experience annoying difficulties with reading. The note was not too troublesome. The sweeping feminine hand was large, the message short.

  P.—

  Sunday as usual.

  “How I love thee!”

  J.

  “Could the initial possibly stand for Juliette Vanderhoff, Fritzi?”

  “I’m sure of it, Mama.”

  “He is still seeing her.”

  “Where do you think he goes every Sunday afternoon? It’s just sickening.”

  Ilsa should have been amused by Fritzi’s jealousy, but she wasn’t. She knew Pauli had gone ice-skating with the Vanderhoffs’ daughter during the winter, Joe Junior had let it slip once several months ago. Ilsa had even discussed it with her husband:

  “I pressed Joe Junior and he admitted Pauli is wildly infatuated. Do you think he will get over it?”

  “Probably. He’s young. He’ll certainly get over it if Vanderhoff finds out. That stupid ass is liable to come after him with a horsewhip.”

  “Joe Junior has made Pauli aware of that. Pauli doesn’t care. Young lovers think they’re immortal.”

  “Yes, don’t they,” he murmured, taking her hand …

  Ilsa returned the note to Fritzi. “It would be best if you put this back where you found it—no, I have a better idea. Drop it near Pauli’s door. That way he’ll be sure to find it, and no harm done.”