TransAtlantic: A Novel

by Colum McCann

  Jon Ehrlich attempted a nod, but a bubble of blood rose up at his mouth. She pushed the shattered cube off his legs. Don’t you go. Don’t you dare. He moved his head slightly. His eyes fluttered. Don’t you die on me.

  She was sure she saw him nod and then she heard the rattle of his throat. Lily could feel the fall of his life away from him, some manner of relief, a melting away. She rose from her knees and put her hands to her head and let out a high keen.

  The storage shed still stood, three-walled. The remaining walls yawed and groaned. The lake within the ice. The water eager for movement. She stepped across the shattered planks and leaned down to Benjamin once more.

  She put her arms under the shoulders of her youngest son and tried to yank the dead boy out from under the collapse. His boot caught on a piece of beam. She could feel the boot rip as she yanked him from under the rubble. She tugged again. The ice moved.

  Some laughter rolled from him. She bent down towards him. Some laughter again. Oh. Benjamin. Oh. She grabbed the back of his head but it lolled. She shook him. Get up, get up, you’re alive. His eyes were huge and surprised and unmoving. She rose into a crouch, pawed her way across the hard ground. Reached for Adam. She put her face against his lips. No breath. No warmth. More laughter, she was sure of it. But from where, whom? She heard it again, this time from its proper distance. Her chest heaved. From the house. The other children emerging from the cabin. The high play of their voices. Lily rose and rounded the corner of the sheds. She brandished an ice fork. Go back to the house, she said. Put wood on the fire, Nathaniel. Clean up the cornmeal, girl. Don’t come out again. I’ll be right home with you. I’ll be right back. You hear me? Tomas? Lawrence? Now, I said. Sweet Jesus. Now. Please.

  Emily stared at her. Rooted to the ground.

  —Go, shouted Lily. Go!

  She went back to the work of dragging the bodies from underneath the ruin. The three walls remained. They moved minutely, threatening collapse.

  SHE LAID THE bodies out side by side on the ground, her husband and two sons, then went back towards the house. She needed cloths to cover their eyes. Lily pushed open the cabin door. The boys were cowering in the pantry. Emily was at the window, looking out. Lily called her daughter’s name. No reply. She called it again. Emily, she said. No movement at all. She stepped across and turned the girl from the window. The child’s eyes were remote, vacant.

  Lily slapped her daughter hard across the face, told her to get herself dressed, there was work to do. The child did not move, but then she rose and put her forehead against Lily’s collarbone. Mother, said Emily.

  TWO EVENINGS LATER Lily Ehrlich hired a carpenter to come out and restack the cakes and fix the wooden shed. The weather was mean. The wind blew bitter. The hammering went all the way through the night.

  A thaw would come soon. She would have to learn how to move the ice herself. To get it to the boats and to float it downriver.

  She lay in her bed, surrounded by her four remaining children. The boys were old enough now, she thought. Emily could help manage the books. There were ways to survive. She looked out at the lake. The light from the moon sighed upon it. She woke Tomas first, then the other two. They stepped out into the night, down towards the barn, their breath making cloudshapes against the dark. First of all we’ll get the wagons ready, she said. Make sure the horses are fed.

  THE BOOKLETS CAME from a company in Cincinnati. The McGuffey Reader. An All-Surpassing Opportunity. Teach Yourself in 29 Days. Money Back Guarantee. She had no idea what to do with them. The words presented themselves as a series of squiggles. How could she learn to read if she could not, in the first place, read? How could she be expected to learn what was unlearned in the first place? Her eyes swam. Her throat tightened. She tucked the booklets away on the shelf.

  She hired a carriage and went south, two days, all the way to St. Louis. The buildings seemed so enormously tall. Laundry fluttered from windows. Men in stetsons tied their horses to hitching posts. A railway station whistle sounded out. Lily inquired about the bookshop. A young boy pointed the way. A bell on the door rang. She shuffled among the shelves. Frightened that she might be seen. The words on the spines of the books meant nothing at all.

  It was a clerk who found it for her, high on the shelves accessible only by ladder. She knew it was he by the frontispiece engraving. The book was wrapped for her in brown paper and twine.

  At home, Emily ran a small finger underneath the marks on the page. This is I. This is W. This is A. This is S. This is a B.

  BY THE THIRD year after Jon Ehrlich’s death, Lily had a group of men working with her—two Norwegians, two Irishmen, and a Breton foreman. Her sons, too. Lily was a small thin figure on the ice, a little hunched by age, tapered by sorrow, but her voice carried across the expanse. They bought the newest machinery: broadaxes, crosscut knives, ice plows, harnesses. The saws kicked up white sparks. The horses heaved and steamed. The sheds were rebuilt and reinforced.

  After school, Emily helped skim the huge cakes of ice across the surface of the lake.

  Lily went to the city once a month. A grueling journey. Often it took three days each way. Lily haggled across the desk on Carondelet Avenue. She knew the price she was getting and she knew at what price the ice dealer was selling. It galled her to think that there was such a gulf.

  She took Jon Ehrlich’s fountain pen out of her small silver purse and marked a signature on the page. She had learned this much, a push of the pen into the resemblance, at least, of a name. The ice dealer worked a thumb at the base of his nose. He was thin and sharp, as if he’d been sliced with a fresh saw.

  —You can write?

  —Of course I can write. What do you think I am?

  —I didn’t mean anything by it, Mrs. Ehrlich.

  —Well, I hope not.

  She strode away, along the Mississippi. She watched the younger women walk along in their elegant finery: wide hats and swishing dresses. Paddleboats and steamers. The whole river was wide with commerce. Paperboys called out about gold and railroads. A hot-air balloon went over the river and drifted off towards the west. A man on a machine rode back and forth near the Opera House. With an enormous front wheel. The onlookers called it an ordinary. There were young men in wide cowboy hats who tied their horses outside saloons. They didn’t glance at her much anymore, but Lily didn’t mind. Her back was stiff from the years of ice. She developed a rolling shuffle. She kept three elegant dresses for business matters. The rest of the time her clothing was plain, dark, a touch of mourning about it.

  In her fourth year without her husband, she negotiated a price with the foreman from Brittany. She sold him the cabin, the leases, and all the equipment. The first thing she packed was the painting that Jon Ehrlich had given her. All the boxes, the furniture, the chairs, the delph, the books. They loaded four wagons. She kept the painting upfront. They pulled up to their new home on Florissant Avenue. The roadbed was made with crushed limestone. The house was a two-story redbrick with high ceilings and a wide staircase. A pale blue carpet festooned with threaded roses. At the top of the stairs she hung the painting, then immediately set about her business as a dealer. Middle Lake Ice. An English sign writer made a logo on the warehouse doors. She was flustered by his accent. He bowed to her and she blazed red with embarrassment. An Englishman, of all things. Bowing to her. Lily Duggan. Bridie Fitzpatrick. Once the death carts had rumbled. The snowflakes fell.

  It amazed her to think that she didn’t even have to touch the ice anymore. That it was others, farther north, in Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, who did the work of farming. She costed out the business carefully. The wages, the transport, the melt. The astounding logic of money. The ease with which it could appear, and the speed at which it could be lost. In St. Louis, she secured a line of credit with the Wells Fargo Bank on Fillmore. She walked up to bank tellers who knew her name. How are you, Mrs. Ehrlich? Such a pleasure to see you again. On the street men and women nodded to her politely. It frightened her. She held
the edge of her wide dresses and stammered hello. She was shown the best sides of meat in the victualers. There was a hat shop on Market Street. Lily bought a flamboyant design with an ostrich feather, but when she brought it home she caught sight of herself in the long oval mirror and couldn’t bear the thought of being seen in it, put it back in its box and never touched it again.

  The demands came. From the hospitals. On the steamers. In the restaurants. Fish stalls. Confectioner stores. There were even some hotels that had begun to use the ice in drinks.

  After six years Lily Ehrlich was able to send her oldest surviving boy, Lawrence, to university in Chicago. Then Nathaniel and Tomas, too. In the winter of 1886 Emily turned fourteen years old. She spent most of her time upstairs in her bedroom, devoted to books. Lily thought her daughter, at first, to have been overcome with loneliness, but soon found out that the girl liked nothing more than to shut the curtains, light a candle, read in the flickering dark. The plays of Shakespeare. The writings of Emerson. The poetry of Harte, Sargent, Wordsworth. The room was so full of books that Lily couldn’t see the wallpaper.

  Her own experiment with books had not lasted very long: she was mother to the daughter. That, in itself, was enough.

  Lily divided her ice business in the winter of 1887. Three equal parts to her sons. Lawrence came home from university wearing a gray suit and bow tie, the owner of an eastern-sounding accent. The two younger boys were interested in the puffs of steam that drifted across the rail yards: they sold their portions, tipped their hats, said good-bye. Nathaniel went west to San Francisco, Tomas went east to Toronto. Emily received nothing: not out of spite, but simple convention. It never even crossed Lily’s mind. Mother and daughter bought a smaller house on Gravois Road. Out front, they cultivated a garden. They kept to themselves. On Sundays they dressed for church: long gloves, wide hats, white veils that fell over their eyes. They were sometimes seen on the promenade together. There weren’t many suitors for Emily’s attention. Nor did Emily expect any. She was hardly considered pretty. The books consumed her. There were nights when Lily asked Emily to come to her bed, slip in the covers beside her, settle against the pillows, and read. I was born in Tuckahoe, near Hillsborough, and about twelve miles from Easton, in Talbot county, Maryland.

  That house on Great Brunswick Street seemed far away to Lily now, remote from her in daily custom and sound. The years themselves seemed to forget what she once had been. The shadows of forty years.

  SHE WAS NO judge of fine fashion, but for the occasion she wore a long purple polonaise with a fitted cutaway overdress. The amethyst brooch lay high on her neck. Her gray hair was tucked under the curved brim of a mauve bonnet.

  She stepped slowly from the horse-drawn carriage and shuffled arm in arm beside Emily who wore a simple alpaca dress. The evening was cool. Dark had just fallen. She was confused by the movement of the light and the close passing of so many bodies. They entered the hotel. Past the granite columns. The bellmen gave them cursory glances. Inside, high piano notes floated through the lobby. The dull pain was deep in her body now. Her hands, her knees, her ankles.

  Lily cast a quick look at the large wooden clock in the corner near the bay windows. Too early by far. All around, women stood in expensive shawls and gowns. A few men in black tie and jackets. The fuss and flux. Small pockets of Negroes, too, in the corners. Mostly men. Everyone so finely turned out.

  She edged forward. A gauntlet. She was sure they were watching her. She skirted the latticed wall, found a row of landscape paintings to pretend to admire, pulled Emily close.

  —Quiet now, she said.

  —I didn’t say anything, Mother.

  —Hush anyway.

  On large wooden easels around the hotel lobby she saw his name. Underneath, the words: National Women’s Suffrage Association.

  Small clusters of women walked around underneath the chandeliers. Their serious chatter. Over by the bar, curls of smoke purpled the air. A distant clinking of glasses.

  The piano player launched into a new tune. Lily turned to Emily and tucked a stray strand of plaited hair behind the girl’s ear.

  —Mother.

  —Quiet.

  —There he is, said Emily.

  Across the lobby, Lily saw him. Douglass was seventy-one years old now. His gray hair still stood in serious abundance. He wore a black jacket and white shirt with standing collar. In his breast pocket, a white handkerchief. He filled out his jacket and had developed a slight slouch, but there was still a heft to him: thicker, wider, yet more at ease. He was surrounded by a group of eight or ten women. They leaned in eagerly towards him. He stood at a slight remove, but then he cupped his hands and made some comment and the women laughed as if they were all part of some intricate clockwork.

  He glanced across the lobby. Lily couldn’t be sure, but perhaps his gaze had remained on her. Maybe some movement behind her, some human fuss. When she turned to look at him again, he had already begun walking towards the hotel auditorium.

  The room drew in behind him. A gust of air. A wake of light. As if it were all being funneled down to follow him. She felt herself falter. She was seventeen years old again. Standing outside Webb’s house. Bidding him good-bye. The early Dublin light. The shaking of hands. So unusual. The creak of the carriage. Later the butler, Charles, rebuked the staff. How dare you. The smallest moments: they return, dwell, endure. The clack of a hoof against the cobbles. The way he had looked at her as he left. The manner in which he had opened the day. The spectacle of possibility. I have little or nothing here. A small room at the top of a house. A series of back stairs. I as good as belong to them. Owned. She left under darkness. The shame she felt in Cork. At the Jenningses’ dinner table. He did not recognize her. At the dockside, too. He remained saddled. She was no more to him than a sweeping of papers, a wash of the carpet, a broom of the floorboards, a yard of calico. But what had she wanted? What had she expected? She heard the loud braying of the horses. The swoop of seagulls. The rain. She could not look him in the eye. Sheets of rain across her face. A destiny. Stepping onto the boat and away. It was all a confusion. She had been so very young. The ship horn was a relief.

  Lily took Emily’s arm and they walked together across the floor. Two policemen stood outside the auditorium door, tapping their truncheons against their calves. They glanced at her, said nothing. The hall was almost full. Rows and rows of women on folding chairs. Their dresses spread out around them.

  They took their seats near the back of the hall. She removed her gloves and put her hand upon the back of her daughter’s, rubbed her thumb along the inside of Emily’s wrist.

  Douglass was introduced by a pale woman in a plain black tunic. The applause rippled through the air. He stepped up from the front seats. Climbed the stairs at the side of the stage. A slowness that he disguised well. He strode to the lectern. Put his hands upon it, looked out. He was thankful for the introduction, he said, glad to be in a city that meant so much to the many causes of true democracy that he so fervently espoused. There was a slight tremble in his voice.

  He paused a moment, then stepped from the side of the lectern as if to show the full extent of himself. His polished shoes, his dark trousers, his jacket trimmed at the waist. His skin was lighter than she recalled. He spread his arms wide, allowed a silence. When the true history of the anti-slavery cause shall be written, women will occupy a large space in its pages. He spoke as if he were saying it for the first time, that he had just found these words in the last few steps across the stage, low now, almost a whisper, a secret to be imparted. The cause of the slave has been peculiarly Woman’s cause. Immediately there was a stir around the room. A stout lady stood and applauded. Several other women followed. There was a shout from a man in the front seat, thrusting a book in the air. Send the nigger home! A scuffle broke out. A flail of arms and legs. The protester was escorted out. Four women left alongside the man. Douglass held his hands in the air and extended the white of his palms. A hush descended. When a gre
at truth gets abroad in the world, no power on earth can imprison it, or prescribe its limits, or suppress it. She could see an orchestra in him, a whole range of instruments and sound. His voice was loud and booming. It is bound to go on until it becomes the thought of the world. He paced the stage. In and out of a pool of light. His shoes clicking on the wooden floorboards. Such a truth is a woman’s right to equal liberty with man. She was born with it. It was hers before she comprehended it. The rational basis for proper government lies in the female soul. Lily could feel the grip of her daughter’s hand, growing tighter now with each moment. There were motes of dust around Douglass in the air, animate and twirling: it seemed as if the dust itself might constitute something.

  He put his hand to his forehead as if trying to summon a new idea. He shut his eyes: close to prayer.

  Lily thought that he might remain that way, that she, too, would become fixed forever in whatever occurrence his mind had found. She was back on the staircase. He brushed past her to go downstairs. She felt her heart lift. All around her now there were women standing, and the applause rang out around the hall, a series of shouts, but Lily stayed seated, and what she felt was incomparable, singular, yet ordinary, too, all the living moments gathered together in this one, the door of his room closed, a tiny rim of light underneath it, growing brighter in the dark. She understood that she had come such a distance, traveled all this way, she had opened a door, and her own daughter was in the room, her own history and flesh and darkness, leaning down by the light of an ancient lantern, to read.

  AFTERWARDS, DOUGLASS WAS ushered quickly from the hotel. A carriage waited outside, the horse clopping its hooves against the cobbles. The night had grown sultry. A hangnail of moon perched above St. Louis. The gas lamps made the darkness unequal.

  A group of protesters had gathered on the far side of the street, men in shirtsleeves and wide suspenders. A row of policemen stood in front of them, arms linked, nonchalant.