Ugo wasn’t the first of her men, he was just the latest. She knew enough by now. He wasn’t so bad. Wouldn’t beat her. Never threatened to kill her. Wasn’t so large. The routine didn’t hurt; it was just routine. That’s what he laid down for. The worst part was that people asked about Ugo if they had an idea who he was. Was he dangerous? Did he hit her? Some people got aroused hearing such things. Evie took a little extra on the side from some gamblers who asked questions like these and more. Ugo didn’t know about that. Evie wouldn’t tell him. He gave her some too, of course. She spent it all, every dime. It was too much money for something as simple as being an old man’s girl, and the only thing that made what she was doing right was to make the money disappear. She wasn’t so naïve anymore to not think what the money meant, or who it was coming from, those gamblers.
That year a swindler they called the Cypriot was the main obsession on the River Ward, on Evie’s street too, even more than the battles in Europe. That’s what people talked about. The Cypriot was a numbers guy from Chicago, some said, a policy man looking to wheedle in on established terrain. There were stories about his being a ladies’ man, a brute. This excited a lot of the girls Evie knew. Some of them said he was a rogue Ottoman assassin trained in Constantinople. That he was a secret agent here to meet other secret agents. Or to knock off a dancer at Chez Paree. It made no sense. One day the Cypriot was a celebrity criminal from the East Coast. The next, girls insisted he was involved with Gavrilo Princip and the Black Hand, that he’d had a role in planning the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Duchess Sophie, and he was on the run from Sarajevo. Everyone agreed the Cypriot was an important man. He had money, he dressed exquisitely, he kept a girl somewhere in Omaha, in the brownstones north of downtown. The whole bit.
It wasn’t Evie’s job to worry about Ugo. But she did. Folks said they’d kill that fink Cypriot if they found him. There was a bounty at stake. These were maniacal people who said these things. If they thought Ugo was valuable, or dangerous, they’d do bad things to him. Evie knew Ugo wasn’t the Cypriot, if there was such a thing. Ugo wasn’t a threat to anyone. He was a silly man.
Still, she worried. He might go missing if someone got the wrong idea. Some days she watched out the window and imagined he wouldn’t come back. She wondered, would it be up to her to go looking for him?
She didn’t really know what Ugo did when he wasn’t in her rooms. She just knew he was prissy and self-conniving and tended to think of himself as a rougher man than he was. He liked to come at her from behind, her lying flat, he pushing her face into the pillows until down seeped into her mouth. She felt small when he did it like that. His body compacting hers. At least she didn’t have to look in his eyes when he did it that way. He’d sleep soon enough, curled into himself. He preferred that Evie sleep naked. But once he was asleep, she rose in the dark to find her pajamas folded on the dresser, or she’d be cold.
He didn’t touch her when she was sleeping. With some of the others she’d had to stay awake all night and not disturb the covers, so nothing happened she wasn’t ready for.
In the morning she helped Ugo dress if he let her. He mostly liked to do it himself, especially the final stages of his costume, the collar, the jacket with the pink silk lining, an ivory comb he scratched through his beard. He flattened his brow with a tip of his pinky finger, flashed eyes at her in the mirror, a threatening motion, maybe not. He straightened his eyelashes, blinking rapidly along an extent of pointer finger. Evie along, ready with his coat.
He placed her in the window when he left. He liked to stop and look back and have her stare down, half-undressed, like she craved him. He liked to have people on the street see that.
Then she could close the shades and forget. It was a long night’s work. Not the easiest way to get by, but she didn’t know of any easy way. This beat dancing for dimes in some crummy hall to a two-bit band bored by its own miserable sound. At least Evie had her cutting table to go back to. Her own two hands warmed the slab when she spread fabric over and marked chalk where chalk should be marked.
Some of those days Evie dreamed about what it would be like to own a garment shop, to make a living selling clothes to other women and not be beholden to wicked men to get by. In some ways her mother, a seamstress from Topeka, had lived this life already. Her mother doing business out of that shabby front room, inching along on the pennies and nickels she earned by darning socks and patching trousers. Evie wondered, if she tried to break out on her own, could she do any better than her mother had done? These were the kinds of unanswerable questions she considered when alone at the sewing table with only her wine and her tools and the memory of her mother.
One evening Maria pointed out a girl to Jake. Tall, slender, with a small, well-shaped face. Her name was Doreen, and she’d have looked dignified, except she was unwell. Her hair thin, her face discolored by clouds of yellow and green. Jake couldn’t take his eyes off her. He tracked the red of her dress as foot traffic washed around her on Clandish. The dress was old-fashioned and out of season, too heavy for the weather. She was bundled up, and everyone knew why.
She clutched a man’s elbow to inch along the walkway. “That’s her betrothed.” Maria’s breath came over the sill, sweet with tobacco. “What a shame. The wedding’s been put off. That’s what they always do when the scandal’s in the papers.”
She and another girl had been raped that month. Black men were the ones who did it.
Jake had never seen anything like the Fourth of July in 1917. There wasn’t anything like this before, as a matter of fact, celebrating Independence Day while fighting a world war. Flags flew over all Omaha, the reds, whites, and blues of the US, France, and Britain. Every neighborhood helped move the celebration along. Even if there was disagreement, if President Wilson should have got them roped into the European war or not, the River Ward wasn’t going to miss out on a party like this. The tunnelers got the day off, despite it being a Wednesday, and they were in Mecklenburg’s early that morning to drop dimes on the bar and bicker before heading to the parade, where spectators packed both sides of Farnam on the sidewalks and lawns that fronted the courthouse and city hall. The parade was to honor the military. This went without saying. Every civic event was obsessed with patriotism that summer. They called this one the Kick the Kaiser Parade.
When the tunnelers got to the parade, Red Cross nurses in white-winged hats marched along the streetcar tracks. Contingents from army and navy brass bands followed, then a handful of blimp pilots from the academy at Fort Omaha. Bunting draped from the windows of city hall. Flags flew from atop the Bee newspaper and Omaha National Bank buildings. Businessmen held pickets painted with slogans against the Kaiser, making fun of his wooden arm, warning that America was coming. Novelty Old Glories were sold, noisemakers and popguns too, paper hats, fireworks and hot dogs, lemonade. The pavement was littered with debris, the walkways packed with people caught up in a fanfare. Merchants in fruit-sticky aprons, office girls in blue dresses, primped schoolkids and frazzled teachers, Civil War veterans with bronze service tokens pinned to their lapels. There were drums and bugles, full brass sections. A group of frumpy girl stenographers near Jake sang the national anthem, impromptu, a cappella, in an ecstatic patriotic joy.
Word started going around that morning about the rowdy celebrations that took place in Europe overnight, how a million Parisians cheered as doughboys marched the Champs-Élysées. All those Frenchies were elated about reinforcements coming over on boats. In Omaha, a place those boys came from, the reality of what America was in for on the Western Front was starting to hit home. Conscription had begun. Over two million young Americans would be selected for service. Meanwhile people read aloud from front-page digests and marveled at the calamities that would soon involve their sons and neighbors. Long-range German railway guns shelled London in June, with mortars blasting sixty miles distant; meanwhile the English tunneled under enemy lines at the Messines Ridge in Ypres and killed thousands of Germans wh
en they detonated six hundred tons of explosives in the mines. The war had already been going on for three years and nobody knew when the fighting would stop. The only certainty was that Americans would soon number in the dead.
Jake hadn’t wanted to go this far uptown, he’d wanted to see a big wrestling match that sounded more entertaining. No-neck Marin Plestina from South Omaha was going to face the handsomely coifed Henry Ordeman of Minneapolis in an auditorium that wasn’t all that far away from where the annual Interrace Game was to be played between Northside and Southside baseball squads. Jake was outvoted by his friends, though, because there was no price for admission to the parade (the wrestling and baseball were two dollars each) and the tunnelers wanted to save money for drinks later on. Jake had spent most of his time in clubs and saloons after what happened with Karel, feeling he should avoid the Miihlsteins until any hard feelings blew over. Even though Karel explained it was just near beer he drank in Mecklenburg’s, and Jake confirmed this, Herr Miihlstein kept the boy under lock and key for the rest of the summer. Jake felt bad about that. It didn’t occur to him until later that Mecklenburg’s operated illegally during the state prohibition. “What if there was a raid?” Herr Miihlstein had asked. “How would you feel if the boy had been arrested?” Jake shouldn’t have promised to look out for Karel. That’s where he went wrong.
There was food at the parade, near the courthouse steps, so Jake ate. He bought a grilled hotdog and a Nehi cola, then a scoop of pistachio ice cream and some roasted nuts. No matter how he passed the afternoon he’d go to the Potsdamer later, a dancing club. Jake couldn’t lose. He wore a gray cap, wool trousers, a whitish shirt. He was excited to be up where the important buildings were. The six-story clock tower of the post office, banks with marble festoons, municipal shrines where politicians did business. Just the year before, President Wilson gave a campaign speech on this spot. Jake stood where the grandstand had been.
He looked to the parade, to the crowd. He smoked to pass the time. That’s when he spotted the girl, the one who was raped in Riverview Park. That Doreen. She was only twenty yards away, steadying herself against a light pole. She wore the same red dress, torn and dirty now, not so red. Her hair was thin, unpinned and breezy about her face.
Street kids surrounded her. You couldn’t stop and talk to a kid like that or else a bunch would move in. That was how the girl screwed up. Now she was in trouble. Maybe she asked what occasion it was or if they’d buy her a lemonade from one of the vendors. Then the street kids noticed her. They pulled at the loose seams of her dress. Called her a tidbit, a chippy. Asked who she worked for, or if she was looking for a mack.
Jake shouldn’t have been bothered—she wasn’t his sister, she hadn’t been his fiancée—but he wanted the kids to leave her alone. She screamed, but it only egged them on.
“We should do something,” Jake said to his friends, the other tunnelers. “We could drive them off if we tried.”
“Cut it out,” Charlie barked back. “It’s not our business.”
Jake turned red. “We can take them. If we have to fight, I know we’ll win.”
“Think a second,” Meinhof said. “Remember where we’re at, Herr Jakob. It would be Huns attacking the boys. They’d have us hanging from a tree before you know what.”
The girl shucked off into the crowd anyway and the gang left her alone. They were just picking on her, reminding everyone of her misery. Street kids were the least of her problems.
It was a relief to see dancers take the stage at the Potsdamer, once Jake and the tunnelers arrived at the club. They spoke their mother tongue here. Smelled and tasted and handled their own food, at the pinnacle of culture as they knew it. A sensational concurrence of music and communion. There was five-cent beer, and the price of admission included a glass of Rhine wine, or something like it. Even though Nebraska was officially a dry state now, little had changed on the River Ward. City authorities made no effort to enforce the law. Many saloons stayed open and, at least in Omaha, the prohibition flopped. Barkeepers kept the beer flowing, moving quickly so the taps rarely closed. A glass was filled with frothing amber then replaced by another before much could spill. Patrons moved at a corresponding pace, they had to, trading dimes for beers in a single motion, their combined mass a cloud of felt hats and rosy faces. The pitch smell of the mills lingered in and out of clothes and skin. Oompahs pealed joyously, openly, by a brass band that throbbed the crowd with dance music until the well-greased hustled to an opening and circled recklessly with their fellows. On stage the girls were lithe and graceful with long kicking limbs, except for one who had short, strong legs, the most athletic, who leapt with rousing quickness. The routine was disorganized, but Jake liked it. The girls were pretty. The skimpy outfits they wore looked like tiger pelts. Furry ears rounded out of their hair. It was nice to watch a band play, to lean into a balcony rail and enjoy music, to watch a twirling baton spin between the drummer’s carousel fingers, and smile as the stick, snatched midair, made the bass drum boom.
More friends showed up. They all got drunk and took up the news that was parsed near constantly in places where they could speak freely—politics, war, the Cypriot.
Joe Meinhof was already exasperated. “I knew this would happen. It’s no coincidence this all started once the Cypriot showed up. And a bunch of Schwarzers moving in to take jobs. What’s happening to those girls. It’s the Cypriot! I know it.”
Jake focused below, where the crowd was busy. Young men looking to get sauced mobbed the kegs of beer and pushed each other around, the same brand of street kids who harassed the girl at the parade. They were out of place, with their tilted hats and clipped English, and that they didn’t dance. They didn’t even sway or tap their feet. They weren’t German.
Meinhof went on, his back to the room. “It wasn’t like this before. Blackies with their paws on a woman. It’s chaos they want. That’s why they’re here.”
Joe Meinhof was the kind of guy who had a dozen theories for any debate, who existed beyond logic. His face had a nervous quality because of the wrinkles in his forehead, that odd fop of hair on his head. He was a small, bewildered person.
Charlie, Meinhof’s half-brother, didn’t buy these kinds of conspiracies. “Don’t make yourself crazy,” he said, moving closer until both brothers leaned on the railing. “What a stupid thing to say. How does having women raped help anybody?”
“Okay.” Meinhof smiled, an amused lilt to his voice. “Not all blacks are rotten. There’s some bad eggs. I don’t like to have to repeat this. But the rapes. Those poor girls. That’s the kind of thing that’s going to happen more and more until a blackie’s held to task.”
Jake wished they’d shut up. He hated talking politics, and how angry some of them got, himself included to be honest, thinking about a girl being taken advantage of by a black man. He’d think about Charlie’s question for a long time after, following the logic that it could somehow help those in power to have a girl raped.
Jake was tired of his friends. How their faces drooped longer and their lips wavered open to preach some injustice or another until the debate spiraled to the irrelevant. Jake didn’t want to hear what his friends said. They were just as hateful as anybody. That didn’t make things better. Jake stepped outside to have a smoke. Once he breathed different air, he decided to head home.
It was late evening. The sun labored to set in the July lethargy, stopped at its vanishing point to smolder, its light turned red in wisps of smoke. Hundreds of folks congregated on Clandish. They packed walkways to light off ladyfingers and roman candles. It was too hot to sit inside, a southern wind gusting furnace air and silt. Jake wandered the boulevard. He watched families outside their homes and smiled at those he knew, friends of Maria. Almost all houses on Clandish were wood framed. Newer, smaller homes crouched in under the eaves of big ones like Maria’s two-and-a-half-story Victorian down the block, so narrow that alleys between houses became shallow ditches and truncated backyards overflowed with
native trees—ancient black walnut, bur oak, and cottonwood. Fragrance seeped from these trees now like it did at no other time of year. Jake caught his breath in the familiar bouquet of a mature tree’s leaves. He picked the aroma out from urban odors and remembered what it was like to stroll in the forests and orchards at home, the walkway dimpled with the remains of cherries.
Jake loved the trees back on the homestead in Jackson County. He’d felt safe in them. Lindens, ash, hickory, plum, and one plane tree he could make out from half a mile away, tall and white and ancient. Its ashy limbs glowed incandescent in morning and evening light, somehow brighter when everything around was darker. Holy in the way it shined in the gloaming of a summer evening, and that it lived at a parsonage. The tree looked like it had a halo, like it was God himself.
Jake imagined what Maria and the Miihlstein kids had devised to savor the evening that Fourth of July. He was miserable, ambling alone in Omaha. What he saw on Clandish reminded him of the way folks back home used to talk outside church on Sundays when the weather was nice. He remembered how they sang hymns inside the sanctuary. Afterwards there would be a picnic under the trees of the parsonage, or they would go to a neighbor’s house to eat in the shade of a vine-heavy pergola. Every Sunday was a holiday. They sang out in church because there wouldn’t have been music if they didn’t. There were so few of them it didn’t matter who had a nice voice or who had trouble staying on key. There was no one else, nowhere outside of them, the body they made together back home in Jackson County.
Kings of Broken Things Page 7
