The Lake on Fire

by Rosellen Brown

  The driver of their victoria, when they arrived and were dispatched two houses from the corner of Prairie and Twenty-Sixth Street, bent to pluck from the curbstone a lone scrap of paper that must have escaped some guest’s purse or pocket; perhaps it was even the invitation to the evening’s gala. Having retrieved it, he held it hidden from them like something shameful, balled in his gloved hand, with a look of profound distaste that bitterly amused her.

  The houses were turreted and gabled, built right to the street and much too stony. There was so little green, here where they could have seeded parks right to the door if they had been inclined to! Here and there a house was wrapped with a porch, its floorboards shiny under fresh paint—those were the ones that reminded her of Wisconsin; they were not impervious citadels, not true city houses. Gregory’s, fenced with pointy black iron spikes, was hewn of faceted gray stone, like a giant carved out of rock; it was not very inviting. But it glowed with lamplight that fell like gold dust from its windows.

  One of the futile subjects of her lecture to herself while she dressed and pomaded her hair had been that she would not spend the evening out of sorts. She would not begrudge Gregory and his family their good fortune (though, she lectured herself, there was nothing to force her to think their house beautiful). Somewhere in Torah the rich were said to be reaping the reward for having lived virtuously—it did not stipulate how—which implied that the poor were being punished for their own shortcomings. Hideous, hideous, to be castigated by He who supposedly made you for being the way He made you.

  She was not as overwhelmed by the opulence of this boulevard as she would have been had she not by now spent those peculiar Sundays when, as hired help, Asher showed off the wonders of his mind. She knew they looked to the owners of those houses like geese among swans and to the maids and butlers like swans among geese.

  What, then, she had to wonder, would she be tonight with Gregory as her stalwart champion, the blunt noses of her unshineable boots poking out from behind her hem. When, inevitably, she tripped climbing the wide stone stairs, he saved her—grabbed her arm with a surprised little exclamation and righted her before she could fall. “Don’t be nervous,” he whispered, but she could hear the tension behind his consolation. Why didn’t you bring me shoes? she wanted to hiss at him, knowing herself already too dependent. If I am to be the curiosity of the evening, where are my glass slippers? Can’t you see the scandalous secret I am hiding beneath my skirts?

  GREGORY’S MOTHER, whose name was Faith, was the first of the Stillmans to instruct her in the discretion that separated her class from Chaya’s. She was not at all formidable, at least as far as Chaya could tell. Tall, fair, rather fragile, but with a determined—clenched—jawline, she had the apologetic posture of one of those girls who never made peace with looming above her friends. Her neck was so long she had bound it up in what looked like a yard of shirred blue taffeta, as if it were a wound. She held out to Chaya a languid hand accompanied by an equally languid smile, meant either to set her at ease or to inform her that what she thought of Chaya hardly mattered, so incidental was she to the conduct of this family. She wanted to ask Gregory if his mother was lazy or shy—or perhaps, she thought meanly, under such medication for nerves that she seemed rather to possess none. Instead she vowed to watch her as she responded to others who presumably did matter to her, and to study that jaw to see if it ever relaxed.

  His father was more what she would have expected: indifferent in a way that she took to be habitual in one whose professional life must have taxed him more than his children’s friendships. He had a ring of sleek white hair the texture of a short-furred dog, combed vigorously downward around a smooth bald head, and a slender nose built somewhat on the lines of Gregory’s, only more aggressive, more prow-like. But he also had cheerful side-whiskers that consisted of a good deal more hair than what remained around his head. Unless she were to press, if she became his son’s bride, for some unseemly item of finance that would affect the Stillman exchequer, Chaya decided she would not have a difficult time with Mr. Edward Stillman. He was otherwise occupied.

  And so, having been introduced to the two of them she relaxed, though like a cat asleep, with one eye open. Gregory, who seemed younger and more deferential than she had ever seen him, looked pleased by her performance, such as it was. She suspected that his parents would hardly raise their voices were the ceiling to begin to crumble above their heads. If she were to accept Gregory’s terms, she would have to learn a whole new vocabulary to speak the language of their emotions. Thinking of her own family—and they perhaps the quietest of the histrionic crew of the Fields of Zion—she could only smile imagining the wedding, if there was to be one, her father in a top hat, her mother without her apron.

  But she was not finished with the introductions. She and Gregory were standing tight together at a punch bowl of alarming size—she could imagine bathing a baby in its cut-glass bottom—when Gregory turned, having handed her a glass, and said in an artificially hearty voice, “Why, Ned, there you are!” as if he had been searching for his brother without luck.

  Here was one Stillman on whom, Chaya could see at half a glance, gentility imposed no inhibitions. He had his mother’s height, only powerfully girded, and, above a spiny mustache, his father’s nose, which looked on him like a scimitar, sharp and imposing. “I was told I could meet my brother’s—ahh—”

  She smiled and took his hand which—why was she not surprised?—closed upon hers with just enough force to be painful. His face was perfectly square.

  “Gregory’s Israelitish maiden. I have heard about you,” Ned told her without confiding a single encouraging adjective.

  “Have you.” She tried not to assess him too openly, the way he was assessing her, head to invisible toe, curious without apology. Or worse: curious as a challenge.

  “You are—” He smiled. “You have—I should enjoy hearing the tang you have brought from your native country. Which is—?”

  “Pardon me?” was all she could manage. The tang?

  “Of your native tongue. I understand it has left you with the most charming accent, of a sort we rarely encounter on our street. I wonder if I could isolate it if I were to hear it.”

  “Ned!” Gregory began, but she wanted no one’s defense.

  “Perhaps,” Chaya suggested, “your circle of friends is not wide enough. And now if you will excuse me, since I am so rare, I doubt that we have anything of interest to say to each other.” Exactly how had she constructed such a sentence? She had spoken like a character in a book. She placed her brimming punch cup on the table with a thud sharp enough to turn a few heads and did not back away, which would have been craven, but turned her back as sharply as she could manage, knees quivering so fiercely she was surprised she couldn’t hear them clacking. It was Ned Stillman’s mouth, beneath his whisk-broom of a mustache, that opened in surprise, and then Gregory was following her as she crossed the room to the hallway in search of a quiet place to compose herself.

  “Your brother is a boor,” she said against his chest. “If I had a better vocabulary in this language I speak with such a tang, I am certain I could find a more fitting word.” She had never felt so powerful in her life, though she recognized that she had made an enemy she would regret. Perhaps the weight of a vigorous antagonist increased one’s strength.

  “I am so sorry, Chaya, so sorry. He did insult you, didn’t he.” He smoothed the hair she had so carefully made complicated for the evening, scattering pins everywhere. “It is never exactly what Ned says, you know, it is what he manages to imply. . . . You should not have had to defend yourself against his execrable manners.”

  She had seen the first faint glimmering of Gregory’s need to stand at a distance from his family, and it softened her, to his advantage. “Have I just witnessed an exhibition of why it is you love me?” she dared to suggest. “So that your brother can despise you for it?”

  Gregory gave a harsh, one-note laugh. “He needs no fresh reasons
to despise me. But I believe I can outdo him in hostility. I love you for yourself and I hate him for himself—my feelings are quite distinct.” His face was still reddened with high feeling. “Everything you distrust only proves to me your earnestness, my darling girl, though you don’t make it easy on a fellow. I can see that you try to see the bright side of so much but I wish you spent less time in—what to call it?” He looked into the middle distance. “Regret. Your dwelling place, that, as if your refusals will save the world. And then along comes something that truly is awful—if only it didn’t but, you know, it will and you must see how you haven’t saved anything, you have only missed out on so much.”

  She listened to him in silence. This was not the time to be lectured.

  “And my brother most probably takes the prize for awfulness. I swear he should be kept in a cage. But you were so fierce and honest with him. I think he is not accustomed to being talked back to. I love it that you pinned his ears back!”

  For his testimonial, she brought her face to his and murmured, “But how can you love a woman who doesn’t make you laugh?”

  He appraised her carefully to see if she was serious. His laugh, finally, was perhaps more public than it would have been had they been alone. “I suppose no one can do everything, my dear. But look, you have just proved yourself wrong!”

  Chaya hoped everyone in the room could see their dark heads touching.

  They stood quietly for a while, breathing hard against each other. Which, she wondered, would she prefer in the end, the openness of Ned Stillman’s disrespect or the covert suspicion she was certain lay beneath his parents’ apparent indifference? Look what their rebel child had dragged in from Immigrant Alley, after all. Why should they trust a woman whose hand, when they took it, was coarsened by work and—except for the lovely beaded bag she carried—dangerously empty?

  THE REMAINDER of the evening she devoted to silence. Silence, when she went on strike against coercion, had preserved her at the farm. Now it would be her university; she would attend, like her schoolgirl self, conversations between those who knew more than she—which encompassed nearly all those in parlor, dining room and library, both men and women and possibly even the tall, gaunt dog who was brought in on a golden leash and walked through to the kitchen. “Bertha’s borzoi,” someone whispered with a tolerant smile. “She will clean the plates for Cook”—and would thus eat far better than Asher and Mrs. Gottlieb, at home tonight at their blue-checked table.

  She overheard intriguing fragments—how much more would the Exposition cost than had been estimated—a great, great deal. How difficult the long winter had made its construction. How vindictive were the mayors of the cities that had vied with Chicago to be granted the Fair and lost out—the newspapers of St. Louis beat a drum tattoo of editorial sniping; a private citizen, identity unknown, of Washington, DC (which a Mr. Tollier said could not by any stretch of the imagination be called a city when all knew that it was merely a government compound), had instigated a campaign whereby the postal station which received shipments meant for exhibit was bombarded with the leaky carcasses of dead birds, opossums, every manner of small stinking corpse. A racket of a laugh went up at this story. “It takes one to send one!” declared a man with a head as bald as a darning egg, and lifted his glass in salute. “To Chicago, onward into the future!”

  Chaya stood on the outskirts of a discussion of the preopening ceremony of the Exposition, which had apparently taken place downtown in the fabulous Auditorium Building last autumn—yet another milestone that had passed her by. Her stupor had been deeper than she had realized. Her friends at work, Sara, Stuka and a few others, took vicarious satisfaction at hearing stories of the doings about town that they could not aspire to attend, a satisfaction like religion, it seemed to her, in the convenience of the comfort it offered: That which you could not have, instead of making you bitter, became an ideal at which you worshipped. She was turned too fully inward to take much notice of what thrilled them: Chicago had remained, for her, the wound she licked, the missing city.

  Now—so strange she could have been dreaming—she stood in the center of a room crowded with the owners of the celebrated buildings downtown, the men who faithfully went every day to work at the Board of Trade just as she went to Winkler’s. Pullman, who lived just down the street, went south to his model city or north to the office from which he ruled. Marshall Field walked, for the sake of his health, to his grand new store on State Street or to the warehouse that glowered like the Great Wall of China. (Gregory had taken her past it one time, identifying the buildings up and down the avenues as though they were old family friends.) John Glessner lived in an armed fortress for fear of attack by inflamed workers. “You know about Haymarket,” Gregory prodded, “the bomb, the riot. Bad luck to him, he built his house just in time to feel the fire of all that rage.” It was no wonder the man, “in” hardware, employer of hundreds, was taking no chances. He looked to live in a bunker with a tiny mouse-door in front, carriages routed to the rear where they could be vetted by a guard.

  The dresses of the women who stood beside Chaya, the wives of these men, cost more than her handiwork brought her in a year. (Oh, tedious, she told herself. This was becoming too old a refrain.) (But, sang a contrapuntal voice, woe unto her if ever she forgot it.) She could see from where she stood a silvery gown edged with some sort of fur that was also silver—what but a slaughtered shepherd dog might look like that? A wolf? It sprang from collar and sleeve, at neck and wrist, as vital as if it were alive. This was dazzling, but not flattering to the woman inside the pelt, whose pallid skin was less vibrant than her unique ornamentation.

  Before her, a very heavy woman stood upholstered in sufficient green satin to cover a divan; no corset could be so formidable as to contain her, but she was pink cheeked as a babe and appeared quite satisfied with herself; her jowls were positively sculpted and did not shake. The table was sunk in treasure, lemon tarts, sweet aspics, a chocolate supreme around which gushed out-of-season strawberries, all the way down the room, displayed upon cream-colored lace. The spread was glorious in its abundance, restored by a watchful servant each time a dish was nearly depleted. She regarded it queasily with a combination of lust and nausea, but this woman dove in heartily and appeared almost methodically to sample everything. Chaya envied her the simplicity of her need, whose satisfaction waited silently at her beck, like prey.

  While she stood asking herself too many questions, wading through a swamp of uncertainties, Gregory came quietly to her side and urged into her mouth a dainty bar of praline rimmed with coconut—she guessed it was coconut, though she had never tasted it—and delicately brushed its stiff white crumbs from her lips.

  Gregory knew what she was thinking—she would grant him that: He knew. But, subversive, he bit into a mammoth strawberry painted with bitter chocolate and slid the other half into her mouth, which she found so stirring it felt like something one should not feel in public. He removed his fingers excruciatingly slowly and sucked the chocolate from them, fixing Chaya’s eyes the whole time. It was ludicrous and provocative at one and the same time. He was playing with her. As if this were a game of tennis, she felt herself too callow a partner to know how to return his serve. The ungracious plodder in her wanted to object, “I know how to feed myself!” and turn away. The realist in her, more honest, knew she could not afford to. The sybarite (a word she would not have recognized) wished she could sink against this solid man’s shoulder and plead for more.

  “All this will go on with you or without you, Chaya, whether you approve or not.”

  She looked at him in full earnest, unsmiling, ungrateful, feeling her foot inching its way toward his trap.

  “Oh my dear, what are we to do with you?” Gregory said and raised her fingers to his lips. “You are very hard on everyone. They expend all this effort to impress and it only turns you grim. What has become of the laughter we practiced just a few minutes ago?”

  AROUND MIDNIGHT, a path seemed t
o part the crowd, and in strode Mrs. Bertha Palmer, whose fame had reached so far that even Chaya in her recalcitrance knew who she was. It was impossible not to feel the force of her presence, though Chaya could not tell if it was her celebrity that made a bubble around her or the magnificence of the woman herself. Truly, she had never seen such skin—she seemed iridescent; she made Chaya want to touch her cheek, which would feel—clichés tended to rise around her in a gentle tide—like a flower petal. No: Like a tobacco leaf, she amended to herself, as if her own life were given value by its usefulness as metaphor. Prime. Her hair, upon a head held very straight without stiffness, was wound higher than she could imagine hair to be capable of without courting ignominious collapse, and around her neck were wound strands and more stands of pearls, less brilliant than that skin. What kind of childhood must precede such confidence, such profound health? No wonder her husband, who had met her when she was a child—thirteen she was, a schoolgirl—no wonder he vowed to wait for her majority, and did. Chaya could not imagine a queen with more regal presence.

  She had crossed a line. For better or worse, she saw as she stood a modest distance from this woman, in the lee of her faint perfume (more tart than sweet), that to choose poverty and a cold bed in the face of what Gregory held out to her would take a perverse and stubborn heart bent on self-defeat. She was halfway to being kidnapped from her class. But she had not shared Mrs. Palmer’s childhood, the ponies, the peonies, the lessons in elocution and dancing, and she would not try to share her adult life. Here was a Lady Bountiful who shed good works like the aura of her toilette, but from on high.

  Gregory had told her that Mrs. Palmer’s house, a palace on upper Lake Shore Drive for which the shore itself had been remodeled, possessed no doorknobs on the outer side of the doors. One passed through many layers of servants, at her bidding, to find one’s way in—how much geography, water the least of it, had been appropriated to please her!—to her Spanish music room, her Flemish Renaissance library, her Turkish parlor and Moorish bedroom of ebony and gold. High up on her rooftop stretched her enormous ballroom and a picture gallery that rivaled the Uffizi; clearly, had Mr. Palmer been able to work a satisfactory arrangement he would have brought down a star or two for her. And so, visitors sent their cards through a phalanx of maids and butlers and social secretaries to beg entry. Chaya imagined it a long walk to the center of her being. How many were allowed the journey? Her husband, surely? Her children? How many contraries could exist in a single soul? If only Gregory could tell her that.