The Lake on Fire

by Rosellen Brown

  A commotion was rippling through the room, at the farthest end. It seemed that Mrs. Palmer’s dog, Napoleon, had gotten loose and come through the swinging kitchen door, ambled down the long butler’s hall and broken into the dining room, which caused a gasp to issue forth, as if there were a fistfight or a guest overcome by apoplexy and fallen to the ground. Conversations ceased; everyone turned to look at him.

  He was like the dog Chaya and Asher had glimpsed at the railway station on the day they arrived, a being suffused with the same confidence and conviction as its owner. The seal of a kingdom. Chaya had no names for dogs—this one had the sheen and color of melted chocolate lightened, perhaps, with a dash of milk, and his legs were so slender it was hard to believe they could hold him up. She had never noticed how acute a dog’s face could be: Long, pointed, assessing, dismissing, he turned his head to survey the crowd, and the crowd looked back silently, challenged. Chaya found him enthralling and more than a bit frightening.

  Then—how could this be?—the creature loped forward and, his aim precise as an arrow’s, stopped before her and stood looking up as if she were his benefactor, whom he adored.

  Chaya let escape a syllable of surprise and, invited, reached down to feel the silken swatch between the animal’s ears. He met her eyes and, apparently satisfied, folded those ears intricately, to demonstrate that he was not on guard in her presence but, rather, at rest. She touched him tentatively, but the dog seemed to approve of the way her hand felt on his head and, with awesome grace—how could a dog possess such dignity?—he bent his long, attenuated legs and sat serenely at her feet, alert but perfectly still.

  “See how he enjoys your touch! How absolutely lovely!” Mrs. Palmer, speaking quietly only to Chaya, lay upon her a long unsmiling gaze as if she were measuring her for a dress or—Chaya cringed—for employment. “Well, my dear, you certainly do resemble a maiden in a tapestry, feeding a deer in the forest.” Chaya, more still than the dog, had ceased to breathe. “You must know those tales in which a maid in the scullery is actually a princess in disguise? You appear to have that perfect, delicate touch. And Napoleon’s judgment is unerring.” Mrs. Palmer patted the dog once on its glittering head, a signal to unbend, stand and accompany her. Obedient, he did so without a backward glance. So much for adoration. She stopped for a few words here, a few more there, inclining her head with interest, vigorously nodding, but never disturbing her ornately sculpted hair. The dog trotted on before her, his nails leaving tiny dents in the carpet.

  Chaya assumed she had received a compliment, but comments dropped from the heavens, she decided, become ambiguous when they enter the ordinary atmosphere. She had been anointed perhaps, but as royalty or as a servant? The woman had perceived her situation without even wondering who she was.

  Somehow, for better or worse, she felt the moment seal her into the life of the room. Like a fairy godmother, she had given Chaya to her future. Across the laden table, Gregory was silently, discreetly applauding.

  21

  IT WAS all light! The Fair, blazing up beside the lake, was the closest she’d ever come to imagining a heaven.

  A shock of sun ignited white temples that must dwarf any that still stood in the world. It reflected off the water that lapped their shores, off lagoons, off extravagant fountains that fractured the air around them with shards of rainbow. Bridges arced the water. A statue of dozens of striving figures with oars raised glowed golden—who had ever seen such gold! Could it be real?

  Because she rose and dressed before dawn, and descended the stairs through channels of soot and coal- and oil-blackened hallways as if she were going into a mine; because she had left her work for months now after dark and felt her way up those stairs again, her pupils must have atrophied, like a broken camera fixed wide, and still without sufficient light. Even the few places where electricity attempted to hold back the dark remained laughably in shadow. At Gregory’s parents’ house, she had stood watching the delicate filaments of dozens of bulbs flicker under clear glass, but the light they gave, despite everything, was feeble.

  These buildings—pillared, domed, adorned with goddesses, with angels, with everything but the devil himself—could not possibly be made of wood and metal, simple sheds, but that was what everyone claimed. They were to be seen, not touched. Whatever lay underneath was slathered with an ephemeral mix of nothing, stiffened a little by something, and yet it looked, from here, like marble. How could this be? The sphinx could hardly be more solid! Chaya stood rapt where they had stepped out of their carriage, shivering in spite of the heat.

  Gregory had already visited the fairgrounds. All winter, thousands of the impatient had actually paid good money to irritate the workers by wading around, getting underfoot while they were slogging through mud to raise the frames of these buildings, or paint them, or hoist these sculpted ornaments. Asher had spent time here but he kept entirely to himself what he saw. “This!” Gregory breathed. “None of those skeletons promised anything like this. A sidewalk that moves! Isn’t it too glorious?” The roof of the Fine Arts Building was supported on the heads of serene goddesses in tunics all in a row. Angels lighted on the red-and-gold square of the Transportation Building like butterflies. Where one arm of a building protruded this way, a balancing arm stretched in the other direction. Gigantic, all of it, and everything balanced, symmetrical, rational.

  In six months it would be gone, or so they said. Still, the Fair was like the sky splashed with stars, humbling because those who gazed at it were so small, because they lived such trivial lives, and those lives must end. She was not used to thinking we about anything but wages and fair or unfair dealing, but the scale of this glowing festival awed her. It was for them to dream on, they who possessed so little.

  She wished she could be alone with her astonishment. She understood her brother’s silence. This was an ecstasy she refused to relinquish to discussion. Who said she could not be happy!

  THEY HURRIED, finally, to the place where Gregory had promised to meet his family. From a distance Chaya could pick his mother from the crowd, her hat commandingly high above those of the other women. She gave Gregory her cheek to kiss, and nodded at Chaya with a slow enveloping gaze she was most likely not aware of. If an evaluation of her worth depended on the cut of her wardrobe, Chaya should simply wish him well and walk to the edge of the pier and leap. “I am pleased you could join us.” The voice was neutral, transparent as air, which must, Chaya thought, have taken monumental self-control. Then, as if in afterthought, Mrs. Stillman took her hand, but the sentence had simply stopped—she did not attempt Chaya’s name, with its uncomfortable guttural. Apparently Ceil had not taken hold.

  Watching her, straining for sympathy, Chaya imagined that she might be seeing in Faith Stillman a shy and private woman whose social duties put her constantly on display, in need of the correct response—perhaps a woman uncomfortable with her excess height or her wan, freckled face and nearly invisible eyelashes with which she was forced to greet lovelier specimens, or with the insufficient influence she had had on her wayward son, this defector to the sins of socialism. In another life, Gregory’s mother’s labor to seem comfortable might have made an ally of her. But this was not that life. Mrs. Stillman, she knew, wished Chaya were other or—far better—nonexistent but, subdued by the rigors of politesse, which protects as it dissimulates, would make no show of her disappointment.

  Lallie, Gregory’s sister, was twenty years old and everything her class demanded: quiet but assured, dressed in a manner that flattered while it did nothing to excite any particular curiosity—in a pink cotton today, with a ruffle at the hem quite worthy, Chaya thought, of a window in need of a summer curtain. Her strawberry blonde hair carefully disheveled around a bow that flapped like a butterfly, she showed the feminine version of Gregory’s face, even-featured, large-eyed—their dark blue eyes were the color of the water on a fair day, as if it were reflected there. They had the same generous mouth and a chin that bore the light press of a fing
er like the fluted edge of a pie. It was a family of strong faces. She smiled at her brother’s friend enigmatically. If you are going to submit every gesture to an inquisition, Chaya told herself, that is another reason to walk away and be done with this. Perhaps her smile was only a smile, without intent, enigmatic or otherwise.

  “Where is Father?” Gregory was looking all around. “Did he not come with you?”

  “Your father discovered someone he knew—imagine, in a crowd this size,” Mrs. Stillman answered, sighing, “and I believe they have gone off together to visit the one building in which we have no interest—machinery! They say it is the largest building in the world.”

  “Well, that only means more room for objects in which we have no interest! But the states, Mother.” Lallie. “Believe me, you have even less interest in South Dakota or West Virginia or Utah. Why do they have such things? Are we really to care who grows flax or where the Mormons practice their peculiarities?”

  Her mother ignored her. “Now, I have been here before, but where would you like to begin? This is simply too overwhelming.”

  “I want to stay until evening, Mother, when the lights come on!” Lallie seized her mother’s hands like a child. “They say it uses more electric bulbs than any city in the world!”

  They walked slowly into it, then, Gregory holding Chaya’s hand ostentatiously. The bridge they crossed was guarded by elks, as though real animals had been put under a spell that had turned them to stone. Turrets rose from unlikely places like the round building unromantically called Fisheries; a dozen spires pointed up from the shrine to Electricity as if it were a Spanish church multiplied; the Illinois Building, flying flags, lay beneath a dome like the capitol in Washington. Numbers rolled proudly off every tongue, as exact as they were absurd: forty thousand panes of glass here, twenty-seven tons of machinery there. An ugly black cannon so heavy Chaya couldn’t imagine how the floor could support it. Bigger, faster, more elaborate, turbines chuffed, and a giant crane that had been used to build the very place where they were standing swung screaming families up and around and let them down dizzy. They saw a cheese that dwarfed the state of Wisconsin, guarded by earnest men in suits too heavy for the heat who did not seem to think their treasure absurd. Wouldn’t Asher love this! He would know how many pounds of pressure each machine supplied; he would understand what torque meant, and how the telautograph worked, that sent a copy of one’s handwriting a distance, wholly out of sight—she surely didn’t. He had nearly choked on the excitement of his first sight of Chicago—this would send him into an ecstasy beyond enduring. Chaya imagined him everywhere.

  They poked their heads into the Children’s House, where the advertisement promised the newest methods of rearing practiced on boys and girls whose mothers had delivered them so that they could enjoy a day of rest protected from maternal distraction. Some of the boys hung from rings, upside down, like bats. Chaya inspected their small faces, imagining her brother safely among them instead of practicing petty larceny everywhere he touched down.

  They must have walked ten miles—these women were intrepid. When they stopped for a meal at a restaurant shadowed by palms, Lallie tried gamely to engage Chaya in conversation—“What do you think will happen to these buildings when it rains?” and “Have you tried that molasses kind of thing, it sticks to your fingers, it’s called Cracker something? With a j. Jacks! Do you know what that means, Jacks?”—but the single thing they appeared to have in common was Gregory. “Usually,” Lallie said, “we are in New Hampshire by now—our house is near the Glessners, you know. They summer at the Rocks and we are at White Pines, which is no farther than you can throw a pebble. But the Fair! Mother was one of the Lady Managers, you know—with Mrs. Palmer—and so we had no choice but to visit. After all, this is her handiwork!” She did like to prattle, even to the point of breathlessness. “We were here on opening day—not that we could come close enough to see a single thing, there were so many people, and they always seemed to be in front of me! I wish I was tall like Mother.”

  Lallie was a sweet, enthusiastic girl, Chaya decided, whose best and worst quality was her refusal to be critical—what must that feel like?—but she was trying, generously, to bridge the distance between them.

  Because Venetian pillars were less intimidating than Greek or Roman the Women’s Building achieved a confectionary lightness that had been purposeful but only brought down upon it the derision of the powerful. Or so Mrs. Stillman acknowledged. “A very young woman—quite a lovely girl—won our competition to design it, but she was not well-treated in the end, and was not as well paid, I’m afraid, as the male architects. A pity. She left us in a fit of anger, which may have been deserved.” She was silent a moment. “I believe she was—they say she”—Mrs. Stillman looked around as if for permission to continue—“broke down.” Her cheeks had colored at this candor. “A pity, really.”

  “Did anyone object, on her behalf?” Chaya dared herself to ask. She kept her face equable so as not to alarm.

  But Mrs. Stillman only gazed at her as if the question were too taxing to penetrate.

  The young woman’s delicate creation sat at the farthest end of the court, set off from the “major” buildings partly by choice and partly by default. But women loved it and, Faith Stillman swore, came and came again. “So indeed,” she said, giving her head a little shake as if the unpleasantness were settled, “she should be very happy to see how successful her efforts turned out to be. I hope she knows it.”

  As if to prove her point, Gregory’s father, who had joined them for ten minutes, hurried off again with his friend to investigate the suitably masculine: Forestry, it was, and Mines. No wonder the advertisements promised something for everyone! The party wandered through his wife’s handiwork, since it was she and the other women—“A bouquet picked from all across the nation!” she called them—who had planned it. (A bouquet?! But she appeared to be in earnest.) “The battles! The vituperation and scandal-mongering! Should we compete with the boys and their toys, or did we want our own domain, where some gentility might be honored? We were not always ladies, I’m afraid, pleading our case with the men. But neither were they gentlemen.” Mrs. Stillman reflected a moment. “Or with each other, for that matter.” Long and light, with an airy feel, the building housed an assemblage of every kind of lace and quilt and picture made of unlikely objects—a bust composed of thimbles! A cradle made like a mosaic of dried rose petals! Some people, Chaya did not say aloud, have more time than taste.

  Surveying the rooms of lovingly arranged crafts, though, she could feel her awe began to ebb. Where, she wondered, laboring to smile, were the landscapes carved out of tobacco leaves that they at shops like Winkler’s and Yanowitz’s might create during their fifteen-minute dinner break? Where were the tributes to the seamstresses who could no longer see to work? Perhaps she was simply weary from too much stimulation. Like the habit of Chicago’s weather, her mood had clouded.

  “Is it not the most gorgeous thing?” Lallie trilled. Gregory was watching Chaya with care. He could tell she was wary of this celebration of the decorative and the trivial. She knew what he was thinking: Possibly she was going to be more trouble to him than she was worth, caviling at everything she saw. She wanted to be—how she wanted to be!—overwhelmed by these glass cases dedicated to women’s crafts, women’s eye for loveliness, women’s essential love of texture, color, shape. This was a fairyland built by busy hands; these projects most probably shed pride and pleasure on the hard-worked women who accomplished them before their children woke, or after they had been tucked in to sleep. She imagined they were heartened at seeing their pretty things chosen to be shown to the world.

  But—Chaya sighed—she was never good at a party. She smiled vaguely back at Lallie, who understood so little she would likely remain radiant in a snowstorm.

  By the time they emerged into the splash of sunlight and the Court of Honor lay over her shoulder, she was filled with awe. Such things as this were possible! Ne
arly overnight they had achieved a perfect bubble of a world, thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of shimmering bubble, and yet Liberty Street remained. No rats ran here. No garbage spilled onto the walks and heaped at the corners, steaming and stinking. They had hired a special police force. They had constructed an invisible river of sewers. They had hired street sweepers who plied the paths before and behind. But look where the backs and shoulders who had built it were going home to sleep! Follow a street sweeper home and see where he hung his uniform and where he rested his head. What was the difference, she seethed, between a lovely diversion and a brutal lie? Yet—Miss Addams would surely insist—beauty was beauty and if the Fair increased the weight of beauty in the world, she would bless it.

  Gregory’s mother leaned toward him and, to judge by the inclination of her chin, was inquiring why Chaya looked perturbed. She could hear nothing of the conversation, but saw that the expression on Mrs. Stillman’s face combined impatience with a touch of amusement. Chaya looked away. Would anyone believe she was repelled by every grand thing, and did not want it for herself?