The Lake on Fire

by Rosellen Brown

  When she and Gregory found their way to the train station—they had decided to return by a different route, just to try it out—“You are a gloomy girl again,” Gregory whispered, trying to lift her chin so that she would look at his beguiling face. They were being pressed upon by a solid mass of exhausted fairgoers, who held each other up by their sheer, sweating mass.

  “If you were as good a Socialist as you claim to be, you would understand why I am gloomy.” She felt him flinch. He patted his forehead with a handkerchief whiter than anything Chaya had ever owned. She took note of this and held it against him. He had not the first idea of what it cost to have nothing. “You are always so full of excuses. ‘This would be here whether you approve of it or not,’ you said, do you remember? At your parents’ party? How will anything change if you forgive it all the time?”

  He stood his ground. “Can’t you take this for what it intends to be, Gloomy Girl? There is, I think, a kind of vanity in that. The Fair is meant to lift people’s burdens for a few hours. Isn’t that enough?”

  Enough if they can afford the time and the ticket. “No, it is not enough. It is an elixir administered by a”—she had to search for the word—“a charlatan. It is not nearly enough.”

  BUT IN spite of her righteous anger, she could not stay away: There was too much to learn from it, and she had no education. For one thing, she studied the paintings in the Palace of Fine Arts. She could hardly tell the famous painters from the unknown, but there were a few whom Gregory told her to look out for—Winslow Homer, who painted fishermen in fog and gales, John Sargent, whose ladies might have attended the Stillmans’ soirée, and someone whose name amused her—Whistler—whose women were long and undulating in shape and somehow mysterious. But there were many she simply enjoyed, and many more by more women than she had realized dared take up brush and paint. Most of the painters and sculptors had studied in Europe. Mary Cassatt had taken her brilliance abroad and brought it back again.

  There was less religion than she would have expected, but these were Americans, and many seemed to find it more fitting to render modest scenes peopled with characters she could recognize: some boys training a dog, a humble couple being married in bright yellow sunlight, a scene at Castle Garden of a worn-looking mother seated on a trunk, holding close her infant, while above her head hung a sign that appeared to be setting forth rules of some kind—rules before welcome. And one, which roused in her a surprising lurch of feeling, a perfectly detailed scene showing glassblowers at a long table littered with equipment; they were attentive, sleeves rolled, an appreciative light upon their faces. She liked that a great deal.

  Then, though it was horribly sentimental, she stood in a moist-eyed Sunday crowd and sighed before what looked to be the most popular painting in the Fair. It was made by someone named Thomas Hovenden and was called “Breaking Home Ties.” A mother in her homely house, in the long white apron every woman knew so well, surrounded by many anonymous figures and a dog—an unfancy one—at respectful attention, has placed her hands on the shoulders of her son, who is going forth into the world, leaving all this behind forever. He is holding his hat and he is looking slightly over her head, eager to be gone, while she is eager to keep him. Such a calculated scene this was, but Chaya stood among those others as teary as Mr. Hovenden must have hoped. As he had intended, she saw her most and her least beloved sitting together in the common room at the Fields of Zion, those brave and foolish souls, and remembered her desperation to be done with them. She had tried not to see this scene with her mother in the middle of it, but here she was in the selfsame apron, sober and resigned, though her daughter had denied her the chance to say goodbye. Chaya would never know if they missed her as his imaginary family would miss this imaginary boy. Maybe they had said Kaddish for her because she was dead to them. She let her tears flow freely, her relief and her punishment.

  She stayed one night, alone, to see the Court of Honor illuminated. As the lights came on over the water—all in a single flash, not gradually but with the push of a button or the pull of a lever—she was kidnapped back to her first awe at the ingenuity—the genius—that had flung a skein of magnificence across an otherwise unredeemed swamp. Thousands of glowing stars, it looked to be, and the grand basin silvered over as though snow had fallen and moonlight grown impossibly bright across it. It was not easy to begrudge the world such a spectacle.

  In truth, one of the causes of her return was that even Miss Addams had rebuked her for her ungracious attitude. She believed in art and music, in the crafts displayed by the women who utilized such skill and patience, in the broad net of new knowledge cast by such affairs as the Exposition. She called it “democratic” and told Chaya (firmly but kindly, as usual) that she might try to moderate her resentments. She carried children to the Fair; she carried their parents, some of whom spoke no English. “But they have their eyes,” she insisted to Chaya. “This spectacle needs no language to insinuate itself. You must try to be more flexible, dear. Use your anger to change what merits changing but learn to celebrate what is worthy of celebration.”

  Chaya bowed her head in deference. Still, she could not apologize to Gregory. He and Miss Addams might be right but, however awkwardly she had launched the imprecise weapon of her convictions, she remained convinced that she was right as well.

  ASHER

  22

  THE FAIR was perfect. When the crowds were thick—on opening day all of Chicago was there, seething, swaying, standing still—he could fiddle in their pockets and never be felt. The President spoke—“magnificent,” “future,” “together,” and many silences in which to receive applause. Asher’s fingers twitched like fish at the bottom of the tank. Crowds made him greedy; he imagined—delicately, silently—picking their pockets clean. He knew when the listeners were bored. They coughed and shuffled; he could feel their knees shiver. When they applauded they rose to the balls of their feet.

  Then it was over. He could see that President Cleveland had removed his tall black hat to speak. Now he replaced it on his head and, with two large men on either side who looked like they could crush him if they happened to fall on him, left the podium. The crowd surged like water in a dish, then surged back again. For one bad minute, Asher thought he would drown.

  HE NEVER knew who suggested him—the building man called “Foreman” or one of the rich people who gave the parties he used to work at? No one told him. Only one day, just after the Fair had opened—all the rubble was gone (rubble should be the name of a game, such a funny sound), the dirt between the walks was finally dry and thick with plants, and clean water ran in the canals—while he was standing on a bridge counting the tops of all the buildings (one list for domes, one for steeples, one for turrets, glorious, glorious!), a man he had never seen, almost a boy only wearing a man’s clothes and a bowler, came so close he threw shadow over him and asked Asher if he could speak with him. No one had ever asked his permission to speak.

  “I’ve heard you know everything,” the man said. He had eyebrows that turned up at the corners like some men’s mustaches and sharp eyes that looked like they already knew what you were thinking. “Is that true?” He held out a tin of mints and Asher took two.

  “Almost everything.”

  “Do you think fast? Are you good at answering questions?”

  “I don’t know. Ask me one.” The mint exploded in his mouth like a gulp of cool water.

  The man, who had said his name was Bloom (which was silly because that was what a flower did and he was no flower), thought for a minute. “Who discovered America?”

  “Oh, what is this Exposition called.” Asher sounded weary. “Ask me a real question.”

  “Well—” The man was looking around at what he told Asher was called the Midway. He seemed to own it. “Do you know what Cairo is the capital of?”

  A sign in the distance said STREET IN CAIRO. Was there a trick that made the answer more complicated than Egypt? He was safe because why was a question he was rarely a
sked.

  The man wiped his forehead with the back of his sleeve. It seemed to be summer already. “Son, would you like to make some really good money?”

  Now there, at least, was a question worth answering.

  He had not been able to go home since Opening Day. New sights came at him like lightning flashes. His stomach churned with the need to hurry, to see it all. Chai would skin him when she found him. He had been sleeping in a different building every night, afraid to bed down outside where he could be seen—first Agriculture, then that very long one with the paintings, and now, one by one, Germany, Norway, Pennsylvania, which had in its center a map of the United States made of pickles. He was tempted to remove a whole green pickle but feared it might all fall in. Instead, tentatively, he dug his index fingernail into a little cuke, bright green and lumpy like an alligator; it was hard, shellacked over with something transparent. No wonder he couldn’t smell pickle. Disappointing. He found the tower of oranges, thirty-five feet of it, a skin of shiny globes whose pores showed them to be real. He had to trust the number; he wasn’t counting that high.

  Then there were the States. A few had made buildings that looked just like houses back home, low and wooden. One night he tried something Japanese called Ho-o-den whose roof swooped down like a skirt. He could probably continue doing that, there were so many and it was easy to hide from the guards, who didn’t seem to look at anything very carefully. They certainly never bent down and looked under or behind the places he found, where crouching was easy.

  But food was sometimes hard to find because they were bundling the garbage carefully and taking it away. He tried to get to it when they first brought it out the back doors of the restaurants, before the wagon came to remove it, but he had to move fast when it was still light. Sometimes men, who must be as hungry as he, were there before him, jumping on the bags and boxes of rinds and crusts like rats before he could get to them.

  One night the lights came on over the water—he wished he could count them, the separate lights that made a cascade, but he would be an old man by the time he got to the end—and he dived under a hedge because he thought he would be seen with a rag of grilled meat in his fist. The meat dripped gravy, and bits of green stuck to it and stained his shirt, which was already a map of splotches. Although he was sometimes hungry, he was never afraid.

  “I wonder if you truly know the Midway.” The man Bloom drew a wide arc with his arm toward the distant swatch of mismatched buildings that ran off perpendicular to where they stood. “See, it’s the place where the fun truly happens. This over here is all American fancy-pants but, sonny, the whole wide world’s over there! There’s so much beer on the Midway you could drown in it.”

  Asher wondered what was wrong with fancy pants but he stayed quiet.

  “You never dreamed of it all, one thing after another—I’ve got Irish, African, Austrian. Got Turkish. I’ve got Lapland, you ever heard of Lapland? Don’t ask me where it is but nobody here ever heard of it. I just got a shipment of llamas, you know the ones with the long necks, the snobby-looking ones with the long eyelashes? Like beautiful girls. You name it, I’ve probably got it!” His smile turned on and off but in general he seemed very pleased with himself. “That dome, the blue one, you see it? Color of the Mediterranean. The Moorish Palace. You can actually go in and pray, face down on the carpet. Our Moslems do it five times a day.”

  “Are you trying to sell me something?” Asher asked. “Am I supposed to care about the beer?”

  “No, no, I’m sorry, little guy. I get carried away, this is so—well, never mind. Look. All you would have to do is sit in a chair—we’d get you a big comfortable chair—and answer questions people ask you. You don’t have to—” The man looked at him very hard, though not meanly. “This probably won’t feel like work to you, sport. This will just keep your mind sharp. Keep the blade from getting rusty.”

  Asher considered. “Would I get food?” He could hear his stomach talking right now.

  “Anything you want. Ice cream. The works. A lot of things you never ate before.”

  He laughed. “I never ate most things.” At one of those Prairie Avenue parties he heard a man say he ate snails. He tried to imagine that, but the idea of swallowing slime and shell made him feel sick.

  “Can you get yourself here every morning?”

  Asher was still laughing. Ice cream would be very good—he could rarely afford it. “I live close. Can I have another candy?”

  This Bloom gave him the whole tin and shook his hand, seriously and firmly, the way people shake men’s hands. “We have a deal. Meet me here at nine tomorrow and we’ll set you up like a king.”

  That would not be easy with no way to guess what time it was. He would get up with the sun and wait right here. Maybe he should tell his sister. Maybe not.

  “Did you ever see real Africans?” Mr. Bloom was squinting down the path at a clutch of very dark men and women milling in front of the Dahomeyan village, who seemed to be half naked. “Those folks know how to dress for the heat!” He rumpled Asher’s hair. “Get a good sleep tonight, Captain, so you’ll have all your wits tomorrow. You’re going to be a celebrity.” He started to walk away, then stopped. “Your name is what again?”

  “Asher.”

  “No, your surname.”

  Asher began to tell him, but an itch came over him that no one would do well with Shaderowsky.

  “Shadow,” he told his new employer. “What’s in a name.” A rose by any name, he began to himself, spooling it out, and smiled. He was the rose and this man was the bloom. They would make a good team. And he would have ice cream.

  ASK HIM ANYTHING! 8-YEAR-OLD WONDER WILL ASTONISH YOU!!

  Eight-year-old?! He was small but not that small. But business, he supposed, was business and if they could get away with it, who—whom?—did it hurt.

  The chair swallowed him. It had a high back and high arms that made him feel even smaller than he was and Mr. Bloom had had it painted gold. It still smelled of something like liquor that he thought was called varnish. Large rocks, painted the color of jewels, ruby, sapphire, lapis—Asher had swallowed a list, his precious and his semiprecious—were pasted above and around him so that they would look embedded. He was supposed to be a prince. His throne sat, high on a platform, between Old Vienna, which was something like a castle, and the best, most ticklish name, Zoopraxographical, where he had sneaked in to see some photographs that showed how animals ran and even how an almost-naked man moved his legs, the same picture again and again with little changes that made him seem to be moving and finally took him up across a hurdle and down again very, very gradually. He was going to steal back to that again, it was the best thing in the Fair.

  Mr. Bloom had met him with two surprises. One was a bag that contained his breakfast, the first of the things he had never before tasted. He reached in and pulled out a mass of sticky little knobs, sweet and quick to melt when he put a handful in his mouth. This was something new, born at the Fair, called Cracker Jacks, and he could have eaten twice the bag. Cracker Jacks was a good name—it sounded like it tasted.

  The second was an armful of bright-colored clothes. “I’m sure they’ll fit,” Mr. Bloom told him. “You can just slip them over your own things. These are ample.”

  Ample, sample, trample. What did he look like? He wanted badly to know. (Why was it badly? Was there a goodly?) A pasha, he thought. Good for a genie. Puffy purple pants and a red velvet vest embroidered with shiny thread. There was a crown made of something stiff that was not gold, but he took it right off, it felt silly and it was hot. Bulbous—another word he liked. (Words, their sounds, not their meanings, were the best joke.) It was good that no one he ran with in the alleys could see him.

  “We shall have to get you some shoes, dear Mr. Shadow,” his friend said. “Those”—he nodded toward Asher’s toes, which showed through disintegrating leather like pale little Cracker Jacks—“will not do for a prince.”

  “Why am I a prince? Prin
ces don’t know all the things I know.”

  “Hey!” Mr. Bloom said and his face went red. “Who asks the questions here?”

  HE SAT back in the shade of his throne. There was someone Mr. Bloom called a barker—like a dog?—who shouted at people as they walked by, promising the mighty feats of mind this boy would perform. “The boy’s name is Shadow, although he’s very bright. A prize if you stump him!” He hoped the questions would be interesting but mostly they were not. Erie, Huron, Michigan, Superior, and—he quickly learned to pause for effect so that the asker would think he was stymied—Ontario! Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic. No, not Antarctic. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Numbers. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. He supposed people would not ask questions they couldn’t answer themselves. On the first day there were forty-seven of them, eight children. They weren’t very smart. It was enough to put him to sleep. Words flowed through his brain; he tongued them, waiting for the chance to exercise them: systolic, diastolic, apostolic, diatonic, dialectic, electric. Sluice, juice, sauce, souse. Symmetry, scimitar, cemetery.

  If he concentrated, he could change people’s faces into slabs of shape and color. There were nineteen rolling cars—if someone asked him what they were called, he would not have known, but he did see that men pushed them, which did not look comfortable in the heat. Many languages swirled the air, German, Polish, Greek? They were like music, sharp or smooth but without sense. Food smells mixed like noise.

  People trifled with him. “What kind of fruit does Aunt Sally bake into her apple pie?” “What kind of cheese is the man in the moon?” He gave them shaming looks but they laughed and moved on. There were two sets of identical twins and a dwarf. Only one person—a man in a white suit who asked him to name the owner of the horse that had won the most races this year at Washington Park—claimed the victor’s purse. It was a booklet of admission tickets to the other attractions on the Midway. He felt no regret for not knowing the answer to such a useless question, a question with no future to it. Mr. Bloom could afford to give those away. Asher yawned six times and dozed twice between customers.