The Lake on Fire

by Rosellen Brown

  “Would you like to be the leader of a group that will talk about books? Or perhaps plays?” The baby was flirting, slapping at her, and she was flirting back.

  Each of them held an infant now. Chaya’s twisted in her arms like the house cat, who did not like to be handled. “How do these people—the ones who come here—have time to be reading books?” It still took some daring for her to raise a challenge.

  Miss Addams produced her slow unexcited smile. “For some, it is the best part of their day, to read a few pages and dream. Don’t assume our friends here are only laboring machines. You mustn’t do that to them.” Every response she made seemed to be a gentle rebuke. Did the woman never doubt? Did she hesitate or regret or wish she could call back something she had done? More likely, she would repent what had been left undone, but that was not the same. Asher had said, on the train to Christa, that he could not look backward, only forward. In their different ways, they had that in common.

  Chaya tried to imagine the disheveled, discouraged suitors for Miss Addams’s succor sitting with an open book across their knees. They must be better organized than she. Or hungrier, or quicker. They must live in some kingdom where the light was good. Chaya wished she had come here while she was working; had submitted herself to this place where she’d have been on the taking rather than the giving side. She had not stored up enough to be prepared to give back very much. She still needed filling up, but Mrs. Gregory Stillman could not ask for that.

  ASHER

  30

  IT WAS true: The Fair was closing, and soon. They meant it, though even when he stood with the men he had refused to believe. Glory would revert to swamp. Thousands of separate showings of dear particulars, tangible and eye-filling. Another week and then—no way to imagine it. Once something was, how could it not be? Maybe the strikers’ families would swoop down and claim it: He could see them set up between the Music Hall and the Casino. Children running the aisles, riding the golden Statue of the Republic, flicking on the lights, silver streaming down across the water, across the toothed silhouettes of the roofs, and off, and on again, everyone carrying off treasures no one suddenly wanted, ivory this and olive-wood that, silkworms, blown glass, oranges and lemons from the indoor grove. Wives cooking beef and biscuits on the hulking industrial stoves in the Machinery Hall, setting out feasts in the restaurants. Sleeping in the Midway tents, swimming in the lagoons. When winter came, huddling warm inside.

  What a gift it could be. The men, out of work, out of hope, had been waning, thinner by the week, unshaven, eyes desperate as if someone were chasing them all the time. They had marched for a while, then gave it up, came back now and then, outside the gates, to raise their furious signs and shout, but no one was listening. Asher had heard his barker complain that once the Midway shuttered, he would never find work. “The city’s shot. It’s gonna close up tight. Unless you got an in someplace, otherwise—” He slashed with the side of his hand right under his chin. “Duck your head and keep it down. It’s all over the world is what I heard. Riots coming.”

  The crowds thickened near the end, the laggardly and the penny-squeezers finally flushed out. “Now or never!” Big Dog cried out as the throngs poured down the asphalt. Asher shrugged when that crazy little Mr. Bloom walked up, spinning his bowler on one finger. Stopped, inquired. He still came around, checking. He made his acts behave, put out better than their best. He called it “Control of Quality,” though what was he going to do this late in their lives? Close the exhibits that weren’t performing? Fire them? The Esquimaux were accused of having lazed off, lying around in phlegmatic heaps like puppies in their heavy fur coats. One or two were said to have died of the heat, though he thought that a vicious rumor. The Dahomeyans complained all the time; they were probably not hot enough! Asher had no demands. He made eight dollars a week, not counting what petty larceny put in his pockets, and a little sugar out of the till when Big Dog wasn’t looking. He was content.

  “Last chance to challenge our Knight of Knowledge, our Pasha of Pertinacity! Throw something at him—any question in the world—and see if it knocks him down!” Big Dog paced, forever wiping his brow, singsonged, flung back his arm to point at his Titan of Trivialities. His Imam of Inanities, his Prince of Particulars. (Asher could not get enough of his names, he felt the way a petted dog must feel.)

  For weeks, the crowds seethed. Chicago Day was like a dare: He couldn’t see through shoulders and hats to the far end of the Midway. On Jubilee Day, after wrangling over whether they had been consulted enough about the Fair, after anger and refusals—he had read a whole little pamphlet called The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition and he could see why, few as they were most days, they were aggrieved—and then forgiveness or at least compromise, hundreds of spiffed-up Negroes crowded the walkways, keener than he had ever seen them, men with shiny buttons and mirrory shoes, women sailing under floating garden hats, children wound around their legs, celebrating, spending money he didn’t know they had. What a fine-looking crowd they made, proud and straight and every shade of skin from luscious dark like pith of mahogany, lightening, lightening all the way to the color of Italian people he had seen, or Mexicans. They could ask me questions about anything to do with being colored, Asher thought but had no one to say it to, and I would surrender and be sorry about it. But few stopped. Many went to see the Africans. Some peeked in at the Street in Cairo. What did they think, seeing their brothers and sisters on display like that, stared at and silent? He wished he could ask but he was afraid of accidentally insulting them by asking the wrong questions.

  The last days were ticking away. Some mornings, when business went nil, he concentrated on geometry, the buildings all peaks, angles, circularity, negative and positive space. Memorize them. Chew them down like daily bread before they disappear into—what? Smoke? A flat horizon? Into memory, like a person you have loved who dies. He would never be good at remembering.

  There were official pictures, photographs, which—lovely!—meant writing with light. But they were silent, they were gray, flat, soulless. He had a collection of color postal cards and souvenirs, from a glass globe that contained a Peristyle the size of a man’s thumb, to a set of silver Columbian spoons, to a wooden wheel with cars that looked like tiny harmonicas that swung from hinges like the actual thing—none of them purchased. But they were a sad nothing, a nullity, a mockery, compared to the living thing, which was an organism as complex, Asher believed, as the human body. Other days he counted the preponderance of blue or purple in the middle distance, or the number of unfamiliar languages that floated by. Nothing would ever be as interesting again. The circus? A carnival? Something that taught nothing and packed up and moved on, unfolded from trunks and boxes and then folded back down again? They had no weight, no beauty, only clamor. Sawdust and hurdy-gurdy. Even if he found himself a place at the university, those grave gray towers, new but made to look ancient, poking up oblivious to this stampede just across the Midway Plaisance, he would never live in such a whirl again—order and disorder, mind and matter, Robin, Pasha—or know such joy.

  HE HAD no right to feel cheated but he did. There was no last day of the Fair. Instead, there was a funeral.

  The city was like a person hit over the head with a plank. Shock. Two days before the Fair was to end, a madman had walked right into the mayor’s house—knocked on the door, shown in by a servant who now threatened to do away with herself, and who could blame her. Stood in the hallway a moment waiting until Carter Harrison could oblige the stranger by consenting to see him; became impatient and entered the parlor where the mayor sat in his bathrobe and, in return for his courtesy, shot him an uncounted number of times with a pistol. Then the intruder, a newsstand man named Eugene Prendergast who seemed to think the mayor had promised to make him something called “corporation counsel,” whatever thing that was, let himself out, shooting back at the mayor’s butler as he ran, and went to the stationhouse and turned himself in. He was
not repentant: The mayor had refused to answer his letters, attesting to his claims to the position. What should he have expected?

  Asher had seen the mayor twice, once making a hero turn around Clark Street, flapping that hat of his—a grand man straight as a general in the saddle, gliding in sunny confidence through the crowds who loved him. The other time was at the Fair. Was his horse bigger than everyone else’s—it was certainly the shiniest bay he had ever seen, suggesting that some groom had lacquered his haunches and dusted him daily—or did his generous spirit enlarge the man?

  IMAGINE BEING the cause of such mayhem. Hundreds of thousands in the streets, mass weeping, helpless anger. The murderer must have a headful of cobwebs. Black hung down the fronts of buildings—where did they find such bolts of black and run them up so quickly? Instruments, deep and throaty, sent out grieving music. Strangers spoke, embraced. Suddenly everyone loved the mayor. The flash of the gun had made him Abraham Lincoln. His opponents silenced each other with praise.

  Asher sat on a stool in the kitchen at Hull-House. Before the news, he had been awake with excitement half the night, planning his goodbyes to his throne, to Big Dog, to the uniformed Columbian Guard who had never caught him with his hand in any pocket; he had perfected deviousness on their inefficient watch. There was going to be a parade, a gorgeous showing, three cheers for Chicago in fireworks, ending with a fiery flag in the sky.

  Instead, “Maybe you’ll go to ’is hanging,” Cook suggested. “They ought to do it right on the steps at City Hall. It’d make us feel a fair bit better.” Though she had most likely never given much thought to the mayor, violence had plunged her into an unforgiving mood. “One madman and he does us all in.” She shook her gray head so long it looked like a tic. “So you’re out of work now, little man.”

  He sighed. “I was going to be out of work anyway. But I didn’t get to say goodbye. Why couldn’t he have done it a day or two later?”

  “Ah, you’re more sentimental for yourself than for that fine man gone? Well.” She shook water off her hands, fast, like a wet dog. “So you’re planning to miss going to your job every day like a regular workin’ man.” She had no inkling what he had been doing, and a good thing or she would have pestered him with questions just to ruffle him. “Why don’t you just go on down and say your own farewell, private? No one’ll keep you out, will they?”

  He looked at her, round-eyed. An idea—the infinitesimal corner of an idea—started up as if Cook had breathed it at him directly. He hated his stuffy room up at the end of the hall. Hated Chaya for saying goodnight to him and closing the door to her room every night to be alone with Gregory. Hated the ladies in the parlor, Miss Starr, Miss Smith, and the preachy Miss Addams and her friends who were always improving things and suggesting cures and running in every direction and not being depressed. He knew he ought to like her, respect her—she cared, after all, for the failing, the blighted, the starving, every bit as much as he did. Probably that was why he found her so galling. Asher did not like the word should, let alone the word must. He resented being the subject of a kingdom. A queendom. Too many people gathered around Miss Addams’s skirts, looking docile as cows with admiration. One hour, he had counted fastidiously, he watched her speak with thirty-two different people.

  The strikers and the men without work would join him, or they would not. He was going to move his operation down there again, not now but soon, the way it was at the very beginning. He wanted to thank Cook for the idea but keeping quiet was safer if he didn’t want to be stopped. He sat rocking on his stool. “Did you know they are going to have seventeen horses at the funeral, and a whole extra set of pallbearers, and a black horse?” Asher sat with his elbows on his knees, hunched like an old man. “His own horse is out of work too. Wrong color.”

  She gave him a long wary look. “I don’t know where you heard all that so quick, we only just heard the terrible news. You’re probably just making that up. But anyway, I should think it could be so,” she said, bending over the oven and, hand on her aching back, straightening slowly. “If ever there was a use for black, poor man, this is it, isn’t it.”

  31

  EACH MORNING when Chaya—Ceil Stillman, now, a name she would barely recognize if she heard it called across the room—walked down the carpeted stairs, joy seemed to come forward to meet her. Hull-House faced east, and though its long front windows were narrow, the rising sun penetrated sufficiently to make her want to shout her rapture. She could feel as much as hear and smell the activity in the kitchen; the air was lightly cinnamoned, and the cat, luxurious in her dark fur, would come to the bottom stair and tuck herself daintily down to wait for her. At the Fields of Zion, they had had a barn cat, or rather the cat had the run of their rats, their chipmunks. It seemed there existed a hierarchy among four-footed creatures too: Miss Addams’s cat, Sophia (named for Tolstoy’s dutiful wife), lived a cosseted life in which she did not have to hunt her breakfast any more than Chaya did.

  She had been doing just as the persuasive Miss Addams had suggested, since such moral force made one feel craven for denying her: A dictionary by her side, she led a group in the reading of great books, which, hardly a step ahead of her charges, she herself had first to discover. But for all that she enjoyed the discussions and liked her students—Miss Addams referred to them as “your women” as if Chaya had created them—she was not comfortable on Halsted Street. The settlement house was a great heart beating with conviction—passion, even—and she respected everything about it. But two things beat in her an opposing rhythm. One was that Asher was keeping himself distant, as though her married state frightened him, or warned him off; as if Gregory owned her now, and would not share. He moped, he read, he kept to his room and would hardly speak to her; as she had waxed, so had he waned. She was constantly preoccupied, searching for a way to lure him to her. Nor was she entirely certain he was welcome here since he was technically, if not intellectually, a child, and other boarders with children had had to make other arrangements for them.

  Her book class was a cluster of shy immigrants—two young men irregularly, which tended to mean that their employment had given out—who were making their way laboriously, like horses lumbering through deep water, into Romeo and Juliet. They liked it best when she read to them; sorting out the words themselves was terribly difficult but their enthusiasm reminded her of her own when she was called a “scholar” at the school house in Christa.

  One woman, Demetria, who sat with her infant in her lap, nodded when Chaya told them that the lovers were, in truth, young adolescents, apparently intended to be thirteen or fourteen. “Oh, yes, in my village we have brides that age of Juliet. Younger!” she whispered proudly. “But they no speak like this one. Never!”

  “Have you ever seen a Greek play?” Chaya asked, fully knowing the futility of the question. Neither had she.

  “What plays are those?” Her baby was grabbing at Demetria’s book, trying to crumple its pages.

  “Oh, they aren’t very happy, the Greek plays I know. Only tragedies.”

  “Nothing about village like mine? Is called Nakia.”

  Chaya had to demur. Surely she didn’t know the names of all the Greek plays that existed; it was Asher who had told her about them, blood in his eye—about the blindings and the murders, the becalmed ships, the woman who killed her own children and the one who was forced to drag her son from a cave and take him to be slaughtered for vengeance’s sake. She had wondered just what kind of place this Greece must be, to emerge in anyone’s dreams the way those stories had overcome their authors. Poisoned minds. Like stories from the Bible, was this true history? Did they make it up or had all that gruesomeness actually happened? The teacher needed a teacher. Gregory might know, that was the kind of thing he’d have learned at university. She vowed to use her newfound time to read them, as many as she could find—Hull-House had a modest library now, too sweet a consolation to believe. And if they were performed at a theater, she could finally afford time and
a ticket.

  But on the day she sat down with Medea she found herself unable to concentrate, as if an attack of influenza were descending upon her; the words floated as incomprehensibly as islands of ink on the page.

  The chill of winter had begun to inch its way toward the city. What, she wondered in her distraction, had become of the white ermine muff Gregory had given her? Could she have left it in the coatroom at Winkler’s? That seemed as good a guess as any, but as she started for the door in her lovely warm coat—how much more bearable the weather had become!—she realized that her usual route to work had been from Mrs. Gottlieb’s. She had no idea how to negotiate her way to the trolley from here.

  But she had money in her purse.

  It still astonished her to open the little black snap-bag in which bills lay folded around one another, coins clinking alongside, spilling out when she was not careful. Gregory had simply handed them to her without a word, and had kissed, rather paternally, the top of her head.

  The exchange felt almost illicit—spending money for having done what? She had once heard a woman ranting from a soapbox on a downtown corner, disheveled and apparently bitter about her state, accusing married women of being no better than kept, of trading the favors of their bodies for worldly sustenance. She railed about their inability to vote, their banishment from the ranks of power, their abject weakness when offered the shelter of a man’s name and bank account. People seemed to hurry their steps as they passed the woman, as if she were dangerous. Her anger was so scattered that Chaya had dismissed what she had understood.

  But she found herself, now, ruffled by a faint breeze of sympathy when she opened her reticule and closed her hand around a clot of paper that would buy her a comfortable ride to Winkler’s. Gregory would say she had too many qualms.