She went out onto Halsted Street where she was greeted by a stiff wind, raised her hand, trying not to be tentative, and a one-horse cab stopped for her. It was a wonder, if not precisely a delight. She sat very straight, self-conscious before no spectator, and looked everywhere at once as if looking preoccupied might make her less conspicuous.
Chaya might have changed but Winkler’s had not: It hulked as plain and dour as ever on its corner. The long flight of stairs, in spite of all its use, was still and forever dusty, and the huge room on the second floor lay before her like a lake tinged with some green light-eating scum. She stood in the doorway just out of view, halfway between shame and regret. The spreading sadness in her chest had no name, really. They would think she’d come to gloat. Her new coat was dark purple, heavy—when she put it on the first time she remembered the sweat where Mrs. Gottlieb worked, the weight of the fabric of coats just such as this dragging them down to the floor, too exhausting for the women to lift. It was a royal sort of color, cut and assembled with complexity—more costly to its maker than its wearer. And her hat—her hat, though simple, was piled with autumn flowers, golden chrysanthemums and burnished leaves. The secret to style, she had always suspected, was understatement. But didn’t her friends here, who would go home to grimness, deserve their frequent election of showy colors and artificial flash at the neck, at the wrist?
She stood in the doorway too self-conscious to go in empty-handed and demand Sara’s attention, and Stuka’s, Yudita’s, Nicolina’s. She had not come to be envied but to be forgiven.
When two men lumbered down the stairs carrying a table, she had to move out of the way, into the stogie room. The rank smell of tobacco and perspiration shocked her as it had her first day on the floor. “Look!” someone called out. “Chaya!”
They were not free to swarm around her until their break. She hadn’t forgotten; she had tried to time her appearance with their dinnertime. When they were finally free to rise from their benches, in an instant she was swamped. It was worse than embarrassing. A little gypsy-dark worker, someone she’d never seen before—perhaps her replacement—stroked her sleeve appreciatively, as if it were alive. Another woman, older, Slovenian, Chaya remembered, her fair hair under a plaid bandanna, tried to remove her hat so that she could inspect the flowers more closely. “Please!” Chaya murmured, her fingers twitching at the strangeness of it all. She was afraid to sound impatient. They must be desperate for someone to give them hope, she thought, stricken, if they have to make a heroine of me!
Sara embraced her, smiling at the fuss; Stuka was gone, home to nurse her mother, who was dying slowly and, for Stuka who could not leave her to come to work, expensively. What was left were ranks of tired-looking women and a few girls too young to deserve this labor, eager for someone to admire with little provocation. Apparently they did not mind envying her. She gave them hope—had she not appeared in that newspaper under the headline CINDERELLA WEDDING? That was not why she had come. But if her muff had been left on the coatroom shelf months ago, someone who admired it had taken it home. Use it well. Frowning, she reflected—and felt such a flush of guilt she knew she would have to kill it before it killed her—Gregory, if I ask him, will surely buy me another.
“WHAT ARE we going to do with you?” she asked Asher that afternoon, having returned from Winkler’s more confused than when she’d set out. She had not expected to find him in his room in the middle of the day, but there he was, wearing a face that told her he was hiding something.
“Nothing!” But his eyes were furtive.
“Are you going somewhere? Are you leaving your room these days?”
When he shook his head, looking away as he did so, she thought, I have lost him. I am not his friend any more. Even his movements were cribbed and tight.
“My soul, come here, will you please.” She reached for him—touching him would restore them to each other. But he gave off a new kind of dignity that enclosed him in an ice-block of privacy. Was it that he was growing up, or had she broken their tie by loving Gregory? “Please, Asher. Talk to me. What are you thinking? You are doing nothing with your”—why not?—“your brilliance.”
He gave her a long, demanding look. He was going to make her labor.
“Please sit here with me.” She patted the bed beside her.
“I’m not the cat. You can get her to curl up there when you want her, but I am not a household pet.”
She laughed. “Try getting the cat to do anything. This is the first time I’ve known your powers of observation to be inaccurate.”
Nothing. The intensity that made him so searingly present could withdraw him into absolute nullity. She thought of her refusals, back at the farm, how she’d learned you could erase yourself. “You are trying to make a point, I recognize that. And your point seems to ignore the fact that you now have the means to do”—she cast about—“anything in the world you want to do.”
Asher bored. Or rather, feigning boredom. He showed her a parody of a world-weary man, eyelids half lowered, an advertisement for indifference.
She ignored the insult. “You could attend the university. I am quite certain you could induce them to accept you in spite of your age and lack of schooling.” She smiled encouragingly and felt the smile returned to her unappreciated. “Or even because of it.”
He gave her a scrap of smile. “Do you think they would like to study me?”
She took the bait. “They might! Wouldn’t that be interesting!”
Asher was pacing, but only because the room was small and gave him no place to go where he had not just been. He was still a compact boy, but he looked compellingly large in that space. “No, it would not be interesting. I told you I am not a pet, nor am I a specimen. Mendel tried to breed tailless rats. A terrible idea to do that purposely.”
She was losing patience. “Ash, this does not sound like you.”
Along with the new wardrobe she had forced upon him, warm jacket to solid boots, he seemed to have a new repertoire of faces to express disgust and impatience. He must be under the influence of someone whose scowl—her own?—he had learned to emulate. It dragged his bow-shaped mouth down on one side, which made even his small nose slightly crooked, which in turn made his ears look huge. Or had she done that to his ears by imposing that harsh, practical, good-boy’s haircut on him? “What is bothering you, my sweet? Why won’t you tell me?” He could allow it to grow back and obliterate the memory of being shorn like a sheep. “Are you missing the Fair?”
He stopped pacing. “I am missing everything.”
“Ah. Missing being hungry? Being cold? Being left at home when I went to my work? All those things?” She listened to the litany herself, with an inward blush. “I think we have a way, both of us, of becoming too attached to our habits. Even the uncomfortable ones.”
But he glowered at her so acutely that she could feel where the skewer of his gaze entered, his eye to her eye. She had to look away. Once she had called him her mirror. He had breathed her air. She’d been certain he dreamed her dreams.
Where was their orphaned loyalty, each to the other? She would not say, Asher, I feel that too, because, little skeptic, he would think she was only consoling him.
ASHER
32
YOU HAD to see the guards before they saw you and duck into shadow. Easy. The men they had hired to keep watch over what was left were slow and lazy, because who cared about it any more? The Exposition was rubbish—crumpled, thrown away, deserted, dead. No, dying piecemeal, not deserted, but all its life, now, was destruction. Dismemberment. Rememberment. Dross. He had come south once and stopped in his tracks at the sight of it attacked, unhinged. It was going back to swamp. Portions of the moving sidewalk that led from the harbor were already under water, the dry sections upthrust like something trying not to drown.
Assembling had been slower work than wrecking: They weren’t dismembering it yet but it had begun to decay. Only the exhibits were coming down. The framing, the slathering
of all that staff—huge tubs of hemp and plaster—the shaping into curves and cornices, and then the spray of its whitening, none of that was built to last, and winter was having its way with it. A different set of people (better dressed than the builders!) had uncrated, arranged and positioned and stowed and placed some of the wonders, delicately, behind glass, while others lugged, by the ton, the glittering machinery, turning it, walking away to look and judge, coming back to change the angle, putting shoulders to it, turning it ten degrees. Pronouncing it perfect. Again and again and again: Calibration. Celebration. Desolation now.
Cart horses, dray horses of all sizes, colors, and conditions, stood everywhere, stolid, tolerant, waiting for their loads. Then, leaning forward against the weight, they towed it, all of it, dozens and dozens of them dotting the paths. Traffic. Wagons, sledges, lorries, clogging the walkways, tugging, hauling, some piled, sloppy, as if everything were suddenly garbage, some carefully stacked. Boxes, bags, trunks, padding. All those paintings. All those pickles, those prunes, those clocks and gears, clever moving machine parts, returned to sender. The buildings were being abandoned, timbers, dented metal, floorboards, and the sludge of white skin that covered it all, huge chunks and clots of it, jagged, useless. The horses were themselves an exhibit, aimed north toward the city or south toward the dumps, to the train stations, the ships, and gone, goodbye as if it had never been whole. Or never been.
They knew it would come to this when they built it. What kind of special place in Hell—he had read Dante, shivering—awaited men who constructed beauty, knowing they would empty it of purpose a few months later? A strange and ghastly place, he hoped, because they had no right to create something alive and then wantonly destroy it. “Like flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport!” The Fair had had a heartbeat, now extinguished by the wanton boys. Want, want, want on, want none. It had been a hoax, not meant to be mistaken for real; a bubble, a bauble, to pacify the crowd when everything else was falling down and men were starving, children dying, businesses collapsing. A jewel in a slag heap and even that snatched back.
Pulling apart that beautiful body, casting its limbs, its organs in every direction—it was the first thing since forever that made Asher cry. He had climbed the façade of the Electricity Building, small feet easily accommodated in its declivities, and skipped up into the tower (minus its bulbs) to look down on the emptied buildings. Whole sides of Machinery and Fisheries were falling in. The wind blew through half the States. Transportation, with its beautiful golden arch, sagged like something melting. The blue dome of the Moorish Palace let in the real blue of the sky. Cannibals, stripping away flesh. One hundred twenty-two buildings. Exhibits beyond even his count. The Midway a ghost town, its long straight avenues strewn with refuse, carried and dropped by dogs and once—Asher watched, astounded—a fox who meandered by unafraid. The dray horses and their wagon loads were so heavy, some strained till they stumbled. Here and there they capsized, falling with a whinny and the shout of the drover. Everything spilled out and Asher, spiteful, cheered to himself. One dingy white horse, when his knees buckled, let everything in his wagon slide into the lagoon, slowly, smoothly, and, after a burp of surprise, whatever it had been, the water healed over it. Some, more lightly loaded, went steady as ants bearing leaves in their mouths. Christa, Wisconsin, had been nothing to him. Now, his glorious city left to rot, he was dispossessed.
CHAYA SAID she was looking for a suitable place for them, their own, as if that would make much difference. “You told me Gregory has rooms,” he said like an accusation. “Why are we here and not there?” She answered by wrinkling her nose as if she smelled something loathsome, which he had never seen her do.
He lay on his stomach in his little room reading the seventeenth-century poets; admired their language—that George Herbert made designs with his words, altars and wings, and modestly admitted to his faults. “Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back, / Guilty of dust and sin.” Calmed himself, wondered what exactly they meant by God and sin. Was he a sinner? (Helpless to resist, he had pocketed the palm-sized book from the bookstore he thought of as his own.) He was bent on rearranging unfairness. Chaya told him that was good. Was that a good thing or a bad thing, spreading around what separated people so deeply that some ate foie gras and some died of starvation? He was not about to ask anyone. Miss Gates, who lived down the hall, wore a silver cross but he didn’t think he’d like her answer. His sister was not the one to talk to any more, though she pelted him with questions. Gregory he would never speak to, unless the roof was blazing. And then there were the Ists, whose meetings he had tired of: They seemed to prefer talking to acting. Talk was like the cotton candy at the Fair—it filled your mouth and then it disappeared.
This house was too full of women, plus a few men who looked like ministers, prissy and soft-handed—though what did he know, really, of ministers that he should think he could recognize one on sight. They wanted him neat and he wasn’t and wouldn’t be. They wanted him stock-still and lost in a crowd. Children came to the kindergarten, caged birds offering their wings to be clipped in return for light and warm things to drink, and toys. They fell upon the toys like starved animals on carrion. Anyone who asked what he was doing with his days—they did, casually, something he’d heard called “making conversation”—received his most withering stare.
But misery tired him out too much to run the alleys. Too much mourning to move. Too much mooning. Mornings he heard his sister’s door open—as good at hearing as the cat—and hated her. She was already dressed in her body’s disguise, new colors, pleats and plats, loving them, and glided downstairs looking full, never hungry any more. Gregory (not accustomed to working-girl hours) came later, bounded down the steps, whistling. Whistling always meant you had what you wanted. You couldn’t get it by whistling. It meant you already had it.
EARLY DECEMBER, snow receding, he went back down to Sixty-Third Street, climbed the fence, and there was a colony of men casting shadows on the icy lawns, ducking behind the skeletons of buildings. Walking in the open. Once he saw a guard warming his hands beside them over a fire they had built—wood lay everywhere, flung tinder, kindling enough for a thousand fires. That was one guard who didn’t care why he was there—he could have been one of them except for the luck of knowing the right person who knew the right person who gave him the job. Mostly, though, they hid when the guards walked by. What were the uniforms keeping watch over? A corpse. Once a copse, Asher thought, fresh from his English poets. Now a corpse. Who copes? Cops.
He counted: He had seen twenty-four men—no women—and how many more they must have been. Clots of checkered shirts, bleak jackets, worn uniforms, filthy gloveless hands, they slept inside the buildings, under the bridges, one or two in every abandoned restaurant, on the floor, across the benches that hadn’t been taken out yet. The buildings were falling, stripped by winter to their frames like arks of bone. The air smelled burnt. And the great wheel, the gorgeous circle—what were they going to do with the wheel? The stairs to its entrance were deserted, a fine red velvet rope across the landing as if it were the way to the Opera House, and up above the cars gigantic as Pullman’s coaches swung in the late fall wind, creaking. Nightmare.
Asher ran like a rabbit from group to group, hoping to meet someone he knew. The grounds seemed even larger in disarray. He had read about Atlantis: Soon it would all be underneath the lake. Another civilization would find mysterious bits—silver spoons, walnuts, incandescent light–wire, water-logged lace. How would they understand the wild combinations of large and small, stationary and moving, soft and solid, on this island, this thousand acres?
Near the end of his second visit he ran right into the standing lap of a man who crowed, “It’s Jehoshaphat! Hell, where’re your legs takin’ you so fast?”
Here was one of the best of the men he had met at the Barracks when the Fair was being born, not disintegrating. His name was Donlan and he had loved to make Asher do the hard names
in the Bible; while the others called him Genie, he was Donlan’s Jehoshaphat and nothing else.
“Well, look at us, would you!” He slapped Asher hard between his shoulders, as hard as if he’d been a man, and a big one. “You got yourself a nice coat there! Who’d you get that off of?”
He had forgotten Chai had bought him a roomy, warm jacket, gray, with a knitted collar that closed snug under his chin, and sound shoes, and made him thank Gregory for it. He shrugged.
“Come on around the campfire, meet my friends.” He was always gracious, always introducing him like a full-grown comrade. Asher wished Donlan had seen him on his throne, in his vest and pantaloons. He’d really have respected him then.
The men sat in a rough circle.
“Asher Shadow,” he told them in his public voice. “I used to work here, on the Midway.”
There was not a job between the lot of them. There was bitterness and coughing, there were names named—Pullman-may-he-rot, assemblymen and congressmen, the mayor (the dead one and the live one, no love lost on him), and their friends Bathhouse Coughlin and Hinky Dink Kenna—“I hate to call my own people scum but there it is,” Donlan said, his jaw set hard—and a whole skein of cheaters and grafters, protectors and accomplices whose pockets were lined with gold, who served the interests of every group but their own.
“The interests?” Asher asked. “What are those? Something interesting?”
Why did they laugh at that? “The interesting part,” his friend Donlan said, so amused he beat his thigh with his fist, “is how they shake people down for the money and what they get in return. It’s diabolic, it is!”
Asher decided he could not penetrate this particular line of talk. Were these Socialists or Anarchists or Proletarians? He still got the words confused. All he understood he could see for himself: Chicago was on its knees and these good-hearted souls were starved as beggars but wanted nothing to do with begging; they felt themselves cheated; they had taken refuge here—refuge in the refuse!—because it was a place to hide and not be alone. They were not trying to escape from work; work had escaped them. “Alls we want, you know,” Donlan said to him earnestly, “is a chance to use our hands, that’s what we’re good at. We couldn’t even get none of this work—” Nasty glance over his shoulder at the emptying clattering on behind them. Wild neigh of a horse objecting to the whip or the ton of machinery it had to pull. “They could hire us when they get ready to clear those buildings away. But no. We could put ’em up good and fast, snowed on, rained on, pissed on, but you know, when it comes to tearing it down, the crew don’t need so many hands. And they got their friends, and their friends’ friends, and out we go on our asses.” A wink at Asher. “Scuse me, son. I don’t want to give you the idea I got a dirty mouth. Our noble behinds.”
The Lake on Fire Page 27
