Ned cursed at the unions that were stripping him of his fortune. He raised his voice with each pronouncement, as if the striking men might hear him and “Desist!” he shouted, smiling as if he’d made a joke. “What will it take to get to them to desist! Nightsticks are not sufficient. A little state-sanctified brutality might be in order.” His guests hummed their approval. “A few smashed heads might do the trick.” Raised their glasses. Concurred.
Gregory, holding tight to Chaya’s arm, called out, “Ned, don’t you think that a bit extreme? Do we really need blood in the streets to make you happy?”
“Oh, you are tedious, Gregory. You and your soft, floppy heart. You would give over the city to the lazy and unclean. To the jabbering class. How did it happen that you became bewitched by those people? I think we have a family in common, but one would never know it.”
The Steel-man only glared at his brother. And Chaya did not dare speak in this company. You see! Asher wanted to shout. You see! You see where you’ve brought us!
“I happen to share the opinion of Medill and his legions, whose editorial stance is that this city will not prosper unless we keep well separated the men who build and sacrifice and those who leech upon us only to spend their days with their elbows on the nearest bar.”
“Sacrifice?” Gregory’s voice got away from him, Asher thought, the way he himself sounded these days when, unpredictably, his voice broke.
Ned’s face was turning violet. “Do not make me out the villain here, Gregory. If you are so aghast at what I call sacrifice, I would appreciate it if you did not enjoy the sweetmeats from my table, which are prepared by a cook whom I pay, on linens my washerwoman bleaches, whom I must pay, in a house kept warm with a mountain of coal for which I must also pay. How do you think an evening like this comes to be? Just who should underwrite it?”
For this Gregory was prepared. “If making a party seems to you such a sacrifice, Ned, I fail to see why you let yourself be so put upon. And what does all that have to do with the fact that with your assent there are thousands of men in this city who have no roof over their heads, who have no food for their children? Please tell me, what is the equation here?”
“My assent? Do not presume to lay the blame on me, if you please, for the fecklessness of those roofless men.” Asher had never seen anyone sniff and raise his chin as if he smelled something foul, but here the man stood. If he’d had a cane he’d have shaken it. “Sentimentalist, get yourself another whiskey and let us leave this for now. I will make certain that I do not trouble you to attend the next time we invite our friends for a convivial evening.” Ned turned his back as sharply as a soldier and left Gregory standing shielding Chaya. It was the first time Asher felt so much as a cinder of sympathy for him.
HE WANDERED the rooms upstairs, fingering the flowers of that wretched man’s wealth, slipping them into his sack (which everyone assumed was filled with books. He had one book, today, at the bottom, but mostly had vacant space in which to drop his discoveries). Men like Ned kept no money loose; there must be a safe or a strongbox somewhere. On the library walls, above dusty Dickens, Gibbon, Scott, pictures of hulking men kept silenced watch. The architect who’d built the house, a man named Richardson, large as a house himself, dead of it all too soon. A familiar face above a checkered cape—the mayor! Harrison the ambushed! He had been a friend of Ned Stillman? Crooked like the rest, and, could be, shot for it, no matter what they said of the crazed assassin? Was the mayor’s son, his successor, any more honest? They were a gang of take-and-hide, get-and-keep-everythings. He closed his hand around a pen, golden, filigreed, and dropped it in his sack, where it bounced against a brass inkwell (inkless). Donlan, for you. Write to your son with it.
“Asher, may we bother you to come down to us and perform your party game?” Gregory stood behind him smiling, framed in the doorway, unsuspicious. He always had an inviting, hopeful look. How could the man spend his time cataloguing the sins of the boodlers and bleeders and look so clean and cheerful? “So many people remember when you answered questions in their parlors. Would you come and be their amusement, and then we’ll have cake.” His voice turned down at the end of the sentence; it was not a request.
Asher manufactured a smile. He would pay up. It would buy him the look of innocence; his perfect book-memory was like perfect pitch. “Greenland.” “The House of Tudor.” He tried not to yawn. “Cosimo de’ Medici.” “The French Congo.” They were so easily satisfied. He sat up straight, still small on his plush-padded chair, his head below its upper curve, and pretended to strain at recalling facts that he tossed like coins to an organ-grinder’s monkey. Soon his deepening voice would turn reliable and he would be too old to amaze them.
Dismissed, the chocolate of his reward carefully licked off his hands—his host and hostess smiled at him as he darted a lizard tongue between his fingers—he went upstairs again to the pleasures of burgling.
He was holding a silver watch in his palm, studying the slow, patient movement of the second hand when, poking into his thoughts like something slipped under a door, it occurred to him that, finally, this was the moment to produce what he had promised. Pocketing goodies made him feel like he was evening the score but—Donlan was right—a mountain of hockshop tickets wouldn’t change anything. What those men needed were paychecks, for their bellies and their self-respect. He pulled out the stem of the silver watch and turned it as fast as he could and watched the minutes fly by, and then the hours. He could feel the blood coursing through the soles of his feet, feel it prickling his palms. He pushed the stem back in, a sharp little click, replaced it on its shelf, and headed for the stairs.
ASHER LURKED around the table, whose array of sweets had dwindled under the onslaught of guests who were not too polite to ignore their appetites. He found a strawberry in a shiny chocolate shell, tongued it cautiously so as not to finish it too quickly to use it as a prop, and stood himself, like it or not, beside Ned, whose posture was that of a palace guard. It was unlikely the man knew how much Asher despised him—so rich in self-regard, why would he suspect such a thing? “May I ask a favor of you, my—” My what? Dear man? Friend? Brother-in-law? He left the sentence unfinished. “I wonder—”
“Not half so much as I wonder at you, my little man. How is it your brain retains so many abstruse facts when most of us can barely manage to remember where we have left the keys to our front doors?”
Ab Struse. He would have to look that up. This admiration, Asher thought, was an astonishing attempt at ingratiation on the part of the man he so reviled. Whatever the reason for it—a desire to draw a distinction between him and his sister?—it was an opening. Here came the ramrod Marco had suggested. (He’d looked that up too. He knew a metaphor when one came round.)
“May I ask a favor?” he repeated. “Sir.” That was the word he’d needed. Ned looked benignly down at him. “I am—I have—I don’t know how many men you employ at your factory but could you possibly make use of a few more?” He tried as abject a smile as he could but forbade himself to say please.
Ned laughed and put his hand too familiarly on Asher’s shoulder. “And why would you be making such a request, if I may ask, a young fellow like you whose hands are still soft, and may they stay so. You are fortunate that you can leave the punishing work to your elders. Have you become a junior member of an employment agency?”
It was not amusing enough to deserve that laugh. “I have—some friends—a dozen or so—who are very skilled at heavy labor, who are in need of work and they would be—” He forced himself to look directly into Ned’s forbiddingly pale blue eyes to telegraph soul-to-soul. Assuming the man possessed one.
“As if skilled and heavy labor belong side by side, my boy!” His brother-in-law blinked at the humor of the idea as if its naïveté assaulted his very eyes. “And why would I take on this cadre of talented laborers? Because, you understand, if I were in need of help, I would know where to find it.” Now he seemed to have fixed his gaze on Chaya, who stoo
d close beside her husband beneath a painting too dark, from where he stood, to decipher. Asher recognized the ploy of seeming to be fascinated by something so as to have a place to hide discomfort; the paintings were all too murky and ill lit to reward much attention.
Before Asher could hazard a reason—why indeed should the man be magnanimous?—Ned squeezed his arm and pronounced, “I do think I might arrange to take them. A gift to you, because you are a brother of sorts, aren’t you. If you will send them over early next week I can find something for them. Tell them to ask for me when they come around.” He gave Asher an abstracted smile, the kind that did not reach his eyes. “I believe I may owe your sister a bit of—well, let us leave it at that. Be certain to tell her, will you? Just as you suggested, iddle kiddo, let us call it a favor. For the sake of”—he sighed heavily—“family.”
36
A PARTY at the Stillmans’. She felt as if she had emerged from a burrow into the light of day; the brightness stung her eyes. Sweet things, laid out like elegant merchandise, made her gag. At the least, she had a moment with her brother. “Thank you for coming, Asher. We are doing our best, aren’t we—to be family.”
Asher stared at her as if the word were unfamiliar to him. “Did I have a choice? Anyway, these people aren’t my family. Do you think they are yours?”
Her eyes had burned when she told him what she was doing for Mrs. K-W. “And what are you doing with your days now, Ash? You should be at the university.”
He’d smiled cryptically. “I am near the university. That should be good enough.” His wild streak had become nearly the whole of him. “What, precisely—” She was smitten with guilt—she had been elsewhere. While she’d pondered her marriage and her new vocation, she had been guilty of neglect.
He gave her an oddly vicious grin. Who knew what mischief animated it? “I am making some plans. I am going to surprise you.” He’d been growing; she had hardly noticed. Or it was his tweed suit, cut exactly like an adult’s, that reminded her that he was not her ketzele any more. More tomcat that pussycat. “The last time we were here, did you hear brother Ned spitting on the workers he likes to put out of their jobs? ‘Lazy as niggers,’ he said. ‘Why do I owe them a paycheck? They come late, they get sick—I had two die on me last week.’” He grimaced and, had he had not been in a carpeted room with no spittoon in sight, she was certain he’d have spat. And there was more to come: Gregory and his brother had an awful encounter, Ned at the top of his lungs, Gregory with restraint, which she was sure Ned heard as cowardice. She stayed as far from the two of them as she could for as long as they were compelled to stay. She studied the paintings, which were de rigueur for such a house. Hung high, they were dark and dense with men grappling like wrestlers. Out of the shadows in the largest, a swan hovered, menacing, above a young woman in a toga who cowered beneath his wings and turned her face away. Chaya found that more alarming than inviting, but, trapped, she busied herself with them as if she were in a museum, or back at the Fair.
Gregory’s mother floated by, inspecting her son’s guests’ glasses. “Please, please, avail yourselves of the punch bowl. That is pure champagne, with green grapes to connote blossoms, and it is just calling out for your attention!”
“She thinks she’s amusing,” Asher whispered. “I think she’s ridiculous. Blossoms!”
Given their little history of confiding, Chaya felt more than halfway kindly toward her mother-in-law. She tried to imagine Faith Stillman without her lovely gray dress, its apron of lace over silk fine as a spider web; without her careful coif and the luscious earrings that swayed when she harangued them. Her necklace suspended a single ruby like a drop of blood that sat like something intimate against the fabric that covered her hollow collarbones. Her coloring was so pale—Lallie had surely gotten the improved version—that had she been one of the women who kneaded a treadle in a sweat—without makeup, minus the clothing she chose carefully to disguise the length of her neck—she’d have faded, all freckles and pallor. Chaya felt protective of her, but she had no way to express it.
IT WAS, as it turned out, not moral revulsion that had made Chaya queasy at the dessert table. She was both thrilled and panicked to discover herself pregnant, a possibility she had not much thought about. At the Madison Street rooms, Gregory had promised her he was “taking care of—” and he had waved his hand vaguely. He hadn’t told her that, safely married, he might have stopped taking care. She was stunned at what had happened without her suspecting, let alone willing it—the glory of it! While she had been intent on pleasures newly found, a force larger than she was securing a place for her in a long, an infinite, line. She had trouble believing it, but when she felt her waist and discovered it slightly widened, and touched her breasts only to discover a tenderness that was very nearly an itch, she was silenced. Oh, she wished her mother were with her! How thrilled she would be.
A child, then. Fine. Better than fine. But now, when she’d just got her useful life in order? She could, she supposed, bring her child along with her when she made her inquisitorial rounds. Otherwise (and how could it be otherwise?) she would become yet another mother who gave over the care of her child to a surrogate. How complicated it was, all of it, and into this welter of confusion, like it or not, she was going to cast yet another soul and allow herself to be joyful.
37
CHAYA WAS grateful the first time she felt truly, unignorably sick: Shouldn’t the creation of a new human demand one’s full attention, and, along with delight, even some sacrifice of comfort? Shouldn’t it announce its presence—invisible, mysterious—by hinting at the visible, unmysterious changes to come? When she found herself unable to sit in a room where coffee was being brewed or fish unwrapped, she was satisfied that the baby-making mechanism was grinding away efficiently, thrumming like a benign machine with no off switch. Gregory, though not happy to see Chaya miserable, was proud, nonetheless, of his part in making her so.
Her condition also thrust her a step closer to the mothers served by Hull-House. They came forward with advice of all kinds, from the sorts of horrific potions she should be imbibing to give her baby strength—vinegar, sauerkraut juice, emulsion of eel—to the necessity of sleeping with her head facing true east. Least welcome was the discreet suggestion that she and her husband sleep separately and that she not yield to his seductions for fear of damaging her child. “Remind him,” she was advised, “that it is his child as well.” Then again, in perfect contradiction, came the assurance by a Sicilian mother of seven that when her labor began, she should indulge in a “feast of love” with her husband to ease the baby’s arrival.
She thanked the ladies and, touched, discarded their suggestions.
Gregory was working at finding a house of their own and she would soon, she was both pleased and sorry to realize, be on her own and missing her mother, whose advice would likely be less exotic.
But on the first morning after Miss Addams’s own doctor confirmed her state, and after she had settled her mutinying stomach with soda crackers and carbonated water, she discovered a fount of unwelcome advice in her own bed.
“Where are you going, love?” Gregory asked her, propped on his elbow. Last night they had ignored the warning against disturbing the babe with their lovemaking; the covers were still wonderfully disarranged.
She was fastening her skirt at her waist, by now almost sufficiently widened to need the buttons moved.
“Where am I going?” she echoed. “Why, to work, Gregory. Today I have a list to attend to on the far west side. I didn’t know there were even houses out that way.”
He sat fully upright. “But you don’t intend to continue Mrs. Kelley’s business in your current state!” He was rumpled, his hair at angles she thought particularly adorable. She sat herself on the edge of the bed and smoothed them down with a placating hand.
“But of course I do! Why would I stop?”
Gregory gave her a look of pure incredulity.
“Chaya! You yourself have ta
lked about the contagion in those places. You called them cesspools! Do I need to make a list for you? Do you recall? Typhus? Diphtheria? Smallpox? Are you mad?”
She stood and put her hands on her hips the way she had seen people do, for emphasis, though it made her feel as if she were onstage. “No, I am not mad. But neither am I a coward.”
“You have a new responsibility now. You are—”
“I know what I have and what I am. Or will be. But darling—” She was bent on keeping her voice low and respectful. “Those contagions can fall upon me anyway, whether I am bearing a child or no! Why is it more dangerous now?”
Gregory looked around the room as if he might find someone to argue to, since her sanity was hardly to be trusted.
“You are no longer responsible for your own health and safety, must I really remind you? Must your zeal render you this irresponsible?”
She was trying hard to understand. She knew that he was earnest and afraid—she even knew that, looked at one way, he was correct and she was tempting fate—but still his argument fell flat. “No one protects the women who work in those places when they are in what you refer to as my ‘state.’” She said this as quietly and calmly as she could.
“Ah, Ceil. Chaya!” He could almost accomplish the throat-clearing consonant. “Will you always regret that you are no longer helpless? Is that to be your lifelong melody? ‘Let me live no better than the lowest’?”
And so they wrestled, and Chaya was made to question whether she thought herself indispensable, whether she was resisting Gregory’s control over her actions, whether she could, in fact, survive her responsibility if something terrible happened to the child she was carrying. Gregory insisted that, of all men, he would not dream of standing between his wife and the needs of her constituents, but did he have no right to protect the child who was every bit as much his as it was hers? “Chaya.” Conciliatory, her name like a hand patting her head. He was out of his pajamas and into his day’s working clothes, suspenders fastened, shoes tied. His shirt collar stayed unbuttoned because he worked here at his desk, at home. “I have a thought, dear.”
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