Then she was reminded why she loved this man: He could not stay distraught. In spite of all, he knew what was momentous. Unimaginable though it was to her with her qualms and quarrels with herself, affection better suited the lines of his face. (She prayed her baby would inherit its father’s temperament.) When she introduced them, every bit of stiffness fell from Gregory like a robe he let drop to the ground. Oh, how, in spite of all, he believed in blood, how he believed in family! Why, then—but she tried to push this aside—could he not grant her Asher, who did not despise her as his brother despised him?
“You are well, and you have traced us to our lair!” His metaphor demanded more than he could guess of her rudimentary English, but Chaya could see that he wanted to embrace her and was only restrained by propriety. He was looking hard at her mother, studying her with his customary intentness.
She could see how pleased this greeting made her mother. But she herself was bewildered. Was she no longer banished for her brother’s action?
Perhaps Mrs. K-W was correct about Gregory: He had felt obliged to be unforgiving of the one who had acted on his own deepest desires. And now, to a man inclined to tenderness, here was the important thing to heal them: her lost mother, actual, in their parlor, this tall, broad-shouldered woman with her rumpled face and missing tooth, her plain, worn black dress with its out-of-date sleeves—Chaya was learning of such irrelevancies from Lallie—and her fifty words of English. “Meyn—husband—English, have more. But he work.” She made a face, squeezing out the words as if they hurt.
Gregory put his hand lightly on her shoulder to reassure her. Then, turning to Chaya, his familiar kind face restored, “Some dinner, dear? Your mother has come such a long way.”
It was just as well, she reflected, passing the bowls of boiled potatoes and steamed carrots, sprinkled with raisins to be festive, that Asher was off somewhere tonight, in the event Gregory could not see his way clear to forgive them simultaneously. That would come. He looked relieved, though Chaya could imagine he was frustrated at not being able to tell her about his day with the astounding minister.
Instead, he turned his attention to his mother-in-law and, with Chaya translating, asked her so many questions about her family’s life in Cleveland that at last she shyly asked, “And you tell me some things of you?” The gaze she cast about the room—high-ceilinged, trimmed with glistening moldings, and, set into the front door, that colored glass, those lavender flowers and pale green leaves like the windows of some secular church—suggested that she wished she could ask how he came to own a house as fine as this. She seemed uncertain it was permissible to address him as an equal.
But Gregory shrugged away her deference. “My life is much less interesting. I had to marry your daughter to make myself worthy of comment.”
The irony was not entirely a happy one but, euphoric, Chaya allowed herself to laugh before she turned the statement into Yiddish and made her mother smile.
ASHER
49
“WHY YOU not come with me. I riding the train. I go.” Bakitis removed his frayed cap to scratch his mown-haired head. He looked without expression at the shiny black louse that was crawling evenly up his finger.
First thought: The train? Who can afford a ticket? Second thought—ah, the poor man’s Pullman! Would it be better to run the rails than the alleys? “You would—I could go with you?” Very little flattered him but Asher was so pleased his scalp prickled.
“Kid, you always smarter as me. You help me figure out what’s what’s.”
Bakitis was so honest Asher could love him for it: He called things by their names. “Let me think about it. I’ll think fast.”
How could he have massed up such a mountain of negatives? He would not cross the street to the university. He would not sit on a cardboard throne again and waste his attention on questions that already had answers. He would not—could not—find work it would pay to do. He would not live on Chaya’s husband’s inheritance. There was no place here for his strangeness—what if he took his strangeness to new places, if he went out to see what he could not even imagine? Asked a question whose answer was not in a book somewhere. It had never occurred to him.
He loved the names of cities, the kind that didn’t describe anything, at least in English: not Middletown or Plainview but Ashtabula, Indianola, Albuquerque, Perth. And there were warmer place than Chicago in January! Better to sleep in blue air than in that boxy room with its heavy door, its windows framed in oak. Darkness, the smell of soap and furniture polish, the narrowness of the hall, the steepness of the stairs. And that maid Colleen poking her head around corners, a stranger who picked up what they dropped, asking what she could do for them in a kick-me voice. All of it the boundaries of his sister’s little life, her safe deliverance. She made too many curtains that kept the sight of the world outside the windows. She would grow fat after she expelled that baby, a baby born rich. Already she was gorging on the milky products out of which it was being constructed. She was drinking beer and stout to stoke the machinery, and stout she would be at the end of its assembly. She would never go back to chasing down the murderers in the sweats. It would be too hard once she had grown soft. A thrush, someone wrote, it didn’t matter where, cannot be an eagle. She would play cards with Lallie’s giggling friends in their rainbowy, ribbony dresses, and join the board of the symphony or that new sprawled-out Art Institute uptown and then, liking the first, would have another child, and sometimes go to read to The Poor, who were growing smaller and smaller in her sight. He remembered lying on the old piecework quilt that hung down, at Mrs. Gottlieb’s, from Chaya’s bed of chairs—how he wrapped himself in it and how they whispered before they slept, trying to learn what Chicago would ask of them, and what it would give back. Gone, for better or worse, that quiet hour when they were both afraid.
From where he had sat himself on the shore of the lagoon, he looked down at the water. Once Bakitis had threatened to drown himself before they all starved to nothing. It would probably be yielding at the bottom, soft under his famished bones. Silty. Silken. Settled. Hopping a train was a better idea.
Marco came to him, still feverish. “Little guy. Listen.” He was sweating in spite of the frozen air, his cheeks flushed, a makeshift scarf all the way to his chin, shred of some left-behind cloth that looked like it had been a banner. “Remember, I wanted to burn out that bastard Pullman?”
“I remember. You and everybody else. You planning to try it?”
“No. But Bakitis tells me you’re checking out tomorrow. I’m better, I come too. I think I will. Be your caboose.” He came so close Asher could smell his fever, like scorched cotton. “You know how to make a firebomb, ain’t I right? You did that boiler factory.” His face looked hot, as though his fascination with fire had entered his own body. “That was real good.”
Asher nodded. At least someone was grateful. “Yes? And? Therefore?”
“Therefore! You so funny. So. And.” Marco seemed to need to think about his connectives. “And so some of us got an idea. How’d you like to leave a little goodbye present to the Exposition here.”
In silhouette, they looked like a bear and a cub. The large, dark, bearded man put one arm around the boy’s shoulder. It sloped down from so high Asher felt nothing but bony wrist across his back. But it was a comfort, after so long, to be touched any way at all.
“How about you put together another one, a dozen even, however the hell you do it, and we have some fun here. These buildings ain’t good for a damn thing now. They all gonna come down soon if they don’t fall in first. Wouldn’t you like to help them along some? Like, you know, putting down a animal that’s dying.”
Asher, surprised, stared back.
“Look at it.” They were standing across the water from the Court of Honor, so gorgeous, so sullied by neglect. In the falling light, the silvery windows of the Machinery building (exactly twenty on each side) were a long row of blind eyes. The Music Hall was stone silent. “Kill it, kid,” M
arco whispered. “Damn thing’s dying anyway. Like, you know, doing in a horse that’s hurting. Why not help it out.” He checked Asher for a response but got none. “We show them it ain’t nothing but firewood now. Someplace we can warm our hands, ’cause it’s cold out here, brother, in case they never noticed. How about a bonfire like you never seen before?”
Marco was crazy—always had been. But still it was something to think about. It wasn’t dying, it was dead. The abandoned Exposition stank of uselessness, insulting to anyone who had loved it. Why not a touch of violence as a farewell. You gave us fireworks? Here’s some fireworks! Would they even try to save it? Pump water from the lagoon? Why bother?
“A gesture,” Asher said. A just jest. Someone might even recognize his signature in the ruins. “I’ll show you how to make one. All of us can fire them up together.” FIRE AT FAIRGROUNDS! COURT OF HONOR BUILDINGS DESTROYED IN SUSPICIOUS BLAZE. Honor had already been destroyed, if anyone cared. Asher wanted to go inside the ruined hall and lay the blazes himself, for spite, a touch here, a flare there, dragging a torch up the stairs, holding it against the banister long enough for it to catch. Wouldn’t it be pretty.
But, “No,” Donlan said firmly. “Oh, no. You ain’t no flea in a lousy mattress. You stand out here with us. You can be straw boss.” A sop. He held Asher against him, inside his mangy coat, one long minute.
THE FLAMES—he tried to calculate but couldn’t—probably reached a hundred feet. They spread and leaped, eating the dark. Doubled in the lagoon, they illuminated the whole known world. His handiwork, better, a hundred times better, than Stillman’s boilers. When the wind blew, gouts of fire rose and leapt, great flowers of light, all the way to the lake. Asher could hear them sizzle where they landed.
Flamboyant flame. Famed and final. He wished he could torch every building.
They fled before the Law could find them. Like roaches, scattered, hid, or walked between the helpless members of the fire brigade and half the south side, trying to look indifferent. Smiling.
Sparks cascaded down, larger than snowflakes, and where they touched the lagoon, the water pimpled, hissed, sputtered. Ash danced on the surface before it was swamped. The sky, reflected in the water, went seven shades of pink, of orange, of rich rose. Midnight, thanks to him, was full daylight, everyone’s face more fevered than Marco’s. He hoped each man of the thousand thousand roofless tonight in Chicago saw the unholy light and cheered. This world did not love them. Let it go.
Asher sat alone on the slanted shore of the lake, near the crumbling skeleton of the rolling sidewalk, his back to the fire. In his anger he could, with one huge twist, have broken away from Donlan and immolated himself like some Zoroastrian on a pyre. But he felt purged, pure, just as he’d hoped. Energy surged through his every joint, every connection, electric. He had seen something through to its end, at the least. Had refused to let it fade. The flames, wild and wind-buffeted, had seared away everything but what he needed for the rest of his life. Neither did the world love him, he supposed. But—a new thought every minute—how could he dare tell anyone to let it go. Who could say they didn’t love it, even hungry, even in pain. He did. He had everything to learn, or learn again, this time without words.
50
GREGORY’S PARENTS never came to their house; instead, summoned to appear, they dutifully reported for Sunday dinners and the occasional party. One day it was Gregory alone who was called and he went with the look of a man on his way to the gallows. When he returned, paler than Chaya had ever seen him, it was clear he had been jerked upwards, his body left to dangle over a gaping hole. “They have done it, finally. Done what I’d expected a long time back.” He gave her the smile a dead man gives, fixed and cheerless. “I hope you haven’t become too attached to this house, my darling. I hope you have not decided to forgive it for being beautiful, because it is gone now.” Some unkind satisfaction glittered in his eyes, as if to say, You see?
All she could think was, My darling? Had she been returned to her native state? And so she had been. “Did your mother have anything to say about that?”
“She did not. You would have been disappointed in her. She stood beside him without a word, with her hands clasped as if she was a praying woman. He said he had refrained from acting on my—infidelity to the values of our family—my infidelity!—on her behalf but that his patience with my straying was now strained beyond endurance and he was ‘cutting me off.’ A lovely phrase. I asked if he was accomplishing the surgery with a knife or an axe and he said”—and here Gregory forced his voice down to a basso profundo—“‘Laugh if you will but I guarantee you will not find penury amusing.’ Such a dramatic vocabulary the man has, for someone so devoid of imagination.”
Chaya went to him without words. He took her into his arms and rested his chin on her head, which she took as a small sign of forbearance, for which she supposed she should thank his father and his heavy hand. “He said he was acting without having consulted with Ned because this was not solely about Ned, who is his own man who can take care of his own business.” He was warm against her but she could feel how rigidly he was holding himself. “Of course, he lacked the courage to say any of this in your presence.” A very deep sigh. “You may have noticed that bigotry does not tend to make a man courageous.” He sighed again. “Or subtle.”
She could find nothing to say that would not sound inadequate. She was going to have to think hard about what it would mean to give back what she had barely begun to accept as hers. Yet—she would not let herself smile—wasn’t it a victory of sorts, not to be rich? Her brother, and she his accomplice, had finally settled the question. Mrs. Gottlieb would be disappointed.
“Chaya, I have some savings. Not a great deal but I promise you will not go back to your cigar bench. At the very least, having failed my father’s test of fidelity, you will now have a chance to administer yours”—he laughed joylessly—“and I am certain I will not fail it. We are not being thrown to the wolves.” The color was returning to his cheeks. “If they want a demonstration of our principles, they will have one. And just as my father said, this has nothing to do with my sainted brother.” Bigotry, as Gregory had said, might not make men courageous but perhaps righteous anger could.
NECESSITY HAS a good name when it comes to its daunting demand that one meet it with invention. She suggested that they might take the occasion to move to Cleveland where her family seemed at home but Gregory, in spite of his father’s influence, had a great many friendly connections in the city and Chaya watched how he used them to create a place for himself. So—since intention was all—it was possible after all to use one’s friends and acquaintances uncorrupted. Reverend Stead, who had returned to Britain, engaged him on his first journalistic assignment, to continue his reports on Chicago’s stupendous failings, which were published abroad to great if hypocritical acclaim. (Because who, in London, could pretend they did not equally excel at debauchery and inequity?) In order to keep the good Reverend abreast of the social and the moral tide of Chicago’s least favored populations, Gregory met zealously and often with every kind of leader, religious, legal, and with Chaya’s two dear friends, Miss Addams and Mrs. K-W, and from what they told him reflected back the unsurprising news that “sin” remained constant and “reform” stayed a few steps behind the most earnest scourges.
He did not finish his book but Chaya completed it. Revised, she liked to say, and completed it in her own style, bearing witness to the atrocities she had visited for Mrs. K-W. She would not have thought of creating such a document but Gregory, passionate and thorough, had laid the foundation and she gratefully built above it, with heavy editing. Somewhere along the way, she picked up the dubious but graphic designation of muckraker, which she thought just the kind of word her Asher would have loved to wallow joyfully around in.
Giving up the house was not so difficult; in fact there was a certain satisfaction in finding, with Gregory, what she called a “happy medium” between its unearned grandeur and the
exaggerated modesty of those terrible rooms he had pretended to. They found a brick bungalow exactly like the rest of its block, larger inside than it looked, and clean. Its front room was a sunporch, which Chaya filled with ferns and ivy and a birdcage containing a blue budgie smaller than her palm. Undistinguished, the house did not embarrass her the way the Stillmans’ excessive bounty had; there was far less shame for her in no longer feeling like the Lady of Someone Else’s Manor. They gave Colleen a generous parting gift. At least she had not curtsied when she took it.
And what that reduction in their means made possible was a meeting on equal ground with her darling Sara. One day when the trees were in bloom, they arranged to meet in Lincoln Park to show off their babies and reminisce. Sara and her Joe and little Joe Jr. lived on Francisco, on the far west side, across the river, and Chaya was delighted to see that she seemed beatifically happy with husband, child, and the comfortable four rooms they had found, with a little shared yard and a good-sized tree she was already envisioning her son climbing. One of the reasons they met in the park was that Sara most likely believed that Chaya’s presence in her freshly papered parlor would diminish the pleasure she took in it. But Chaya had a surprise for Sara: Their new house, she told her friend almost proudly, was not much larger than hers and Joe’s.
She had, she supposed, learned the concept from those Greek plays she had struggled through at Miss Addams’s of something called hubris. Why must everything return in the end to the discrepancy between economic fortunes? Whom you know, how you live, where you spend the hours of your life—she had always understood, but without the experience to prove it, that all those dire separations between people represented nothing innate, not intelligence, certainly not virtue, yet everyone was so defined. Hubristic—ugly word but applicable no matter where she looked. She was happy almost beyond words that disinheritance had put the two of them on the equal footing their affection deserved.
The Lake on Fire Page 36
