Abbeville (6 page)

On either side of the lobby identical staircases rose like the ascent of angels. At the landing of what was labeled “mezzanine” the staircases gave way to more conventional steps. He climbed and climbed until, by the time he reached the floor marked 5, he was perspiring.

When he found the door with his uncle's name on it, he knocked. No answer. In Abbeville you usually just stepped into folks' houses and called out a name, but here he wasn't sure. He knocked again and heard an exasperated voice say, “Come on in, for heaven's sake!”

Inside stretched a long, empty room with a few vacant chairs and low, round tables holding newspapers in various states of disarray. He noticed a window set into the wall at the far end of the room. Behind it sat a woman with flame-red hair pulled up into a swirl.

“Didn't you hear me?” she said through a round hole in the glass.

“I thought you said to come in,” he said, leaning toward retreat.

“Three times,” she said. “You're all sweaty.” The word in her mouth made him feel exposed. “Is the elevator broken?”

“You keep the grain right here?” he said.

She looked at him as if he were the one who used foreign words like mezzanine.

“An elevator,” she said. “It rides people up and down.”

“Well, I never heard of anything like that,” he said.

“Where in the world do you come from?” she said.

“From Michigan just now,” he said. “Been logging there. Originally from a place in farm country you never heard of.”

“Then you must be Karl,” she said out of nowhere. “Go sit down and cool yourself. He's been a regular pest, asking after you.”

She disappeared, and moments later Uncle John entered the waiting room, looking nothing like he did in the woods. Under a starched white collar and vest flashed a silk tie stuck through with a gold pin.

“Hello, son,” he said, offering his cultivated hand. “Luella? Where did you disappear to? I need you to help me get this lad into the appropriate straitjacket.”

The redheaded woman emerged from the door.

“Should we try the Fair?” the young woman said.

A county fair in the middle of the city?

“Ask for Will Doyle,” said Uncle John.

“What should we be looking for?” asked the young woman.

“Two good suits with waistcoats. Shirts. Ties. Everything it would take to make you look at him twice.”

“I've done that already,” said the young woman.

Luella. Karl rolled the word silently on his tongue. It made him tingle.

“Well?” she said, looking right at him. He could not think of a single word beyond her name. She seemed delighted to prolong his state of suspension. But finally she spoke again. “The boss has given us orders.” Then she actually took his hand, as if the fiddler had started to play and the whole room was awhirl. “Come on. Don't be afraid of me. I'm just another girl.”

“Don't you believe her,” Uncle John warned.

The Fair turned out to be an enormous emporium. Just inside the door they passed a counter of women's lotions and elixirs that smelled so sweet he felt faint. Next came a counter with so many different kinds of handbags that he thought every woman in the city must have
wanted one that was unique to her. Then it was up the stairs to a room that held enough jackets and pants to clothe all of Cobb County.

“And what may I be doing for a hearty young gentleman such as yourself this fine afternoon?” said a man even more dapper than Uncle John.

“He needs to be made presentable,” said Luella.

“And who would you be proposing to present him to, Miss?” said the man. With his accent and lovely tenor voice he seemed almost to be singing. “Would it be your family, then?”

“Oh, my, no,” said Luella with a little more vehemence than Karl wanted to hear. “This is the nephew of Mr. Schumpeter.”

“Well, then, he could buy the whole store,” said the salesman.

Karl looked around him. Nobody had enough money for that.

“I'm just a farmer and a logger,” he said, “and I'm here to get an education.”

“Then let's find you a suit of clothes befitting the educated man you are to become.”

Karl followed the two of them to a rack that must have held fifty suits. When they reached it, the salesman took a step or two back and looked Karl up and down.

“I'd say a 40,” said the salesman. “Now here is a classic.” He pulled a dark-blue suit off the rod and sent the other clothes dancing. “Can you feel how smooth that is?” he asked, inviting Karl to finger the weave. Under Karl's callused fingers, the fabric might as well have been silk.

“I am under strict instructions to make sure he comes home with something with a vest,” said Luella.

“Ah,” said the salesman, thumbing the edge of his own. “I think Mr. Schumpeter is correct, though a waistcoat is not for everyone. It takes a certain bearing to carry it. But let's first think only of fit.”

He lifted the dark suit he had taken down.

Karl reached for the hanger, but the man turned and walked away. Karl looked at Luella.

“You have to try on the pants, too, silly,” she said.

Karl was still confused.

“Not right here in the middle of the floor,” she said. “Just follow him.”

The next hour was extraordinary. Luella chose suits and shirts for him to try on. She touched each of them all over, inspecting the weave and the stitching inside, before handing it to him so he could go into the little closet and place it, fresh from her hands, directly against his skin. Then he would come out and model for her how the shirt or suit or jacket looked on him, and sometimes she would actually touch it on him, the shoulders, the calf—even, praise God, the waist. What's more, she did not seem the least hesitant about it. What kind of incredible women did they raise here?

When they were finished shopping, Karl noticed in the mirror Luella looking at both sides of him.

“You wouldn't be reconsidering now, would you, Miss?” said the salesman.

“Reconsidering?”

“Bringing this one home.”

“He does look nice, doesn't he?” she said, and Karl felt like a stallion that had taken a ribbon.

Luella signed the store ticket. Though Karl knew his uncle's generosity would pay the bill, his gratitude went to her, and he said so.

“You are a real gentleman,” she said. “Do you know that? For someone raised with goats.”

O
VER THE NEXT SEVERAL
days his uncle tutored Karl in the firm's basics.

“My company deals in promises,” Uncle John explained. “Promises
to sell a certain quantity of grain at a certain price on a specific date in the future. People buy and sell those promises until the day arrives. Then whoever has sold it last must fulfill the promise, either in grain or cash.”

“What is the point?” said Karl.

“The only way to control the future is to pay its price today,” said Uncle John.

Within a few weeks he moved Karl from the office to the Board of Trade itself.

The trading floor spread out over what seemed like an acre under high, grimy windows. Above it stood enormous clock-like devices. An attendant manned each, following the action on the floor and moving the dial's single arm, clockwise on a rising market, counterclockwise on a decline.

Karl's first job was to take orders over the leased telegraph line that connected to Uncle John's office down the street. When he received an order, Karl dispatched it via one of a half-dozen young toughs who ran them to the Schumpeter traders in the pits.

Karl was amazed at how this stone-hard city transformed grain into an abstraction, but it was not as though the physical world did not intrude. A surfeit of rain moved the market, though no one on the trading floor suffered a drop of it falling on his shoulders. A military upheaval in Europe stampeded the market, though no one here heard a cannon.

Every day as Karl walked home to the boardinghouse, he passed a little square where street-corner orators condemned everything Karl was learning how to do:

“Who are the wolves who wager on our toil?” Predators speculating upon the very food in our children's mouths. They buy and sell you as surely as slave masters. They stir great waves of panic, then mount the crests for gain.

“There is nothing in this world that is not material. Love? Religion? The milk of human kindness? Money and class crush them.

“But one day the contradictions will all lie bare before you. The workers of the world will come together in the great, inevitable surge of history. Class will battle class, and the weak shall rise up as one and bring the predators down!”

The next day Karl told Luella about the man.

“You should have seen him,” he said. “He had a head of hair out to here and a beard scragglier than any I saw in the woods. And the mouth on him. He doesn't stop for a breath.”

“Maybe he has a lot to say,” said Luella.

Less than a week later, one of the regular traders fell seriously ill. Uncle John asked Karl if he was ready to take his place.

“You have everything in your head that you need,” Uncle John said. “Now we must find out what's in your belly.”

That afternoon Karl pulled at his starched collar, cleared his throat, and asked Luella to dinner. She accepted immediately, and he wondered why he had waited so long.

As afternoon wore into evening, his uncle left for some engagement or another, and the activity in the office slowed. Luella came to Karl's desk, and side by side they looked out the window into LaSalle Street. The city lay before him as if it were his. Luella on his arm, he tipped his hat to one of the clerks and winked at the doorman, who got them a carriage and received a nice gratuity for his trouble.

Karl had chosen a fancy place on the Gold Coast north of the river near where Uncle John lived—along with the Swifts and Armours and Potter Palmers and everyone else with a name. As soon as the two of them stepped into the restaurant, he realized he had made a mistake. Luella, who had always before appeared cosmopolitan in her bright white shirtwaist and black skirt, here seemed totally out of
place. The preening little maître d' did not even meet her eyes as he suggested that she leave her knitted shawl at the coat check in the tone he might have used to ask her to take off a pair of shit-smeared boots.

“Are you all right?” Karl asked as they were led toward a dark, faraway corner of the restaurant.

“Why wouldn't I be?”

“We could go somewhere else.”

“Only if you think we should,” she said.

“I don't think any such thing,” he said.

The restaurant was lighted by candles, which gave the lacy expanses of the ladies' white gowns an antique glaze. The menu came in French. He knew a few words from Abbeville, but they weren't the words that described this fare, so he had to seek the waiter's help.

“Why don't I just bring you some sort of steak,” the waiter said.

“And some corn,” said Karl.

“Corn,” said the waiter. “Yes, of course.”

When the waiter had gone, Karl arranged the napkin in his lap and surveyed the array of implements before him, which seemed extensive enough to perform surgery. Luella said nothing.

“I don't know why they say this is such a great place,” he said.

“You really don't, do you,” Luella said. She reached over and took his hand where it lay next to a rank of spoons. “It's because people like me don't come here.”

They ate as quickly as they could and left. She gave her address to the carriage driver, who headed south and west into precincts of the city Karl had never traveled before. There were sweatshops and small restaurants and greengrocers and block upon block of three-story tenements. At some point he got a whiff of what smelled like the farm, and he wondered if they could already have reached the city's outskirts. Soon it was stronger than any farm he had ever known.

“That's the stockyards,” she said. “You get used to it.”

She leaned forward and tapped the driver on the shoulder.

“Here,” she said.

The carriage rolled to a stop. The horse twitched. Karl jumped down onto the rutted street and came around to help her, but by the time he got there she was already on the way to the rickety steps of her flat.

“I'm sorry,” Karl said.

“You didn't know,” Luella said. “I should have.”

Through the window of the tenement across the street somebody was shouting in a language Karl had never heard.

“Will you be all right?”

She smiled, put her hand to his cheek, and gave him the slightest, sweetest kiss on the lips.

“Next time,” he said, “I'll be smarter about where we go.”

“Next time,” she said, “you will be smarter about who you go with.”

“Don't say that,” he said.

“I won't have to,” she said. “Others will.”

In the morning his uncle called him into his office before Karl left for the Board of Trade and his maiden descent into the pits. Karl brought with him a small notebook in which to record his uncle's instructions.

“You were with that girl Luella last night,” said Uncle John.

“Yes, sir,” Karl said.

“Did you have a good time?”

“She's very nice.”

“Have you seen her here this morning?” said his uncle.

“I was a little worried,” said Karl.

“There is no place for sentiment in business,” his uncle said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you know why you haven't seen Luella?” his uncle asked.

“No, sir.”

“She has become much too familiar,” said Uncle John. “I had to let her go.”

“But I was the one who wanted for us to go out,” said Karl. “I am the one you should blame.”

“Business and sentiment, lad,” said his uncle. “You must keep them scrupulously separate. When you don't, someone always gets hurt.”