Bright and Distant Shores (44 page)

“My dad used to bring me out here when I was a kid. All of America practically gets its meat from here.” It was a boast and only half true; he could feel his hometown pride coming in.

Argus saw pigs and cows lowing behind fences, enough animals to sponsor a lifetime of feasts. He asked about butchering and keeping the meat fresh because he wanted to understand everything about America. Owen told him what he knew, about railcars stacked with ice and the migration of steak and pork chops. Argus would study their customs like a foreign language. The first rule was to mimic, but before he could imitate he would have to put on a tribal show.
Strut the boards
. He could do that, he knew, imitate someone savage and godless for three months, bend to their expectation of a heathen, a wily kanaka. Him and his sister dancing and chanting tribal oaths on the rooftop, if that's what it took, but in the end he was destined for something entirely different. God was at work, seeding the field of his future—a bishopric with oriel windows and a garden of antique roses came again to mind; he would be of service and study the scriptures at night, become a seminarian, take to wearing spectacles and ale-colored weskits, find a Christian wife, a black girl who also felt the call, whose life had been riven, like his, by a fervor for the Holy Ghost. The skyline came into view— hard-edged silhouettes jutting against the formless sky, the soft diffusion of daybreak mirrored back, squared-off in the countless windows, then, as the train rounded a bend, the sun broke through in a glassy flare, a burst of Orient gold. They watched the light glint and quake off the buildings, silent for a full minute.

As the train approached the Loop, Owen began to reminisce, yelling to be heard—his father shooting deer on the south branch of the river, within living memory, near the west side of the gasworks, an ex-minister to Persia, the honorable F. H. Winston,
riding a white horse, same as Napoleon's, every morning along the lakeshore, the very word
horse
like an expletive in his mouth after the business on Tikalia. His stomach was still on the mend from the animal's kick and he had a hoof-shaped bruise just below his sternum. As the city drew them in, he told Argus about hitching rides from wagons in the lumber district during his Tabernacle days and about stealing a slab from the iceman (who carried a long-handled axe!) midsummer, keeping the cake of ice like a foundling in straw and sawdust for weeks, concealed beneath the dormitory piers, unwrapping the muslin when no one else was around. It was all in secret, the block of ice like a giant, embezzled diamond.

He hollered such memories at Argus, who feigned interest even if he didn't catch every word above the train's clatter. Owen realized, by listening to his own booming voice, that the stories were a way of talking himself back, of preparing to be with Adelaide again. He was nervous, chatty, winded with anticipation. He wanted to talk and smoke off the nerves so he could come to her with some presence of mind. He would have to tell amusing stories and recount the strange islands over dinner. For months he'd been accountable to no one, showed up to meals and traded, but he'd shared nothing of his inner hopes and ambitions, had guarded them closely. She would want that and much more; he would have to begin again. The slow seduction of lapbound napkins and hearing her recite poems or the lilting immigrant songs from Hull House; most of it entailed listening but some of it, he recalled, involved the revelation of innermost character, of
self-hood,
as if that were anything more than a cipher, more than that scintillation off the windowpanes as the sun surged and fell back in the east. He pointed out the tallest building to Argus and told him that was where they were headed. To the highest mountain of glass, Argus said, tossing his cigarette out into the rushing cold.

It was a Monday morning and there was no welcoming party at the train station. This was Owen's doing—he'd neglected to telegraph the details of their arrival, either to Hale Gray or to Adelaide
at the museum. He suspected it was an oversight, but perhaps it was by design. He wanted to first see his fiancée in private and the memory of the Gray family during their departure was still fresh in his mind, the convoy of teary aunts trailing behind Jethro's mountain of kidskin. That same luggage was returning in tatters, cankerous with salt and little starbursts of sea-green mold. The son had not fared much better. From the platform, Owen watched him step gingerly down from the hotel car, the fencing glove on his left hand, an insomniac and drawn look on his face. His face was sun-scalded and the eyes, coldly distant, held the febrile blue of childhood illness. The dandy's nerves were shot and Owen suspected a loud handclap might send him over the brink.

There was a distance of a hundred yards between them and Owen had no intention of bridging the gap. He had intervened on Jethro's behalf, brokered a treaty at considerable expense with the manic captain, in return for the heir's cooperation. There would be no divulging to Hale of the native siblings' true station in the tribal world, that the brother, outside a few faltering phrases, spoke a scholar's English. Jethro moved uncertainly down the platform toward the baggage compartment, apparently to oversee the unloading of his specimens. The porters hefted the boxes and cases and tanks, began lugging them onto dollies and carts. Suddenly animated, Jethro scolded them to be gentle with his cargo. The artifacts, along with the canoe, were packed in a separate compartment so that Owen could avoid standing beside him. Argus and Malini alighted in the exhausted flow of immigrants and they joined him on the platform, already shivering in the cavernous station.

Owen arranged for all the artifacts, the canoe, as well as Jethro's taxidermied spoils to be transported to the insurance building. He would find a hansom for himself and the siblings, but Jethro could fend for himself. Owen was hours away from completing this colossal errand—receiving payment and getting a foothold on a new life—and he was suddenly impatient to be unyoked from the feckless son. He would simply tell Hale that
Jethro was in good health, perhaps a little fatigued, and would be along shortly with his seaweed albums and bottled seahorses. That ought to get a single-malt chortle out of the old baron.

The hansom pulled into the frenzy of the streets and Owen couldn't help feeling as if he were crossing a threshold. A native son to this city, he was returning under changed circumstances. By the end of the week he hoped to look at houses where he and Adelaide might live after the wedding. The trade payment would put a sizable dent in a mortgage, especially if they found a fixer. His own house. He did not take up the thought of her father's possible death or the threat of a looming inheritance. Instead, as they rode into the din, he thought
Here comes Porter Graves's kid,
raised as much by doormen and demolitionists as by his own father and the whey-faced nuns. He missed that time, longed for communion with the boy who, at age thirteen, had a smoker's consumptive laugh and was a confidant to dog fanciers and druggists airing grievances out on their stoops. Adultery, larceny, gambler's remorse, nothing was held back from their confessions to the orphan on the lam. Could a man pray to his boyhood self, send back worship like a telegram, reassure the little sniveler that all would end well? A pretty wife, a promising house on a third-acre plot, take heart. He was drunk with his own return and wanted to launch a Sioux cry out the window of the cab. He loved this town in a way that confounded him, caught in the back of his throat—the bawling, mongrel side streets, the midwinter offerings of the curbstone vendors (meat, hothouse flowers, blankets), the singing blind man hawking pencils from a tin box on Washington, the big-bayed windows of State Street, as if the city couldn't get enough of her own brash reflection. He turned to see if some of this wonderment was lit into the faces of the native brother and sister but he saw nothing but cold and wincing confusion. He pointed his stupid grin out the window to let them have their moment of bracing contact.

Argus felt sick riding into the wall of noise and traced it to a wedge of cheese he'd eaten on the train. Cow's milk didn't agree with him, he knew that now, and he would have to develop a tolerance. Perhaps a constitutional piece of cheddar each night before bed, just the way the Reverend Mister had taken sulfonal for wakefulness. Owen sat next to one window and his sister had the other, so everything Argus saw of the chaotic city was above dreadlocked, black hair or crowned around a felt hat. He looked at his shoes when a wave of nausea threatened to brim the banks of his stomach. He counted his breaths, first in English, then in Poumetan, then in pidgin. The cold ached in his bones and he wanted to bathe. He'd spent six years hearing about distant lands and imagining cities, but there were things he could never have guessed—dogs on leashes, dray horses feeding from nosebags, bicycles dusted in snow, placard advertisements for dentists and undertakers nailed to tree branches, the view of the enormous lake choked with ice, the clay-red buildings as tall as cliffs, their hundred postage stamps of windowlight. He couldn't discern, for now, what was beautiful and what was ugly but knew that it all moved too quickly and with too much noise. Malini had her hands over her ears as a delivery wagon blocked the way and their own driver incited a tirade in the street. Every driver and pedestrian within a half-mile radius began screaming blue murder at the wayward wagon, an assault of such profanity and violence that Argus feared someone might actually get killed or injured, feared pistols and bloodshed, but then there were big guffaws and belches of belly laughter from the box seat above their heads and ridicule came hurling with laughter from open windows on all sides. Even Owen leaned out his window to lend a hand in the humiliation. He pulled his head back inside, wild with good humor—
Welcome to Chicago!

First Monday of March and Hale Gray was getting his monthly shave-and-trim in his office. The white-smocked barber, a man with the demeanor of a jeweler, of someone who spent hours
bent at close work, went at the ruffle of unsightly neck hair with something like religious devotion. The straight razor made a few scratches at a time before being wiped free on the hand towel. Hale was in his singlet, the doors were closed, his face still stinging with the ablutions of a hot lather shave. This tradition of ushering in the month with personal grooming always made him hungry for a substantial lunch, a steak so rare it made him consider his own mortality. Insurance was a great, pragmatic philosophy to Hale; a wager against God but also an acknowledgment that death could come hurtling through at any moment, bloody or benign, slow and grueling, or, with tremendous luck, merciful and swift. He had his head down to let the barber razor his collar line, eyes closed, the smell of lather and tonic a bit thick for his liking—was he being embalmed or barbered? When he opened his eyes he saw them enter under the shambling auspices of his frumpy new secretary—Owen Graves and two savages buttoned up in wool coats, eyes averted, the lot of them, as if this ritual of barbering were a single rung above bloodletting.

“You've caught me in the throes of the monthly trim. Don't worry. We're almost done here. Please have a seat and I'll be right with you. Fetch our guests some coffee and cake would you, Miss Ballentine?”

The underwriters called her type a lumpy dresser and Hale watched her shuffle out of the room. Could an Iowa girl with a first name of Lulu be trusted with company letterhead? Some scrolled papers arrived for signature, the document capsule thucking in the pneumatic tube behind Hale's desk.

The sound reminded Argus of a dog clearing its windpipe.

Hale continued to study the savages and on several occasions the barber had to adjust his head back down. “I take it we're all in one piece?”

“All things considered, we're in fine shape, sir. Your son is tending to some details at the train station and should be along shortly.”

“Very well. How did he fare?”

“At the very least, he had an adventure.”

“Did him good, no doubt. And tell me of the collectibles.”

Owen produced a handwritten inventory from his coat pocket and brought it forward.

Hale took it and began reading, head still down, the paper in his lap. He made a series of nods and murmurs before speaking in a cryptic tone:
And how am I supposed to get a canoe into my office, Mr. Graves?

Owen shrugged, stalling.

The barber wiped Hale's collar line with a steaming towel, dried it briskly, made some whisking motions with a neck duster before releasing the insurance baron to a standing position. Hale buttoned up his pressed shirt with a half-turn away from the black girl. Tucked in, buoyed, and close-shaven, he shook Owen's hand with slow, emphatic movements. “This is something,” Hale said, pumping. “You've bettered the Marshall Field collection and then some. South Seas ethnographica is now my niche, I would imagine. Maybe I'll turn the whole building into a museum. Ha! I knew you were a top-notcher when I laid eyes on you the day of the opening. Picture me in that chief's canoe on the sooty river in June. Or down at the yacht club for the commodore's amusement. No, it'll be preserved and hoisted somewhere. Bravo!” He still had hold of Owen's hand as he directed his attention to the siblings, their stiff woolen backs turned at the glass-fronted display case. Behind the glass doors Argus recognized some tribal weapons from the island of Poumeta.