Bright and Distant Shores (49 page)

Out into the river of people, the amazed stares. It was sport of a kind, to see the native girl with dreadlocks and a cashmere scarf, walking stiffly along, as if in damp clothes, and the black fellow strutting out like a duke of the underworld, that Malacca cane rowing him down the thawing sidewalk. They got cheers and whistles, welcomes, racial epithets, scowls. They passed through the shadows of the terracotta cliffs, the towering façades tilting down on them as the siblings looked straight up, into the heaving,
abyssal blue. Argus gave in to the street's curiosity and spread his coat on the ground so that he could lie down, faceup, arms across his chest, casting his eye up one of the endless stone walls. They applauded this, though he couldn't think why. From this angle the parallel lines converged upward, reaching out to the big blue vanishing point, as if craving the benediction of heaven. There was a time, he remembered, when his sketching had been free from perspective, free from the lines that did not meet in life but appeared to merge on paper. That was another person now, the boy who'd seen the world rioting without pattern, flushed against a single plane. He got up and dusted himself off, received several pats on the back for his timely display of awe.

Adelaide took them to a lunchroom for morning tea and they ate slices of hickory nut cake. Fellow diners watched as Argus sliced up his cake with knife and fork, aping a fastidious Briton they thought, both utensils in hand. Malini spread her cake with apple butter and ate it like a sandwich. She wanted to take the whalebone and fabric cups off her breasts so she could eat without sighing between bites. Argus had already noted the way that Americans favored the fork, as if the knife were merely an accomplice, only to be used in a pinch, for navigating the outskirts of a steak or breast of chicken, then promptly set down. He imitated this style, putting down his knife and attempting to use the business end of his fork like a shovel. But then he noticed the reporter looking askance and he suddenly remembered that he'd been
discovered in the wilds
! He fumbled the silverware, picked up the cake with both hands. The reporter wrote something in his notebook and the neighboring diners looked away now that everything was in its place.

Back outside, into the mellow sunshine, a small attachment joining the entourage as rear guard, a few tourists from Kansas and a couple of housewives loafing on State Street. Adelaide let them tag along, no harm done, so long as they gave a wide berth. Adelaide took them into a venerable old Loop bookshop,
Hardwick's, a book depository that resembled a rail depot with its iron and glass-block landings and wooden benches, seating designed to keep potential customers on their feet. The shop was presided over by a slovenly monastic, a man who'd spent his life in bookish pleasure, and it showed by the way he ate with his mouth open, spitting crumbs, working his sack lunch while deliberating on sonnets and obscure European novels. He sat behind a rummaged desk on a raised platform, like a judge, interrupting his private reading to dispense literary justice. Adelaide had been coming for years, at least once a month, and each time he made his recommendations and pronouncements anew, calling her
young lady
and sending her into the hinterland of wood-rung ladders for a particular volume or translation. If she didn't return within sixty seconds to the register with said edition he was on his feet, indignant, chewing, telling her to hop out of the way. Today he stood watching the native boy climb in search of hardbacks. Some new books of marginal interest came down—
A Students' History of the United States
(cloth, with maps, $1.40 net) and
Where the Trade-Wind Blows
by Mrs. Schuyler Crown-inshield, a novel set in the Spanish West Indies, for $1.50. Hardly Hardy, the book monk pronounced, seeming to enjoy the hard
H
up against his glottis. Adelaide saw the reporter study Argus as he perused the books so she moved the party to the register. “I'm going to teach him how to read,” she said to the proprietor, loud enough so that the reporter would take note. Argus wanted to stay and linger in the fusty pong of endpapers; he hadn't even been allowed to enter the scripture section, an entire alcove walled in by kidskin.

They moved up along Michigan Avenue, the broad plain of Grant Park to the east, softening the enormity of the lake. They came to the new public library building and entered from Washington. It was a mausoleum dedicated to books, that much Argus knew, devotion worked into the Bedford bluestone and granite like faith itself, the Tiffany domes and Romanesque portal, the
mosaics of Favrile glass and mother of pearl, the chief librarian, a supplicant with a hushed voice, giving the tour himself. They padded across the cork floor, noiselessly passing into the reading room with its oak tables and lamps. Argus was allowed up into the iron stacks and when no one was watching he opened several books in a row, bringing each up to smell its faintly fungal loins. The act was almost sexual in pleasure. He fingered the leather spines, thumbed along the parched bookblocks. One day he would have a library card and use the catalogue, use the saving shelves set aside for scholars. He would spend long hours in the reference room working on sermons—they were open thirteen hours a day, Sundays included—studying the history of knowing and loving God, yes, but also centuries of literature, history, art.

They were gathering in the lobby and he was called to join them.

Next stop was the Art Institute at the foot of Adams, a whirlwind of Egyptian and Assyrian sculpture, objects of the Italian Renaissance. They stood the natives in front of the old Dutch masters and waited for something to happen. The
Tribune
reporter sidled up, pencil in hand. Malini walked the perimeter of the room, feeling the oily gloom of the paintings weighing down on her. These were the clayskins' dead ancestors, she could tell, assembled in a longhouse for remembering but with no bones in sight. Argus came close to a Rembrandt and noticed the perspective was off, but to great effect, the girl looming in the foreground with her rouge cheeks and snub nose, her porcelain, globoid face and averted eyes. She was standing in contemplation, in a cataract of half-light, a tunnel of miry shadow behind her. It was too uneven to be sunlight; it fell marbled and daubed, white firelight cast through shifting muslin.
Chiaroscuro
the plaque pronounced and Argus repeated it aloud after Adelaide pronounced it for him.
Probably thinks it's on the menu for tonight,
said one of the Kansan tourists, playing to the others. Adelaide didn't bother with
a reply and they moved back out into the streets, ditching the hangers-on for the use of Hale's carriage.

They rode north along the shoreline, eating ham sandwiches as they crossed the Chicago River and made for Lincoln Park. They rounded the zoo, promised for another day since the animals were still in their winter quarters. Neither Argus nor Malini could comprehend an afternoon spent watching wild animals. They passed the archbishop's residence and Argus studied the windows and redbrick façades for signs of holy habitation but all he saw was a layman grooming a horse out in the carriage house. They turned south and on North State Street stopped outside the Holy Name Cathedral, the archbishop's parish church. Argus went in alone, through the massive bronze doors, and knelt in prayer before the granite altar. He asked for forgiveness of his sins and for a new life to begin. It was his first time in a Catholic church and he was impressed by its seriousness—so much stone and stained glass, the Stations of the Cross raised up above the bare wooden pews. The Ambo of the Evangelists served as lectern, cast in bronze, the saints depicted in symbolic form, Matthew the angel, Mark the lion, Luke the ox, John the eagle. In the vestibule there was a framed photograph of Archbishop Feehan, a profile of such benevolence that he found himself sunk again in prayer.

They crossed back over the grimy river, its jaws opening out into the lake, congested with scows and Mackinac lumber barges making test runs and repairs in the clear weather. There was a plan to convert the boats of Chicago into a navy fleet, in the event of foreign foe coming from over the waters. The reporter was telling them all about it. Malini fell asleep as they came back into the tumult of South State Street, the carriage haltered by the stop-and-go, the window-shoppers spilling off the sidewalk, the delivery wagons flouting the rules. Argus waved to a band of Salvationists ringing bells and blowing horns for redemption on the street corner.

Argus did not wake his sister until they pulled up in front of the museum. Like the rest of the public buildings he'd seen that day, the outside was solid and imposing, chiseled from gravestone. They were welcomed by Mr. Gray, their employer, and Mr. Field, the man who owned the department store where they had obtained their clothes that morning. Miss Cummings looked a little wary when she greeted Mr. Field. Malini stepped from the carriage slowly, still a little groggy from her nap. Argus felt embarrassed that she had slept for part of the tour but Miss Cummings didn't seem to mind. She put an arm around his sister and led the way up the broad stairs. He hung back, taking the stairs slowly so he could eavesdrop on the conversation between the two important men behind him. The reporter scribbled madly in his notebook alongside.

“.  .  . as I say, Marshall, the tour was Miss Cummings's idea. Public institutions, after all, are available to everyone, and we felt it was our duty to show the natives some of the city's finest. Their clothes came from your store just this morning. Can't have them sporting loincloths until warm weather is here for certain.”

Mr. Field spoke evenly and without emotion. “I understood that you wanted to take a tour yourself. I've asked one of the curators to guide us.”

“Indeed I do wish to take a tour. Along with my charges. What should we see first?”

“I'm not much involved with the day-to-day.”

“Surely,” Hale said, letting the reporter catch up, “you know your way around. You'll have to come up to my own museum when it's finished. The entire lobby will be used for the summer just for that purpose.”

Mr. Field put his hands behind his back and looked at Mr. Gray. “Do you suppose that will sell you more insurance?”

“I certainly hope so. Oh, look, the tour is leaving without us. Let's move along.”

As with the other venues, the siblings were led around. Miss
Cummings's colleagues did not seem happy to see her as the party moved through the halls and wings, the deer and bird dioramas, the skeletons of untold heathens, the urns and jewels and chain mail of vanished peoples. The curator waffled on. Malini trudged along, hungry and bored. Argus tried to stay interested but it wasn't until they reached the weaponry of the Pacific Islands that he was drawn in. There behind the glass, labeled with small pieces of typed-up cardboard, were more weapons from Poumeta, just like the ones in Hale Gray's office. The clubs, spears, arrows, and slingstones had belonged to his ancestors, to his great-grandfathers, from a time when village boys didn't go off to the sugar fields or mission houses. The artistry could be read in the woven beckets for throwing spears, the inlays of whale ivory, the child's club, feathered with egret, that his great-grandfather, still a boy, might have used to strike dead bodies to incite bravery, as was the custom back then. Argus could not place the emotion that coursed through him. It resisted naming but, like
chiaroscuro,
combined light and dark, regret and revelation all at once. His dead grandfathers lay in cabinets—both in the museum and in the skyscraper. They were molded into handles, captured in the obsidian flakes that came to a finial point. These items did not belong to the white men but had they saved them from oblivion? He couldn't know what was true. What he did know was that the stories he'd heard as a child of a less complicated time, of generations spent in long hours of storytelling, fashioning the same handicrafts for days, weeks, those were all true, just as his father had told him while reprimanding his boyhood carelessness. A dropped clay jar offended the ancestors because of their artistry and care, a tradition faltering then and now lost forever. Poumeta no longer held villages of his own people. It struck him for the first time since the day he'd left its beach with his sister in the rowboat. He'd come to the other side of the world, into another hemisphere, to see firsthand what his father had told him when he was six years
old—that their traditions were waning and would eventually be lost for all time.

Hale Gray stood in front of the glass display case. “I have something similar to these weapons,” he said, throwing his voice back toward Marshall Field.

Argus said nothing. The reporter and Malini stood looking out the window at a lone sailboat on the gold-threaded lake.

Finally, Hale Gray said, “Well, we're grateful for the tour, Marshall. We'd best be off.”

They moved toward the main rotunda.

“There's one more thing I'd like you to see,” said Marshall Field.

“What's that?”

“Something we have on loan from London for a few months.”

“Ah,” said Hale, pivoting, his mouth held open.

Marshall Field said, “Miss Cummings, would you ask Dr. Dorsey if we might borrow the Bennelong document for a moment?”

Adelaide went to find her boss, certain she would be fired by Monday afternoon. She returned wearing a pair of white gloves and holding a manila envelope.

Hale could see that it was a letter of some kind, a transcript in old cursive.

Marshall said, “To commemorate the visit of the natives to Chicago. Seems they are part of a long line of imports. Reminds us that there are people attached to these objects, no? Bennelong was an Aboriginal fellow from Australia. Went to England with the governor of New South Wales at the end of the last century. Anyway, the original seems to have disappeared but this is a certified copy on loan. Our historian is quite fascinated. Miss Cummings, would you mind reading it aloud?”