Bright and Distant Shores (56 page)

That same week an arctic storm swept through the city, the mercury and the barometer taking a plunge, followed by a late-summer heat wave. All that flux and pressure, coupled with months of foundation shift, caused the faulty windows to finally buckle and crack. Hale, the first one in the building besides Benny Boy, heard the bracing sound from his office. Not all at once, but a serial progression, floor to floor over several hours, like a set of murderous footsteps crunching over packed snow. Hale went to one of the windows in his office and saw that a hairline fracture had riven the pane in two. It divided the world outside in half, crosswise, split the gathering day between two mottled hemispheres. He placed his hand to the pane and was horrified to
find that it had a slight give. He rushed out into the hallway and went to inspect the other floors. Benny Boy came with him, calm under pressure, the two of them walking the floors to inventory the havoc. They traced their fingers over the fissures—
like frozen lightning,
Benny suggested during his one lapse in decorum. And then they watched as a piece of glass, about the size of a lemon wedge, fell free and glinted down into the pit of La Salle Street. Hale gently opened the window, stared below, and saw that no one had been hurt.

As soon as the building maintenance crew arrived for the day, Hale gave the order to remove the faulty windows at once. They would have to use the utmost care and team up with the window-washers. Twenty men went out into the floors with rubber mallets and muslin sacks and all morning the sound of breaking glass rode above the chittering of the typing pool. The window–washers attached themselves to the stone ledges to ensure no glass fell into the street. Sudden updrafts and intakes of air blew policies in all directions, as if the building itself were inhaling a colossal breath. They placed rectangles of plywood over the unglazed windows, cutting a floor's daylight in half. Clerks and secretaries joked and complained in the sudden dusk and turned on their worklamps.

A wheat broker was the only injury, his head gouged open from a shard of glass no bigger than a bottle cap. It fell with such force that it dropped him where he stood. One second he was expounding to his colleagues, evangelizing on the morning's trades, and the next he was prostrate, bleeding at the curbstone. They thought he'd been shot. For fifteen minutes La Salle Street turned to bedlam, the traffic blocked by a swelling tirade of onlookers. An ambulance arrived and took the broker away. Hale looked out his window to see hundreds of faces upturned, accusatory fingers raised in the air. He ordered Benny Boy to cease all elevator operations to the upper floors.

Then, just before noon, the city descended on the building. The mayor had been scrutinizing the building ever since its recent
suicide and had heard about today's injury. An army of inspectors raided every floor. They took glass samples, tapped at the window frames with rubber mallets, checked for health and fire code violations. They sent structural engineers into the basement and drilled holes into the substructure. While a final report on the integrity of the building would not be ready for some time, they found that the concession stands on the rooftop were not in compliance with city ordinances, that the balloon ride was unlicensed and unsafe, and that the natives had not been properly documented or vaccinated upon their arrival in the city. Health Department nurses arrived with syringes and inoculated Argus and Malini against smallpox. It took three of them to subdue Malini, who swore at them in two languages. The mayor wrote a personal letter to Hale Gray and itemized the transgressions, pending the final report. Hale responded by closing the exhibition and writing a letter of apology to the mayor. He consulted his lawyer and offered a settlement to the injured wheat broker.

W
ith the rooftop closed and cordoned off, Argus and Malini were out of work and they returned to their converted corner offices. Hale said they could stay until the end of the summer. He would arrange passage back to Melanesia or they could find alternative employment here in the city. Argus read the help-wanted ads in the newspaper and studied for his seminary entrance exams. His limbs ached from the smallpox immunization and he missed the singing and murmuring crowds. Alice Binns came up to see him each noon and they sometimes left the building for lunch. Argus was known by now in the lunch-rooms of the adjacent blocks and Alice enjoyed his celebrity, the discounted sandwiches and free desserts from proprietors. The prospect of Argus leaving the country was never discussed, because they both knew that he was hardworking and, if push came to shove, could get a job washing dishes until a seminary took him in. Argus believed that someone of distinction had seen his sermonizing and it would only be a matter of time before an offer came in the mail. He took the elevator down to the mail-room each day, hoping for a letter. If not the archbishop then a parish priest or rector, even a godly layman in need of a butler would tide him over.

Malini often heard Argus moving about in his room late at night. Unable to sleep, she went in one August night to find him sitting cross-legged on the floor. In Poumetan she said, “Why don't you use the little table?”

“Desk,” said Argus, in English. “I can spread everything out
on the floor. How are your lessons coming? No one will hire you without proper English.”

Malini said, “Very well, thank you.” A moment later, she added, “Will you marry Alice Binns as a wife?”

Argus smiled, looked down at his open textbook. “She's pretty, don't you think?”

“Far too pretty for you.” Switching to Poumetan she said, “You need an old hag with gigantic, sagging bosoms. Or a widow with lots of dogtooth money.”

“Alice has never missed a Sunday church service.”

“Bully for Alice.”

“Where did you learn
bully
?”

“At the night classes. Idiomatic impression.”

“Expression.”

“Yes.”

“We need to find you a husband.”

“I will never marry again. I have no use for men. If someone gives me a job as a nanny I will have my own bedroom and ride a bicycle like Adelaide Cummings. She says she will teach me how.”

“Her name is Adelaide Graves now.”

“Why?”

“Because white people take the groom's name after marriage.”

Malini looked around the room. It was strewn with books and papers. She said, “What are you studying?”

“History and mathematics. Are you bored?”

Malini nodded.

“If you are still awake in an hour we can play cards again.”

“You always win.”

“It is God's will.”

She threw him a weary look and closed his door. She went back to her room, where one of the big windows was now blacked out by plywood, and the others were still pasted over with newsprint. Slumping onto her mat, she returned to her knitting, something Adelaide had taught her. It kept her mind busy and she was
making a little blanket for the baby. Without being told, she had known as soon as Adelaide came up with the yarn and needles; it was in her face, her eyes bright enough to light up a room. Malini couldn't contain herself and guessed the new bride was carrying a child. Adelaide teared up behind an enormous smile and wrapped her in a hug. “We've told no one yet. It's a secret for a while longer.” Malini nodded and that night began on the blanket. She imagined Adelaide as her sister and giving her the Poumetan preparations for motherhood—braiding her hair with flowers, massaging her stomach with hibiscus oil, showing her the secret swimming hole where only pregnant women could bathe. There were no secret places in Chicago; pregnant women wandered the city, unchaperoned, hair imprisoned under ugly hats.

Around midnight she woke to footfalls outside her door. She realized that Argus had never come for the card game and she called out to her brother. There was no answer. She'd dozed off with the knitting needles still in her hands, the beginnings of the blanket no bigger than a hand towel. She got up to use the bathroom but when she opened the door she nearly stumbled on a glass jar at her feet. She bent down groggily to pick it up. The finger floated in a slow spin, the thinnest remains of blood tinting the liquid inside. In the wavering of the lamp behind her, she lifted the jar to eye level, the white finger bulging slightly through a meniscus of water and glass and lamplight. She dropped the jar but did not scream until the glass shattered at her feet and the finger rolled once before coming to rest on the floorboards.

Argus came running and stared down at it. For a moment he didn't know what it was, then he made out the bitten nail bed; in the lamplight it appeared translucent and faintly blue. He held his sister as she sobbed. Then, after a moment, they heard the fire door close at the stairwell.

“He has cursed me,” she said in Poumetan, “taken up in my dreams.”

Argus tried to be logical about it, patted her back. He knew it
was Jethro's finger but couldn't imagine why he would give it to Malini. The heir had gone crazy, that much was certain, and the finger had been a source of ridicule on the ship—seamen's wagers placed on when it would fall off—but now, here it was, six inches from his left foot. Argus fathomed the situation aloud for his sister's benefit: “White men don't curse people. He protected you on the ship, remember? Maybe he thinks the finger is an offering because he misunderstands the customs, doesn't realize that finger bones are trophies of war to be put in the longhouse. Yes, that's it.” He could feel her shaking. “A madman. I've seen him up on the roof watching those birds at night as if they were angels. Pay no notice.”

Malini pulled back from the embrace, her face rife with something. “You followed Mr. Graves onto Tikalia because you love white men more than you love your own blood sister. You pray to their God instead of calling to your dead uncles. It's your fault this has happened—” She broke off, turned away.

“What are you saying to me?”

She was rigid, overcome. “He poisoned me on the boat and put me to sleep.”

A complicated silence unraveled between them.

Argus opened his mouth, then closed it again. The look on Malini's face made the breath go out of him. Quietly, already knowing, he said: “What is it he did to you?”

There were three Poumetan words for rape—one for the act of a relative, one for the act of a stranger, and one for the act of a warring tribesman during a raid. She used the latter term, the word
rakshik
rasping dry in her throat.

Argus couldn't say anything to her while she smoldered with the memory of it.

Without looking at him, she said, “You must make amends in our father's name. It is a brother's duty . . .”

He looked down at his hands and then at her bare feet. “Sister—”

She shook her head, hearing the timidity in his voice.

Steadily now, he said, “I cannot murder a man. He is our employer's son . . .”

She folded her arms and brought her burning gaze up from the floor. “When our parents died I told my Kuk kinsmen that you were dead also. They have a word for brotherless just like childless and barren. My mother-in-law said I was unwanted by anyone. Flung out. I was useless to them.” She looked him dead in the face. “You have never been a brother to me.”

It hung in the air between them for a full minute. Then she retreated to her room and he heard her sobbing on the other side of the door.

Argus picked the finger up in his handkerchief and took it to his room. He set the appendage on his desk and lay on his bed. Lately he had taken to sleeping on the mattress and he suddenly wondered what remained of his Poumetan self. His father and uncles had been bound by the rules of retribution. Action against wrongdoers was swift and severe in the islands. When a man died of sickness it was assumed that black sorcery was at play. The elders sat on the beach, looking for omens in the flight of a flying fox or the drift of oven smoke, and then a payback runner would be off into the bushes, wielding a tomahawk against an accused enemy of the village. It seemed thoroughly unchristian to him now, this endless cycle of violence and payback, but then he thought of the Old Testament, of his own actions against the shipwrecked Englishmen.
Genesis 4:23–24 . . . for I have slain a man to my wounding, and a young man to my hurt. If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold
. . . The reverend had believed in this brand of justice but it was always mixed with the beatitudes of the New Testament; the merciful God emphasized over the wrathful one in each of his sermons. Wars could be holy, Argus had learned, could be waged in God's name. Blood could be shed for a noble cause. He might will himself into a fury and strike out. He had incited the Kuk clansmen toward their revenge against the hoary Englishmen but he'd led
the way with poisonous leaves rather than a pistol or a sword. He could project religious fervor into the rooftop crowds but he seemed unable to petition wrath from within himself. He stared up at the ceiling, aware of the finger on the desk, and tried to imagine his sister's defilement beneath the waves. Nothing came. The scene fell away behind cold abstraction and he hated himself for it. But then something mounted in him and he went to the stairwell.

Jethro had long known about the spare keys in the secretary's desk and used them to let himself into his father's office. He poured himself a drink and sat behind the hulking cherrywood desk. The high-backed leather chair made him feel stately. He could imagine issuing edicts and decrees from a chair such as this. Several of the windows were boarded up. The clock boomed from up above, grave and paternal. Life continued with its little oscillations. The young falcons were hunting on their own, had left the nest a few days earlier. The building was like any other organism—maintaining, creating, declining, all of it happening at once. He felt lightened without the finger, unburdened by its psychic weight. Civil War amputees spoke of phantom limbs but he had no such sensation—the gap itself was empty, senseless as a vacuum. It was a void, a formless reminder of those blanched days at sea. The mulled thoughts had stopped since the finger's removal and now he'd made an offering to the woman he'd wronged. He was shaking off the remora's grip. The balance would be restored. Europe in the fall would be a time of rejuvenation. He would write poetry beside Keats's grave and continue his study of Pythagoras. He crossed to the display case and unlocked a partition with a small key on the ring. A cascade of velvet was lined with obsidian knives and cutting stones. He moved down the compartments, opening the glass doors and handling the contents. Staring at the crude knives, he realized that even the most primitive of men performed surgery—extracted teeth, removed spear tips. Science, however brutish, flourished everywhere. How many autopsies had been
performed by the light of bamboo torches? Even the barbarous are curious, he thought.