Bright and Distant Shores (7 page)

It could be done ethically, he supposed, walking again. He would vouchsafe the welfare of the natives, find a few that genuinely wanted to travel abroad, ensure their safe return passage. But even as he made these mental commitments he felt Adelaide's disapproval like a shroud around his own thoughts. As someone who'd never done without, whose livelihood had never been in doubt, could she fully comprehend the proposition? He
found himself striding out, making assertions. His own misgivings would make him careful and he'd strike a balance between self-interest and morality. He told himself this all the way home, falling into bed amid the spoils and curios. He was twenty-nine years old. Not since the Great Fire of 1871 had the Graves family owned a house.

The next evening he invited Adelaide to dinner. The restaurant was darkly paneled and sconce-lit, held a kind of religious light. There were ferns in copper pots and leather booths with the patina of worn luggage. The waiters were old men in butterfly collars and bow ties, shouldering between white linen tablecloths, a vintage bottle of wine cradled in the crook of an arm or a cellar-cured steak held aloft, smoking and spitting on a china plate. Tableside, they glumly boasted about the provenance of their meat, of the iced railcars that carried their porterhouses as far as New York and San Francisco. With grim, judicial faces, the waiters gave the impression that there were other, more pressing obligations than taking orders and delivering meals, that each misguided entrée selection was not only a personal insult but a blow to civilization. They looked to the male diners for compliance, upgrading the good lady's dalliance in fowl to something the restaurant could stand behind.

Owen and Adelaide sat in a booth, reading menus the size of broadsheets in the flicker of a wall sconce. The ornate woodwork of the booth, the church light of the dining room, reminded Owen of going to confession at the Tabernacle School, of distant afternoons sunk in penance. Telling Adelaide that he was going to sea again felt like a confession, a cardinal sin. He found it hard to look at her and stared off at his fellow diners or at the oil paintings on the walls—bucolic scenes of livestock in paddocks at dawn, steam rising from the hides of brindled cows, but also breaching ships in a gale, their prows pitching through heaving swells. Only people who'd never gone to sea would find the drama of a squall romantic, something to hang on the wall like
clouds and seaside picnics. To Owen the tossing ships depicted the very real threat of oblivion, not only from the unfathomable deep but the countless diseases that could fester in the planking of a clipper—scurvy, flux, rheums, fevers. He was glad that their booth's painting was a still life of glossed pears and corpulent grapes. He looked at Adelaide over the top of his menu. She was wearing a pale organdy dress trimmed in ribbons and lace and an heirloom necklace. It was a far cry from her usual industrious clothing, the museum plaids and streamlined cottons, the tight sleeves and necklines, and it worried him. She had removed her gloves and her ringless white fingers drummed gently on the back of the menu.

“They make it so difficult,” she said.

“Choose carefully. The waiters are constables and jailors.”

Her eyes softened. “I think I'm going to have the Iowa pork chop. What about you?”

“The Angus steak. Aged a thousand years in a cave.”

“I like it here. It reminds me of Boston.”

They set their menus facedown on the table and, on cue, the waiter came with his hands clasped behind his back, listening now with his head cocked, gravely agreeing with their course of action. He lingered for a moment, eyes tracing the arabesques of the rug. “And the wine, sir?”

It had slipped Owen's mind completely and he was forced to ask the waiter for his recommendation, which wasn't so much a recommendation as a statement of fact: “I'll bring you the 1865 Beaune Grèves Vigne de l'Enfant Jésus. A perfect match.” Owen didn't speak French but remembered enough from his Tabernacle days to realize the wine name contained a reference to the infant Jesus. Wasn't 1865 the year that Lincoln had died, the body touring the country by train just as the grapes were budding on the vines in France? The wine sounded both pricey and inauspicious.

The waiter smiled for the first time, perhaps at Owen's
expense, and turned to Adelaide, taking her menu. It was in the waiter's patronizing smile that Owen saw the unraveling of the evening. Adelaide was expecting a marriage proposal, had dressed for it, was wearing an antique locket that no doubt had been passed down the maternal line. The waiter sensed the imminent occasion and had aged his wine selection on its account. Had Owen seen the profile of a wink when the waiter uttered
a perfect match
and turned to Adelaide? As the waiter hobbled away, Owen saw visions of a mythic bottle of wine being pulled from a bed of straw in the cellar. He saw the old man bringing the bottle up like a relic from a tomb, smug with the knowledge that he was making Owen pay through the nose for his moment of posterity. Owen had twice caught the bastard looking at his weary shoes under the cover of the linen tablecloth.

Adelaide put her hands in her lap and spoke of her day at the museum. She had paper cuts on her fingers from so much cataloguing. She spread her fingertips as proof. Owen took her hand spontaneously, then remembered his mission and set it gently on the tablecloth. Then she spoke of a museum in New York that was bringing in some Inuit to study and he felt his heart drop into his stomach.

“You remember Boas, my old boss? He's the one behind it. A terrible thing to bring natives here. Remember what happened to the Esquimaux at the fair?”

Owen looked down at the table, nodding, unable to speak. Did she know about the voyage, about the contract to bring back savages? Thankfully, the wine came and the waiter proffered the label. Owen nodded and watched the man remove the cork and pour an inch of amber into a glass. He pretended to sniff the rim but couldn't get past the taste of iron in his mouth. He sipped the burgundy, let it sit dutifully on his tongue, then swallowed with deliberation. The waiter said, “Hints of chalk and lime, an overlay of caramel,” and Owen found himself nodding mutely. The glasses were filled and the wine bottle was wrapped in a napkin
and placed on the far side of the table. Owen would let Adelaide finish a glass and eat her pork chop before launching into his plans.

But by the time she had eaten her pork chop and baked potato she had finished two glasses of wine and was flushed in the face. The delicate recesses behind her earlobes were blotched red.

“Do you taste the caramel overlay?” he asked.

“I do, as a matter of fact. Why do you always have to poke fun at anything refined?” she said flatly.

He felt obliged to answer in earnest. “I suppose I've never been comfortable with privilege. Places like this.”

She wiped her mouth with the edge of her napkin, her head slightly bent. There was good breeding in that demure, polite gesture. He remembered his father drinking soup from the bowl and using a crust of bread to shovel-end a pond of beans from his plate.

“Adelaide—”

“Mr. Graves.”

“Miss Cummings.”

“I'm a little tipsy.”

“I have something to tell you.”

“Good, because I have something to tell you as well.”

They both breathed, sipped their wine. Finally, he said, “Ladies first.”

“Very well then.” She smoothed her palms on the tablecloth and placed her knife and fork at six o'clock on her plate. “George Dorsey, one of the curators at the museum—”

“I know Dorsey. His work anyway.”

“He plays poker with a few businessmen, likes to keep in with potential donors and benefactors. Anyway, he had an interesting chat with Hale Gray the other day. You know, the insurance man.”

Owen felt the muscles in his neck go taut. “I've heard of him.”

One of the ancient waiters was singing “Happy Birthday” in a far-off corner—Christ, was it in Italian?—his voice low and providential. A champagne cork popped and hit the tin ceiling. Adelaide lifted her chin, waiting. She had the same warm skepticism as that day amid the bottled brains at the fair, sitting like a bookkeeper with her open ledger, warding him off but also inviting him in. How surprised and delighted he'd been that night when she lay on the floor beneath the whalebone skeleton and pondered Jonah's fate. He'd fallen in love in that single, enigmatic moment, but had never quite figured her out. She was complicated, practical, elevated, homespun, recited Whitman in taffeta but also read comics barefoot on a divan, took her tea with lump sugar but loved to drink in the oaken shade of a German beer garden. She gave directions to tourists with infinite care and precision but also blasted her bicycle horn at wayward pedestrians.

He said, “I'm going so that I can be in a position to ask for your hand. Hale Gray is paying handsomely.”

“So I hear.”

“It will be less than a year.”

She folded her arms.

“Six months or so. I promise.”

She picked up her water glass and took a long, slow sip. The gas in the wall sconce hissed and she glanced up at it, slightly bothered. “It's been four years. My father thinks I've made you up.”

“And I'm still living in a tin shed on the South Side. I need this voyage to make my mark.” He wanted to talk about the objects he would bring back but was worried it would prompt a discussion about the natives. He couldn't be sure she knew about the savages. Perhaps the mention of the Inuit had been a coincidence. Yes, he thought, that was possible.

She looked at the backs of her hands and waited a long time before speaking. “If we were engaged while you were at sea . . .
well, I suppose then the whole thing would seem very different to me.”

There was nothing to be said after that. It was a declaration, definitive as a ship's bronze bell. He waited for the check and paid it with large bills, straight from the dwindling stash he kept in an old powder keg. They went outside and walked into the balmy evening, the streetlamps pearling through the lake fog. It was uncomfortable to breathe and they walked heavy and silent. They headed in the direction of the La Salle Street cable car stop and at the corner of Adams he saw the skyscraper, reared up and electrified, its clock face like a second moon in the ether of night. Every floor was alight—Hale believed the building itself was the company's best advertisement—and the windows were alive with the glints of work lamps. There was no denying the building's power, like a bishop presiding over a stone canyon. Owen stopped and craned but Adelaide refused to do likewise, as if the building was partly to blame. At the streetcar stop they waited. Owen would escort her home to the flat she shared with a curator's sister. Then he would jump a car and spend the remainder of the night in the dun-and-ale splendor of a levee district tavern. Then Adelaide said, “I'd like to see where you live,” with a simple tone of entitlement. There was no question mark attached or rising intonation. He said nothing but bit his bottom lip and nodded almost imperceptibly, resigned.

They arrived at the yard after a long walk from the cable car. It was a neighborhood that Adelaide did not know and he watched her feign casualness as she took in the leaning tenements full of raucous arguments and carousing in six languages, gypsy women smoking penny cigarettes on sagging wooden stoops, old Russian men betting on dominoes while dogs growled and barked and were kicked, the smell of charcoal and sawdust and dank laundry, the sidewalk petering out into a goat track of cedar blocks and mud. Although she worked among these people at Hull House, Owen knew she had never been on their native turf; she listened
to their quaint singing and folklore and taught them to read
Tribune
English, utilitarian verbs and nouns, but had never actually seen their kitchens and bedrooms, the beds made from apple crates and tables sawn from railway ties. A few of the rabble-rousers called to Owen and he bade them good night. A chorus of wolf whistles and a heated
Someone's lucky tonight
followed them down to the yard.

He opened the chain-link gate and led Adelaide past the hulking piles of scrap metal, the copper pipes and iron bars waiting to be smelted. Inside the tin shed he lit a few spirit lamps and their shadows loomed as they moved among the workbenches. Here were decades of salvage from the rubble of teardowns, arranged and organized by function, windows of every mullion and design, ornate doorknobs, lintels engraved with the first initials of dead wives or secret lovers, glasshouse and conservatory panels, greened copper turrets, doorjambs with bored-out compartments for pistols, balcony railings and orchestra-pit podiums, box seats from condemned theaters. On a lone table under a window were the artifacts from the Pacific that he'd not sold to the museum. A few shell adzes and stone hammers that were sentimental to him, suggesting that the natives of Melanesia might also be adept at wrecking and dismantling. They stood by a wall of tools, the bradawls and gimlets taking on a sinister, surgical bearing in the lamplight. Adelaide surveyed the chaos of objects, the endless rows of fixtures, the subsections of brick and mortar so numerous that a fortress lay in pieces. “Where do you sleep?” she said lightly, continuing the theme of inveterate explorer of the ghetto.

Owen, with nothing to lose by now, pointed to the bed he'd made from king posts and metal trusses, a leadlight window standing in for a headboard, the calash of an old carriage acting as canopy. It looked to him now—imagined through her eyes— like a Chinese junk, something forged and welded from scrap, as whimsical as a parade float.

He said, “It's ridiculous, I know.”

“I love it,” she said, walking toward it. “Bring the lamp over.”

He followed her with the light, thrusting her shadow against the wall. She stood at the banister that doubled as the end of the bed frame. He waited for her to say something but she didn't. Finally, he said, “I don't have a ring,” and saw her shoulders go loose. Without turning around, she said, “Be quiet and lie down with me.” He watched her pull the barrette out of her hair and knew, in that moment, the engagement was sealed. He came forward with the lamp.