Bright and Distant Shores Page 17

  IV

  LINES AND LATITUDES

  14.

  Several times a week, Hale Gray took his lunch at the Prairie Club, a hallowed gentlemen’s club in a converted mansion on Michigan Avenue between Adams and Jackson. Many of the members were Hale’s neighbors from Prairie Avenue—six blocks of turret and sandstone that controlled the mercantile fate of the city. Philip D. Armour (2115), the meatpacking giant; George Pullman (1729), the ailing railroad magnate; John G. Shortall (1600), the realtor who, after the Great Fire, produced thousands of property deeds and covenants from his bricked-out basement; and Marshall Field (1905), the emperor of retail. The Grays lived at 1903, directly adjacent to the Fields. Over the years there had been squabbles about the upkeep of a common fence, Mrs. Field’s mania for bird and squirrel feeding, and responsibility for removing a blighted elm. Hale could remember bellowing over the side fence at the chittering war cries of squirrels or standing with his shirtsleeves rolled up, fists clenched, as he stared down at the Fields eating breakfast in what amounted to a backyard aviary. In earlier years, they had been neighborly, even fraternal. Their children shared the same music and archery teachers, their wives served on each other’s committees. The husbands—elm blight and bird menace aside—sat shoulder to shoulder at the club’s millionaires’ table or idled smoky talk from the divans in the sun-sheeted reading room. They were brothers of a sort, had framed the club’s bylaws and points of order, helped to police the visitor sign-in book, enjoyed a bit of sport with the Negro hallboys—dressing them up as Nubian slaves in leopard skins and sandals for the annual Twelfth Night festivities—and yet their curiosities for each other’s lives ran more to potential downfall than triumph.

  Hale kept up with all the woes at the millionaires’ table. George Pullman, who’d become widely hated after his handling of a railway strike, was said to be at death’s door and would be buried beneath concrete in a lead-lined casket to avoid being plundered and exhumed by angry unionists. Hale was relieved that he had declined to carry Pullman’s life insurance policy. Philip Armour, who preferred boats to trains, had attempted to dynamite a passage through the frozen lake one winter, trying to get a shipment of wheat and pork out east on time. This had guaranteed him the undying enmity of every sailor, bridge warden, lock keep, and shipping clerk in Chicago. Hale had no such enemies and was grateful for the quiet and dignified line of insuring a man against fire, maritime mishap, and untimely demise.

  But Hale reserved a special curiosity for Marshall Field’s life. That he had given a million dollars to found his namesake museum of natural history was, to Hale, showy and distasteful, the kind of puerile vanity that nowadays bloomed everywhere in America. Money could not buy character and giving it away— Marshall had also teamed up with Rockefeller for the University of Chicago—was a misplaced desire for status, an ornate label on a cheap bottle of wine. Marshall Field had never gone to university and knew nothing about the charter of a museum. He was a farm boy and dry goods merchant made big, didn’t know a piece of Baltic amber from a sliver of Malaysian jade. Hale had peerage in his bloodline, members of the House of Lords, and even with that endowment—or perhaps because of it—he hadn’t felt the need to inscribe his own name on the world’s tallest building. A legend on the translucent windowpane of his office door was good enough for him. The totemic spire was a company gift to the skyline, to the children of the city so that they might aspire to something lofty, and it was born of civic pride, a social dividend from the simple calculus of hedging one’s bets against God’s unknowable plan. Civilization’s highest point had for centuries been reserved for pyramids, cathedrals, and monuments, but now it belonged to this business of wagering against divinity.

  The talk in the club reading room this Wednesday was about the suicide who’d plunged to his death from the Masonic Building that morning. Headfirst, arms trawling the air in front of him, the well-dressed clerk fell sixteen stories from the rooftop atrium, through the center court of the Masonic Temple, hurling past office windows in a downpour of sunlight. The shock of impact, said Horace Wells, a lawyer, was akin to an elevator in freefall. As a freemason and Worshipful Master, he had seen the body shuttle past his office window and thought one of the office boys had dropped a large bundle of newspapers as a dangerous joke. He held forth as the authority on the matter, leaning forward in a circle of armchaired tycoons and industrialists.

  “The clerk hit the fourth-floor landing and went through it like it was butter, gentlemen. A scrubwoman discovered his body a story below in a tangle of wooden and iron balustrade. His shoes were found sixty feet away, the soles blown off.”

  “I heard he was down-and-out, living in a ten-cent lodging house on State Street,” said Francis Cooper, an iron and lumber baron.

  “Used to be,” said Sinclair Tipton, who owned ice fields in Wisconsin and had been awarded lucrative city contracts, “that the suicides took their leaps from High Bridge in Lincoln Park. One a month or so. Or the south side of the Rush Street Bridge, until they stationed a constable there. Now the self-mutilators have their eyes set on the skyscrapers. This chap was said to have gone first to the Chamber of Commerce but was driven out by the building engineer. So he walks next door and sprouts wings. If I were you, Hale, I would make provisions against this sort of thing.”

  The hemming circle turned to face him with a rustle of newsprint that sounded to Hale like the weft of carrion wings. “Already done,” Hale lied. “I have a watchman posted on the rooftop around the clock.” He would make said arrangement upon his return from lunch.

  Marshall Field, prematurely gray, his eyes and complexion bright, spoke with his customary self-containment over the rim of his Tribune. “That’s the least of your problems, I imagine, Hale. I’ve been following the stories in the paper and they say that most of the tall buildings have insufficient foundations.” He turned his eyes on a column of newsprint, set his jaw. “All that deep blue clay, you know. And then there are the claims that the rush and backroom dealing to cheat the height limit resulted in shortcuts being taken. Substandard materials and whatnot.”

  Hale cleared his throat and ran a finger along the edge of his raised newspaper. They were like battle shields, these sheaves of broadsheet. “As a matter of fact, it’s the heavy masonry buildings that are doing all the settling into the clay. Take a walk around City Hall and the courthouse and you’ll have to keep one heel six inches higher than the other because the sidewalk inclines so badly to the façade. The steel-frame building doesn’t have this problem, you’ll be glad to know, Marshall.” Technically this was untrue. It all hinged on the way the foundation met the floating concrete raft. Hale wasn’t about to tell them this, nor was he going to tell them that most of his windows, over a thousand of them, were purchased from a foreclosed Canadian glassworks after the American combines threatened to delay his construction schedule. Hale changed the subject with: “Marshall, my wife wants to return a vase to your store but she’s already used it for a dinner party. Our house smells like roses, I assure you, but I told her she cannot return an item once it is used. Am I correct on that score?”

  Marshall crossed his legs. “Stop terrorizing the poor woman, Hale. Unconditional refunds is our motto.”

  The running joke at the club, which Hale was proud to have started, was to repeat Marshall Field’s winning retail catchphrase—give the lady what she wants!—whenever he ordered another Scotch from a passing waiter.

  Marshall continued: “I’m sure the notion of a refund is unfamiliar in your line of trade. Send her down to the store.”

  Hale flat-toned: “A man is dead or he isn’t. Either his house burns to the ground or it stands. Refunds are strictly a retail notion. I will agree with you on that point.”

  This back-and-forth chuffed the circle of men and, like a Greek chorus, they enjoyed making statements about theme and content, inserting points of narrative clarification in this unfolding rivalry, in the century’s run-off between old money and new, between Am
erican come-from-nothingness and the English sense of entitlement. Granted, Hale had been born in Boston, but it was to British parents who’d taught him all the words to “Rule Britannia” and “God Save the Queen.” Francis Cooper, who performed the office of club historian and wrote member obituaries, adjudicated with “I call that round a draw, gentlemen. Pace yourselves. We have a luncheon lecture starting upstairs and it’s sure to spark another round of disagreement. What’s the topic you ask? The influence of food on character. That should be riveting. Are we to be told that boiled potatoes will make a man compliant? Good grief!”

  They racked their newspapers and stubbed their cigars. Hale removed the dottle from his pipe with a silver penknife and walked into the domed vestibule. In twos and threes they climbed the carpeted stairs that led to the auditorium, the oil portraits of notable dead members sombering the walls. The millionaires went to their assigned table and both Marshall Field and Hale Gray eyed Pullman’s empty place, the silverware crossed to signify his absence. Here was Armour coming to bolster their numbers, crossing the room as if he might toss a stick of dynamite at anyone who got in his way. He sat with a curt nod and took a sip of iced water.

  The waiters emerged with trays of hot lunch—porterhouses from Armour’s stockyards served on china plates from Field’s department store. It was a tidy arrangement, Hale thought. Was the club’s silverware milled at one of Francis Cooper’s concerns?

  The guest speaker came to the lectern after a mercifully short introduction by the club president. The visitor, a portly fellow in a white suit, asserted that after eating, the blood left the brain for the stomach. “No good brain work can be accomplished after a heavy meal and the body falls into distemper. This accounts for the high incidence of apoplexy in after-dinner speakers and I assure you, gentlemen, that I will be eating a small meal at the conclusion of my remarks. Postprandial speakers are advised to be abstemious on this front.”

  This elevated drivel continued for an hour while Hale worked on his steak and mashed potatoes, followed by a slice of plum cake. He sat there listening to Marshall Field breathing too loudly—the brash modulation of his very existence—and thought about foppish Jethro at sea, about the imported windowpanes that clad his building, and whether he would stay for a round of billiards after this agony was over with.

  At the conclusion of the lecture he hurried back to the office, bounding down Adams past the awnings and flags of the Fair Department Store with its rabble of window-shoppers. He turned north onto La Salle with the tolling bells of the Board of Trade at his back, then the overlay of his own clock tower bronze—which was fast and which was slow?—before coming to an abrupt halt in front of the First Equitable façade. For a full minute he stood staring down at the place where the terracotta and brickwork met the sidewalk. A quarter-inch fissure ran along the building’s seam.

  15.

  A delaide had kept Owen’s unopened letter in her pocket all morning. Things were tense at the museum and she wanted to read the letter as an afternoon tonic. Ever since Franz Boas had been ousted by one of the museum’s trustees, she had been shunted from one assistant curator to another, between botany, zoology, geology, and now back to anthropology again. Her new boss, George Dorsey, had recently been promoted to acting curator and was waging a campaign to retain the position permanently—he’d given up his predecessor’s large office and converted it to a workroom, taking a small room near the east court so he could be nearer the exhibits. Dorsey was also enlisting a small army of clerks and typists to overhaul the flawed card catalogue, cross-referencing collections and donors, duplicating each accession in a set of inventory books in the department office. Adelaide had so many cardstock and paper cuts on her thumbs that she kept a pair of thimbles in her desk drawer. For all his efficiency and curatorial acumen, Dorsey could not escape scandal. He’d recently returned from an expedition to the West Coast and the stairwell gossip was that he had been arrested for disturbing Indian graves. A month later, he was called to give testimony as a physical anthropologist in the murder trial of Adolph Luetgert, attesting that the bone fragments found at the defendant’s sausage factory were indeed of human origin. The case had led to a nationwide decline in sausage sales and had earned Dorsey a new nickname at the Field: the wurst-wife inspector. This amounted to humor at the museum.

  Adelaide thought the whole affair, from the witness-stand testimony to the grave-robbing, tawdry in the extreme. She’d imagined some measure of respectability when she took employment with the newly formed museum but now she was finding her post to be no different from the typing pool and secretary jobs in the skyscrapers—doctoring the men’s coffee with a dash of whiskey when they were out of sorts, curtailing her lunch to buy a bolt of silk for somebody’s wife, sewing buttons between dictation and filing. She enjoyed typing exotic memoranda about burial customs and ghost dances. But for all its rarefied scientific aura, its stone lions and sun-spanned rotunda, the museum was sometimes a vaulted arcade of drudgery, backbiting, and petty revenge. Battle lines were drawn along discipline boundaries and there were daily clashes between geologists, botanists, and anthropologists in the lunchroom. The plant and rock men were always feeling slighted by the “gravediggers” and the zoologists feigned neutrality at the frayed edge of a debate about who had brewed the last pot of coffee. The model makers, preparators, and taxidermists who assembled the deer and bird dioramas were enlisted in these tribal skirmishes. The salaried men, both the curators and their minions, loved to play practical jokes on each other—pinching a femur and hiding it in the lavatory, inserting sheets of copied hieroglyphics into an herbarium case as if they were Egyptian ransom notes. Countless acts of sabotage could be found in the galleries, if only one knew where to look. Franz Boas, Adelaide thought, had been much too earnest for this place.

  Adelaide drank her third cup of coffee and returned to her typing. She had just finished correcting an ill-worded missive about the upcoming Saturday lecture series whose topics included How Plants Travel, The Beetles of Chicago and Vicinity, and A Visit to Queen Charlotte Islands. The subtitle to this last lecture could have been How George Dorsey Sacked a Bag of Native Bones and Was Subsequently Arrested by Local Authorities. He was down in the bone room, preparing his osteological loot for display, and would emerge some hours from now in a mumbling fog. Maybe she was just having a bad day. She took Owen’s letter out, smelled the envelope for hints of pressed flowers, and propped it under her desk lamp. She could see the place where Owen had rested the ink nib after writing her name. If she waited until lunchtime, she might take it onto the west steps and sit overlooking the stand of elders or take it up to an unused alcove and sit beneath a slighted display of Persian chain mail. These were her favorite spots for removing herself from the museum’s piddling rivalry. But lately Dorsey had been taking mid-afternoon strolls by the bronzed Roman bathtubs—was he plotting his ascent?—and she couldn’t afford to run into him up there.

  She spooled a catalogue card into the typewriter:

  Accession: 25

  Object Number: 13124

  World Area: North America

  Country: Greenland

  Description: sledge, etc.

  It was the etc. on the last line that was giving Dorsey so much grief. The winding-up of the fair and the frenzy to inventory the masses of newly acquired objects had led to a cataloguing system that was both vague and incomplete. Hundreds of description entries simply read: implement. After his promotion, Dorsey had walked among the cataloguers and said: “But what kind of implement? Was it used for skinning or sewing or cooking? When we visit the library do we find a catalogue card that says a story about a milkmaid’s life in rural England or does it say Tess of the D’Urbervilles: Hardy, Thomas?” At one point, fresh off the witness stand in the Luetgert sausage-murder trial, Dorsey had walked among them, hands butterflying behind his back, and had actually declared, “I hear something heroic in the clicking of those Remingtons, ladies.” Adelaide could think of a dozen caus
es more heroic than revamping the museum’s card catalogue—the neighborhood programs of Hull House, for example, or the Audubon Society’s anti-bird-on-the-hat campaign.

  She typed another card:

  Accession: 25 Object Number: 13859 World Area: North America Country: Greenland Description: harpoon head

  Did they use harpoons to catch whales in the South Seas?

  She took up Owen’s letter and walked out into the corridor, slipping the envelope into her pocket. She made for the ladies’ restroom but, when she was sure no one was watching, climbed the stairs and passed quietly into a wing containing Etruscan objects of earthenware and bronze. She stood by a bone-and-ivory funeral couch that had been excavated from a tomb at Orvieto. A handful of coral sand and a dried frangipani dropped from the envelope when she opened it.

  My Dearest Adelaide,

  I began this letter not a day out of California, writing it in loose-leaf sections, and it soon became a rot of words and tangents. So I’m beginning again and plan to dispatch this version to a mail steamer in Suva. If winds and boilers and tides are favorable, then you’ll be reading this within a month. I can hardly wait to hear from you. We are now westering out from the placid Honolulu Bay where we spent close to a week. The ship is watered and fueled and the men have seen to their business on dry land. While they killed off the days and nights in taverns and houses of ill repute, I consigned a few artifacts—fishing hooks made from human bone, stone lures, mortars and pestles. The men came back to the ship looking as if they’d returned from battle. I sometimes feel as if my work collecting among the savages of the South Seas could be done on board. The crew and captain are a rowdy lot. Captain Baz Terrapin has a penchant for former inmates and rough lads from the steel mills of San Francisco. He’s really something. Cantankerous doesn’t even begin to describe it. Lewd, calculating, womanizing, creative and barbaric with the mother tongue, burlesque—I’m not positive about this last word but you can call me out on it with your pocket dictionary. I expect you are deeply immersed in activities at the museum and hope that the savage curators aren’t making you slave at those catalogue cards all day and night. Keep your eyesight for those chapbooks on the cable car! And then there are the Sunday concerts at Hull House and tutoring the illiterate immigrants and such is a life filled with virtue. I sometimes hardly believe you wish to marry me. My kindness toward others consists of avoiding them when I’m feeling surly. Much to learn from you in the years ahead. Hope the marriage preparations are going well and not turning you into a nervous wreck or one of those formidable lace-hunters on State Street. I’ll be honest, the thought of meeting your father intimidates me. In that daguerreotype you have by your bed, he resembles an English vicar with a case of burning gout. You’ll forgive my jesting as a kind of sea sport. As I sit here in the shade of the topgallant sail, the wind finally gusting out of the east, I’m watching a pair of seamen argue about the virtues of homemade bitters as prevention against syphilis. Despite the blather within earshot, the scene is worthy of a watercolorist. The sky is the color of pewter and iron and the ocean is a moiled dark green.