Bright and Distant Shores Page 5

  But it was also true that he’d grown smitten with Adelaide at sea. His recollections of her had become almost devotional in their tone—she sat reading a chapbook in the half-light of a cable car, her chest rising between stanzas. He was always at the other end of the cable car, in those daydreams, coming toward her. When she looked up at him her whole face came alive, as if he’d brought her happily back from the brink of a desolate poem.

  His homecoming. Adelaide in a bustled skirt and shawl, fighting the bluster of March to meet him at the train station. They kissed on the mouth, briefly, and it was she who leaned in first. Owen felt a surge of affection, and lust, but also a mild sense of dread. He was clearly in her benevolent sights and it wasn’t long before the afternoons and evenings of ballroom dancing and civic-minded pastimes grew heavy with expectation. Sometimes he had to shake himself free for a few hours and drink himself into a stupor in a dramhouse where patrons spat and ashed their cigarettes on the floor. Whereas the seamen’s lewdness and excess had made him more upright at sea, Adelaide’s noble intentions drove him to gin. He slept off hangovers in the tin-wire shambles of the wrecking shed and showed up clean-shaven and breath-minted the next day, ready for another round of self-improvement.

  And yet there was no denying Adelaide’s allure, her implacable friendliness and lightness of spirit. Owen was happiest in her company and even amid the din of a taproom she was the object of his thoughts. The way she chatted with strangers, doled out bus fares and petted strays like an urban St. Francis, thought nothing of removing her shoes to walk in the frigid waters at the lake edge or tuck a napkin into her neckline to eat pork ribs for a lark. She was buoyant, high-minded, affectionate. She kissed Owen with increasing pluck, allowed his hands to run the fences of her undergarments, but it was clear that an invisible line had been drawn and only a marriage proposal would suffice to cross it.

  The prospect of marriage unsettled Owen but not because he couldn’t imagine happily spending his days with Adelaide. It was a question of means, of what he might bring to such an arrangement. It was also a matter of doubt. What if Adelaide’s affections were conditioned on some act of conversion, on Owen joining some gilded society or humanitarian circle? He wanted to be sure she loved the wrecker’s son and the orphan and not some phantom of her moral imagination. On one of their afternoon walks he asked her why her affections for him ran so deep. She spoke freely, as if he’d asked the simplest of questions. “I admire you greatly, for one thing. You know how to do so much in the world. I like your broad smile and shoulders and that schoolboy curiosity . . . and I’ve never seen hands like that. They’re so . . . capable.”

  He held up his calloused hands. “They could be in a window display.”

  She took one of his big hands and held it. “The men I knew in Boston were timid, with soft hands and no opinions. But don’t get a big head. Being fearless is fine, but recklessness isn’t a trait I admire.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.” He stopped to kiss her, pulling his scarf up to protect them from the gusting wind.

  Owen placed all his hopes for future respectability—and therefore marriage—in the sale of his artifacts. On the voyage, he’d managed to assemble over a hundred items, from Melanesian masks, daggers, and spears to Polynesian baskets and clay bowls. His eye for signature details, indelible marks of an object’s maker, led to the possession of carved figurine war gods and ornately trimmed dance shields. He hauled the items in a wagon to the rear of the Field Columbian Museum and several of the curators came out for the appraisal. Owen could tell they were delighted and surprised by his bounty, but they were also stone-facing their reactions to keep the prices down. The artifacts were arranged on the loading dock by region, Owen referring to detailed notes in his journal. The curators studied each item while describing, in great detail, the financial strain of founding a new museum. “We’ve bought thousands of artifacts from the fair and now it’s a question of remaining funds. We’ll have to consult the board and come back with a figure for the whole lot.” The phrase whole lot did not do justice to Owen’s months of careful acquisition and he could already sense that they were out to scam him. When the handwritten figure came on museum letterhead, it was ten times less than Owen had expected. It was enough to float him for a few months, but not enough to secure a mortgage or rent an apartment without worry. He accepted the offer and a month later he saw some of his artifacts in one of the museum’s velvet-lined cases. They’d been given pride of place in the main gallery.

  Within a year, Owen stopped talking to Adelaide about moving to an apartment. He had spent his sea wages and the money he’d received from the Field Columbian Museum. “They paid me like it was native bric-a-brac,” he told Adelaide bitterly. She wasn’t sure that he’d been swindled but she sympathized nonetheless. Soon he was back to occasional wrecking jobs and renting out half the salvage yard to an ironworker. The economy was still bad and he occasionally borrowed money from pawnbrokers and loan sharks. Adelaide never asked him about his finances, never once came to the yard, because to do so would be to stare into the gravel pit of his working-class roots. She remained determined and hopeful, told stories of her father’s financial generosity as a way of lighting the trail that might lead the way forward.

  3.

  In the grip of a second hangover, Owen left the First Equitable and took to the streets with Hale Gray’s contract in hand. The crowds had thinned out but groups of revelers still choked the doorways of taverns and restaurants. He headed down La Salle and across to the shoreline where the darkened lake was dotted faintly with navigation lights. The long walk into the South Side was just what he needed to clear his head. He bought some fried potatoes from a vendor and ate them as he walked along, a greasy thumbprint becoming his unofficial seal on the first page of the contract. Under a streetlamp he stopped to study the list of tribal artifacts, considering where each item could be acquired, but soon he returned to the signature page with its dollar amount and the phrase a number of natives. The money was enough to buy a modest house in a good neighborhood, perhaps with a small mortgage. He wondered how much had been apportioned to the artifacts and how much to the islanders. Was a number as little as two? He felt himself calculating, justifying. He had a complicated moral aversion to bringing back natives for an insurance spectacle, but he also had a simple aversion to continued poverty.

  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 Adel
aide 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.