Fair Weather (10 page)

“Ah,” Mrs. Palmer said carefully. Then disaster outright befell us.

As if from a puff of infernal smoke Granddad appeared. He was just suddenly there, elbowing Mrs. Palmer out of the way, swatting his old curly-brimmed Panama on his knee.

“There you’ens are!” he roared in the room. “Helaca-toot, Terpie, I’ve lost Buster!”

*  *  *

When I can bear to think of us next, we were well away from the Turkish pavilion. The exposition spread around
us, a vast anthill of people, a haystack where a needle named Buster would be hard to locate. Aunt Euterpe moved like a woman in a terrible trance. Though I’d meant well, I’d robbed her of her last hope. I thought that once we found Buster, I’d offer to have myself arrested and put away someplace where I could do no more harm.

“Think, Granddad.” Lottie gave his arm a good shake. “Where did you last see him?” We were hurrying now, though where, we didn’t know.

“After we left the Electrical Hall, I took him over to the California pavilion to see the horse and rider made out of prunes,” Granddad recalled. “Then we skated past the United States Government Building to view the weapons of destruction. After that I stood him a good meal at the German place we was at last night.”

It wouldn’t have taken Granddad long to get back to the Midway. We headed there now. “Then what?” Lottie said. “Think, Granddad.”

“Well, I dropped in to see Little Egypt do her dance, and the boy went for a camel ride,” Granddad admitted, stumping along. “I told him to meet me out front, but the little squirt didn’t.” Granddad was worried. Lottie and I were too, though we understood that Buster was quicksilver, there and gone before you knew.

The Midway was as crowded as before. Long lines waited to pay their fifty-cent pieces and ride the great wheel. The captive balloon had worked free of its
moorings and vanished, but people were examining the cable. We stopped to inquire if Buster might have been riding the balloon when it drifted off to oblivion. But we were assured he hadn’t been.

Small boys darted everywhere, none of them Buster. We made our way to A Street in Cairo, then saw we’d have to go door-to-door from one attraction to the next.

Aunt Euterpe followed, wordless. If she’d been herself, she’d have objected to going into anyplace with unruly crowds or half-dressed women. But she wasn’t herself and never would be again, thanks to me.

Not all of the Midway attractions were gaudy. Hard by A Street in Cairo next door to the Laplanders’ Village was a small, plain brick building. It was Professor Muybridge’s Zoöpraxographical Hall.

Though unpromising, it wouldn’t take long to search. It was only a single room like a laboratory with a fence across one side that the public could hang over. Over that fence we found Buster, hanging on Professor Muybridge’s every word.

Granddad was well-nigh overcome with relief, but naturally wouldn’t let on. He merely turned his attention to the professor, who was lecturing at the front of the room. He was old as the hills, with a long white beard like Father Time.

The professor had invented a way of placing photographs together on a clear strip. He put these pictures
into a machine called a zoögyroscope that threw their images up on a blank wall. The pictures seemed to move. Horses appeared to race. The folds of skin on a hog’s back rippled. Galloping tintypes, I thought. Seeing pictures come alive and race across a wall made me dizzy. Though they didn’t race for long.

“Can you make ’em talk too?” called out Granddad. I believe this was mostly to let Buster know he’d been found.

“Well, sir,” Professor Muybridge replied, “I have spoken to Mr. Edison about it. He undertakes to match sound on a phonograph to the movements of my pictures. But there is no way of amplifying it for a large gathering.”

“Just a fad,” Granddad decided, collecting Buster off the fence.

At the beer garden nearby the Bedouin Encampment, we discovered Flanagan, a little the worse for wear. He took us home. Granddad and Buster again rode shotgun for him up on the box.

That left us women in the cab of the carriage, and I was sick with shame. Waves of it washed over me.

“What in Sam Hill could you have been
thinking
?” Lottie barked in the consoling way of a sister.

“I just thought if I introduced Mrs. Palmer to Aunty, she might leave a card on her,” I said in the mousiest voice I owned. “I just thought . . .”

“Never mind, child,” Aunt Euterpe said. A black-gloved hand came out to me. “You meant well and knew no better. But all is lost. I think I had best go to live in a hotel in some other city.”

We’d begun the day by running off Aunt Euterpe’s household help. I’d ended it by running her out of town. Oh, how I wanted to light out for home right then, and never leave again. I wasn’t ready for the world, and I couldn’t figure out how it worked.

I draw a veil over the evening that followed. But then even this endless day came to its close. Lottie and I were in the bed when a tremendous rainstorm whipped up off the lake. Rain pounded the window. Lightning cracked. Thunder clapped.

Finally Lottie began to snort and then to giggle in the dark. Then by and by so did I. They say that once a turtle bites, he won’t turn loose till it thunders. We were thinking what a relief it must be to Mrs. O’Shay, wherever she was.

Then we slept, trying not to imagine what tomorrow might hold in store.

Part One

I
t was to be Granddad’s day from start to finish. He let us know this by turning up at the breakfast table with the tips of his moustache waxed sharp as spurs. His necktie was a new one to us, and may have been batiste. He’d buttoned a winged collar to his shirt.

More wondrous still, Buster at his elbow wore the dreaded artistic cravat under his Eton collar. He had an unnaturally scrubbed look. His hair stood out as if somebody had held him under the pump. In passing, Lottie dipped down for a look at Buster’s ears and found them clean as whistles.

Lottie and I were back and forth from dining room
to kitchen, since we were all the household help Aunt Euterpe had. There was a pie in the oven. We’d found a sealed jar of pie cherries Lottie thought wouldn’t poison us. The kitchen was our territory now. Come to find out, the butcher’s boy and the grocer’s boy would deliver at the back door. You didn’t even have to lay in your own supplies. We marveled at what an easy job Mrs. O’Shay had given up.

When we were all at the breakfast table, Aunt Euterpe sat propped at her place in another of her shrouds. A string of black jet hung around her drawn neck. She had the look of a woman shorn of all hope, but she was there. A lesser woman would have taken to her bed after what we’d done to her.

“We’ll have Flanagan take us down to the Congress Street station this morning,” Granddad announced. He seemed to know Chicago like the back of his hand now. “We’ll try out that new Alley Elevated train.”

Though her life was over anyway, Aunt Euterpe quaked with alarm. It seemed that Chicago had built a railroad line with tracks laid high on stilts above the alleys. It was another way to get to the fair.

“It is thought to be unsafe,” Aunt Euterpe said. “I don’t mind for myself, but what would Adelaide say if these children . . .”

Aunt Euterpe fell silent before she conjured up a picture of Lottie and Buster and me squashed like june bugs when the elevated train jumped its tracks.

“It’s progress,” Granddad said, the last word on the subject.

To our surprise Aunty perked up some. “Papa, if we are going that near State Street, I’ll take these girls to Marshall Field’s store on the way. They need more clothes.”

“Aunty,” Lottie said, “we can’t let you—”

“It is only money,” Aunt Euterpe muttered, a bleak reminder that we’d robbed her of everything else.

Then Lottie saw her chance. “It is very good of you to be so generous, Aunty, especially in the circumstances. Rosie and I will make you a deal, fair and square.”

A little curiosity crept into Aunt Euterpe’s tired eyes. She seemed not to have slept a wink all night.

“We’ll accept a gift of new outfits if you will get a new outfit for yourself. And not black, Aunty. Black is not right for your coloring, and you have mourned enough.”

“Amen to that,” Granddad put in from the other end of the table.

Aunty gazed down her own blackness. Now we weren’t even going to let her dress the way she wanted to.

“Our shopping won’t take long,” said Lottie firmly. I suppose she pictured Marshall Field’s store to be the size of the dry goods back home. “Then we can go on to the fair.”

“We’re not going to the fair!” Buster sang out suddenly. It made us jump. We’d begun to think he was too scrubbed to speak.

“Then where are we going?” said Lottie.

Now Buster and Granddad were grinning and elbowing each other, acting as foolish as the male sex so often does.

“We’re goin’ to witness a spectacle that puts the fair to shame!” Granddad crowed. Buster was riding his chair like a half-broke pony. “Tell ’em, boy.”

Buster blurted, “We’ve got us tickets to see Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World!”

We women received this news without comment, until Aunt Euterpe sighed, “Oh dear, cowboys and Indians. Think how dusty it will be.”

“And we’re takin’ Tip with us,” Granddad declared. “If I leave him behind—”

“He pines and gets off his feed,” Lottie and I chanted under our breath.

From beneath the table Tip heard his name mentioned. His tail thumped the floor.

*  *  *

Buffalo Bill had brought his Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders show home from three years of entertaining the crowned heads of Europe. The Alley Elevated built a station at Sixty-third Street expressly for people flocking to this spectacle. It stood on fifteen acres opposite the fairgrounds themselves. Some people traveled to Chicago and saw Buffalo Bill’s show, then went home again thinking they’d seen the Columbian Exposition.

You could understand why. The very coliseum we sat
in held eighteen thousand people and seemed bigger than Chicago itself. We sat jammed onto a bleacher above the great artificial prairie where they promised us an authentic buffalo hunt and a reenactment of Custer’s Last Stand.

Buster and Granddad waited restless for the gunplay and mayhem to begin. Between them sat Tip, who didn’t mind where he was, as long as he got to go. We women sat behind in fresh finery. It seemed the outfits we’d brought from home were last year’s fashions in Chicago.

I was newly turned out in a middy blouse over a white pleated skirt that swept to my shoes. My new hat carried out the marine theme with streamers down the back. Lottie looked all grown up with ruffles high on her neck and a wreath of silken lilies of the valley around the crown of her hat. We both had reticules now, and lacy handkerchiefs thrust into our belts.

Between us Aunt Euterpe was all in dove gray. A hint of shell pink showed in one of the flowers on her unveiled hat. Her face was still in mourning, but the rest of her was much relieved. Lottie was right. Black hadn’t suited her coloring. She was improved, but not used to it yet.

I see us still amid that multitude, there in the filtered afternoon light, the air heavy-scented with lemonade and horse. Now Mr. William Sweeny’s Cowboy Band is striking up the overture, a medley of “Tenting Tonight on
the Old Campground” and “Hello, Central, Give Me Heaven.”

And now Buster’s piping up. “Granddad, why do they call him Buffalo Bill?”

“He shot buffalo for the Kansas Pacific Railroad in his early days,” Granddad explained loud enough to inform everyone around us. “He had his own style of stampedin’ the critters into a circle. He shot the back ones to keep their leaders circlin’. It was like shooting ducks in a ditch.”

“Was he kill-crazy, Granddad?”

Granddad reared back. “He was killin’ meat to feed the workers buildin’ the railroad, boy. We killed to eat in them days.”

Then Granddad burst into verse, as he was apt to do: