Bright and Distant Shores (45 page)

Owen pried himself free as Hale continued: “Now, let me get a good look at our guests. Will they take their coats off? Never mind. Must be chilly for them, no?”

Argus and Malini turned to face Hale but kept their coats buttoned. Owen introduced them by name and said that Mr. Gray was Jethro's father and the man who funded the voyage. Argus nodded, smiled, but knew better than to shake hands. Malini was surprised by the old man's solid build and athletic bearing; he was nothing like the fence post of a son. Hale deliberated, took a few
paces toward them like a theater director about to dispense insight to thespians, then stopped short: “I assume there are, what, grass skirts and loincloths, that sort of thing?”

Owen couldn't bring himself to answer and the room fell quiet, the slate sky darkening the high windows. Miss Ballentine returned with a cart of clattering refreshments and Malini thought again of the train, of sitting on her backside for days without end. She was beyond hungry and would eat whatever they offered. The curdled feeling she carried in her stomach from the elevator—a flying room not much bigger than an outhouse—was beginning to subside. In the slight commotion of tinkling spoons and china and water glasses, Hale seized the barber's scissors from a metal tray and caught Malini off guard. Lulu Ballentine brought the cart to a full stop, asked whether the darkies drank tea or coffee, but as she did so they all turned to see Hale holding one of Malini's dreadlocks between thumb and forefinger, raising it in the air like a kitchen mouse. Stunned, they watched Hale take the dreadlock over to the barber to ask his professional opinion.
Not exactly lustrous,
was the quip he offered,
but very sturdy and thick
. A second later Malini crossed the room to snatch back her stolen hair, gripped by the idea of clayskin sorcery, by the memory of the old man's son counting and measuring her teeth to what end she couldn't tell but knew it to be dark. Hale arched his freshly pruned eyebrows, then shot Owen a glance. Again, as on the ship, Owen was the intermediary. “Sir, the natives don't like their bodily parts touched, especially the hair. Has to do with black magic.”

Hale folded his arms as Malini returned to her brother beside the display case. “Ah, I see, then, well, should we have our refreshments and take a tour of the exhibit I'm building on the rooftop? I think you'll be pleased. The first of May is the scheduled opening. Should be a spot warmer by then. Black magic, you say?”

And then, with his own kind of black magic, the barber packed up his shears and straps, the ivory combs and unguents, all of it cinched neatly into a leather case, like a physician's bag, and with
such precision that Argus couldn't help thinking of customized luggage, of how much he wanted a Gladstone bag with his own monogrammed initials blazed in gold. The barber took a piece of cake for the road, holding it in a paper serviette with his free hand—“In a month, Mr. Gray, just like clockwork.”

Hale turned to his guests and gestured to the sitting area. “Most barbershops are underground in this city and I refuse to be lured into their dank lairs. I gave Bart a concession and storefront in the lobby and he's played it up strong. Our clerks and managers get a discount, of course. He comes up here by special arrangement. Cake?”

They drank coffee in cups that sat on little white plates. Malini had a second piece of cake and didn't regret it—it tasted of nuts and honey. The coffee, on the other hand, was so strong it felt like a wasp was trapped and buzzing in her chest. The white men were talking about the weather in Chicago and in the islands;
snow
and
typhoon
were two of the English words she knew. Her brother sat quietly, studying the things in the big glass case, pretending not to know anything. After a while they were taken to the roof of the tall building, this time on a staircase. They were outside again and the sky was so low she could have touched it with her fingers. There was a policeman walking around, shoulders up against the weather. Again the cold; it felt like her bones might shatter. She squinted against the snowy glare. The hair thief was pointing this way and that, yelling to be heard above the wind—a monsoon bearing ice instead of rain. When she widened her eyes a little she saw something that resembled a bamboo hut, made poorly and tied with twine instead of rattan or sennit. The roof sagged and there were no eaves. Some brownish wet sand, clumped with snow, had been piled outside and above it all was the biggest clock she had ever seen, a pale moonface rimmed with giant numbers. Weather and time; she was beginning to understand that these were two of the clayskin gods. And then the way her brother started poking around the bamboo hut and gesturing to the white men as if he were a Kuk clansman gave her to
understand that this was why they'd been brought here. This was the job. Live in a hut that looked as if it had been built by a child—a stupid one at that. In Poumetan, her brother told her that for now they would be living in rooms in the tall building. He said the sun would be out in two months and that's when they would be moving to the hut. She told him that they had better make a decent hut first, with separate rooms, and that the sand smelled like cat piss. He turned back to the whitefellas and a second later the son appeared on the rooftop. Her whole body shuddered. She couldn't hear or understand what they were saying. The father and son shook hands and Jethro took off his glove to display his mutilated fingertip.

They all walked over to the place where the sky began. Malini had been aware of the high, churning air in her peripheral vision but walking toward it she felt her legs blunder at the knees. She had been on top of volcanoes many times but for years had lived among the nearsighted Kuk, in a village where a thirty-foot clearing constituted the horizon. If you wanted to see the ocean you had to climb to the uppermost branches of a teak and only the children bothered. She slowed and let the others go ahead. They stepped up onto a wooden platform and Argus showed off by taking two connected glass tubes, one for each eye, and looking through them, as if the unpeeled sky and the stony chasm weren't close enough already. They beckoned to her with smiling faces but she stayed put. As it was she looked up and felt an unbroken thread between her stomach and the swirling clouds and then, moving her gaze out toward that sea they called a
lake,
she felt the dream where she was out of her body but somehow walking across the ocean floor. She felt the heaviness of deep water. The wind blew hard against her face; the sky was going to fall on her and she wanted to be inside again. Another piece of cake might do the trick. The wave of dread pinned her in place as she remembered, with clarity, the son's breath hot in her mouth and ears, the bruises he pressed into her wrists, the wavering candlelight and the burning shame that followed as she got up, trembling with poison,
to clean his salt from between her legs. All the while he had sobbed on the floor as if he'd been the one wronged. She felt the weight of this memory like a stone lodged in her mouth.

According to Jethro there was a small glitch in the delivery of the specimens and artifacts. Owen had to hear all the variations of excuse as they rode down in the elevator. He'd made the mistake of letting the heir speak with the deliverymen. Jethro motioned and explained beside his father, trying to get an empathetic word from the tycoon, but Hale was all business, eyes front and center, done up in his Prince Albert coat and derby hat, warning Jethro that he'd better not be late for lunch at the club. Every now and again, as if to ignore Jethro by degrees, Hale exchanged a remark with Benny Boy, on the order of the day and the league team developments and elevator running times top to bottom. Owen suspected that Hale found it hard to look directly into his son's eyes, and he hoped to get his check before some State Street physician shone a light into that dead-blue stare.

“The deliverymen ignored my instructions,” Jethro sputtered, “and they were very explicit, down to the letter. Workingmen with delusions of independent thinking, as if we need any more of that.”

So far he had made good on his word to keep quiet about the savages. That was something at least. Was the check in Hale's breast pocket?

Malini pressed into the corner of the elevator, but Jethro was still close enough that she could smell his chalky breath. She wished him dead; it came to her with the simplicity of a pebble in her palm.

Argus was the only one in the elevator who commiserated with Jethro as he talked. He listened attentively, feigning incomprehension, a brute overcome with fellow feeling. Argus had been warming to him ever since he'd heard of Jethro facing down the captain to protect his sister.

“A step at a time, son,” the baron was saying; “let's get to the loading bays and see what's what.”

Jethro pushed forward onto the balls of his feet. “This is what I'm trying to tell you. Ben needs to take us to the lobby instead of the loading bays.”

Hale looked directly into the tropical fever or whatever malady lingered behind that wavering regard. “What?”

Benny Boy, bent at the controls, brought the elevator to a gentle rest and into the chiming bells of the lobby. They all piled out and the commotion was already starting up from the cherrywood rotunda and the nookery of cigar shops, shoeshines, newsstands. Half a dozen men in coveralls were stacking wooden crates and a few of the containers were already open, a cotton-stuffed sea eagle emerging from a bed of straw, a tomahawk brandished overhead. Actuary clerks and secretaries were shoulder to shoulder in the lunchtime gawking, a gaggle of pedestrians also, in from the cold, following the hullabaloo to its source. Deliverymen were still bringing in crates and tea chests, the doormen holding the main entrance in an open embrace, and with the snow-spun wind and the debouching of people in through the doorway the chaos of the streets had taken root in Hale's marble lobby. He was powerless to stop it and rested a hand on the bronze bust of his grandfather, waiting for the racket to simmer down. More people—stenographers, typists, commission men—arrived by the elevator-load, straining and jostling, right there with the curious window-shoppers and housewives. Next through the doors came the chiefly canoe, carved with war gods and inlaid with pearl shell, carried like a coffin by four men. Its stately entrance brought a fresh round of jostling and murmurs.

It came to Hale in the commotion that this was something he could use. He didn't have nearly enough room in his office for all the artifacts and he'd never planned on exhibiting Jethro's mothballed specimens. But why not turn the lobby into a museum, at least through the summer, while the native spectacle showed on the rooftop? Keep Jethro busy and away from treatises and chapbooks, give him a chance to find his land legs. A curator of
sorts. Why not? The genius of the idea brightened his mood and he went to tell the head watchman to post a few guards and leave the rest of the boxes unopened. He would inventory the items later. Tomorrow he would speak to his master carpenter about display cases. He was mounting another theatrical. The tradesman was probably incapable of museum-grade joinery but so be it; this would be a temporary display, just long enough to drive up interest in the building, pull in the crowds, and, of course, put a damper on admissions at Marshall Field's namesake museum. He donned his hat, buttoned his coat, shot through the cavalry of onlookers. Owen Graves was suddenly at his heels, wordless but clearly on tenterhooks. Ah, the check. Hale could hold out until all items had been properly appraised but he felt flushed with goodwill and found his fingers probing his coat pocket.

The sound of the crisp envelope grazing the silk lining—this is what Owen would recall thereafter. “Put it to good use,” Hale said through a clenched, benevolent smile.

“Also,” Owen said, hesitantly, “I wonder if I might ask a favor. I'm seeing my fiancée for the first time this evening and I wanted to make it something special. I was wondering if I might bring her to one of the upper floors and show her the view from the rooftop.” Owen thought her bias against the building might be cleared away by the panoramic view but also wanted her to meet Argus and Malini, to see that they were being well cared for.

Hale agreed to the proposal and told him to speak with the building manager. And then Hale was at the curbstone, free of the mob, bounding along La Salle in the cold, thinking about lunch and recalling the title of today's noontime club lecture:
Recent Advances in Mesmerism
.

A
delaide saw the driver waiting for her at the bottom of the museum steps, a placard held at chest-level and barely visible in the six o'clock gloaming—
Adelaide Cummings-nearly-Graves
. She knew at once, of course, but was already finding reasons to fan the anger she'd been coaling night and day. On top of the deceit about the natives, he hadn't bothered to telegram his arrival. She had half a mind to keep walking. The driver helped her up onto the covered seat and put a twill blanket over her lap. He poured her a mug of hot chocolate and handed it to her. “Where are you taking me?” she said.

“Strict instructions of secrecy, ma'am,” he said, clicking the horse into a trot.

She expected the hansom to forge its way toward the South Side, to Owen's scrapyard, but then they were riding into the Loop, walled in by chiming streetcars, their interiors lit up, ashen faces and worsted coats full-pressed to the windows. She thought briefly that he'd had the decency to choose a good restaurant, but then the cab stopped in front of the towering First Equitable façade and her anger surged; she could barely move. The driver took the blanket and untouched cocoa and helped her down. The street was still thinning from the six o'clock exodus. The building doorman opened one side of the double doors, tipped his cap, told her to make for the elevator. She did as she was told and in her fury failed to notice the packing crates and the canoe that had been banked into an alcove of the lobby, a night watchman standing by with his truncheon. The elevator operator appeared also to
be in on the conspiracy because he said,
Evenin', Miss Cummings
as he closed the doors. Adelaide said hello, folded her arms across her chest, settling into her warding-off stance. For what seemed an hour they rode to the upper floors; she stared into the mosaics at her feet, itemizing her complaints, deciding in which order she would bring them to light. Her mother was waiting to have dinner at the hotel and she would have to excuse herself after fifteen minutes. Let him feel some of the cruelty she'd been carrying. But then the bell rang in the lower twenties, somewhere between Underwriting and Management the man said, and her pulse thickened so that her whole throat was swollen with it.