Bright and Distant Shores (46 page)

The elevator doors opened onto a gloomy floor still under construction, the columns exposed and unpainted, an acre of drop-clothed desks arranged in rows. There was a hollow of candlelight somewhere up ahead and she had no choice but to walk toward it. The elevator closed behind her with a stutter, followed by a descending hum. She moved forward but refused to call out his name. The perimeter of windows hung washed with late twilight, darkening, a few stars and rooftop beacons pearling up against the chill glass. She thought of drab portraits and then of aquarium tanks, of seeing the shark knife through the underwater murk the day of their first meeting those four years previous. He'd been gone half a year. It astounded her. For an instant, she couldn't picture his face. There was something oceanic about the sky at this hour, seen from this height—she felt as if she were beneath a wave, breaking to the surface, the way the atmosphere poured into the alcoves and stone canyons, stippled faintly with gaslight, the way the boundary between the lake and the shoreline blurred in the near-dark. She was aware of her footsteps, her palms turned and facing forward. He emerged slowly out of candlelight, his shadow looming, and she found this overly dramatic. She dropped her hands by her side and looked at his silhouette. She didn't trust her voice but decided she would be the first to speak.

“My mother is waiting for me at the hotel for dinner.”

He took a step forward. “And your father?”

She breathed, clasped one wrist at her waistline. “He won't be waiting anytime soon.”

He tried to discern some sign that everything was ruined.

She looked at the darkening windows behind him.

“I'm so sorry,” he said, finally.

“Months ago now. That's what it seems like.”

“I should have come sooner. There were delays at sea.” He made another step forward and took her hands in his.

She wanted to retract her hands or at the very least curl them into fists, but instead she let them go limp, brought her gaze to meet his. Suddenly, and infuriatingly, she wanted to be held, kissed until she felt thirsty and faint. Instead she turned her shoulders away. He let go of her hands and she moved to the windows, annoyed that now she was the one being overly dramatic. Was she going to fold her arms, stubbornly regard the skyline, the billows of smoke, the blackened river, while he explained, apologized, beckoned? Yes, apparently, she was going to do exactly that. She watched his reflection beside her, dimly aware of his words, her attention gripped by the way he held a flounce of her dress between two fingers.

She said, “He died peacefully, with a view of the river, his dog beside him. That's something at least. But my mother has come for God knows how long. I think she's afraid of being alone in Boston.”

He touched her shoulders and she stiffened to fend off an embrace. She didn't like the predictability of this scene and realized the topic of her father's death was killing her anger. She put one palm against the cold glass and said, “I know about the natives.”

There was a pause.

She continued: “You deliberately kept that from me. I suppose because you knew what I'd say.”

His face fell a little in the window reflection.

He'd aged, she thought, something around the mouth. Perhaps it was the sun and salt air.

Their ghosts floated silently in the blackened plate glass.

“I meant to tell you and then it was too late. I didn't want anything to jeopardize the expedition. Our future was at stake.”

“Where are they?”

“Who?”

“The natives.”

“There's only two of them. Brother and sister. You were going to meet them tonight, here, but I think they're tired out from all the traveling. You'll meet them soon.”

“These things don't end well, Owen. Do you remember the Esquimaux at the fair? They treated them like slaves or carnival freaks. Most of them burned down their skin tents and ran off to who knows where. And there were some others from Greenland in New York lately, living in the museum basement, dying by the day.”

“This will be different. For starters they're islanders not Esquimaux.”

“As if that will make any difference—they're going to freeze to death.”

“I'll make sure they're well looked after,” he said. “In three months they can go back if they like.”

Suddenly appalled—with herself? with him? with the little scene animating the windowpane?—she turned and walked between the rows of covered desks. There were enough desks for a hundred clerks or typists. Insurance must be booming, she thought. Why not put a petting zoo on the rooftop instead of a Melanesian village built for two? It amounted to the same thing. She started for the middle rows, running her fingertips across the desktops—out there was a little dell of open space and more candles. Some rows in, she noticed a narrow desk converted for dinner service, covered with a white tablecloth instead of a drop cloth. Pewter candlesticks, brown paper packages, a bottle of wine. The smell of food was pungent and she wondered how she'd missed it.

He came toward her. “I went hunting for our dinner. Braved
the open-air markets, two delicatessens, even the building's cafeteria.”

He began unpacking the motley spread—fried oysters, a tub of cottage cheese, corn cakes, veal loaf, sweet pickles, a ham sandwich cut in two, a handful of peppermint wafers. He finished with a volcanic island of mashed potatoes rising in a sea of gravy and two tin cups of wine. As he pushed one cup toward her, she felt the anger slipping.

“I have no intention of being wooed by your brown paper packages,” she said. “I'm fuming. I really am.” She took a step back from the table, drummed up some fury. “I have half a mind to call the wedding off and never see you again. I don't even have a ring, Owen.” She held her composure long enough to see the cruelty of it register in his eyes. There was a moment where she saw him looking into his own future and his face dropped, stricken and utterly bereft. Somehow—she was certain she was a despicable person for this— that glimmer of desolation in his face made her willing to soften. She came back to the table, picked up the cup of wine, and took a gulp. And like the night sky gushing at the windows, everything came pouring out: “Oh, God, what a thing to say and I don't mean a word of it. I just wanted you to confide in me. But already we have secrets from each other. I missed you terribly, Owen. Here's a secret: my mother almost convinced me to buy a house before you got back. I was ready to do it, too. With my inheritance. And I was afraid you wouldn't love a rich girl. It was going to be your punish-ment—an old regal lair not far from Prairie Avenue. A house with servant bells and a library. My father gave me his books and I have nowhere to keep them. You would have hated the house my mother picked out. Me as well, probably. I don't know. It even had an attic apartment where she was threatening to live for part of the year. You really dodged a streetcar on that one, Mr. Graves. A big streetcar named Margaret. She would have made lists of things for you to do because idleness is a terrible sin and she is the queen of lists. Do you understand how close you came—”

He kissed her full on the mouth, her cup of wine poised midair. He wondered
how rich
but knew better than to ask. Her hand came up to the back of his neck, then took hold of his shirt collar for good measure. They leaned kissing across the table, across the street-vendor spoils, then she pulled him around by the shirt-front, their mouths still flush and brimming with wine, her hair tangled in the kiss. His hands thumbed the waistline belt of her dress and she murmured softly, but then he realized she was saying
my mother
.

He drew back, dabbing at his mouth with his wrist, breathless, as if he'd been punched. “Invite her up here. There's enough pickles for the three of us.”

“She'd have a conniption.”

She smiled for the first time and with such ease that he wanted to cup her jaw in his hand. Her mouth was an object in the world, no different than a jade figurine.

Owen collected himself. “Very well. I'll send a messenger to the hotel. Which one?”

“The Palmer House. But you can't.”

Owen took her meager protest as absolute surrender. He walked to the elevator landing and pressed the call button. While he waited for Benny Boy—who was working late and for a handsome tip—he danced an off-kilter jig, stupidly and without remorse, for Adelaide's entertainment. She told him to stop, lifted the lid on something that resembled pork rinds, rolled her eyes extravagantly. A few minutes later the elevator arrived and Owen negotiated a relay of transactions—Benny Boy to doorman, doorman to delivery boy from the late-night druggist, errand boy on his bicycle through the slushy streets to the Palmer, only a few blocks over, deliver message of regret to Mrs.—what's her Christian name?—Margaret, tell Mrs. Margaret Cummings, a new widow mind you, so kid gloves, that her daughter is visiting with her fiancé just returned from the South Seas and must miss dinner. Very sorry. Repeat. Very sorry.

“She'll be miffed,” said Adelaide. “The proper thing would be to all dine together and I'll hear that refrain for weeks to come. Maybe years.”

Owen handed Benny Boy some more money, enough to disperse to the various parties, and strode back to the dinner table, feeling like a general who's just ordered soldiers to the front. “‘Margaret' is a formidable name. Now I'm especially nervous about meeting her.”

Adelaide was sitting, legs crossed at the knee, her hands folded in her lap; apparently the kissing was over for the time being.

Stifling a smile, she said, “You should be nervous, especially after what you've put her only daughter through.” She picked up a fried oyster and put it in her mouth.

He sat across from her. “Eat up. We have a tour to take after this. Veal loaf, Duchess?”

Suddenly ravenous and relieved, Adelaide began eating everything in sight, spooning and slicing things onto the cafeteria plate embossed with the company seal. They ate and drank for an hour before he led her into the stairwell and they climbed their way toward the rooftop. What she said of the view was, “This building bothers me with its self-importance,” and then she complained of the cold wind and that she couldn't see much for the descending fog.

So much for winning her over with the view, he thought, and so he took her into the tower and kissed her again, held her behind the illuminated clock face, the enormous lunar disc that was like a set piece for a musical. At least twenty pedestrians, confirming the hour from down on State Street, saw two amorphous silhouettes projected behind the white clock face as Owen and Adelaide kissed. The gears clicked over with their deadbeat lock and slide and she found herself, within minutes, unbuttoned and shivering. As with most things between them, Adelaide would concede in her own time and on her own terms. He was back along the strange coast of her affections, powerless and waiting for steerage. She told
him to take her down to Underwriting or whatever it was and to make them a bed on top of the desks with their coats because she wasn't about to lie with him on an office floor. He chided that he was better prepared than that and they took the stairs back down, stopping twice to kiss, emerging into the cavernous space where a daybed had been made up with sheets and pillows and pushed into a corner of windows. She made him turn away while she undressed hurriedly, her fingers still trembling from the cold. Owen listened and counted the layers of underwear and lace as she unpeeled. He got down to his underwear and they pressed together under the blankets for warmth. Owen told her about the drifting ship burning with coal, about imagining her beneath the captain's skylight, watching the stars, and she said she would probably get horribly seasick. He kissed her again, marooned in her smell.

At some point during their lovemaking, Owen realized he was facing northeast and that through the windows he could see the lake and the department stores of State Street reared up like enormous passenger ships and somewhere over there were the sites where he and his father's crew demolished buildings, sometimes in a single day. They devoured the teardowns like titans, like warring Vikings or rampaging Huns, pickaxes and adzes thrashing and sparking through the daylight. All of them fall, eventually, and in the meantime are leased from gravity, his father used to say in his grave, substantial tone. Owen had lingered on the sidelines, a demolitionist but also bent on unlikely treasure. Oddly, with his life spread before him, partitioned into city blocks, with Adelaide's pliant body beneath him, her cold hands against his chest, he thought of his father's boots on a shelf at the scrapyard, worn into workaday combat with their laces frayed. They seemed like an admonishment not to trust his luck.

T
hey slipped out of the building under cover of dark, before the secretaries and clerks arrived for the day. Owen bought her hotcakes at a worker's diner and they idled with talk and coffee for hours, waiting for the sun to rise over the lake. At first light, they bought her a fresh blouse from a street vendor and she wore it over her dress to keep rumors at bay among her colleagues. They bounded along the shoreline in their coats, contemplating the long walk south to the museum. “We're quite the vagabonds,” she said. “First we eat out of brown paper, then we sleep on a narrow daybed—incidentally, that was torture on my back—and now we're buying me clothes from a gypsy on the street. This isn't what I had in mind for us, Mr. Graves.”

He smoked a cigarette, striding out, brazened by the cold and the sex. “I don't know what you're talking about. I'm living like a king. We slept up with the stars last night, didn't we?”

She took his arm, then his cigarette.

The lake was still and quiet. Windrows of ice clogged the shoreline, a field of white boulders and foot-high escarpments. A fishing boat moved beyond the frozen rim, pulling into a shroud of fog, the upstroke of its engine magnified and somehow forlorn in the stillness. Owen looked out at the wide skirt of ice and recalled the coral flanks of Tikalia. Already it seemed like a lifetime ago. In fact, it had been less than two months since he'd been sitting on that beach, wondering if he'd gambled everything and lost. He touched the corner of the check in his coat pocket.