Bright and Distant Shores (5 page)

Owen edged closer, hands in pockets. “That's what I've heard.” It occurred to him that she might know the names of skippers and traders, that perhaps she had typed memoranda and bills of sale for numerous artifacts. For a brief moment he imagined his interest in her was practical. He swallowed. “Have you tried the carbonated soda, Miss Cummings?”

She studied her ledger, breathing. She had tallied the number of visitors to Neurology on the left side of the wide-margined page and Owen could see only ten strokes, two sets of rickety fence posts struck through with blue ink.

“I'm terrified of hiccups,” she said plainly, not looking up.

“But you seem so intrepid,” Owen said. “An administrator of brains and typer of headhunting memoranda.”

“Typist,” she said. “Or typewriter. Whichever.”

“What did I say?”

“Typer.”

“And the Ferris wheel is out of the question? I suppose you're afraid of heights as well.”

“I love heights, actually. But I found the wheel rather dull.” She shook her head at the ledger, biting her bottom lip, enjoying the look on his face.

“A gondola ride in the lagoon? A walk on the Japanese wooded island?”

“You're persistent and I don't even know your name.”

“Owen Graves. I'm sorry if I'm being impossible.”

She clasped her hands, elbows at the edge of the desk, looking up now. It was a warding-off stance. But then came: “I'll be off in thirty minutes. I'll meet you out front. I haven't been to the wooded island yet.”

Owen nodded, smiled, looked out into the main exhibit. He had taken a half-step out of the brainy enclave when she said,
“The exhibit hall is full of hatchets and tomahawks, Mr. Graves. Professor Putnam would love nothing more than to scalp any man who preyed on his favorite secretary. Good shorthand and dictation are hard to come by. But I'll tell him that your intentions are honorable, shall I?”

Owen was at a loss, staring at a case of reed blowguns. After a pause he managed to say, “Tell the professor that he has nothing to worry about.”

They walked north toward the wooded island, past the Indian camps and wigwams, the simulated ruins of Yucatán. A breeze came off the lake and Adelaide pulled a shawl about her shoulders. Paper lanterns swung between burr oaks and a Japanese temple floated through the trees, an apparition of paper and wood. A couple sat kissing in a darkened teahouse and Owen saw Adelaide stare then abruptly look away, as if someone had called her name. He led her by a stony brook, onto the moon bridge that overlooked the village of Japanese carpenters, musicians, and stonemasons. All had retired for the evening—a shifting tableau behind rice-paper walls. There was a moment of quiet, the fair seeming far off, but then they noticed another couple in a thicket. A hatless man in shirtsleeves, a woman pressed into the hollow of a tree. This time there was a flurry of searching hands and boozy whispers.

Owen said, “I had no idea this was such a lair.”

“I have a better idea,” she said. They left the island by the nearest bridge and headed east. Adelaide walked briskly and Owen wondered if she was angling for the viaduct and the midway. Perhaps a thousand-foot ascent in the captive balloon or a camel ride was more to her taste than the Ferris wheel. She greeted several guards by name, exchanged pleasantries with turnstile attendants and cashiers coming off shift. Owen quickened his step to keep up. He was being led, whisked through a late spring evening by a woman of industrious plaid and whalebone barrettes. They
moved between the Bicycle Court and the Woman's Building and were suddenly flanked by scores of women in serge riding skirts and hopsack jerseys. The riders unlocked their bicycles, affixed white helmets, spats, headlamps.

Owen said, “I take back my earlier comment about the savagery of lady cyclists. I would trust these women with my life. That one there is attaching a first aid kit to the handlebars. Fit for an expedition.”

Adelaide turned. “They're coming from a lecture at the Woman's Building. It's one of the best halls if you haven't already seen it.”

This surprised Owen. He'd assumed the Italianate building was full of exotic draperies and tapestries.

She said, “One of the building's benefactors is Mrs. French-Sheldon.”

“Ah,” Owen said. He had no idea who that was.

“She led a caravan through eastern Africa, unattended by any of her sex, bartering and trading in the Arab coast bazaars.”

“Yes, of course. And what did she come back with?”

“It's all on display in there. Weaponry, brass beads, that sort of thing.” Then Adelaide began a summary of the speeches she'd heard inside, from Lady Aberdeen to a Russian princess and Swedish baroness whose names Owen could not hear above the pealing of bicycle bells. Something about leagues and temperance unions affirming the rights of women. Adelaide raised her voice to be heard: “The vote . . . not as a privilege, you understand, but as a right, Mr. Graves.”

Her formal tone bothered him and he found himself thinking about the midway, about the Hungarian wine they poured into goblets over there. Adelaide turned north again, walking back along the lagoon, past the Illinois Building. She stopped in front of the Fisheries Building, a baroque arcade of taxidermied fish and living sea dwellers in glass tanks. Despite his interest in seagoing, Owen had avoided the exhibit earlier in the day. With its
high-blown façade, its colonnades and flags aflutter, the building seemed to be full of cheap, touristic novelty. To top things off, it was fronted by the North Canal, where a merchant navy of singing gondoliers—South Siders trying to pass for Venetians in their striped shirts and broad felt hats—ferried couples from one concrete shore to the other.

“It's closed but I know one of the night watchmen. Come on,” she said, trotting up the stairs, her skirts flaring.

He had no choice but to follow and feign enthusiasm. Adelaide struck up a conversation with a certain night watchman— avuncular, smelling of some exotic supper—who said that they could have thirty minutes but not to touch anything or it would be his hide.

A few sconces lit the way and they passed through trapezoids of light and shadow. The rooms and annexes twisted and burrowed, smelling of fish-bloat and iodine. Owen walked behind Adelaide, watching the way her hair hit her shoulders as she walked, barely noticing the maritime marvels—floating luminous eggs in a wall-side tank, dried fish strung like silvered sheets of paper; specimens of the deep, cured, salted, or stuffed in wooden box frames. A series of nets, traps, and lobster pots was accompanied by odes to Yankee enterprise. They stood beside the articulated skeleton of a sperm whale. She walked around it slowly, touching the alabaster ribs in the underwater gloaming.

“He said not to touch anything,” Owen said.

“He won't know the difference. Isn't this something?”

“The whole place is something.”

She paused, turned to him, wiped her hands down her skirt, muttered
forgive me,
then carefully lay beneath the suspended skeleton on the floor, looking up into the giant rib cage. She did this with ladylike precision, as if she were reclining on a gurney for a renowned physician, modesty intact. She made it seem like a perfectly natural thing to do on a Sunday evening. Palms down, she closed then opened her eyes, her braided hair coiled beside her head.

Watching her, prostrate on the wooden floor, he said, “Have you been swallowed whole?”

“Like Jonah. You could fit a house in there. Do you want to see the view?”

“I'm terrified of whale stomachs.”

She laughed and sat bolt upright. She crouched and came out. “You must think I'm deranged.”

Owen extended his hand and she took it as if alighting from a carriage. She straightened her skirts.

“I'm sure you're not the first one to do that.”

“I bet not. Shall we see the rest?”

Owen put his hands in his pockets and followed her into the adjacent building. It was even more elaborate than the last, with porticos and loggias, a basilica for fish. They went inside and found themselves in a room of glass tanks. Spandrels of moonlight braced the high windows of the central dome. In the diffuse light Owen could barely read the placards let alone see the inhabitants lurking behind the glass walls. Supposedly there were catfish from muddy western rivers, halibut and cod from the Atlantic, king crabs and lobsters prowling the sandy bottom.

“Come over here,” Adelaide said.

She was standing by a large tank, her face pressed to the glass.

“I can barely see a thing,” he said.

“Your eyes will adjust. They brought these three by railcar. Can you imagine?”

He stared at the tank. “Still nothing. My father used to tell me stories of them bringing live lobsters by railcar for the downtown oyster houses. I never believed him until he took me there one day and showed me. They were all crawling around in a tank and you could walk up to one and tell them to throw it into a boiling pot.” He saw a looming shape inside the tank. Then another.

“You have to come right up to see in this light,” she said.

He could see the whites of her eyes.

He hooded his gaze and peered into the watery gloom.
He could hear her breath against the tank wall. His elbow was up against hers and she made no effort to move it. He blinked, squinted, then the gray maw of a shark passed just inches away, teeth serried and hinged, eyes inscrutable and white. The animal hit the tank with a thud and Owen jolted back, his hands raised in front of his face. A view of flared gills flashed by as the shark recoiled and turned. Adelaide had a hand on her breastbone, awed, stifling a panicky laugh. She had to steady herself against the wall. They stood three feet from the tank and watched the sharks for ten minutes, neither of them talking. The sharks' marbled gray flanks were flecked with white and a dozen tiny parasites clung to the sandpapered skins, dangled and swayed like wilted flowers of the deep. Every now and then there would be a thud against the glass—were they blind or trying to escape?—and Adelaide grabbed his arm each time, anchoring them in place. Of all the foreign and exotic encounters at the fair, these creatures seemed the most far-flung to Owen. Barely of the planet, Darwinian relics, as unlikely and apocalyptic as some sightless, mud-dwelling griffin. How did he and Adelaide appear through those cold, lightless eyes? Was there something in there looking back, by turns curious and appalled?

When they left the Fisheries Building it was almost nine. Owen offered to buy Adelaide a late dinner but she declined. He insisted on buying her a cherry-flavored soda and listened to her hiccup all along the Grand Basin, past the orb-bearing goddess of the Republic. The belching was retribution for the terror of the sharks, he told her. He walked her back to the Anthropological Building where Professor Putnam's assistant, Franz Boas, was waiting to escort her home on the streetcar. They stood outside for a moment.

“When are you on brain watch again?” he asked.

“It changes every day. It might be the psychology experiments tomorrow.”

“But always the same building?”

She nodded, tightened her shawl.

“You can tell Putnam and Boas that there is no need for the tomahawks. You're in one piece.”

“For now,” she said, turning, dashing up the stairs. He added the word
now
to his mental catalogue of the day. It lay wedged between the sight of her prostrate beneath the whale skeleton and the otherworldly stare of the sharks. More than amulets and bamboo tinderboxes it was these moments that would stay with him, something in the way they hovered just beyond the grasp of plain reckoning—like apartments glimpsed from the El at night. The strange orbit of other lives. He walked back through the fairgrounds and bought a hamburger at the first place he could find. He sat on a bench in front of a bandstand, not far from where he'd witnessed the bloody Sun Dance, and ate with abandon, like an invalid back from the brink. He was sure his two-year slump was about to end.

They fell into a steady rhythm of afternoon walks and early suppers, working around her schedule at the fair. Over meals in which Adelaide described her charity work—teaching immigrants to read at Hull House, taking an elderly neighbor to church each Sunday—Owen marveled at the way she ate soup, bowl tilted carefully away, spoon idled and de-dripped at the ceramic curb before making its ascent to her lips. He could watch her do this for hours. The long, pale line of her neck was something he thought about on the streetcar or crossing the street. She was so remarkably decent and kind and her refinement came off as care—even grace—rather than privilege. Owen felt himself pulled by the promise of future shared meals, by the thought of loosening her braided hair so that it spilled—smelling of rosehips—over her delicate collarbone. He had to remind himself of his seagoing ambitions, of the need for a livelihood and the tin shed squalor in which he lived. Forcing himself to be practical, he asked her for voyage leads. She told him about the men who showed
up at the ethnographic exhibit with bones and artifacts in burlap sacks. Word that a Chicago museum was forming had traveled far and wide. They came from all over: German copra traders, New England clipper mates, brig captains. They'd forged careers in the South Seas, hauling sulfur, felling teak, ferrying sugarcane recruits, but most of that had given way to wool and transport. They traded with the islanders for ethnographica as they went. A fathom of calico, a sack of glass beads, a steel-bladed knife, each of these could buy fine native weapons or artifacts. Owen listened and took notes, mesmerized as much by Adelaide's mouth as by the words spilling from it.

In search of a hiring captain, Owen frequented the barrelhouse saloons in Little Cheyenne, the levee district. Some of his father's men had come here on weekend benders—the
grand tour
they called it—spending their way from saloon to dance hall to brothel. They hocked wedding bands and fob watches at pawnshops and posed for midnight portraits with street waifs in tintype galleries; they ate oysters from the shell and bought virility potions at voodoo apothecaries. One Saturday morning Owen found Otto Bisky, a crapulous German clipper captain, breakfasting on eggs, sausages, and beer in a saloon eatery. He supported his head with one hand, holding a stump of bratwurst at bay with a fork in the other. A folded newspaper lay beside his plate. His face was sun-ravaged, his lips blistered, his complexion ruddy. Each time he took a swig of beer or bite of wurst his face turned increasingly sour, as if he were eating a lemon by the rind. Owen sat two bar stools down and ordered a shot of whiskey. He wanted to get the German's attention but Bisky failed to take his eyes off his newspaper or his eggs. Eventually, Owen asked him about the list of names he was tracing with a finger in a column of newsprint—
Argo, Nemesis, Peregrine, Industry, Aramac
. Beneath a heading of
Shipping Intelligence,
the names appeared under the banner
Wrecks and Casualties
. Bisky thereby began a bleary-eyed lament for all the ships he'd ever captained in the Pacific and the
Atlantic, and their fates. He detailed each ship's peculiarities, the way she acted in a squall or the way she took in wind and water in high swells or smelled like baleen in her lower reaches, before giving the exact nature of her demise. Scuttled, hogged-up, reefed, run aground, he gave each word a throaty, Germanic inflection. He discussed the quirks of his current ship, the
Paramount,
which was being repaired and due to set sail in the morning, eventually making for the South Seas. Then Bisky began a diatribe about the wretched state of the Chicago River and its bridge-opening schedule, the humid weather, the many hazards of falling asleep in a brothel. It was during a brief pause that Owen asked him outright for a job.