Bright and Distant Shores (51 page)

“Mr. Gray, your parents have been coming to me since before you were born. I delivered you, as it happens, on account of the midwife taken ill. I've had your father on stomach bitters for decades to good result. Point is, I'm not up on the latest this or that. No need to be. Read the papers and it's Eucaine or some such. Some Swiss doctor just removed a human stomach and
last week some mangler in Muncie, Indiana, Svengalized a boy's big toe off, frostbite, using nothing but hypnosis to put him out and under. What a lot of noise and bunk! We'll watch the finger closely. But there is no miracle cure for this kind of thing. Avoid touching your eyes with it. The finger.”

Several moments of pipe-drawing.

Jethro stared at the finger as if it were a particularly colorful slug. He felt the parasitic remora hard at work, a sharksucker on his brain, enervating his presence of mind. He wanted to say to the old physician, a man he saw now was largely incompetent and outdated, whose walls were filled with department store calendars instead of diplomas,
Sir, a fish is eating my brain from the inside out
. Instead, he said, “And for sleeping better? Is there nothing to be done?”

The doctor stood and fetched a few jars from a shelf. “First, here are the powders and ointments for the finger. Powder in the morning, ointment at night. Then take some of this before bed. It's brand-new. A cough syrup for children but I've been giving it to my anxious wife to great effect.”

Jethro took the small bottle and held it up into the hemisphere of pipe smoke above their heads—
Bayer Heroin Tonic and Suppressant
.

“One spoonful before bed,” said Doctor Jallup. “Pay the nurse on the way out.”

Jethro collected his medications and did as he was told.

It was warming outside—the elms and maples were suddenly a startling green. It had happened in the last hour, he was sure of it: spring. Outside a spaghetti joint he threw the finger powder and ointment into a garbage pail. Let nature take her course. He took a long swig from the bottle of Bayer tonic and kept walking. By the time he reached the commotion of the lobby, he could sense abandon creeping in, a melancholy anthem flowing through his limbs and thoughts. He ducked beneath the drop cloths and went into the
wunderkammer.
Nestled between a fern case and a rookery of taxidermied birds, he slept extravagantly.

T
he house was on the Near North Side, anchored in a kind of no-man's-land but within walking distance of the Lincoln Park Zoo. It was close enough to hear the lions at night, but far enough from the lake-view mansions on Astor and east enough of Clark to be affordable. Wedged between the residential and the commercial, in a district of breweries and clapboard churches, it was a fixer to be sure—carpenter Gothic on hard times. It hadn't been painted in twenty years, by the looks of it, the arched windows and the board-and-batten siding weathered pale. Owen liked the steep gabled roofline and the high windows, the fact that this was a religious style rendered by American house carpenters, immigrants with awls and jigsaws. It was part barn, part chapel, the way it flashed a big expanse of timber wall at the street but drew the eye up with broad, high windows. From the attic there was a sliver of lake crowning through the trees and room enough to swing a cat. This might be the new home for his collection, though the objects would have to be pared down. The rest of the interior was spacious and mostly intact: bright airy rooms, two parlors, a candidate for a nursery. The big backyard, half an acre, held an overgrown orchard, rows of arthritic trees that Owen guessed were either barren or bore wild, inedible stone fruit in late summer. There was a workshop and stable, a stone garden bench engraved with the letters
E.J.Z.
The house had been vacant for some years, inherited by an absent nephew, fallowed during the years of financial panic.

Owen wrote a check of deposit and came back with Adelaide
the next day. He gave her a tour and they ended up in the back plot, beneath the gnarled fruit trees, looking back toward the house. From this aspect, he had to admit, it didn't look promising—the eaves sagged and there was a rent of jagged space smashed into the round attic window.

“It needs some work but I can do it myself,” Owen said.

“Who's E.J.Z.?” she asked, avoiding his eyes.

She seemed distracted and it annoyed him. She hadn't said one word during the tour, not even when he said the sunny room could be a nursery.

He said, “The dead owner, I imagine. Maybe his mistress. What do you think of the house?”

“You love it, don't you?”

“I think it has potential,” he said, trying to sound impartial. He couldn't say why he loved the house so much.

She said, “There's a lot of work to do on it. Should we keep looking?”

He waited for something to curb his mood. It was the beginning of marital discord. For a few seconds he felt it ringing all through him. It was the groom's job to secure housing before the wedding; everyone knew that. Had she been studying the lists of marriage licenses in the paper all this time just to deny him his rightful place?

Then she said, “I'm no longer at the museum.”

“Did they fire you?”

“They were considering it. Somebody made a formal, anonymous complaint to the board after the episode with Hale Gray. Said I'd compromised the museum's reputation. I couldn't stand the thought of defending myself before those old sods so I quit. I handed George Dorsey my letter of resignation this afternoon.”

He let her anger peter out. She ran her hands down her skirts.

He said, “Without telling me first?”

She flushed, saw where he was headed. “Everything happened so quickly.”

“All the same, when I arrived back weren't you complaining that I hadn't confided in you about the full particulars of the voyage?”

She looked up at the warped gables. “Yes, I suppose I was.”

“What will you do?”

“Devote more time to charity.”

They sat on the stone bench. After a while, he said, “I still don't know what you've inherited. It's probably impolite to ask.”

She did not look at him but said, “I don't know the exact figure yet. It will come in stages. That's what the probate attorney tells me.” She waited, then added: “It will be our money soon and there's no use pretending otherwise.”

His voice broke off then came back: “A rough estimate?”

She swallowed; it would be the first time she said the amount aloud. “Two hundred thousand dollars.” Hoping to soften its brashness, she added, “Roughly.”

He couldn't speak. He tried to gauge what could be done with such an amount. It was not monumental wealth, not the wealth of department store magnates and steel barons, but it was a sum big enough to make him feel embarrassed on behalf of the tired house listing above them, its little attempts at high Gothic rectitude, the glimmers of pretension where a carpenter maybe got carried away with his scroll saw. Pediments of wood, buff in their seasoned condition, strung along the fascia like ornate icicles.

She said, “It's a lot, isn't it?” Any other man would be happy, she thought, but Owen Graves will carry a grudge against anything easy or given. He probably blamed her for the inheritance. Another absurd ritual of the well-heeled. But she knew something good could be done with wealth. She thought about Dorothea in
Middlemarch
then felt embarrassed for the thought. “I'm not about to start wearing fur coats, if that's what worries you.”

He wanted to say something to brush it off and then consider it in private, but nothing came. The silence went on so long that anything would have sounded forced and disingenuous. Finally,
he said, “So this house is not good enough for us?” He was staring at her diamond ring, wondering if it had, in fact, been stolen.

“I never said that.”

“Wouldn't get the Margaret seal of approval, is that it? Might entail her daughter sleeping—”

“Please stop. I know where this leads.”

He went quiet again.

She said, “I could care less about what kind of house we live in. No. That's a lie. I want something comfortable and beautiful. Whoever said we shouldn't surround ourselves with beauty was a philistine. I'm not ashamed to want nice things. It won't make me an aristocrat if we have money in the bank.”

“Well,” he said, his voice indignant suddenly, “I want to buy this house with my own money. A mortgage, payment by payment, year by year. Interest. The whole arrangement.”

“That's absurd. Most of a mortgage is interest. Why would we do that if we have the means to buy it outright?”

“I never said it was rational but that's the way I feel about things.” He sounded petulant, even to himself. “I need to know whether you see any potential in this house at all.”

She drew her eyes along the roofline then cast them directly at him. “What I see is a man wanting to rescue a charming old house from demolition. It must have been a beautiful house in its day. After the Civil War and the fire—somebody built it to be their pride and joy. But take a look at it now. It can barely stand on its own feet.”

“That's an exaggeration. Most of the walls are intact. The roof needs some work, granted.”

“It's not much of an exaggeration,” she said.

They sat longer on the stone bench, neither of them conceding anything.

After some time, he said, “What if I buy it as an investment? I fix it up in time for the wedding, but if you still hate it then we can sell it, hopefully for a profit. Then you and your mother
can find us some redbrick monstrosity on a fashionable block and I'll go along willingly. I'll concede everything if I can't make you fall in love with this house.” He leaned closer. “Look at the way she'll catch morning sun off the lake and the way the windows are set overlooking the garden. What about all those rooms with good aspect? The maple skirting boards and honey-colored floors. The high ceilings.”

She could hear it in his voice—actual tenderness for the ramshackle house. Her mother would not be pleased but that was true on most fronts. Without meaning to, Adelaide had complicated their union, her father's largesse a liability in their imminent marriage because her husband, soon-to-be, had grown up proud and poor, and now owed a debt to his past. His proposal didn't make much sense; it was more a statement of pride or protest than anything else. She would give in because she didn't have much hope of stopping him, and because she knew the man she wanted to marry was somehow attached to that stubborn plan. The son of a wrecker wanted to build something back up, to save a piece of tumbledown history from the scrapheap.

Released to his vision, Owen finalized the bank loan—issued partly, and to his chagrin, on the prospect of Adelaide's new financial standing. The banker knew of the Cummings family, and while the inheritance was not formally mentioned in the documents, it seemed to be a subtext at the signing. Keys in pocket, Owen worked every day at the house, sleeping on the bare floor in the empty rooms, auditioning them. He made the structural repairs first, gutting walls, replacing roof beams and floorboards, inserting copper pipes into the serpentine network that ran under the pier-and-beam. Next he painted, sanded, varnished, wallpapered. When the job seemed as if it would go on forever he decided to finish out a single room. A room wedged between the dining room and the parlor. It would be his peace offering to Adelaide—built-in shelves from lumberyard spruce, floor to
ceiling. He asked Margaret where the dead husband's books were being kept. Apparently Adelaide had told her very little of the house project, because she was cheery and amenable, wanted to be in on the surprise. Owen told her she could see the house when it was all done, but in the meantime he needed to patch things up with her daughter. Margaret tapped the side of her nose, winked as if the first gesture were cryptic, and sat down to write him a letter of consent for the storage warehouse manager.

A few days before Hale Gray's opening, Owen had all thousand volumes pressed onto the shelves, arranged by author and in alphabetical order, the library smelling of wax and sawn wood. He brought Adelaide in the morning, when the light was best, and led her blindfolded into the room. When the room revealed itself—a crypt of sunshine and coralline book spines—she put her hand over her chest as if startled. “It's beautiful,” she said, “so very beautiful.” She walked around the perimeter of the library, tracing a finger along the edge of the shelves. She opened pages, read text and marginalia, felt her father's mind at work. Then she stopped before a shelf, shaking her head. “Gerald would never have made Dickens a neighbor to Dostoyevsky. The Russians always lived on a separate shelf.”

Owen smiled. “
Gerald
and
Margaret
. So proper.”

“I know.”

“
Owen
and
Adelaide
.”

Turning, she said, “Not such a terrible ring to it.”

He kissed her cheek as she began exiling the Russians to their own shelf.

T
he opening day crowds were thin, despite the sunny weather—less than a hundred sightseers and not one policy signed before noon. Hale Gray, rocking on his heels, watched the streets from the rooftop—caravans of headlong immigrants, Cuban and American flags aflutter, patriotic fervor even as they moved from one cramped flat to another one farther west or south. Signs that read:
Down with Spain!
There wasn't a single May Day worker parade in sight, making the meager turnout even more baffling. No anarchists, just babushkas and tias carrying infants on their backs. Hale turned to see a green-faced lad going aloft in the tethered balloon ride—a little Napoleon about to lose his lunch. Perhaps he'd miscalculated and overplayed his hand. Did their own policy even cover death events or permanent maiming in airborne vehicles? The bored salesmen drank chilled coconut milk and watched the siblings mimic island life. Up on the spit of sand, the loinclothed brother stacked wood for a small fire while the sister, dressed in a grass skirt and cotton blouse, prepared a dozen yams. With the fire warden's permission, they were going to cook their lunch in the hearth. The coral for the oven had come from Mexico, just like the coconuts and the bamboo. The two-foot-deep lagoon looked a little brackish so Hale asked an underling to add some more indigo dye.