Bright and Distant Shores (6 page)

Bisky turned on his stool, sized Owen up while tonguing a morsel of food, pushed some air between his lips, and finally said, “You look more idler than able-bodied. Can you cook for two dozen men hungry enough to slit your throat if they miss a meal?”

The vision of preparing countless fishy meals at sea hovered before him. “What about ship's carpenter?” he asked. “I have experience and my own tools.” He knew from his years in the library stacks that a ship's carpenter made general repairs and kept the masts in good condition. That seemed easy enough.

Bisky said, “Do you have a bevel gauge?”

Sensing this was a trap, Owen said of course and waited for the captain's reaction.

Bisky drained his mug of beer, folded the newspaper, and said, “We leave tomorrow at dawn.”

This was not exactly what Owen had in mind, but he shook Bisky's calloused hand, received the details of the dock, and went out into the street. On his way back to the wrecking yard, he stopped in a hardware store and bought a bevel gauge. The salesman said it was the perfect tool for replicating pieces that weren't square. Owen arrived home and penned a letter to Adelaide in his finest Tabernacle cursive.

He tried to be brief but something poured out of him in the kerosene lamplight, his collected spoils spread before him, everything ordered and arranged, none of it seen by another person since his father's death. What was the point of all these objects? A private rummage; his solitary childhood labeled, filed, boxed. He wrote of his mother's daguerreotype, his father's death, his desire to find his place in the world. She was the loveliest person he'd ever known and he prayed for her forgiveness. The word
pray
felt like a falsehood—he hadn't communed with God in years—but within a month he was doing just that. Bunked down in the idlers' deckhouse of Bisky's clipper, his hands smelling eternally of tar and brine, he floated prayers out to the white stars, to the ocean mounting against the groaning ballast, even to the Holy Ghost. He prayed for land, for a steak medium rare, for the sight of Adelaide tilting her soup bowl in the wan light of a café.

Somehow, while he was at sea learning the petulant ways of the old clipper from stem to stern, Adelaide had forgiven him. He was gone a little under a year and the exchange of letters—three on each side—took on a life of its own. Entreaties and dispatches from San Francisco, Hawaii, and Sydney, all by commissioned mail steamer, each of his letters blotted with sealing wax stolen from Bisky's cabin. Whenever he got the chance, Owen fled the fusty nooks and fetid warrens below deck, the fishy brume in the cookroom, and climbed onto the foredeck to pen what he saw: the bruised green in the troughs between swells, the seabirds riding high on the trades without so much as a wing flap, the iron blue of the sky before a storm. He did not mention the debauchery that went on in the forecastle, the flagons of grog, the fist-fights in the spiritroom, the pornographic reminiscences in cabins and bunkrooms. Owen drank with the seamen, spoke of women as sport when required, but used his station as carpenter to live on the periphery. He reported directly to the captain and shared quarters with the other idlers—the bosun, the sailmaker, and the
cook. Because he did not have to stand watch like the ordinary and able-bodied seamen, he found time to read, write letters, and try his hand at trade whenever they anchored.

Adelaide began her letters a little stonily, describing the move to the new museum without much flair or affection. She kept to the facts—meals, weather, appointments, errands, books read in the buzzing light of the cable car. But by the time she responded to Owen's second letter, in which he reiterated his sincerest apology and stated his desire to be with her upon his return, she was warmed through. Not only because of those simple declarations—underlined with Indian ink—but because his letter was full of exotica and anthropological sightings from island ports: baskets made from sedge, a jew's harp made from bamboo, native boys surfing waves on rough-planked boards, women's girdles stripped from bark, the sight of missionaries from the Society of the Divine Word playing cricket beside a volcanic beach. She was won over by such details and showed parts of his letters to colleagues at the Field Columbian Museum. They asked her to write and express the museum's interest in buying certain objects upon his return. Owen kept this to himself and used his wages, such as they were, to buy calico and tobacco for trading in the islands. He made a deal with the cook and kept his tribal artifacts in flour sacks in the messroom larder.

By the time he received her third letter he was a few months from being home. While the stationery smelled of jasmine, the letter spoke of hard times. Eighteen ninety-four saw striking mobs in the railroad yards, runs on wildcat banks, the homeless sleeping in City Hall and precinct police stations. Adelaide continued to volunteer at Hull House, prepared meals and taught immigrant children how to read, sat on the porch alongside Jane Addams, the great social reformer herself. After a long day of service they listened to street orphans singing Slavic hymns. With the distance and perspective that came from nearly a year at sea—so many nights in the brimming stomach of the brig—Owen suspected
that at least part of Adelaide's interest in him was sociological. On her father's side she came from New England brahmins, men with high-bridged noses, honorary degrees, and a blue-blooded zeal for philanthropy. Adelaide had come west to strike out on her own, type memoranda and take dictation at the museum by day, improve the lot of the poor in her off hours, petition for women's rights, but all the while receiving a monthly stipend from Boston that was wired to the downtown post office.

Perhaps, Owen thought, he was one of her causes. The orphaned son of a housewrecker, partially raised and educated by South Side nuns, a little unrepentant and raw in his scuffed blucher boots, he fit the profile for Adelaide's wider mission. But surely the parents back east did not condone a romantic alliance with someone of Owen's prospects and parentage. And yet Adelaide's letters unfurled suggestions for future plans—going to worker concerts in the park where men in coveralls would eat pork sandwiches while listening to Brahms, standing amid the dotted brushwork of the Impressionists at the Art Institute, attending one of the Friday lectures or poetry readings at the Chevron Tea Room on Michigan Avenue. It was clear to Owen that she wanted to refine him, to bear him up. And though he preferred the subterranean charm of a poolroom to a lofted lunchroom, a pitcher of stout to a carafe of burgundy, a midnight platter of ribs in Little Cheyenne to a midday bowl of chowder in some downtown clam house, he was willing to go partway along with her vision. She was a missionary of the plainspoken and practical kind, moved to service not so much by God but by some inherited belief in humanism and the common plight of all. It wasn't the Bible that had been read aloud during her childhood, but the musings of Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson. Owen would go to the lectures and concerts, attend the Christmas pageants at the houses for the poor, but he'd also keep a racetrack form guide in his back pocket or a ticket stub for a curio museum where a bearded lady farted and belched on
demand. The truth was, he trusted Chicago's armpit more than her jeweled fingers.

But it was also true that he'd grown smitten with Adelaide at sea. His recollections of her had become almost devotional in their tone—she sat reading a chapbook in the half-light of a cable car, her chest rising between stanzas. He was always at the other end of the cable car, in those daydreams, coming toward her. When she looked up at him her whole face came alive, as if he'd brought her happily back from the brink of a desolate poem.

His homecoming. Adelaide in a bustled skirt and shawl, fighting the bluster of March to meet him at the train station. They kissed on the mouth, briefly, and it was she who leaned in first. Owen felt a surge of affection, and lust, but also a mild sense of dread. He was clearly in her benevolent sights and it wasn't long before the afternoons and evenings of ballroom dancing and civic-minded pastimes grew heavy with expectation. Sometimes he had to shake himself free for a few hours and drink himself into a stupor in a dramhouse where patrons spat and ashed their cigarettes on the floor. Whereas the seamen's lewdness and excess had made him more upright at sea, Adelaide's noble intentions drove him to gin. He slept off hangovers in the tin-wire shambles of the wrecking shed and showed up clean-shaven and breath-minted the next day, ready for another round of self-improvement.

And yet there was no denying Adelaide's allure, her implacable friendliness and lightness of spirit. Owen was happiest in her company and even amid the din of a taproom she was the object of his thoughts. The way she chatted with strangers, doled out bus fares and petted strays like an urban St. Francis, thought nothing of removing her shoes to walk in the frigid waters at the lake edge or tuck a napkin into her neckline to eat pork ribs for a lark. She was buoyant, high-minded, affectionate. She kissed Owen with increasing pluck, allowed his hands to run the fences of her undergarments, but it was clear that an invisible line
had been drawn and only a marriage proposal would suffice to cross it.

The prospect of marriage unsettled Owen but not because he couldn't imagine happily spending his days with Adelaide. It was a question of means, of what he might bring to such an arrangement. It was also a matter of doubt. What if Adelaide's affections were conditioned on some act of conversion, on Owen joining some gilded society or humanitarian circle? He wanted to be sure she loved the wrecker's son and the orphan and not some phantom of her moral imagination. On one of their afternoon walks he asked her why her affections for him ran so deep. She spoke freely, as if he'd asked the simplest of questions. “I admire you greatly, for one thing. You know how to do so much in the world. I like your broad smile and shoulders and that schoolboy curiosity . . . and I've never seen hands like that. They're so . . . capable.”

He held up his calloused hands. “They could be in a window display.”

She took one of his big hands and held it. “The men I knew in Boston were timid, with soft hands and no opinions. But don't get a big head. Being fearless is fine, but recklessness isn't a trait I admire.”

“I'll keep that in mind.” He stopped to kiss her, pulling his scarf up to protect them from the gusting wind.

Owen placed all his hopes for future respectability—and therefore marriage—in the sale of his artifacts. On the voyage, he'd managed to assemble over a hundred items, from Melanesian masks, daggers, and spears to Polynesian baskets and clay bowls. His eye for signature details, indelible marks of an object's maker, led to the possession of carved figurine war gods and ornately trimmed dance shields. He hauled the items in a wagon to the rear of the Field Columbian Museum and several of the curators came out for the appraisal. Owen could tell they were delighted and surprised by his bounty, but they were also stone-facing their reactions to keep the prices down. The artifacts were arranged
on the loading dock by region, Owen referring to detailed notes in his journal. The curators studied each item while describing, in great detail, the financial strain of founding a new museum. “We've bought thousands of artifacts from the fair and now it's a question of remaining funds. We'll have to consult the board and come back with a figure for the whole lot.” The phrase
whole lot
did not do justice to Owen's months of careful acquisition and he could already sense that they were out to scam him. When the handwritten figure came on museum letterhead, it was ten times less than Owen had expected. It was enough to float him for a few months, but not enough to secure a mortgage or rent an apartment without worry. He accepted the offer and a month later he saw some of his artifacts in one of the museum's velvet-lined cases. They'd been given pride of place in the main gallery.

Within a year, Owen stopped talking to Adelaide about moving to an apartment. He had spent his sea wages and the money he'd received from the Field Columbian Museum. “They paid me like it was native bric-a-brac,” he told Adelaide bitterly. She wasn't sure that he'd been swindled but she sympathized nonetheless. Soon he was back to occasional wrecking jobs and renting out half the salvage yard to an ironworker. The economy was still bad and he occasionally borrowed money from pawnbrokers and loan sharks. Adelaide never asked him about his finances, never once came to the yard, because to do so would be to stare into the gravel pit of his working-class roots. She remained determined and hopeful, told stories of her father's financial generosity as a way of lighting the trail that might lead the way forward.

I
n the grip of a second hangover, Owen left the First Equitable and took to the streets with Hale Gray's contract in hand. The crowds had thinned out but groups of revelers still choked the doorways of taverns and restaurants. He headed down La Salle and across to the shoreline where the darkened lake was dotted faintly with navigation lights. The long walk into the South Side was just what he needed to clear his head. He bought some fried potatoes from a vendor and ate them as he walked along, a greasy thumbprint becoming his unofficial seal on the first page of the contract. Under a streetlamp he stopped to study the list of tribal artifacts, considering where each item could be acquired, but soon he returned to the signature page with its dollar amount and the phrase
a number of natives
. The money was enough to buy a modest house in a good neighborhood, perhaps with a small mortgage. He wondered how much had been apportioned to the artifacts and how much to the islanders. Was
a number
as little as
two
? He felt himself calculating, justifying. He had a complicated moral aversion to bringing back natives for an insurance spectacle, but he also had a simple aversion to continued poverty.