Haymarket (5 page)

Maybe, Lucy thought to herself. But not now, that was for certain, and not for a long time to come, she suspected. But she held her peace and allowed herself to be comforted.

It mystified her how Albert remained unruffled, how little he seemed affected by the assault of smells, filth, and noise. How could he take it all in stride, Lucy wondered, while she, who thought—no, knew—herself a strong person, felt actually ill much of the time? Between the stench from the river, the foul smells from the smokehouses, the faulty gas lamps, and the thick bituminous coal pouring from thousands of chimneys and darkening the sky at noon, she felt in constant danger of retching.

She longed for the pure Texas air. And the uncluttered stretch of horizon. There’d been hubbub aplenty on her uncle’s busy ranch, but it had felt connected to purposeful activity, to tasks that could be completed, and it existed in counterpoint to the dense, faraway stillness of the unlimited land. In Chicago, the noise came at her from all directions, unidentifiable in origin, never giving way to a quiet interlude. The downtown area produced a ceaseless, capricious din, emanations of the perilous disorder everywhere in sight—the unruly, shouting crush of workmen; the aggressive army of food vendors hawking oysters, baked pears, or spiced gingerbread; the icemen hauling hundred-pound blocks between the jaws of their tongs; the scissor grinders ringing handbells; the scurrying hollers of competing hordes of ragpickers. Should two horsecarts collide, a carriage overturn, or a runaway team of horses break loose—everyday occurrences—traffic would abruptly deadlock, and stay deadlocked until limbs could be untangled, tempers cooled, and the calliope whistle announced the deafening arrival of a patrol wagon, officers hanging off its sides, determined to arrest
someone
.

The filth of the streets was as overwhelming to Lucy as the noise. Debris and garbage were piled everywhere, and in the more poorly paved areas, where the inefficient sewerage system failed to drain properly, store owners had to pay “crossing sweepers” just to clear a path through the muck in front of their establishments.

“What’s wrong with these people?” Lucy irritably demanded of Albert one afternoon, as she stooped down for the fourth time that day to wipe slime off her shoes. “The city’s worse’n a pigsty! Why do they put up with it?”

“I guess they don’t much care,” Albert replied blandly, irritating Lucy
further. “Too busy racin’ around makin’ money to bother with a little dirt.”

“Only the big shots are makin’ money, and they don’t see the dirt, sittin’ in their parlors on Prairie Avenue, cooled by the lov-e-ly breezes from Lake Michigan—or in summer, sittin’ in the same kinda parlor somewhere in Europe. I’m talkin’ about everyday folks, people that got to slog to work everyday. Why do
they
put up with it?”

“I guess they don’t have much choice. Or maybe they expect to live on Prairie Avenue themselves one day.”

“I think they’re too damned tired from workin’ fourteen-hour days to care about anything, including themselves—” Lucy suddenly interrupted herself. Her face reddening, she pointed across the street. “Now just look at
that
, willya?”

A janitor from an office building across the way was blithely dumping five-gallon containers of ashes from the building’s furnaces directly into the street. As the flaky gray specks started to settle on her hair and clothing—her one good dress—Lucy became so angry that Albert had to restrain her from crossing the street and directly confronting the man. He held her tightly as she and the janitor got into a shouting match across the street, ending with the janitor calling her “a no-good nigger bitch” and spitting in her direction before disappearing into the building’s tunnel.

If Lucy felt assailed by Chicago’s chaos, Albert, from the beginning, seemed enlivened by it. “This city’s out-of-control,” he said to Lucy cheerfully one day, looking up at a new eight-story office building—the city’s largest to date—with life-size griffins plastered in terra-cotta around its circumference. “These people don’t know when to stop,” he chuckled. “The papers say a ten-story building, the Montauk, is already on the drawing boards. I hope they skip the griffins this time.”

“What is a griffin?” Lucy asked anxiously.

“It’s a mythical creature.”

Lucy frowned. “Then griffins is just right for this place. The whole city’s unreal. A river with no fish and birds walkin’ on top of it!”

“I sorta like the excess,” Albert said, sounding a little guilty. Yes, he thought to himself, that’s it; the place does the bustin’ out for me; the one thing it isn’t is neutral! “Yeah, even that new hotel we walked through yesterday.”

Lucy shuddered. “That Palmer House? Ugliest thing I ever saw. All those plaster statues up the entryway, then you get inside and it’s just one big hall crammed with people talkin’ money and spittin’ on each other’s shoes.”

“Well, I liked those fancy electric annunciators they got for room service. Now that
is
special.”

“They probably don’t work, or won’t work for long. I’ll bet they never even finish the place. Or if they do, it’ll burn down again. These people
like
bein’ unfinished. Helps keep ’em frantic.”

“Now you’re bein’ silly,” Albert said, taking her hand.

Lucy pulled away. “And how come nobody talks about the lives lost, people crippled and homeless, thanks to all this tearin’ down and buildin’ up. Chicago don’t want a past
or
a present—just some future that never arrives. It’s like bein’ in the middle of a hog auction that goes on forever.”

“Oh, soon you’ll be runnin’ for Mayor.” Albert put the back of his hand gently across her cheek. “You don’t fool me, miss.”

That made Lucy smile. She hated the way she’d been feeling since they arrived—uneasy and insecure, more deeply afraid than she could account for. She’d fought against fear all her life; she’d insisted on acting in charge even while knowing that her actual circumstances made a mockery of her commanding ways.

“That’s a sweet thing to say,” she said, kissing Albert on the cheek. “I wish I could figure out why I’m so on edge and you’re so damned calm. It’s not like you been livin’ in New York all your life, or even Galveston.”

“It’s temperament,” Albert shrugged. “You’re quick to the boil, I’m low-keyed.” He laughed. “The strong, silent type—like the heroes of yore.” Lucy tried to give him a good-natured kick, but he skirted nimbly out of the way.

On one matter, though, Albert had been quick to flare up from the first day they set foot in Chicago: the city’s barbarous treatment of its horses. Eighteen seventy-two, the year before they arrived, had seen the calamitous “Horse Epizootic”—an undiagnosed illness that had killed more than a thousand horses in a six-week period and had continued to rage on for months; oxen had to be brought in as a partial replacement for horse-drawn commercial wagons, but for a time traffic had been brought to a near halt.

Albert felt sure he knew the cause of the horses’ “undiagnosed” illness. It was plain and simple mistreatment. Back in Texas, there’d certainly been times when he’d seen an animal ill used, but he’d felt able to personally intervene or remonstrate. In Chicago, the scale and frequency of the abuse made him feel helpless. He couldn’t be stopping the dozens of horsecart drivers he saw every single day ferociously lashing their animals or pushing them beyond their strength. Besides, here—unlike in Johnson County—he wasn’t sure who was in charge, who was responsible. Was an individual driver to blame or was it a horse-car company? Even if the driver was self-employed, perhaps his frantic brutality came from necessity, from himself being under the lash to make enough deliveries to keep food on his table …

All Albert knew for certain was that he couldn’t bear to see the trusted companions of his childhood treated so badly. When he saw a horse being harshly beaten on the street or forced to pull heavy weights that brought the animal to its knees, the image of his beloved Bessie would come to mind and bring tears to his eyes. Few of Chicago’s horses had any meat on their bones; fed a starvation diet in hard times, in sickness or old age they were simply turned loose and abandoned.

Albert wasn’t the only one concerned: a group of citizens, just a few years back, had formed the Illinois Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Maybe if enough people protested conditions, Albert thought, the city fathers would pass a law ensuring better treatment for the animals. Maybe. Brought up to rely above all on himself, Albert knew he wasn’t the likeliest candidate for banding together with anybody to do anything. It didn’t come naturally to him. Still, he signed up for membership in the ISPCA. It was the first organization he’d ever joined.

The second was Typographical Union Number 16. Just as he’d predicted earlier to Lucy, Albert found work almost immediately, as a substitute typesetter on the
Inter-Ocean
newspaper. Always a quick study, within six months he’d mastered enough of the new steel-engraving techniques to find full-time employment as a typesetter on the
Chicago Times
. His eventual goal was to become a reporter again, but he knew that would take time. Meanwhile, he kept his membership in the typographical union a secret: the
Times
was notoriously anti-union, and besides, he himself remained ambivalent about the utility, perhaps even the morality, of collective organizing.

Lucy insisted on working, too. Albert’s sixty-dollar-a-month salary was considerably above the working-class average but not enough to allow them to have children, which they both wanted, without risking poverty. Besides, Lucy had never had any intention of spending her life at home—“I’ve spent too much of it there already, too much time preparing lye, shifting ashes, and emptying chamber pots.”

Albert encouraged her to find work, but there were few options for women, other than becoming a live-in domestic or a prostitute. He teased her about the opulent attractions that awaited in the higher-class brothels, the elegant parlors, the cultured pianist, the French cuisine and the (post-coital) games of blind man’s buff. “To hear the lads at the paper tell it … Why, at Carrie Watson’s House they provide the girls with free liquor and morphine—enough to bring home a little extra at night for your old man.”

“And
I
hear,” Lucy shot back, “that she charges her girls a dollar a towel. No, I’d do better sitting in an open window on Clark Street and leaving my blouse off. Exotic Aztec Queen. I’d be rich in no time. Marry myself a ty-
coon
!”

“Perfect!” Albert laughed. “Wealth would make you eligible to become a Nervous Woman with sick headaches, palpitations, and morbid chills. Then you could get yourself shipped off to the mountains with the other fancy ladies for a rest cure.”

“Where I would lie abed”—Lucy thrust back a nonexistent bustle on her dress and piled her hair onto the top of her head in some vague approximation of a chignon—“and regularly dose myself with laudanum and Bakers Stomach Bitters, with perhaps a bit of cocaine hydrochloride on the side—quality-controlled, of course.” She collapsed in a burst of laughter.

“Just one minute, young woman!” Albert said, thrusting a hand through the breast of his jacket in imitation of a pompous physician. “You do realize, I trust, that your sexual organs are at the root of all your troubles. Medical Science has proven that sexual desire in a female is a form of derangement, a danger not only to herself but to any man with whom she might come in contact.” Lucy silently insinuated her hands into Albert’s pants’ pockets, stroking his thighs through the wool.

“You must learn to restrain and retrain your body, curtailing abnormal sexual desire, making the will of the male your own.” He pulled her
hands out of his pockets, then gently put his own around her waist. Lucy pretended to swoon, going limp in his arms.

“Yes, m’lord,” she said faintly. “Do as you like with me. I’m yours to command. But may I first ask one small question?”

“Well, be quick about it,” he whispered in her ear as he began gently nibbling on the lobe.

“It’s just this, sire: how do you know when a woman is exhibiting ‘abnormal’ sexual desire?”

Albert stifled a laugh. “A simple test, madam. I take my finger—like this—and mechanically stimulate the breast and clitoris.” He moved his hand slowly down her body.

“That does not feel mechanical, m’lord.”

“Aha!” Albert cried in mock horror. “You’re responding to my touch! A clear sign of degeneracy! You must be sent at once for gynecological surgery. Only a clitoridectomy can cure so hysterical a condition!” He kissed her passionately on the lips, as their bodies slid slowly to the floor.

With Albert away at the
Times
all day, Lucy began to make a few friends among the neighbors in their tenement, and particularly with a woman named Lizzie Swank who lived alone in a one-room flat on the floor above them. Like Albert, Lizzie came from a family whose members had fought in the Revolution and then moved west, in her case to Iowa. Her whole family, including her mother, was actively engaged with public issues, and Lizzie herself sometimes wrote for the libertarian press. Far better read than Lucy and Albert—Lizzie had a high school education—she started to loan them books, including a dictionary, which they avidly consumed.