Metropolis (23 page)

He was angry; he was also concerned. He’d already given them all the information they needed to infiltrate the sewers. He’d shown her more places than they could possibly need and how to negotiate them. What further use could he be to them? He couldn’t stop the feeling of gloom that washed over him. She’d used sex to extract information from him, and now she would lead him coldly to slaughter.

He went to the door of the kitchen and watched her: Beatrice O’Gamhna peeling potatoes and dropping them into a pot of water. Beatrice O’Gamhna laughing casually with her nephews. Beatrice O’Gamhna actually looking up and smiling at him, though emptily, without any allowance for the grunts and clutches and kisses they had traded last night. No, there was nothing at all in the eyes, and that was what made him despair. His aunt in Fürth had smiled at him often enough over the years, and now Beatrice’s eyes were the same as Hedwig Diespeck’s: empty, polite, cold. Fürth had been a dreadful place, but he’d learned at least one thing there: People who take you in at someone else’s bidding will never love you. They’ll resent you. They’ll use you for what they can. It occurred to him that the Whyos and Beatrice had taken him in the same way his aunt and uncle had. Why should he now be surprised? Hadn’t he learned anything for all his sorrows?

He thought with a wave of regret of the final conflict he’d had with his uncle—a memory he’d long suppressed. He’d been rifling through his uncle’s desk for the key to the shed where they kept the extra tackle for the horses when he came across an unfamiliar envelope addressed to him, from his father. It had been a grim year, with another wave of fever that claimed his aunt and remaining cousins, and his uncle had grown paranoid; he’d begun locking doors though there were only the two of them. The boy that Harris had been, then, looked at the envelope, which was empty, and grew angry. It was his name on the front. Yet he hadn’t received a single letter from his father since he returned from Hamburg. Then he went and confronted his uncle in the barn, where the old man was camped out in an armchair with a crate of brandy by his side, in front of the iron stove, which was pretty much where he’d been ever since the funeral. Normally, they lit that stove only on the coldest nights, to keep the animals from freezing to death.

“That’s not your business,” his uncle said, snatching the envelope and tossing it in the open door of the stove. “At least I never threw you out, the way your father did.” Then he picked up a half-empty bottle of brandy and pitched it at his nephew, who ducked. The bottle flew, slowly, gyrating across the open air of the barn, and landed with a thud on the straw-covered ground without breaking.

That was when he’d decided to go to America. There was nothing for him in Germany; that much was clear. He went inside to pack a few belongings. He heated water for a bath in the kitchen tub. Who knew how long it would be before he had the chance to be clean again? He’d soaked in that tub until the water went cold. It must have been sometime during his bath that the fire had started.

Just because the Diespecks and now the O’Gamhnas had taken him in—and just because Beatrice had made love to him once—didn’t mean they cared for him. He saw how glad Colleen would be to get him out of the crowded flat. He was certain that Beatrice wasn’t even his friend, much less his lover; she was a Why Not and his keeper, no more. Except for John-Henry, who he knew would fiercely disapprove of the double life he’d been leading and whom he feared to tell the truth, he had no one he could rely on or trust—least of all the one he’d put his heart and all his stakes on: Beatrice.

It was a long week, waiting for Sunday, and on Saturday night he slept badly, his dreams indistinguishable from his restless half-waking thoughts. Sometime before sunrise, he sat up abruptly, wide awake. It was exactly the same hour of the morning as their tumultuous unrobing in the bath hall. The room was pitch-dark, but he felt her there. He knew the slow rhythms of all the O’Gamhnas’ sleeping breath, especially hers. He wanted nothing but to go over and lie with her, unless it was to flee. He did neither but closed his eyes and his mind and finally fell back into a dream—an outdated one he hadn’t had for half a year—the dream of finding Maria, the girl from the boat.

They spoke in German. He asked her to go west with him, to a wild, distant state—maybe Minnesota or even further, California. She smiled, but the dream faded there, as it always had. He’d never gotten to the part where he got to marry her or to be a pioneer.

In his next dream, he was on his way to a meeting (whether with Towle or the Whyos was unclear) when he was met in the road by a red cow. It lowed at him, and then, seeing that he didn’t understand, it cleared its throat and spoke in English.

“Hello, brother,” it said. “I never thought I’d find you again.” But then it switched over to German, and he feared to be seen with it. Was it one of the cows from his uncle’s farm? Was it Robert Koch? His sister? He looked away rather than respond, and the animal lowered its head. He seemed to hear Beatrice telling him, “Don’t go around with cows, Frank. You’re one of us now, an Irishman and a Whyo, not a beast or a German.”

“An
Irishman,
” he said, imitating her voice, her intonation, “and a Whyo.” In the dream, his accent was perfect, and what she had said was true: He knew their language, their secrets; and she was his girl.

He took her hand and pulled her to him, and in the dream they kissed. Their arms encircled each other’s bodies, and it was perfectly natural and expected. Her hair brushed his cheek, sending shivers through him. He smelled her pungent, faintly smoky smell. They were in the grotto, and they lay down together on the narrow ledge. She was beneath him, on top of him, all over him, and he was all over her. At the crucial moment, though, she began to speak German and melded back into Maria. Harris struggled to turn her back into Beatrice, only to find, when he succeeded, that he was no longer himself but Dandy Johnny.

When he woke at last, the others were all up, and Beatrice was gone. When he’d drunk his tea and had his porridge, he put on his warm scarf, his cap and his topcoat over his jacket. His first stop was the café where he was to meet Mr. Towle and Dr. Blacksall, but he had plenty of time, so he walked rather than take an omnibus. He wasn’t at all sure he would keep the second meeting.
Or else,
she had written. If they were going to kill him, why should he help by walking into it?

As Harris approached the address Towle had given him, he saw a familiar sight: people streaming toward the Lutheran church. He knew it was in the same area but hadn’t realized the café would be directly across the street from that church. It made him nervous. He’d avoided that block for a long time now. For over a year he’d been good, disassociating himself from all things German. Were there still police officers and other citizens who would remember the descriptions, artists’ renderings and wanted notices? He feared yes. There were people, queerly enough, who followed crime. There was also Luther Undertoe. Harris considered what Beatrice would say if she found out he had gone there, after all the lengths she’d gone to to protect him from himself, but then he saw again her final words to him
—Or else—
in white chalk in his mind’s eye. Why should he care about her or the stealth she’d long advocated?

He was early, and from the density of people on the street he guessed the service would begin on the half hour, at the same time he was appointed to meet with Mr. Towle. He shoved his hands into his pockets and paced up and down before the church, nervously watching the passersby and churchgoers, unable to commit to being outside or going inside the café. Only when the doors of the church finally closed did he cross the street and find a seat at a window table in the restaurant.

He sat facing outward so he could keep his eye on what was going on out the window. He pictured the congregation across the street beginning to pray and remembered the service he’d been to there. Once that idea was in his mind, he couldn’t escape the liturgy. His head was full of
thou
s and
thine
s,
du
s and
deine
s,
body
and
blood, Blut
and
Leib,
and he was as helpless to quiet it as if he had actually been in the church. Towle was five, then ten minutes late. Finally, to distract himself from the mental rumble of German devotions, Harris reached for a paper from the rack and began to leaf through it. The Brooklyn
Eagle.

He read the notices first, imagining he was looking for a job, wishing he were free to take one. He noticed several paving contractors were hiring. Then his eye wandered to the
LOST
column. Among many items of the sort that commonly went missing—lapdogs, wallets and ladies’ brooches—he saw that there were several notices for livestock. “
RED COW,
white spot, answers to Bella or Moo Cow. $20 reward for return. Mr. Noe, Ft. Greene.” It was a large amount—another wayward heifer was valued at only fifteen dollars. Harris was thinking it was awfully cold weather for a cow to be outside for days on end, but the thing that really struck him was the description. It brought back the faded image of the cow in his dream.

Then Towle bustled in with Dr. Blacksall, apologizing that the pastor had rambled on longer than usual that morning. They were curious about Harris’s education and his knowledge of germ theory, and after interrogating him on such matters for a good half hour, they explained their project and made him a proposal.

The initial results of the doctor’s experiments were in, and they were good. Now they intended to launch a publicity campaign, and they wanted to use him, a model sewer worker with a sterling work ethic and a rational understanding of science, despite his very basic education, as a common-man spokesman to help promote sanitary reform—everything from reversing the legislation banning dirt-catchers to encouraging landlords to link their buildings to the sewers. For a moment, Harris was excited, but then he realized it was impossible, even if he did survive the Whyo meeting that day. Mr. Towle wanted to have an engraving made, a likeness of Harris in his sewerman’s boots, and use it for the cover of a pamphlet, perhaps a handbill, too. They wanted him to make public appearances with prominent ministers, scientists and government officials, possibly even Mayor Hall or Mr. Tweed, who was sponsoring the project. It was going to be good for the slums, they said. Harris would have loved to go along with it, but putting himself in the public eye could easily bring him back to the attention of the cops or Undertoe, and it would certainly infuriate the Whyos. It would be suicide.

While Harris sat there in the window, trying simultaneously to manage the roil of conflicting excitements and worries, to tell a coherent tale of his supposed upbringing in Ireland and to discuss microbiology and public health and the peculiar thing called
publicity
with Mr. Towle and Dr. Blacksall, a young couple approached the restaurant. They were joking and laughing and elbowing each other in mock outrage at nothing in particular. Indeed, Fiona and the Jimster were making something of a scene. Against Beatrice’s advice, Fiona had taken her flirtation with the Jimster to another level—they now frequented several different basement hideaways—all in the name of Whyo reconnaissance, of course. Fiona had assured Beanie that she didn’t really care for him, could drop him like a stone in an instant if the need arose. Be that as it may, they were just then headed for a nonworking breakfast at the coffeehouse where Towle and Blacksall were interviewing Harris—whom the Jimster still knew as George the Torch, the object of Undertoe’s now rather old offer of bounty.

Fiona knew Harris a lot better now, and she spotted him at once, while the Jimster walked over to an adjacent window table. Fiona was staggered. It was the day of the first big meeting in months, and there he still sat, Frank Harris, brazen as day, right across from the German church, engaging in a highly suspicious conference with people she knew he hadn’t been introduced to by Beatrice: official-looking people. It appeared that Harris was betraying them. He had to be stopped, but the first problem was making sure the Jimster didn’t see him. As they sat down, she noticed a crowd pouring from the heavy doors of the church across the street.
Filthy Germans,
she thought.

“Look at that,” she said to the Jimster, pointing at the church, thinking on the fly. “This java joint’s gonna be chockablock with God-fearing Krauts in a minute. Let’s take ourselves elsewhere, what do you say, Jimmy?”

“Sure, Fiona.” He’d have been pleased to let her take him wherever she liked. Pity for him she was too worried about the sewerman, on too many fronts, to dally with the Jimster any longer. Their date was over. He shouldn’t have been talking to those people, Harris, and he shouldn’t have been hanging out at a German coffeehouse. The two things together demanded that she file a report with Beanie—or possibly directly with Johnny—as soon as possible.

Was it possible, she wondered, that Harris was smarter than they thought, that he’d been breaking cover all along? She’d gotten the impression that Beanie trusted him, but then again she also suspected that Beanie was smitten. Perhaps her judgment was clouded. Fiona listened to the church bells ringing and figured she would probably find Beanie at the baths.

“Jimmy, I just remembered something. Sorry, but I’ve got to go. Come find me later tonight.”

She kissed him well enough to let him know she really was sorry, and then, before the besotted smile had even fallen from his face, she was gone.

19.

DIPTYCH

A
t the baths, Fiona stood in the lobby and whyoed quietly for Beatrice, but she got no response. It was no wonder, what with the many hallways and chambers and the sound of rushing water everywhere, so she paid the fee and went in herself. She hurried through most of the rooms, finding no trace of Beanie. In the steam room she did linger for a moment, though—the moist heat was lovely, especially considering how bitterly cold it had gotten—and there, though Fiona didn’t know her from Adam, she sat down beside Maria. Harris’s Maria. The very same.

Fiona watched the other woman’s toes stretch and curl, stretch and curl—slowly, unconsciously, happily. She tried the gesture herself—stretch, curl—and it did feel good. But then she recalled the urgency of her message for Beatrice and abruptly rose to go to the next room, a cool and shallow swimming pool. A single lap rinsed off the sweaty heat of the steam room, and then she passed quickly through the rest of the rooms. Beanie wasn’t anywhere. It was puzzling. And it was a problem. She had to let people know about Harris before the meeting. Fiona was still reluctant to go to Johnny—she was sure Beanie would want to handle this herself—but if she didn’t find her soon, she would have to. Then, when Fiona emerged from the great damp doorway of the baths, she saw her, settled comfortably on the siamese hydrant in front of the building, apparently enjoying a small patch of sun, regardless of the cold and her wet hair.

“Beanie!” Fiona shouted, and in her haste she failed to see a package set down by a lady who was rearranging her scarf against the chill. She tripped and pitched forward in Beanie’s direction. When Beatrice looked up, there was Fiona, her still-warm hair radiating steam like a medusa. First, she was annoyed—she was waiting for Harris, not Fiona, and she didn’t want an entourage; then she was on the sidewalk. Fiona had knocked her over.

“Christ in heaven! What are you doing?”

“Sorry. But I got something important to tell you. It’s about Harris.”

Beatrice picked herself up and folded her arms, doubting that any news would merit that introduction. She still hadn’t told Fiona what had happened between her and Harris. She hadn’t decided quite how to present the information, but as far as she was concerned, it was for her to tell Fiona about Harris, not vice versa. Then, before either girl could speak, Beatrice saw Frank Harris. She straightened her skirts and brushed a few damp strands of hair away from her face and turned from Fiona to smile at him. She knew well enough she had put him off the day before; she wanted him to know it was just a mood, just worry, just nothing. Not that she wasn’t still worried about what would happen at the meeting and after. But she had made up her mind that she was going to fight for him. Seeing him now confirmed it.

“To be honest, Fifi, your timing is bad. I don’t want to hear it,” she said quietly as Harris approached. “Not right now.” She thrust her chin toward Harris, who had seen her too, now, but was still out of earshot. “See, I’m planning to enjoy myself a little before the meeting.”

Fiona raised her eyebrows. So it had gotten that far. “Beanie, no, you can’t do that. Not now. See, I think he may have cops following him. He may even have tipped them off.”

“Oh, come on,” said Beatrice. “Cops? It’s Harris.” Her concern was betraying him, not the other way around.

Fiona glared. “I’ve really got to talk to you, alone, now. I saw something. . . . You need to know this.”

“Fine. I’ll figure a way to send him off on an errand. The curtain is at two-thirty. We’ll be about a block north of the theater at a quarter to. Find me and you can tell me what you want then. But now, go.”

As for Harris, quite contrary to his own expectations, seeing Beatrice made him happy. No matter that he was about to let her take him back into the company of Whyos. He looked at her, and she was smiling at him; that easily, his faith in her was restored. He wondered how he could have mistrusted her. He recalled the way Maria had invaded his dreams lately, and realized he’d never really tried to find Maria, only thought about her when things were at their worst. He hadn’t known her very well, after all. She was mostly just a feeling of common doom, an imaginary double, someone else alone, cursed with ill luck, who knew his landscape and his language. It had been a feeble, seasick infatuation, and as intimate as the ordeal aboard the
Leibnitz
had sometimes been, wiping up vomit and burying bodies at sea were not experiences on which to found a friendship, much less anything more. Whereas Beatrice was standing there before him, grinning, and most important not pretending anymore that nothing had happened. He knew Beanie day in, day out, in seriousness and laughter, her family and her various masquerades. He knew her body, and he spoke her language, which she’d given him. He came up to her and smiled, reached for her hand. She let him take it, and he brought it to his lips. She was clean and fresh and glowing from the alternating rigors of damp and dry heat and hot and cool baths.
Two baths in quick succession,
he thought, wishing again that she were dirtier so he could smell her.

“Hello there.”

“Hello there,” he said, exactly the same but an octave lower.

“I was going to say you were late, but you aren’t. You’re just on time.”

“I wouldn’t want to get us in trouble. I’m a little nervous. And I wanted to see you.”

“You’ll be fine. Just take my arm. You’re taking me to the theater, but the show doesn’t start for a while.”

He didn’t question, just let her lead him east and south, through the streets. And as they walked, they played at being a couple. She clenched his arm tightly and chatted, laughed and flirted about empty things, the weather. It was just as if they were out courting. There was some part of Harris—the small intestine, perhaps, or the kidney—that still suspected this promenade was just part of a covert arrival plan, but on the whole it felt real. He was there, with her, after all, her arm in his. His skin was buzzing again. After a while, they turned onto Broadway, where the sidewalks were thick with people out strolling, showing off their fur hats and muffs and cold-weather Sunday finery. Just in front of them, a man and a woman stopped walking and kissed each other, right there, in the middle of the sidewalk in plain day.

“Did you hear that?” yelled the man to the street in general, then turned and looked directly into Harris’s eyes. “Did you hear that, brother—she said yes!” He gave a little yip of glee.
Brother.
The man wore a rust-colored coat, and his white shirt showed at the collar. Harris had never seen a jacket quite that color, the very red of a red cow.
You’re one of us,
Beatrice had said in that dream,
an Irishman, a Whyo.

A little further on, they came up to a table manned by white-clad suffragists passing out pamphlets and collecting signatures. They stopped to watch the ladies argue their case to the general public. Beatrice told him how the Why Nots had turned out at the voting booths at the previous mayoral election. With several Whyos assigned to man the polling place, the girls had been able to march through the doors wearing hats and pants and sign themselves in (first initials only). They had voted and been counted, while legions of proper suffragists in white dresses had picketed the voting halls ineffectively. (Not that it was ever a question that the Tammany man, Oakey Hall, would not be elected, but for the Why Nots it was a matter of principle.) Harris had no trouble picturing her doing this—in fact, he couldn’t stop thinking about Beatrice in pants. If only the freedom to wear trousers and vote didn’t entail her being a gangster.

“But you know,” Harris said, “just because you managed to cast your vote that way doesn’t mean the suffragists haven’t got a point. What about the rest of the women, who aren’t like you, who can’t dress up like men? And do you want to have to do it that way, illegally?”

She looked at him, eyebrows up. “Any way we can do it is better than none.” But they signed the ladies’ petition. As Harris wrote his name, he was aware his script was still too German. He knew Beatrice was right, the other day, when she complained about it, but he was too fond of the Gothic style of writing to unlearn it.

They strolled and talked, and finally he asked her what would happen later. She told him not to worry, and he believed her. The truth was, she herself wasn’t sure. When they came to a corner where a tintype photographer had a studio, they stopped and looked at the many portraits and advertising signs posted in the window. Pictures cost only five cents apiece and took just five minutes to be developed, making it a remarkably cheap and quick amusement. Beatrice looked at her pocket watch. This was the corner where Fiona was supposed to meet them. She said, “Harris, let’s go up and get our picture done, what do you say?”

He grinned. He was thinking that he’d carry the picture with him all the time. She was thinking he was very handsome, and that if anything happened she didn’t want to forget him the way she’d forgotten her mother’s face, her brother’s.

Ten minutes later, Beatrice and Harris were still waiting for their pictures to be finished and trimmed. The five minutes didn’t include waiting on line. When a clock in the back room struck the three-quarter hour, Beatrice told Harris she was overwarm, what with wearing her coat in the studio, and would wait for him outside. Fiona was waiting, as promised.

“You’ve got two minutes. What is it?”

“Listen, you know the German church where we followed him that day? I saw Harris at the coffee place across the street, just this morning, meeting with two people I’ve never seen before.”

“Harris? Come on.” Fiona stared. “Was he in the church or the coffee shop?”

“The coffee shop, but he was meeting with two people—”

“Who were they? Were they Germans? Were they cops?”

“No, I don’t think so. It was a gentleman and a lady—who was definitely not his wife—but who’s to say he wasn’t arranging a tail? He shouldn’t have been there, today of all days.”

“Have you seen anyone tailing us? I haven’t—except for you.”

“No, but maybe he told them where to meet him.”

“He doesn’t even know where we’re going yet. Listen, Fiona, I’ll make sure we’re not followed. If we don’t show up at the meeting, I realized you were right and took him somewhere else. Now get out of here. He’s going to be out any second.”

Fiona had expected Beatrice to be a bit more grateful, or at least a bit more angry at Harris. Was she so besotted that she had no insight? It was obvious to Fiona that Beatrice had finally capitulated to Harris’s queer charm. She knew her friend too well not to be able to see that as clear as day. Normally, she’d have been amused, but it seemed to have clouded Beatrice’s judgment. On top of which, Fiona had just deprived herself of an afternoon with the Jimster for nothing. But she knew enough not to try to fight Beanie when her mind was set. “All right,” she said. “Just be careful. I know you wouldn’t bring him if he wasn’t clean.” Then she slipped into the throng.

Beatrice was leaning against a lamppost, staring at the traffic, when Harris came outside with their pictures. They were good likenesses, he thought, both of them looked happy, though the process didn’t have half the clarity of the old daguerreotypes. The two pictures were taken side by side, at the same instant, through two adjacent lenses, so they were almost identical, just a few degrees apart. Harris thought he saw a distinction between them, though: In one, Beatrice looked slightly older—the way she might in five years’ time—and in the other he almost appeared to be laughing. He’d watched the photographer clip the images apart with his tin snips, trim the edges and insert them into two leather slipcases. He chose a black case and the older-looking picture for himself. He had the laughing one put in a red wallet for her. He was about to show them to her when she spoke.

“Frank, I have one question for you.” There was something odd in her voice. She didn’t usually call him that, and he noticed it.

He stopped, swallowed, looked down. He had a litany of questions he could have asked her: Would you marry me and run away? Will you forgive me if I went too far? Do you really want to be a gangster? Do you want me to be one, too? But he could tell that this was not the time.

“Just keep walking, Harris. And while you walk, I want you to explain what you were up to this morning. Fiona just told me you were at that German church and in the café across the street, holding a meeting with someone.”

“What?” His stomach lurched. He didn’t know whether to be outraged or chagrined. It was true that he had agreed to avoid all things German, all the time, and the café Towle had chosen was inauspiciously close to that Lutheran Church. But nothing had come of it. He had been circumspect. He had turned down Mr. Towle and Dr. Blacksall’s quite wonderful proposal, for the Whyos, for her. And how did she know? “Is there someone following me all the time, then?”

“Maybe there should be.”

“I never went in that church.”

“Were you in the café across the street? Having coffee with people who wouldn’t approve of the Whyos?”

He looked at her. Had she changed back again?

“I can see only two possible explanations for it, Harris. Maybe you’re trying to get yourself hanged. Maybe you don’t like me after all, maybe the Irish aren’t good enough for you, maybe you’re lonely for your own kind—your loving father, perhaps, or a countryman like Undertoe?”

“Bea—” he began, but she just went on delivering a hissed rant.

“The other possibility is that you really went and squealed to the cops. In which case, you’re hoping to watch the rest of us hang. That’s the interpretation Fiona came to, and that’s why she came to find me back at the baths. Any Whyo would think the same, why shouldn’t they? Harris, I do hope you’re not that stupid, because if she’s right, you’re dead, too, mark my words. It won’t be up to me. So now would you please tell me that I’m wrong on both counts? Would you tell me why you were at that café, and who that couple was?”

“I’m not hoping to hang anyone,” he said, slipping both tintypes into his pocket.