The Jazz Palace (2 page)

Her eyes widened. “How did you know?”

He smiled, shaking his head, not looking her way. “Oh, you seem like a strawberry kind of girl.” The horn sounded three long honks as the ship's lines were released.

The girl blew kisses to her brothers as they vanished below. She kept waving long after they were gone. She turned to Benny once more. “They'll have a wonderful time.”

“I'm sure they will,” he replied.

Suddenly the mother pointed. “Look,” she said, “there's Wren.” They followed her finger to the promenade deck where the deaf boy, dressed in a snappy blue jacket and beige pants, signaled with the flapping motions of his arms. He fanned his face at the wet, warm air. He walked in circles, doing an imitation of Charlie Chaplin, who was in Chicago that summer making a movie about a vagabond who falls in love with a farmer's daughter.

In the midst of the dancing passengers Wren performed a jig. He waltzed with an invisible partner, twirling her with one hand. Dipping toward the floor, he put his hands on the deck to feel the beat. He teetered back and forth like a balance, and his mother and the girls laughed. He made a clown face and they laughed some more. Then he stopped and frowned. He sniffed the air like a hunting dog. Looking up at his mother, the boy shook his head. He held his empty palms up to the sky. Then raced toward the stairwell to warn his brothers. “Something is wrong,” his mother said as he disappeared below.

The ship was unmoored. It listed to starboard, then over to port. Dancers glided from side to side. Passengers braced themselves, clasping their hats to their heads. On the wharves a watchman shouted to a crew member, “You're leaning.” A deep, harsh horn sounded again as the boat pitched. Nervous laughter rose. Deckhands noticed the sway beneath their feet, the little skips they had to do to keep from falling.

The chief engineer ordered the refilling of the ballast tanks. In the hull salt and pepper shakers rolled off tables. A cabinet toppled
over, and beer bottles crashed to the floor. A player piano in the dance hall smashed into the wall. Two crew members looked at each other, then scrambled topside. The music stopped. Dancers paused in mid-step, waiting for it to begin again. On deck laughter ceased. A strange silence hung in the air. All Benny could hear was water slapping the hull.

He was still waving when the
Eastland
, just feet from the wharf, tilted ever so slightly, and then more, until the ship pitched under the weight of its lifeboats. It made a gurgling sound as if someone had pulled an enormous plug. Benny's hand froze in midair as the ship turned on her side and sank in twenty feet of water onto the river's bottom. Sheet music flew like aquatic birds. Musicians clung to the railing. A bass fiddle careened into the river, taking an infant in its wake. Mothers clutched children as they toppled over the side. Men were hurtled off the deck like torpedoes. Below passengers were tossed right, then left, from one end of the hull to the other. They raced for stairwells, men shoving women and children aside as the water rushed down upon them.

The screams did not resemble any Benny had ever heard. His mouth was open, his arms raised as if he could somehow stop this behemoth as it settled into the silty bottom. His package of uniform caps slipped from his hands and fell into the river, bobbing for an instant before sinking out of sight. He barely noticed it go. People were caught in the cloudy waters. Others had been hurled from the deck. One woman seemed to reach toward him, then vanished, and only her hat with its straw brim, its green and blue feathers, remained. Picnic hampers, derbies, thermos bottles drifted by.

As Benny raced to the dock, his eyes met those of the woman who'd stood on the bridge beside him. Her mouth was opened wide as a continuous shriek came from somewhere deeper inside of her than the water in which the
Eastland
sank. The younger, blond girl wailed as the dark child pressed her hands over her ears, pleading with her mother to stop. But the woman seemed to be drowning as if one could drown not only from water but from air as well. The woman uttered one endless cry that ceased only when she saw Benny
on the dock. She stared into his gray eyes as if there was something she needed to tell him. Instead she clutched her two girls. “Go,” she shouted at him. “Dive.” And Benny ripped off his shirt, his shoes, and his trousers.

As he hit the water, he was startled by how cold the river was and how quiet. He could see nothing in the darkness, only a silhouette of limbs. He swam in the direction of arms and legs, but they eluded him. Surfacing, he grasped a piece of wood. Egg crates, chicken coops, ropes from other vessels, were hurled from the wharves. Benny shoved a crate at a flailing boy, then dove again. He reached his hands around the hips of a little girl who fluttered like a fish as she slipped away.

Gasping, he pulled himself onto the hull. He coughed up water as he tried to catch his breath. Then he heard the muffled cries. Beneath his feet he felt the pounding of fists. People were trapped inside. The hull was slick, and twice he almost fell. Ironworkers, welding on a nearby bridge, rushed to help as a tugboat coated the slick hull in ash. With his hands and feet Benny helped spread the ash, and his skin turned black. Then the ironworkers set to work. The flames of their torches seared the hull. Captain Pederson tried to stop them. “You're ruining her hull,” he shouted as passengers wrestled him away. As a hole was carved, a welder took Benny by the arm.

Benny, who was small but strong for his age, bent and reached into the dark pit. Arms groped up for his. Like a midwife he pulled out a boy, howling a newborn's cry. He reached in once more and this time took a girl from her father's clasp. He raised her easily into his. She wore a linen dress, covered in soot, and he caught her by her narrow waist. She was lithe and moved as if she was waltzing.

He had never held a girl before. He had only imagined what desire would be. To have a girl in his arms, her body close to his. He had envisioned the softness of skin, the smell of freshly washed hair. Now her breasts, which were round and full, pressed into his chest, and he grew aroused. He was stunned by the pulsing in his loins. He
longed to see her grateful eyes. Perhaps she would tell him her name. But as Benny dragged her onto the hull, her legs dangled against his thighs. There was no warmth in her breath. Her arms hung limp around his neck.

Easing her down, Benny saw the fixed stare in her eyes, her blue lips. As he handed her to the next man, he began to weep. Standing on the hull, tears poured down his face. He could not bear the fact that his first embrace was in the arms of a dead girl. He found himself growing afraid of things he could not name. Somewhere above him Benny still heard that woman screaming on the bridge, and he dove back into the water to escape her.

A
s her eyes scanned the river, Anna Chimbrova wasn't sure where her screaming came from. Her bird children were on board—the boys she'd named Robin, Jay, Wren. She had broken the Sabbath by letting them go. She carried money to buy ice cream for Pearl. She hadn't heeded the warning signs when her deaf son, Wren, pointed to the sky and on their way to the river said he heard crows. Now she watched as bodies were pulled from the hull and placed in a neat row on the dock.

It wasn't long before a boy in the blue jacket and beige pants was laid out beside them. Wren had been the last to go down. It made sense he'd be one of the first to leave. Her sons were dead. She despised herself for even thinking this, but how, without them, would they survive? It was as if she'd looked into one of those mirrors her first husband, Samuel Malkov, used to bring in from the street and found herself face-to-face with what she'd always feared—a person she didn't know.

As she dragged her girls from the bridge, she thought that she hadn't always been afraid of mirrors. At one time she'd even admired herself in them. But as she made her way through the Shadows, a desolate place of brothels and saloons, that seemed like long ago. Anna staggered by the noisy bars of Clark Street, ignoring the women, their faces painted like clowns, who called out from the window above. She passed the grim iron gates of the county jail. Turning
east, she crossed against traffic. Horse-drawn carriages came to a halt. A newly minted Model T sputtered and honked while a trolley slammed on its brakes. At Pine Street a policeman shouted, “Lady, watch where you're going!”

Pearl chased after her mother, clutching Opal by the hand. Her mother kept moving. The ocher sky threatened a worsening storm, but Anna had to tell Samuel that his sons had drowned. He had circumcised those boys himself with a sharp razor and his own careful hands. Though he'd been gone for years, she'd look for him in the waters that had frightened her when she was a child.

They boarded a trolley. Soon the soap factories and tenements of the Shadows slipped away. There were no shops, no Hebrew letters written above the stores. No women stood on corners haggling over fish. No pushcarts lined the streets. The houses got bigger. They were made of granite and redbrick. They were more like castles with turrets and walls. Black cars were parked in circular driveways. Anna didn't notice. It was Samuel she was looking for as the bus carried them north. She missed him on summer evenings when the sound of cicadas filled the air. Before they were married, he took her for walks to the park where a calliope played. In a dense grove he pulled her to him, and for the first time she felt the heat and hardness of a man. Anna rubbed the spot where tree roots had pressed into her spine and stones had left their mark.

The trolley stopped near the lake, and Anna led the girls off. “Where are we going?” Pearl cried, but her mother ignored her pleas. Pedestrians looked at Anna and shook their heads. News of the
Eastland
hasn't spread across town. Some asked if she was all right. Others assumed she was drunk. Or old and dotty—perhaps even the grandmother of those children. In fact she had just turned thirty-eight and she was their mother, widowed for the third time with nine children left in her care. She'd struggled to keep her family intact. A Bohemian neighbor had taken pity on them and gotten the oldest boys their jobs at Western Electric. “Don't tell anyone you are Jews,” the neighbor had warned. “We'll all get fired.” They said they were Czechs. They had been desperate for work. It was a sin and Anna knew it—to pretend you were something you were not.

The lake was a steely gray, the color of humid days and stormy skies. The shades of pavement and impoverished walls. Its surface imitated the sky and it was difficult to tell where one ended and the other began. But Anna wasn't frightened. As she led her girls to the shore, the water beckoned.

In 1673 an explorer, armed with astrolabe and compass, and a priest, carrying the Word of God, followed the advice of an Indian boy. They took a detour from the Mississippi on to the Illinois River, where they sailed through billowy waves of grass. They traversed a portage until they came upon an inland sea. To the priest, this was a miserable marsh, but Joliet got out of his canoe. He was also a geographer. Walking along the plateau, he envisioned water spilling off of it, heading south to the Gulf of Mexico and east to the ocean. He reported back to the governor of New France that he had found a place of “great and important advantage” where the lake would meet the sea. On his way back Joliet lost his all maps and journals in a shipwreck, and he died in obscurity.

Benny stood on the rise where Joliet had imagined a great city. He gazed across the river toward the sullen lake. It took a long time for him to realize he was naked. He felt no chill; only a numbness between his thighs. The greasy river clung to his flesh, but he didn't notice. He didn't feel the breeze on his skin. He stared into space as robbers stole jewelry and wallets from the dead and photographers snapped pictures. These pictures became postcards that were mailed around the world or collectors' items sold at auctions.

He fumbled in the pile where other trousers and shirts and shoes had been tossed, but it seemed like such a foolish thing to do; to
search for your clothes with so many dead. Around him people wept. A breathless man, his face streaked with tears, held up a sign,
KRISTEN, AGE 4, IN A RED DRESS
. A grandmother wailed over the bodies of twins. But at least the screaming woman was gone. There was only the slow tedium of tragedy before him now. The
Eastland
lay resting on her side like a dead whale, and Captain Pederson was being led away in handcuffs.

Benny saw no shame at his nakedness. He was a boy of fifteen, but he could be dead tomorrow. He had learned this two years ago when his youngest brother, Harold, disappeared in the snow. Benny had been responsible for his brothers that day as they trudged to school. His mother had tied them together with a sturdy rope through their belt loops. But Harold was not with them when they arrived, and Benny had raced through the snowbound streets, shouting his brother's name. He had thought that nothing could be worse than his parents' anguished search, but now he knew this wasn't so.

He found his clothes, lying in the heap. As he pulled on his trousers and was buttoning his shirt, he began looking for his order. After a few moments he recalled that he had dropped it into the river. Crossing Wacker Drive, he wondered how he would explain this to his father. Since Harold's death, his father blamed him for everything. If orders were slow, if a light was left on. It could all be traced back to Benny.

State Street seemed eerily dull. Shoppers moved in slow motion. Some stood frozen like statues, staring toward the river. Others raced to the water, but most went about their business with grim faces. An impatient woman tugged on a child's arm. The air smelled of caramel corn and horses. From the distance came the sound of sirens.

Looking up, Benny saw the dusty opaque windows of his father's workroom. He tried to remember where his order was going. And he wondered if the women would be paid for their work. As he crossed state street, Benny began rehearsing what he'd say to his father.

L
ehrman's Caps was located near the corner of Wabash and South Water, not far from the river, in a dilapidated building. The stairwells were dingy, with holes in the walls. In the large open room a dozen Bohemians sewed elastic around a cloth circle or finished buttonholes by hand. It was a hot Saturday morning. For years Leo Lehrman had ignored the Sabbath, and the sewing machines hummed. The humid air was thick with dust and the sweat of women with unshaved armpits, hunched for hours over machines. The Bohemians were hard workers, and Leo Lehrman, a burly, bald man with a temper he reserved for his family, was good to his employees as long as they stayed bent, hands guiding cloth through the foot-pedaled machines or stitching swiftly by hand the needlework required for the buttonholes.

Lehrman's Caps was only a small company. But it earned Leo enough to feed his wife and boys and had enabled them to move out of the tenements of Maxwell Street and the cold-water flat where Benny was born. Now Leo rented a three-bedroom apartment for seventy-five dollars a month in Albany Park. He paid his workers and covered the expenses on his factory. Still he wasn't a man to think small.

Wasn't Chicago a place where you could package beef, ship wheat, and make a fortune the way Armour, Pullman, Swift, and McCormick had? Where you could flex some muscle? So why not Lehrman? Many deliverymen and soda jerks throughout the city already wore a Lehrman's cap, so why not every meat-packer and grain-elevator operator? Why not every railroad worker, not just in Chicago, but across America?

Leo was proud of his designs, which were displayed on the heads of faceless mannequins around his office. When you bought from Lehrman's, you got two for the price of one. The rim was lined in buttons. The crown had buttonholes. With each cap you purchased, two crowns were provided. “Wear one, wash one” was Lehrman's motto. His biggest idea had come just a week ago. He had taken his boys down to the South Side to the new steel-and-concrete Comiskey Park to see the White Sox play. It had been a dull game on a
hot afternoon. Collins couldn't seem to get a hit and Red Faber was pitching lackluster innings. Even Leo's boys slumped in their seats, waiting for Faber to wake up or for a batter to connect.

Nervous, Faber adjusted his cap two or three times, and Leo stared. His chief competitor, Kaplan Brothers, made the gray-and-white caps the Sox wore. Leo had cornered the market on meat-packers and rail workers, but Kaplan had most of the bigger hotels, the ball clubs, and factory workers like Western Electric. Leo looked as Faber pushed his cap back, then pulled it forward again, just before the windup, and the idea came to Leo. “They should have the name of their team on those caps. Or better yet some trademark. Not those plain white-and-gray things they're wearing.”

As Benny walked through his father's workshop, denim and thread sticking to his shoes, Leo Lehrman sat at his desk, fiddling with a design for the White Sox. He drew a white sock with an
S
down its side, then scratched it out. He drew a
W
and an
S
interweaving, then he scribbled an
S
with an
X
through it. He liked this last one. Leo was imagining every major team in America, wearing a Lehrman's cap with a trademark embroidered on the rim when he looked up and saw Benny, his face and hands blackened with ash, a glazed-over look, scraps of cloth stuck to his shoes. “What happened to you?” his father said. “Were you in a fight?” Glancing at his watch, Leo pursed his lips. Benny shouldn't be here now. He should be done with his delivery and heading home.

Head down, Benny trembled, “No, I wasn't in a fight…”

A constricted feeling rose in Leo's chest the way it did whenever he was about to yell at someone. He saw the river water dripping from his son's hair, the muck on his skin, his coal-streaked cheeks. Leo put down his pencil. “Benny, what's wrong?” his father blurted. Benny stammered as he did only in front of his father. The words were tied in his throat. Leo looked at him, then down at the Sox design on his desk. “What is it?” He wanted to tell his father about the ship and the woman screaming on the bridge. And what it was like to be in a dead girl's embrace. But words were not his medium. Instead he said, “I dropped the deliveries in the river.”

“You did what?” Leo jumped up, all five feet six inches of him,
his hand pounding on the desk. “What are you talking about? What were you doing? Fooling around? That was four dozen.” Just moments before Leo had been thinking about the big plans he had for his caps factory. Now Benny, his intended heir—a dreamy boy who preferred to sit at the piano, running his hands up and down the keys, not even practicing really, but just banging out tunes—stood before him, bringing him more bad news.

What reverie was Benny lost in when he let the order fall? But it was just like him, wasn't it? The son he had loved first and most, the one he'd placed his hopes in. The litany of blame rose easily. He comes back late. He forgets to get a signature on delivery. He drops his orders in the river. It was Benny, wasn't it, who'd been in charge when Harold wandered off? Why would Benny get anything right?

Benny stood before his father, examining a scrap of denim that clung to his shoe. With his other foot he tried to tug it off, but it was stuck. There must have been some glue. Perhaps it was a scrap that belonged to one of the caps he'd dropped.

Leo stared, waiting for an answer, but Benny had none. “We spent a week on that order,” his father boomed. Leo did the calculations in his head. Twelve needle workers who could not speak English depended on him for their livelihoods. How would he meet their payroll if his son was dropping orders into the river? Even as it dawned on Leo Lehrman that his son's eyes were a rheumy red, and sirens howled outside, Benny tugged at the denim stuck to his shoe.

“What happened?” his father asked, his voice softer.

“Nothing,” Benny said. “I have to go.” He tossed the scrap into a wastebasket, then raced through the workroom as his father called after him. He heard his father yell as he dashed down the stairs. He caught the “el” north, and it took him as far as Belmont. At a drinking fountain, he rinsed the ash from his hands and face. Then he ran the rest of the way home.