Wild Heart (19 page)

He laughed easily. "Well, that's what I've heard."

"Have you? Well, as you can see, it's not true. Does he look uncivilized to you? Does he look like a wild man?" Her tone was too harsh; she softened it with a laugh. "Really, I think Michael's one of the most civilized people I've ever known." Dangerous, maybe, but that was a different matter.

"Well, if you say so." He laughed again, and the surface tension he had created between them faded. She wondered why in Cam this sort of talk was mildly amusing, but when it came from Lincoln she found it offensive. He wasn't a bad sort—her aunt hadn't exaggerated any of his sterling qualities. He really was good-looking, with sun-streaked brown hair and a healthy complexion, an athlete's muscular body, a strong-featured, intelligent face.

She was being too protective, she supposed, too sensitive on Michael's behalf. And he was strong, he could look after himself; he didn't need her to defend him. Still, Lincoln's attitude stirred up an emotion in her that actually came close to rage. Where did
that
come from? She didn't know, but she was helpless to control it.

She glanced back to see Michael striding along behind her, with Sam sitting proudly on his shoulders. She smiled, delighted—but at that second Lincoln slid his hand inside her arm again in a firm, proprietary way. She turned back to stare straight ahead, her smile fading.

The Ferris wheel, as Michael had noted in one of his reports, was two hundred and sixty-five feet high. It might as well have been two thousand and sixty-five for all Sydney cared, because anything over two or three stories—thirty feet, say—she avoided like the plague. She had always been that way, although she couldn't have said why; she couldn't remember anything, no height-related trauma in her past to account for it.

Waiting in the sparse line for tickets, she craned her neck with the others to see to the top of the gigantic contraption, and peered through the long glass windows of the cars as they swept past to examine the expressions of the thrill-seekers inside. Were they white-faced and screaming? Frozen silent with terror? No; they looked excited but perfectly composed, and there were as many children in the spacious cars as adults. What was there to fear? The wheel must be safe or they wouldn't let people on it. She told herself that over and over while the endless, deafening clatter of the motor, housed in a ridiculously small building at the base of the behemoth, shredded and clawed at her nerves.

"You're not really scared, are you, Syd?"

"No, of course not," she lied, giving Sam a big smile. "Especially if you'll hold my hand."

"I will. I won't let go."

"Then I'm all right."

Michael looked a little white around the lips. "Hold mine, too," he said, and she didn't think he was joking. "What holds it up?"

Lincoln started to explain it to him, but Sydney shut her ears. She didn't want to know what held it up, what made it go, what kind of engine ran it. All that information would just give her more to worry about. Better to plunge to her death in ignorance, she reasoned, than add the excruciating ingredient of understanding to her last few seconds on earth.

Then it was time to get on the damn thing. Because of the rain, their roomy car wasn't even half full when the attendant closed the door on them. And locked it, she couldn't help noticing. Was the lighter load good or bad? Maybe forty people evenly spaced around all four sides gave the wheel stability. Maybe fifteen people walking around anywhere they liked created a hazard. What if everybody on all thirty-six cars suddenly walked over to one end? Wouldn't that tip the whole thing over?

She yelped when the car suddenly jerked backward and glided up into thin air, then abruptly stopped. Philip and Lincoln laughed at her, and so did a few of the other passengers. She laughed with them, to show what a good sport she was, and to mask her hysteria. "Ow," said Sam, and when she let go of his hand he shook it, to ease the pain in his fingers. "You okay, Syd?"

"Fine."

"Because it hasn't even started yet. They're just letting the people off two cars below us."

"Right."

Sam deserted her to join the others, including Michael, who had moved to the windows to look out and see the sights. She wrapped her arms around one of the upright poles running the length of the car and tried to decide where to look. Closing her eyes or staring at the floor made her nauseated, but the view through the windows, even when the car wasn't moving, made her light-headed. The car jerked again. She managed not to scream by biting her knuckles and pressing her damp forehead to the cold metal pole.

It kept happening and it wouldn't stop. Each time the wheel jolted to put off and take on new passengers, her stomach plummeted. The stationary periods were worse, because then the hovering car rocked in the wind, slowly and gently. Sickeningly. Those were the times her life flashed before her eyes.

Conversation drifted to her in random patches, interspersed with a dull roaring. "That's the new university, see? It'll be huge when they finish it." "Oh, look, see the skyscrapers? There's the Masonic Temple, and there's the Home Insurance Building on LaSalle." "Sydney, come look at the lake, it's really beautiful. You've never seen it like this."

But she couldn't move. Then the worst happened: the last car disgorged and refilled, and the giant wheel, which she loathed now with every cell in her body, began to turn in earnest.

Nightmare. Which would be worse, to disgrace herself by vomiting, or to have a heart attack from terror and die? Somebody was patting her shoulder, and somebody else— Philip—was chuckling and saying comforting things at the same time. So: she was a joke. Vomiting
on
Philip began to appeal to her. But so did dying, because then he'd be sorry.

She still didn't know where to look. The ceaseless, kaleidoscopic swirl of buildings and sky, buildings and sky, brought her as close to fainting as she had ever been, but closing her eyes made icy sweat pop out all over and pushed the nausea so high in her throat she had to keep swallowing to force it back down.

Michael's ashen face loomed in front of her. He mouthed her name; her teeth were clenched; she couldn't reply. He tried to take her hands, but she was incapable of letting go of the pole—her lifeline. Finally his voice penetrated the roaring in her ears.

He said, "I'll make it stop."

Or maybe she only thought he said that. An aural hallucination.

She locked her gaze on him, and his body became her visual lifeline, a black-coated sliver of solidity in a slipping, sliding ocean of panic. He squeezed her shoulder hard, right through the padding of her jacket. Then he turned away, and she watched him clutch at one pole, pause, lunge for the next. He made his way across the car like that, and the significance of his jerky, stiff-legged gait slowly sifted through the fog of fear around her brain: he was almost as scared as she was.

At last he reached the door, the locked door, the one facing the guts of the infernal machine. As the car swooped downward toward the bottom of its hellish cycle, he began to pound on the glass and shout out at the top of his lungs, "Stop! Stop! Stop!" But no miracle occurred, and with a sick lurch in her stomach Sydney felt the dizzying ascent begin again.

The window opened with a crank. Michael found it and tried to wind the glass pane down, but it was stuck. No one helped him; no one went near him. In her peripheral vision she saw a dozen people, including her brothers and Lincoln Turnbull, staring at him in motionless disbelief. Finally the window dropped down, and when the wheel neared its next nadir, Michael stuck his head and shoulders out and screamed,
"Stop! "

Nothing happened.

He began to pound at something on the outside of the door—the metal dowel between the two brackets that kept it closed. "Hey," somebody in the car said, and someone else said, "What are you doing?"

Unlocking the door and opening it—in midair, while the Ferris wheel glided to the top of its circuit, hovered for that horrible, unvarying instant, and then started its ghastly downward pitch.

"Michael!" She shrieked it, in pure, absolute terror. No one moved—no one tried to grab him! And her own hands were glued to the pole, frozen stiff. She watched him lean far, far out into nothing, hanging on with one hand to the slippery edge of the door frame, waving his other hand in the air, and now standing on only one foot so he could lean out even farther.
"Michael!"

"Stop it!" he yelled. "Stop it! Stop this goddamn machine!
Stop it!"

They stopped it.

It took two more revolutions, the last one agonizingly slow. When the car finally touched firm, unmoving ground, Sydney's knees buckled under her, and only her white-knuckled hands, still wrapped around the pole like twin vises, kept her from sliding to the floor.

"My God, Syd," Philip said wonderingly, prying her fingers off the pole. At his elbow, Sam stared up at her with the same stunned and sheepish expression." Behind him, Lincoln shook his head over and over, dumbfounded.

Outside on the platform, Michael was having an altercation with two uniformed engineers, one of them the man who had put them in this car a few minutes ago.
A few minutes ago?
It felt like hours, days, a lifetime in hell. "Go fix it," Sydney uttered with a strangely thick tongue. She had to repeat it, but once he understood, Philip went outside to help straighten out the mess. A little later, with Sam holding one of her arms and Lincoln the other, she managed to exit the car with a particle of dignity. It felt as if the whole world was staring at her, but she had no emotional energy left to care. She would take intense embarrassment over heart-stopping panic any day.

The farther they walked from the Ferris wheel, the better she felt. Some of the jokes at her expense that Philip and Lincoln traded even began to draw a wan smile out of her. What she still wanted badly to do, though, was throw her arms around Michael and burst into tears and kiss him all over his face.

They said good-bye to Lincoln at the train station. He told her he was looking forward to her party, and she just
stared at him, blank-faced. "Your aunt's dinner dance. In three weeks. For the historical society?"

"Of course. Yes, I'm looking forward to it, too." Almost as much as she was looking forward to his train coming, so he would go away.

It finally did, and they waved him out of sight. Her shoulders slumped with relief. Philip hadn't stopped teasing her yet, but thank God it was just the family again.

On the ride home, Sam fell asleep against her shoulder. In the opposite seat, Philip found a newspaper and buried his head in it. Sydney stared across the short space between the seats at Michael, who stared back at her. "Thank you," she mouthed, and he silently mimed, "You're welcome."

How inadequate. She very much wanted to sit on his lap and hug his neck and tell him he was her hero.

"What made you do it?" she murmured to herself, too softly for him to hear.

But he did hear. Leaning toward her, he touched the hand she was resting on her knee. "You were afraid," he breathed, his grayish green eyes warm and caressing.

"So were you."

"Not as much."

She turned her fingers over, to clasp his hand. "Michael." She sighed, not wanting to let go. What was happening to them?

Philip rattled his newspaper. They dropped hands hastily and sat back. Sam yawned, rubbing his eyes. Presently the conductor called out their stop, and they filed off the train tiredly. Nobody said much as they tramped home in the gray, windy twilight. At dinner that night, the story was told and retold, with much laughter and amusement and relief and astonishment. Sydney waited, but nobody, said the main thing, the truest thing, the
moral
of the story: that Michael Mac Neil was the most extraordinary man any of them had ever known.

Chapter 11

Little Egypt wasn't really naked. Still, even though Philip had played a joke on him, Michael couldn't say he was disappointed. While she did a dance called the hootchy-kootchy, Little Egypt wore a filmy skirt he could see her legs through, including the tops of her thighs above her garters and black stockings. All she wore on top was a gold blouse cut off above her stomach, with a little fringe hanging down that looked like it would tickle her skin.

"Is that how all ladies look?" Sam wanted to know. "Is it, Papa? Under their clothes, is that how they really
look?"

Philip snickered, but Michael wanted to hear the answer, too. Dr. Winter pulled on his ear and made a humming noise. Finally he said, "Well, I expect some of them do, yes."

"The lucky ones," Philip said out of the side of his mouth.

Sam stood on his toes, trying to see around the man in front of him. "But they don't look like that in their clothes. We look like ourselves in our clothes, but ladies don't."

Michael had noticed the same thing. He had seen paintings of naked women, but until now he had never known for sure which was accurate, the shapes of the women in the pictures or the shapes of the clothed women he knew—Sydney, for instance, in her S-shaped dresses with the little hump in the back. Interesting.

Little Egypt didn't move like any other women he'd ever seen, either. While a man sitting with his legs crossed played a thin, sad song on a flute, she held her bare arms over her head and swayed her hips in a slow circle, showing off the muscles in her stomach and the fat curves of her breasts. She had dark hair and white skin, and she smiled while she danced, flashing her black eyes at the people in the audience.

"As far as we know, women didn't begin wearing corsets or stays until the close of the Middle Ages, a time coinciding with the end of the War of the Roses," said Dr. Winter, without taking his eyes off Little Egypt. "Before that they wore smocks—that's the Saxon name; the Norman word is chemise."

"What do they wear now?" Philip asked, looking sly.

"Nowadays they wear—" He started to cough, glancing down at Sam. "Never mind about that. Mind your manners, Philip."

Philip grinned and gave Michael a wink.

Little Egypt's dance ended. She disappeared behind a silver beaded curtain while the people standing below the stage on the Midway clapped and whistled and yelled, "More!" But she didn't come back, and the crowd started to break up and move away.

"Time to go home." Dr. Winter took Sam's hand. "No need to, ah, hm." He coughed again and straightened his spectacles. "No need to mention to your aunt that we saw this, hm, dancer, Sam."

"You mean it's a secret?"

"Ha! No, no, just no need to mention it, that's all."

Sam looked puzzled. "Can I tell Sydney?"

"Hm? Oh, well. I suppose so. Suppose that's all right. Now, you, Philip."

"Sir."

"Don't want you staying out till all hours of the night, hear me?"

"Yes, sir. I won't."

"Hm." He leaned closer. "Wish I were going with you. Madhouse at home. Women've lost their minds."

Michael laughed when Philip did, realizing it was a joke. Sydney and the aunt and all the maids were getting the house ready for the big party they were having in two weeks. Everything was a mess. "Chaos," Dr. Winter called it, and locked himself in his study.

"Could we, Papa? Why can't we go with Philip and Michael? Why do we have to go home now? Can't we go with them?"

"No, we can't."

"Why not?"

Dr. Winter gave his older son a funny, knowing look, then leaned over and whispered to Sam, "Because I'm too old and you're too young." He winked at Philip, and for the first time Michael saw the resemblance between them. It was in their lips when they smiled, a way they both had of twitching their mouths sideways when they were making a joke but pretending they weren't. Being "dry," he'd heard it called.

After Sam and Dr. Winter left, Michael said, "Where are we going now?" They were having dinner together, at Philip's invitation, and afterward they might even go to a show. Michael had been looking forward to it all day.

"Downtown, so we need the northside station." He pointed across the lights of the Midway. "It's right over there, you can even see it. But it's a twenty-minute walk because the lagoon winds around in the way. Too bad we can't portage over to it with a gondola—we'd be there in no time."

Michael stopped in his tracks. "Portage," he said softly. "Portage."

Philip went a few steps before he noticed Michael wasn't with him. "What's wrong?" he said, coming back.

Michael stared at him. "Portage—what does it mean? What does that word mean?"

"Portage? It's when you carry your boat overland from one body of water to another. Small lakes, say."

"A small boat? A light boat. A—"

"A canoe, usually. Why?"

He put his fingers in his hair and pulled on it. "That was it. It wasn't a shipwreck. That's what happened."

"What are you talking about? You mean when you were a child?"

He could
see
it. "White water, not blue."

"Rapids!"

"The canoe went under. White foam. Ice cold. That's all I remember. I woke up on the land, the bank, and they were all gone." A picture flashed in front of his eyes: fear on the faces of his uncle and his aunt, and another man he didn't know—the guide, it must have been. "Everyone drowned but me." He had known it before, buried down deep in his mind, but now he could see their faces. It made him want to cry.

Philip squeezed his arm. "That's good, Michael. It is, because it'll help Sydney's detective. He's been searching through lists of shipwrecks in the Great Lakes, but now he can look for
inland
drownings. And he can probably narrow it to southern Ontario."

"Why didn't I remember before? It's so clear now. Why did I have to hear that word?"
Portage.

"I don't know. Are you all right?"

"Yes." But he felt queer.

"Come on, let's get out of here. What we need is a drink."

* * * * *

They got lots of drinks. In places Philip called "sporting saloons," here the patrons were all men with names like Slick and Dink and Fast Paddy. They all knew Philip, and they all wanted to buy him glasses of beer.

"I didn't know there were places like this," Michael said, blinking at Philip through the cigar smoke at Burke's Ten Dollar Saloon. He was sipping his first beer and finding that it tasted a little better than it smelled, but not much.

"City's lousy with 'em."

"Men just come here to talk to each other? Is that it?"

"Talk and drink. And do a little business."

Philip had done business in the last two saloons, paying money to a man in one, getting money from a man in the second. Since he'd brought it up, Michael felt all right about asking, "What is your business?"

"Horses."

"You bought one?"

"Ha! Almost. No, I play the horses. Bet on the races at Washington Park. If my horse wins, I win. Yesterday I won; tomorrow, who knows?" He grinned, biting down on the fat, smelly cigar between his teeth. He didn't look like the others, though, the Slicks and Lefties in this saloon. It was as if he was playing a game, Michael thought. A joke on everybody, even himself.

They ate bloody steaks for dinner at a restaurant on Clark Street. The wine Philip ordered tasted better than beer, but after half a glass Michael started to feel dizzy.

"This is different from the time Sam took me to Chicago," he noted, thinking of the darker, narrower streets outside, where there were almost as many people crowding the sidewalks as there were in the city. They weren't businessmen, though. He couldn't make out what they were, except loud and reckless.

"I should hope so," Philip said, pouring more wine into their glasses. "What do you think of that girl over there? The one with the old guy."

Michael craned his neck. "The lady with black hair? She looks nice," he said doubtfully. "But her husband looks tired."

Philip stopped with his fork halfway to his mouth and started to laugh. Pretty soon he was roaring. Michael didn't know what was funny, but he laughed, too.

From then on, everything was funny. They went to a theater on Fourteenth Street and saw a play called
The Bohemian Girl,
in which men on real horses galloped onto the stage, kidnapped the heroine, and rode off into the wings! Afterward, Michael couldn't stop talking about it, couldn't get over the wonder of it. It was getting late, but instead of going home they went to another saloon, in a different neighborhood. This saloon had ladies in it. They were called waiter girls, and they served drinks and entertained people by singing and dancing on a stage. They showed their legs, like Little Egypt, but they danced to a fast piano instead of a mournful flute, so the feeling he got from watching it was completely different. Not exotic. More like what he was learning to think of as Chicago: fast and rough and full of energy. He tried to imagine Sydney singing and dancing on a stage while men watched her, but he couldn't.

"It's true what Sam said," he confided to Philip in a low voice while two of the waiter girls sang a song called "Under My Lemon Tree." "Their bodies really are different from the way they look in their clothes."

Philip was drinking glasses of whiskey with his beer now. "You've never had a woman, have you? Never had sex with one."

The way he said it, just casually, not laughing at him, made telling the truth easy. "I've never made love," he said, using the term Philip had taught him. "What kind of girls are they? Why do they do this?"

Philip laughed and didn't answer.

"Do they like it?"

"Sure, why wouldn't they?" He drank all the whiskey in another little glass with one swallow. Afterward he made a face, as if he was in pain.

"Are they rich?" They all wore flashy clothes and a lot of sparkling jewelry.

Philip slid down low in his chair. "No, they're not rich. They do it to make a living. I don't know if they like it or not." He watched the two ladies on the stage for a minute, smiling a tight, hard smile. "Probably not."

Michael could see him slipping into one of his gray, quiet moods. "Let's go someplace else," he said quickly. "Someplace where there's a show." He thought of
The Bohemian Girl
and how much it had lifted Philip's spirits.

"A show?" He threw down some money on the table and stood up, stumbling slightly; Michael had to reach for his arm to steady him. "Now, that's a hell of an idea. I know just the place."

* * * * *

Mrs. Birch lived in the Levee. When Michael asked what that meant, Philip said, "It means you never want to come here by yourself. 'Specially at night."

Mrs. Birch's house, at the bottom of a dead-end street, looked dark and deserted, but a man opened the door as soon as Philip knocked. "Who's your friend?" he asked, standing back to let them in.

Philip threw his heavy arm around Michael's shoulders. "This is Mick. He's visiting from Canada."

The man led them through a narrow hallway ending at a long, heavy curtain that smelled like leather. He pushed the curtain open.

Bright light—music—people laughing and talking. Michael blinked in surprise. Was it a show?

The first thing his eyes focused on was a lady in her nightgown, sitting on the lap of a fully clothed man. The second thing was another lady, also in her nightgown, dancing by herself to a song with violins coming from a phonograph. She had her eyes closed, and she was really stretching more than dancing. Maybe she was asleep. He had heard of people who could walk and even talk when they were sleeping.

"What is this place?" he whispered to Philip. The room, which looked sort of like the Winters' living room only with much more furniture, was full of people. The men were all dressed and the women were all undressed, and nobody seemed to think a thing of it. So many candles were burning, it was almost as bright as day. There was food on a low table, fruit and bread and little cakes, but what the room smelled like was a mixture of perfume, cigarettes, and sweat. And one more thing.

"What is it?" he said again, but before Philip could answer, a woman glided up to them.

"As you can see, we're crowded tonight," she said in a low voice that didn't go up or down. She had clothes on, a shiny red dress that covered all of her skin, and she had dark brown hair, as curly as Sam's. Her face was very white, and when she talked it didn't move at all.

"Not too crowded for an old friend, I hope," Philip said in a too-loud voice. "How are you, Mrs. B?"

She flicked her heavy eyelids over him coldly. Michael stood straighter, feeling stiff and uncomfortable. Philip was drunk and saying the wrong things, and this had ' never happened before. Mrs. Birch didn't answer his question; she said, "What are you gentlemen in the mood for this evening?"

"A drink, to start."

"Wine?"

"No, champagne."

That made her smile a little. "Are you celebrating?"