Angel of Brooklyn (16 page)

He took his empty glass to his desk and started moving papers around, sliding them under the giant conch shell he was using as a paperweight. He put some loose charcoal pencils into a pot.

‘It’s very late,’ said Beatrice. ‘I should be going.’

‘All right.’ He turned towards her and shrugged. ‘Frivolity,’ he said, with something of a smile. ‘See where it gets you?’

*

After a day bagging carrots and turnips, Beatrice sat with a glass of warm milk reading
Pride and Prejudice
. Jeffrey had waved good-humouredly while she was shovelling muck in the farmyard, enjoying the sight of her in muddy overalls. He was on his way to see a cousin whose husband had been killed. ‘I didn’t really know the chap,’ he’d told her. ‘But sympathy and respect costs very little.’

The milk made her think about Normal. Glasses left souring on the table. Joanna adding a drop of honey when she’d had her hand stitched. She looked at the scar. It was almost invisible now.

The book had a torn paper jacket and yellow-edged pages. The spine was a shade or two lighter, where it had faded in the sun. It smelled musty. After the first thirty pages, her eyes began to ache. The print was too small and she longed for her magazines. The pictures of showgirls, the chat about horoscopes, or the baby-faced actor who’d left his new wife to set up home with an acrobat. So she gave up, putting the book across the cushions as a small piece of sunlight fell across the jacket. Words appeared. Holding it at an angle she tried to make them out. Scrawled dents across the illustration of a girl in a pale Regency dress said,
Please come home it’s killing me
.

‘You’ve been out with Jeffrey Woodhouse,’ said Ginny. ‘What would Jonathan think?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You think he wouldn’t mind?’

‘Why should he mind?’ said Beatrice.

Ginny shrugged. ‘I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem right to me. Is it different in America?’ she asked. ‘Do married women go out with other men from time to time?’

‘I don’t understand. We only went out for a drink. Jeffrey and Jonathan are friends. Can’t I be friends with Jeffrey? Who says men and women can’t be friends?’

‘Nature,’ said Ginny, as a pig rolled onto its back.

‘I thought I’d come and say goodbye,’ said Jeffrey. ‘I’ve had my five days’ leave.’

‘Goodbye? It must be England’s favourite word.’

‘Any news from back home?’

‘Nothing,’ she told him. ‘Coney Island? New York? It’s just like a dream.’

‘That’s exactly how I feel about this place when I’m over there. Is it real?’

‘Oh, I think so,’ she said, leaning against the windowsill, the light pushing through her hair.

‘I’ll miss you,’ said Jeffrey.

‘You will?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then good, I’ll miss you too.’

He smiled. ‘I’d better go.’ He looked at the clock, then at the picture of Morecambe. ‘I’ll think of that,’ he said.

Two days later, Frank was sitting at the kitchen table in his uniform. He had an hour before the train left.

‘What shall I tell the others?’ said Madge. ‘They’ll wonder why he went off without even saying hello, never mind goodbye.’

‘You could tell them that he had to go quickly, without warning, that there was some kind of an emergency? They sent him a telegram? Or I could tell them for you?’

Madge said nothing, putting her lips to her teacup.

‘Is it time?’ said Frank.

‘No,’ snapped Madge. ‘Not yet.’

‘I hear you’ve been eating bouillabaisse,’ said Beatrice.

‘Stinking bully bass is all they had,’ said Frank, resting his chin on his hands. ‘Bony fish heads and guts. They were all dirty bastards, but you’re lovely you are, you know.’

Beatrice left them. She sat at her window with an American magazine that was so well read the words were starting to vanish. She looked at ads for grape soda, cotton gloves and washing powder. The latest shades of the season were crash, vivid coral and deep cobalt blue.
Miss Susanna Hearn (Delaware) held her eighteenth birthday party at the Astor Hotel
. Outside, a door slammed and Frank started shouting, No! No! No!
The guests were entertained by the James Baxter Orchestra. Champagne was served on the roof terrace. At midnight, Miss Hearn’s father presented his daughter with a Model T Ford. She was said to be ‘delighted
’.

THE PRESERVATION OF MEAT

Sunday

ON A LATE-APRIL
afternoon, Beatrice and Elijah were listening to the transformation of their father from the corner of the landing. They could hear him batting the dust and the creases from his mothballed clothes; the splashing of water, and the snip, snip, snip of the scissors.

‘He’s cutting his beard,’ Elijah whispered.

‘I can smell soap,’ sniffed Beatrice. ‘Can you smell soap?’

‘It’s the good soap. It’s the sandalwood.’

‘Oh, this is going to be some fine trip,’ their father was saying through the crack in the bedroom door. ‘I was going to write to the keeper, but then I changed my mind, no, I’d much rather meet him face to face. Now, Elijah, don’t go all pious on me, if I start telling a few half-truths, don’t land me in it.’

‘You want me to come with you?’

‘You’re both coming,’ he said, stepping out of his room for a moment, his suspenders hanging loose and his hair dripping wet. ‘Didn’t I tell you? I’ve got the tickets in my jacket pocket. The train leaves at eight tomorrow morning. We’re staying overnight in a small hotel called the Lemon Tree. It’s all arranged, and paid for.’

‘But –’ Elijah slumped hard against the wall, loosening his collar.

‘No buts,’ their father said, waving his soapy hand. ‘Everyone likes a menagerie, Lincoln Park is one of the best in the state, and the
Chronicle
tells me that the sun will be shining, apart from a brief scattering of cloud, later on in the afternoon.’

‘Lincoln Park, Chicago?’ said Elijah.

‘The zoo by the lake. Everyone’s talking about it.’

‘Everyone who?’

‘Bob Rickman. He tells me they have everything, bears, parakeets, monkeys.’

‘The next-door neighbour? When did he tell you about Lincoln Park Zoo?’

‘When that dozy blind dog of his lost its ball. I found it in a bush. I threw it back over. He started talking, and I couldn’t get away.’

Beatrice took a couple of steps forward, passing the wild turkey and something that looked like a dormouse sitting on a twig. ‘What exactly are we going to do at Lincoln Park?’ she asked.

‘The same as everyone else,’ her father said. ‘We’re going to look at all those animals, we’ll buy ourselves a souvenir guide, and we’ll eat whatever it is they’re selling at the kiosks.’

Elijah looked at Beatrice and gave a helpless shrug. ‘What was it you were saying?’ he asked. ‘About writing to the keeper?’

Their father sighed heavily. He was fully dressed again. His skin was shiny pink and scrubbed. ‘Don’t you listen to anything I say? I told you. I was going to enquire about their disposal system.’

‘Their what?’

‘When an animal dies, what do they do with it? It would be a shame to let a good animal carcass go to waste, when I have the expertise to transform it into an interesting, educational, almost alive-looking specimen. Now, Elijah, do you have a tub of hair cream I can borrow for tomorrow? My hair is wild and springy, like I’ve just had a terrible fright, it needs licking down, I need to look respectable, I need to look like I know what it is I’m talking about, which of course I do,’ he said. ‘Find the hair cream, Elijah. That’s right, you heard. Hair cream will make all the difference.’

Monday

At ten to eight they were on the eastbound platform, waiting for the next Chicago train. Beatrice and Elijah were standing a little way back from their father who was leaning against a lamp post, his hair slick with cream, poring over yet another catalogue that the mail boy had handed him that morning. He was talking to himself and screwing up his face. ‘Wire frames,’ he was saying. ‘Plaster bones? Why plaster? Why not the real thing? It’s an animal we’re recreating, not a child’s stuffed toy.’

They sat in the dining car. The other tables were crowded. Families in their best spring clothes sat quietly, looking through the velvet-
curtained
windows, the world a steamy blur. Girls in fresh lace collars toyed with their hair, reading the breakfast menu, or their new city guides to Chicago. Beatrice looked at her brother. Elijah was nineteen years old, but he was like a small fresh-faced boy, complete with freckles, reading his book of sermons, smiling and nodding at the pages as if those words could see all those rapt encouraging signs he was giving them. He’d been working with the local minister, who had great hopes for him as a lay preacher. ‘You go out into the world and you tell those folks what this is all about,’ he’d said, banging his Bible. ‘Doesn’t matter who they are, where they are, or what it is they’re doing. They could be picking cotton, or washing down their automobiles. You reach out and you grab them. You get them to listen, to ponder a while, and to pray.’

Washed and brushed and spruced, her father, she supposed, looked like any other father in the car.

‘Ham and eggs,’ he was saying, licking his lips. ‘You can’t go wrong with ham and eggs, even on a train.’

She looked at her reflection in the glass. She was just seventeen, yet she felt tired and worn; her dress had looked fine at home, but now she could see that it was old and faded, and she couldn’t help but compare herself to the girls on the opposite table, sisters with hair as light as her own, with pearls in their ears and good-looking clothes. Their mother, a plump woman with a small turned-up nose, kept tapping the table saying, ‘Amy, look at that building.’ ‘Lucille, did we pack our new spring bonnets?’ ‘Larry, the hotel is in a good district, isn’t it? I wouldn’t like a repeat of Wilmington, not when the girls are with us, Lord, I simply wouldn’t get to sleep at night.’

Beatrice read the menu again. She tucked in the frayed edges of her cuffs, yet she supposed they were lucky. Families all over America were living in poverty. Elijah had told her all about it. How he’d met families who were starving, who were dressed in rags, with nothing on their feet.

‘I told them that God would provide.’

‘Really?’ said Beatrice. ‘And they didn’t want to shoot you?’

The train rattled on. The waiter brought them coffee, ham and eggs, baskets of bread, curls of yellow butter and preserves. Elijah prayed, while the sisters on the opposite table giggled into their hands. Beatrice turned her face towards the window, losing herself in the fields, houses and the glass that flashed back in the sunlight.

Their father slept for most of the journey. Elijah kept sharpening a pencil, annotating the sermons. Beatrice listened to the other travelling families. ‘I’ve never liked Uncle Claude. Why? Because he spits tobacco juice onto the rugs, isn’t that reason enough?’ ‘Father was in Chicago after the fire, he said he could still feel the heat through his boots.’ ‘I have a headache, Mama. Mama, I said I have a headache.’

The sun was still shining when they reached Chicago. They rode the crowded ‘L’ to Harlech Street, where the Lemon Tree Hotel was squeezed between an employment agency and John T. Hooper Optometrist. It was a small, shabby hotel, with a cramped green lobby. The man behind the desk was reading a sports paper, and he handed them their keys with hardly a glance up from the page.

‘Second floor,’ he grunted. ‘Top of the stairs, take a left.’

Beatrice wasn’t disappointed with her room. She’d had little expectations. The narrow bed was hard and the window looked out onto a yard full of boxes, but there were no stuffed birds or animals. She found a bent hatpin in one of the drawers and the visiting hours of the Chicago Hospital for Women and Children had been taped across the bureau. Someone had circled the wards for infectious diseases.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ her father said. ‘Why waste time cramped up in our pens, when we could be observing wild animals at close quarters?’

Her father was trembling as he paid the entrance fee. The air was already full of animals, the scent and the sound of them mingling with fried apple doughnuts and a small wind band.

‘This,’ Elijah whispered, ‘could be a very bad day.’

Beatrice felt a little sick. She’d rarely seen so many people. Squeezed into the elevated train, her face almost pressed into someone else’s sweaty collar, she’d felt like she was suffocating. Here, children raced around with balloons and wooden tigers. The small lake shimmered like a moving plate of silver as her father strode purposefully towards the large mammal house, the map of the zoo flapping in his hand.

‘First stop,’ he said, ‘the lions. Margo and Mitchell, bought last year from Barnum and Bailey’s circus.’

People were already pressed against the bars of the cage, watching Margo and Mitchell sleeping in the sawdust.

‘Keep a step back,’ a woman was saying to her children, ‘they might
be
hungry; they could soon have both your arms off.’ The children squealed, running around in circles.

‘They’re nothing but a bag of old bones,’ a man said. ‘Let’s go and find something with a little more life left in it.’

Beatrice and Elijah duly looked into the cage, where the lions slept, oblivious to the faces, and to the flies that had settled on their scabby-looking tails. Their father became very still. He was carefully observing the heavy bone structure, the position of the ears, the fine brown lines of their whiskers. He wrote something in the guidebook with a small silver pencil.

‘How old would you say they were?’ he asked.

Beatrice shrugged.

‘They look pretty old to me,’ said Elijah. ‘I’d say they were ancient.’

‘Exactly, and if they came from the circus, then they must be into their retirement years. A lion,’ sniffed their father, ‘is a distinct possibility.’

Beatrice didn’t know whether to laugh or feel alarmed. ‘A lion?’ she said. ‘How on earth would you get a dead lion all the way over to Normal?’

Her father turned on his heels. ‘Have you never heard of a crate?’ he said. ‘The railroads carry hundreds every day.’