Bright and Distant Shores (58 page)

He could imagine going to sea again but it seemed a very distant prospect. With wife and child and days spent unearthing the promise of old houses, the heat had gone out of the idea. Some Friday nights, the workday completed and all the tools locked up at the scrapyard, he went with his men to one of the saloons in Little Cheyenne. Amid the din and inebriate jostling, he would
fall back on his old habit of reticence in the face of wild good cheer. He stayed several beers behind the carpenters and masons, chimed in only when he had a particularly lacerating quip, and was always the first to leave. But these hours spent in rowdy communion with his men gave him a sense of possibility, that other lives run parallel to his own, to one so staid and predictable. But there was never a moment when he wished for anything different. He would trundle home, gently drunk, and find that the whole house had gone to bed. He would sit in the parlor with a drink, grateful and speculative, alternating his gaze between his mother's daguerreotyped face of smoky pearl and the grimacing effigy. Two different ways of honoring the dead, he would think. One suspended the departed as a million drops of mercury, capturing likeness as a memento of the past, while the other reminded the living that the dead had never really left, that they were too curious and meddlesome to turn away.

J
ust weeks before the wireless system was due to be tested, the upper floors were still stripped bare, the curtain walls removed. Canadian winds keened against the steel frame in the late December bluster. Birds nested in the pockets of dead space between floors and the construction workers had to flush them out with broom handles each day. The new windows on the floors below were rollered to perfection, so translucent that the girls in the typing pool sometimes forgot they were in an office. They sat high above the lake, swimming in ether, typing out a policyholder's fate, the dividends of sudden decline.

The renovations of the upper floors were behind schedule. After the final report had been delivered by the city panel, Hale decided to exceed its recommendations and mandates. He wanted to woo Chicago back like a jilted lover. Not only did he replace the windows and square up the foundation, but he embarked on a completely new design for the top two floors. The foundation would not support the addition of more floors—conceding the title of highest commercial perch to First Manhattan Life & Casualty—but he had a new architect re-envisage the offices for senior executives. A public company required a forward-looking image, a sense of strategic mission. The executive offices would wrap around a central area where the entire city was platted out like a giant chessboard. Each neighborhood would be rendered in miniature, by the block, some of it painted and some of it modeled from wood. Landmarks and historic churches would receive to-scale renditions. It would be like the view from the roof, only
more manageable. It would be a battlescape, a campaign field. The lake, an expanse of blue paint, would run to the east of the tracts and in this way remind his senior executives of their own limits. It would also remind them that the First Equitable still offered maritime coverage with a good margin. On this giant grid of the city they would track the sale and renewal of policies, using colored squares to denote activity. Hale could come down from his own office and, at a glance, know the state of affairs—the greening upswing in the Near North, the middling blue of the Near West, the red, unprotected barrens in the Far South.

As for his own suite, he had ordered the removal of the display cases, all of it going into storage, and requested the construction of a private apartment. There were nights when he could not face going home to the house on Prairie Avenue. Jethro's private nurses did their best to keep him out of harm's way but the heir moved from one crazed scheme to another. One day last week he'd tried to excavate the backyard, telling Hale at dinner that there was a Potawatomi burial mound beneath the hedgerows. His right arm was near useless after the attack so the thought of Jethro plying a shovel and trowel made it even harder for Hale to bear. Eventually they would have to find a rest home for Jethro, but for now Hale's wife wouldn't hear of it. She was rearing a child again, a precocious boy with an eye for bird feathers and honeybees.

The rooftop, of course, would be a recreation area for employees and, pending the results of the upcoming tests, an outpost for wireless Marconi telegraphy. Hale hoped to have the first Marconi station in the city, sending out bulletins and orders across the voids above La Salle, even farther, perhaps, traversing countless rooftops and the jungle of electrical wires. Hale envisioned the radio signals as a natural complement to the beacon at the pinnacle of the clock tower. That perennial light beckoned to the flock and he hoped the radio signals would find their way into the symbolic mind of the city. In the small hours, wakeful in bed, he imagined the yellow beam of light pulsing with radio waves—signals
of distress, weather warnings, orders to sell wheat or buy pork, pithy farewells to lovers, the city's entire halting anthem.

That was, if they ever finished the renovations. The unions and combines had their teeth in and he was lucky to get a full day's work without some complaint about bathroom facilities or meal breaks. And recently he'd asked them to work in shifts around the clock. The construction workers responded by pissing off the side of the building in protest. They tracked mud into his lobby. Used to be that night construction was a natural part of things, that all winter long the derricks and hammers went at it. Now construction workers earned more than insurance clerks and were twice as demanding. Benny Boy, recently promoted to underwriting clerk, earned less than a fledgling carpenter. It seemed wrong, like a misplaced allegiance, but Hale would pay only what the market demanded. He could feel the new century in the offing and it reeked of self-regard.

On New Year's Eve, despite the ongoing construction, the small event went ahead. Just before midnight the Marconi wireless system underwent its final tests. There were two messages to be sent from the rooftop of the First Equitable—one to the Tribune Building and another to a steamer bearing two miles north on Lake Michigan. Professor Tabits, from the University of Chicago, had set up his transmission apparatus above the clock tower. A zinc ball topped the flagstaff and an insulated wire connected it to the top floor. Amid the bared steel and renovations, the professor had placed a makeshift telegraphy station. He sat behind the little wooden desk holding the induction coil and battery, exposed on all sides, and prepared to tap out the same Morse signals to both destinations, sending dashes and dots out into frozen space. A zinc ball and receiving apparatus waited on the steamer and at the top of the Tribune Building. They would send their own messages as well. The waiting crowd was small—a few patriots with tiny flags, a manager from the Western Union Telegraph Company, a
reporter from the
Tribune,
foremen and telegraphers from a few railroad companies. Hale had outfitted them with logoed mittens and scarves and they waited amid the exposed steel as the professor tended his apparatus. Hale hoped to win their regard if he could send the first wireless message of 1900. He turned to them on his heels, braced against a headwind, told them it should be any moment now.

They heard the clock tower gearing up and then it opened its baritone chords all at once, announcing midnight and the new century. Some champagne was poured, though it threatened to freeze the flutes. The visitors drank a hurried toast to prosperity but were fast losing their patience. There was a lot of foot-shuffling and wringing of hands going on. The Western Union manager had frost in his beard. Hale tapped the professor on the shoulder for an update but the telegraphy expert raised a hand to fend him off. Hale, stalling, sermonized on the new age.

May we be the chosen generation, friends. Let us send wireless messages around the globe and bring down the horizon. I'm a firm believer in science and wish to offer this experiment as a promise to be its ally. When these floors are finished there will be a dedicated telegraphy station, right where we stand, next to my office. We will send and receive the lifeblood of commerce. Information. The beating heart of the enterprise. Just as the pneumatic tubes in my building carry the flow of paper, this wireless device will carry waves of
—

The wooden speech was cut off by Professor Tabits bundling forward in his fur hat. He whispered in Hale's ear and the spectators leaned in. The company president smiled benevolently and told them the ship and the Tribune Building had both received their messages. A timid round of applause. Hale said, “Another message is coming back from the steamer right at this moment.” They circled the professor's little wooden desk as he jotted down the Morse code. The dashes and dots inevitably reminded Hale Gray of the signature line at the bottom of a life insurance contract:

The Western Union manager, his frozen beard like an arctic explorer's, asked, “What does it say?” on behalf of the timid crowd. He couldn't see the code because of the professor's fur hat.

Tabits said something but between the driving wind and booming clock his words were lost. He said it again, louder, but it may as well have been a foreign language. Finally, he wrote out the message on a piece of paper and held it up.

Can you hear me
?
Is anybody there?

They all stared at it for a moment, nodding, feigning gravity but wanting to get out of the cold. The clock continued tolling, resounding like a rebuke from the old dead century.

B
oth Davids had been in exile and Argus was no different. The icefields of Wolf Lake hemmed in life's possibilities. After ten days of cold the ice had hardened enough for the horses to pull the snow-scrapers across the frozen lake. Argus worked with the others to marshal the snow into long windrows, revealing the ice below, a glaucous eye, he thought, looking straight up at heaven. They began to lay off the field, gouging furrows three inches deep, a grid of lines twenty-two inches apart. Then the deeper blade was plowed along behind the horses and the gangs came out with handsaws and hooks. Argus piloted a raft along one of the canals because after two seasons cutting and a summer care taking he was considered an old hand. He used a pike pole to deftly maneuver the raft into position for loading. A muffled gang began stacking it with the cubed, frozen lake, their breath smoking with cold. They called Argus
Romeo Mowgli
and told him he ought to move to Venice and become a gondolier.
You'd make a killing,
one of them called across the ice. As far as they were concerned, he was from Borneo or some unlikely place and knew about twenty words of English total. They loved to watch him pole a raft, wend along the slushy streamway, toward the elevator incline and the icehouse. He was nimble and uncanny on the ice. Years back, the bunkhouse legend went, there had been an Esquimau escaped from the fair who wintered here and cut for a season. That native couldn't pike-pole to save his life. They called out bawdy encouragements as Argus piked his way along the canal, his gondola laden with ice. He raised a mitten in response.

Argus watched the icecakes trundle and glint onto the incline; the endless chain with its crossbars was a slipstream that he carried into his dreams each night. Before each block of ice was loaded it was passed over a vent of steam, scalding the under-side clean so that slush didn't form and slow the conveyance. The cakes mounted their way toward the towering icehouse and another gang waited inside with icehooks, sluicing and angling the harvest into tiers. By the end of the season the house would be stacked full, half a foot of sawdust on top, the doors clapped into place. Argus and a few others would remain throughout the year, fixing fences and cutting weeds, hauling dead beavers from the lake. They would load the delivery wagons in the early light of summer. Argus would think, as he did last summer, of the ice making its journey into Chicago, to the breweries and lunch-rooms, of the way it would be chipped for drinks, dropped into soda and whiskey, touching the lips of people he once knew and loved. The bricks of ice ascended, the chain clacking in its groove. The conveyance needed greasing and he went to tell the foreman in his practiced broken English.

In the evenings, when steam breathed out of the newly cut lake, Argus sat in the messroom with the others. He listened to them complain about supper and the beds they slept in, about unfaithful wives and girls abandoned in pregnancy, and he remembered the ribald seamen on board the ship. Men living in groups, separate from women and polite society, brought out the godless swagger, he knew, but he liked them just the same. They were fair-minded and treated him well. His position among them allowed him to live slightly apart. They thought nothing of his nightly habit of retreating to the bunkroom before anyone else. In secret, he read the Bible by a kerosene lantern and put the great book under his pillow before they came to bed. His penance, in addition to the burning cold, was silence. He didn't sing or preach and his conversations were limited to transactions about food, weather, and ice. This future was furrowed for him long ago, he
thought, but by his own hand. God was merely watching and waiting for his next move.