On the Trail to Moonlight Gulch (6 page)

“They just got the elevator moving this morning,” Joseph said. “The electricians finished wiring the entire building a few days ago.”

He shut the screen and pulled back a lever. The floor vibrated, followed by a sudden jerk, and next Tory felt an upward movement, a sensation not unlike riding the mine train. The stir both exhilarated and frightened him. Instinctively, he clutched Joseph’s arm.

Joseph chuckled. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I felt the same way my first time riding in the elevators in New York. But I’ve never ridden one that goes as high as twelve stories. I’ve gone up and down on this one a dozen times already. It’s quite something, isn’t it?”

“Like flying without your feet leaving the ground.”

Joseph threw his head back and laughed. “I love how you see things, Tory. I really do.” He turned to kiss him on the lips. A prolonged kiss, but light and gentle, a kiss expressing hopes and dreams. His curly mustache tickled Tory. Tory rested his hand on Joseph’s shoulder and held him in place, wanting a deeper kiss. Joseph obliged.

Still overwhelmed with the frankness of their affection, Tory chuckled when Joseph pulled away from his mouth and gazed into his eyes. When he had first seen those cocoa-colored eyes of Joseph’s almost a week ago, he had never imagined he’d have the chance to see them up close so often. Their relationship had sprouted as fast as the elevator climbed the building.

For a moment, he forgot what had driven him to rush to Joseph’s drugstore. His parents and Clair Schuster faded like a meaningless delusion. Dilemmas no longer existed. Only discovery, newness, joy persisted.

Two minutes later, they reached the twelfth floor. Alone at the top of the world, a sense of privacy like he’d never known besieged Tory. Joseph pushed the lever into the lock position and opened the screen. A wide empty space opened before them. Grinning in wonder, Tory sauntered to the center. Wind gusted from the windows still without glass panes. The dull howl seemed to materialize from every corner. Tory joined Joseph in wandering about the barren space.

“An insurance company is moving into this floor,” Joseph said. “And an accounting firm just below, and an export company below that. I’m unsure about the others. Our store is considered the anchor.”

Tory remained speechless. Loving words did not always come easy to him. His bashful nature often paralyzed his tongue. But when had he ever needed to express the lofty emotions circulating through him now? He slipped off his white glove and held onto Joseph’s hand, rough from his stint with manual labor. Another rush of pride rose inside him.

“Come and look out.” Joseph led Tory to the row of windowless sockets. “This is what I wanted to share with you, my love. Do you see?”

Tory looked out. Sounds from the beating street below seemed distant, yet distinct and within reach. Faint lights emerged against the dusk. He had never stood so high, both literally and figuratively. Looking down at the bustle of the city with its glowing streetlamps, Tory wondered if he were not dreaming.

“Isn’t it amazing?” Joseph said, his pompadour blowing in the breeze.

“Yes, it truly is.”

“They were supposed to install the windows last week,” Joseph said. “But union issues have stalled work. I’m sure they won’t let it go undone too much longer.” Joseph’s arm tightened around Tory. All Tory’s worries flew out the window. His father’s fury stood like a mere bump in their path. His wrath had perhaps spurred forward everything Tory had wanted from the first moment he had spied Joseph van Werckhoven descending from the hansom cab Friday afternoon.

He and Joseph could get their own place. Even move back to New York City, if that was what events dictated, once Joseph had finished overseeing the building of the drugstore. They could stay in a room somewhere until then. Possibilities stretched endlessly, like the sprawl of the city below them. Two young lovers could surmount any obstacles.

“I can see the Chicago River,” Joseph said. “Look! I believe I can even see out west to the prairie.” He giggled and pointed southeast. “Is that Indiana over there?”

Tory chuckled. “No, I don’t think we can see that far. But I can see the lake.”

Joseph leaned farther out the window, his hand firm on Tory’s back. “Yes, you’re right. I can see it.”

His head full of lofty notions, Tory left Joseph by the window and wandered the expansive space some more. Riding on a cloud, he rubbed his bare hand along the cement and steel beams that held the monolithic structure together.

“Wouldn’t it be grand to live this high?” Joseph said from the window, where he still leaned out.

“Yes, it would,” Tory said. A simple statement, but one that held mounds of meaning for him. Could he and Joseph live together, in a relationship that transcended time, high above the judgmental eyes of society?

From the corner of his eye, Tory glimpsed Joseph sitting on the window sill and spreading his arms wide.

“I’m on top of the world,” Joseph said, as if for the both of them.

Tory glanced up to send him a smile, but Joseph had disappeared. Just like that. In an instant. He peered about the empty space. The wind howled around the support beams and stirred the debris in the corners. Tory blinked, rubbed his eyes, shook his head. How could he have vanished like that? Where did he walk off to?

Was he some kind of a prankster or illusionist?

“Joseph?”

In a trance, Tory edged to the window where Joseph had been sitting. He thought he detected the building wobbling. Or was it his legs? Unable to process what he thought he had seen, he placed a shaky hand on the sill and allowed his eyes to move down toward the lighted sidewalk.

Laborers from inside the drugstore had gathered around something. A mob of curious onlookers surrounded them. A brief part in the crowd revealed what Tory couldn’t grasp but on some unspeakable level had understood all along.

Joseph’s body lay sprawled on the sidewalk face up, a dark spot growing by his head.

Chapter 5

M
RS
. P
ILKVIST
, sitting in her favorite armchair in the parlor, cried into her embroidered handkerchief. Tory merely stared, eyes wide and stinging with dryness. The undertaker had laid out Joseph’s casket away from the windows, which Mrs. Pilkvist had draped in black fabric, as she had the two mirrors in the room and even her shiny silver tea service. A combination of gas and electric lighting cast flickering orange orbs about the dim room. Tory stood in the far corner, away from the two dozen or so mourners who had called to pay respects to someone they’d barely known. None of it seemed real to him. Even while the undertaker had prepared Joseph’s body for the wake behind the parlor doors, a potent emptiness had gripped Tory.

Clair carried on as badly as his mother. She kneeled at the open coffin by Joseph’s head and dabbed at her eyes, a pointy finger poking under her handkerchief. Her knees must have been adhered to the prayer kneeler, for she remained there a good half hour. The seething hatred that Tory had harbored for her had vanished. He no longer blamed her for Joseph’s death.

He no longer felt anything. The dizzy confusion and despair that had whirled around his mind yesterday while he stumbled down the twelve flights of stairs (after dozens of frantic failed attempts to get the elevator to work) to find his beloved dead on the sidewalk had left him. He was too numb to feel anything other than stunned nothingness.

The other two boarders, the Scottish man Mr. Dunlop and Mr. Raincliff from Indiana, also attended the wake, their faces drawn and uncertain. And there were the laborers hired to raise the interior of the van Werckhovens’ drugstore. In under a week, they had already grown to respect their overseer. “A man none too averse to gettin’ his mitts dirty,” one of the men had said in a heavy Irish drawl. Death jarred all of them, yet few had had the pleasure to truly know the New Yorker.

Mr. Pilkvist came in from the bakery and set a large tray of pastries on the coffee table next to the ceramic coffeepot. Tory barely compelled himself to gaze through the steam rising from the hot water bath in which his mother had set the pot. Beyond the mist lay the body of Joseph van Werckhoven, a man whose eyes he had never seen before a week ago.

Now he grieved for him as if he were his widower.

Too numb to cry like the women, Tory stood and watched the goings-on as he would a stage play. Even a few of the rugged workmen shed a straggling tear or two from red downcast eyes. But not him. No, for Tory, the stubborn tears failed to come.

Objects, fluctuations in shadows, subtle sounds of conversation or sobs—they were mere echoes from faraway places. Nothing remained tangible to him. The wake went on and on, an endless chain of nothingness, until the last of the laborers left for home while muttering about what would become of the new store, and Mrs. Pilkvist cried into the last of her clean hankies.

The next day, Tory traveled in the hansom with his parents, tailing the wagon driven by the railroad agents transporting Joseph’s body to the train depot. Earlier that morning, Tory had overhead his father telling his mother that he had sent a telegram to Joseph’s family in New York informing them of the calamity. Only a slight wonder about what they might think had skimmed across his mind. None of it was happening.

Clair Schuster had expressed distress that her factory job would not permit her time off for a final farewell. Mrs. Pilkvist’s sobs had increased since yesterday. She insisted they had failed their handsome and promising boarder. He had arrived in Chicago a lively, energetic man, and a week later they were sending him home in a pine box.

At the station, Tory watched, numb and wordless, as the porters lifted the casket from the wagon onto the baggage car that would carry Joseph’s body back to New York City. By tomorrow afternoon, his family would be receiving the casket along with his personal belongings at Grand Central Depot.

No one had mentioned the quarrel from Thursday. Resentments still simmered, but what did any of it matter now? Only the slightest regret for having threatened to oust Joseph eked from his father’s crystal-blue eyes. No one had asked why Tory had gone to see Joseph or why Joseph had taken him to the top floor. It would’ve made sense that Joseph might want to show off the building in which his family was leasing space. The event had happened, unraveling like an abrasive burlap sack.

The porters slid the casket against the far wall of the car, silent and reverent. With a rumbling and final thud, they secured the door shut. It was then that Tory noticed a transformation in himself. His soundless shock was mutating into something new. His throat caught and his eyes burned. Sheer sorrow welled up inside him. He bit down on his anguish. His father, especially, would deplore such an outpouring of grief from his son. Surely his father already suspected that he and Joseph had become lovers.

When they returned home from the train depot, Tory descended from the hired hansom and scurried off without uttering a word. He did not want his parents to detect the tears that singed his eyes. Away from the spread of the city, he came to the Chicago River, half a mile from his home, and stood along the bank. With a sudden tremble, he fell to his knees and sobbed into his palms.

The cold breeze coming from the north chilled the tears dribbling through his fingers. Released of the pressure that had been building inside him since that horrible Thursday evening, he slowly raised his face and stood gazing into the water. The river, too murky for him to see his reflection, drifted past with muddy indifference. Downriver, grain elevators and factories mushroomed around Chicago’s downtown. Already a dozen bridges crossed the river from the near west side. North of the city, the sprawl had leaped west across the river and out of sight, beyond West Town. The Chicago and Milwaukee Railroad tracks paralleled the river along the west bank and veered sharply westward, heading off to a world only glimpsed in dime novels and travel guides. He remembered seeing farms dot the horizon as a boy, where his eyes now traced the tracks. One of his favorite lines from Walt Whitman weaved through his mind:

But I do not undertake to define thee, hardly to comprehend thee,

I but thee name, thee prophesy, as now,

I merely thee ejaculate!

He supposed it was impossible to find that kind of love again. Wasn’t that why men like Whitman wrote poetry, because of love’s utter unattainability? Tory’s kind of love existed only in romantic fiction and within the confines of idyllic and cloaked verses. Death’s snatch had made sure of that.

Why did Joseph allow it to happen? And so soon after their meeting? Their love had only begun to bloom. Another shudder of sobs overtook Tory. His shoulders grew heavy and tossed him forward, as if the city behind him had knocked him down. Weakened, he wiped his throbbing eyes with the back of his hand and inhaled the nippy air, thick with smoke from the factories abutting the coal yards upriver on Goose Island.

Through his damp eyelashes, he watched the red sun set over the western sprawl of the city, a ball of fire descending into oozing expanse. The river transformed to a brownish red, like molten lava. He stepped back. Even the illusion of fire upset him.