“Tess, please let me—”
She stood up, smoothing her skirt. “Subject closed. Shall we walk? It’s a lovely afternoon.”
He mentioned marriage twice more during the afternoon, but she refused to discuss it. She was cheerful, spoke rapidly, with a flush on her cheeks as she chatted of other things. At five o’clock she said they should go home.
He left her in Detroit’s central square, at the monument to the city’s founder, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, Knight of St. Louis. Behind the empty granite chair she rearranged the red scarf, smoothing the ends over the lapels of his coat.
“My shining knight. Off to chase the Saracens and dragons.”
“The only dragon I know is the green one Oldfield drove. I can’t go unless we settle—”
“Carl, we’ve settled it. Godspeed. Please don’t call or try to see me again. My heart’s breaking already.”
She threw her arms around him, shocking the automobilists and buggy drivers passing in the spring twilight. He felt her tears as they kissed. She struggled to smile as she snatched up the basket and ran for the streetcar.
He withdrew all his savings from the Dime Bank down on Griswold Street, nine dollars. He settled accounts with Mrs. Gibbs, who said he’d been a good boarder, no trouble, he’d be welcome back anytime. He wrapped the red silk scarf around his neck and set off with his grip for Jesse’s house. He found his friend in the backyard, trying to cultivate a flower bed one-handed.
Jesse let the hoe drop and rested on his padded crutch. His left trouser leg looked fatter than the right; it was still bandaged.
“Came to say so long, Jess.”
“So long, Carl. I’ll miss you, you’ve been a true friend. When you looked at me, you never saw a colored man, except maybe the first time. Do you figure to hunt up Oldfield like you said?”
Carl nodded. He pointed at the ashy black remains of the shed. “Will you rebuild that?”
“Sure. I can work sitting down. I’ll sort out the metal first, then use the ashes. Wood ashes make good cheap mulch.”
“What are you going to do for a regular job?”
“Oh, I won’t have trouble. There’s always some kind of nigger work long as white folks don’t want to dirty their hands. Maybe I’ll go to barber college. I could buy a stool, tall, so I wouldn’t have to stand. Got nice steady hands.”
Carl was appalled at the thought of a strong, free spirit like Jess reduced to cutting hair in some colored barber shop. “Hoot Edmunds will always hire you as a riding mechanic.”
“I suppose he might. Can’t ever drive, though. Can’t work those pedals.”
“I’m God damned sorry about it, Jess. I caused it.”
“Oh, hell, no,” Jesse said, waving. “It would have come down on me some other way, because I’m strong for the rights of the laboring man. That’s trouble in this town. You seen Tess?”
“We said goodbye Sunday. She gave me this scarf.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.” He hugged Jess.
It was right to leave abruptly, make the cut swift and clean, although part of him longed to stay. That night he jumped a Michigan Central freight in the yards, headed south.
33. Postcard from Indianapolis
Fading summer wrapped Grosse Pointe in haze and lassitude. Yet August, no matter how hot, no matter how stale, always brought with it the sense of imminent change. No one felt it more than Tess. With the first lightning storm that swept a wave of cold air from the north woods, with the first brown curl at the edges of the leaves, with her father’s impatience to move back to town, she saw a chapter in her life closing.
On a Saturday afternoon in late August, lacking any prospects for the evening, she sat in a canvas sling chair under a beach umbrella on the lawn near the sea wall. A mandolin lay beside the chair. She’d started lessons but couldn’t get interested.
She was writing a letter to Carl, never knowing when or whether she’d hear from him with a proper address. She felt that even if he wrote her once or twice, she would certainly never see him again. Ironically, she was at the same time enjoying a new sense of physical health. The headaches were gone; cramps too; her skin glowed. Father had remarked on it.
Emotionally she was far from whole. Often she cried for hours. The trauma of releasing Carl might fade but would never leave. She knew she couldn’t have held him with the blackmail of love. To do that she’d have committed herself to years of watching his soul shrivel before her eyes as he tried to live as a conventional husband.
She felt a certain nobility and pride over her gesture. At other times she mocked it, asking how warm her high-minded attitude would keep her on long December nights. When she grew too annoyed at her own inconsistencies, she rallied by saying to herself, I am not a saint and he wasn’t one either. God, far from it. He was merely the man she would always keep closest to her heart.
She wished she’d understood him more. She yearned for some all-seeing oracle to explain him. Tell her, for example, whether being the last child of dominant parents contributed somehow to his wayward nature.
She interrupted the letter, turned the sheet of the tablet over to reveal a blank one. She drew on it with her pencil, a musing, almost whimsical smile on her face. She wore an old dress this afternoon, white, with puffed sleeves, and smart new gray stockings and her white summer shoes. She was the pretty picture of one of Gibson’s girls on an outing.
The hot breeze blew stray strands of her hair. Pensively, she looked at what she’d sketched. Three initials, in fancy script:
cTc
Ice tinkling in a pitcher broke her reverie. Giselle, from the kitchen.
“I thought you might like more lemonade, ma’am.” Giselle set the dewy pitcher on the white iron table beside Tess’s tumbler and napkin. Giselle was sixteen; probably thought of Tess as hideously old. Which, in fact, she was getting to be.
“Thank you, Giselle, very thoughtful of you.”
“This came in the afternoon post.”
She handed Tess a gaudy postcard showing a cigar store Indian and the words SOUVENIR OF INDIANAPOLIS. She turned the card over, caught her breath. The message was one sentence, written in an obviously disguised hand but not signed. Have a job with “Barney O”!
She almost cried. For the message that said so little but set so many fears to rest, she was thankful. It made her decision easier to act upon.
“What’s that you’re drawing, ma’am, if you don’t mind me inquiring?” Giselle had Old World courtesy. Her last name was DePere; she was only a couple of generations removed from French farmers who had planted all the gorgeous fruit trees that graced the region.
“Just a monogram, for pillow slips and things.”
“It’s so pretty. So neat and balanced.” Slightly flushed from the heat, or boldness, Giselle then said, “Is it yours?”
Tess looked up, her dark blue eyes unreadable. “Well, it would be if I could find the right man.”
Perplexed, Giselle took refuge in gazing at the lake. A long, graceful yacht had appeared. “Look, ma’am, I believe it’s your father.”
“He’s early. He’ll want supper by half past seven.”
“I’ll tell Cook.” Giselle tripped off through the sunburnt grass.
Tess stretched, considered again what she’d planned to say to him. She firmed her resolve by gazing at the monogram one last time, then tearing off the sheet and crumpling it in a ball. If only the hurt in a heart could be disposed of so easily.
The yacht’s captain docked the Hiawatha smartly with the aid of a local boy who crewed for him. Lorenzo Clymer strode up the pier. His white linen suit and white hat broke the deep blue canvas of the lake. Tess rose, smoothed her skirt, ran her hands over her waist with a pleasurable shiver. How cross he looked. She was about to change that.
“Father,” she said, stepping to the head of the pier as he came stomping along.
“What is it?”
“I want to speak to you. I’ve cha
nged my mind about Wayne. If you’ll give your consent, I’ll marry him.”
PART THREE
PICTURES
The five-cent theaters make schools of crime where murder, robbery, and hold-ups are illustrated. The outlaw life they portray in their cheap plays tends to the encouragement of wickedness. They manufacture criminals to infest the streets of the city. Not a single thing connected with them has influence for good. The proper thing for the city authorities to do is to suppress them at once.
—CHICAGO TRIBUNE, 1907
When Griffith walked, I walked. I fell in, matched strides, asked questions. “I want to put together full-length stories,” he would say. “And I don’t see any sense in always showing so much. For instance, we have a scene in Room A. We finish with it and the characters go to Room B. Why do we have to photograph the people walking from Room A to Room B? Just cut to Room B.”
—MACK SENNETT, King of Comedy
34. Ilsa to the Rescue
Since 1902 the Pennsylvania and New York Central railroads had competed for business between Chicago and New York with extra-fare luxury trains, the Broadway Limited on the Pennsy, the Twentieth Century Limited on the Central. The Broadway’s route was fifty miles shorter, but the Central claimed an advantage, advertised on a signboard at the depot gate.
THE WATER LEVEL ROUTE
—YOU CAN SLEEP—
When the Limited arrived in the great shed of the Grand Central Station, the porter lifted the drop plate that covered the vestibule steps and Ilsa descended, a regal woman wearing a smart suit and a Merry Widow skimmer, black straw with a wide brim and low crown.
“Your bags will be waiting at the counter inside, ma’am,” the porter said.
“Thank you.” Ilsa handed him seventy-five cents, a lavish tip.
Ilsa had told Joe that she wanted to shop in the great stores on New York’s famed Ladies’ Mile—Wanamaker’s at Eighth Street, Siegel-Cooper’s on Eighteenth, James McCreery’s on Twenty-third, R. H. Macy’s at its new location on Herald Square. Even this elicited a sharp challenge:
“You don’t give a hang about shopping. It’s Fritzi taking you there.”
“Is that so terrible, Joe? Am I to feel guilty for wanting to see my only daughter? So far as I know, it isn’t against the law. You and Fritzi are the ones estranged. It’s your doing, and it’s time you got over it.”
His answer to that was the same as his answer to similar pleas in the past—a steely look and silence.
At least he didn’t retaliate by forbidding her, or seeing to it that she had no funds for the trip. Under existing law even the wealthiest women were almost completely dependent on their husbands. Joe gave Ilsa a monthly allowance, which she kept in a separate bank account. He never questioned her about how she spent it.
Fritzi burst through a cloud of steam, waving. How good it was to see her beautiful brown eyes again. Of course, her blond hair remained a bramble patch. And, Ilsa noted with concern, she was wan and desperately thin.
“Fritzi. Liebchen.” They flung their arms around each other.
“I’ve missed you, Mama. Where shall we go first?”
“My hotel, please. After I collect my bags. I want to hear about this play of yours, Macbeth. A friend showed me your name in a New York paper. You were a naughty girl to keep such a thing secret.”
“I wanted it to be a good show, then I was going to tell you. It wasn’t good, it was awful. We closed in a week.”
“I missed my only daughter starring on Broadway. What are you doing now?”
“Nothing to brag on. I am, as they say, between engagements.” Ilsa listened with dismay to her daughter’s recitation of her work during the spring and summer: waitress at a rundown restaurant destroyed by a mysterious midnight fire that did not seem to upset the owner; four weeks demonstrating a potato peeler at Woolworth’s; a just concluded two weeks as a typewriter for an insurance agency.
“They fired me for being slow,” Fritzi said with a shrug and a sigh.
Inside the terminal, a porter with a hand truck moved Ilsa’s trunk and suitcase to the clamorous curb on Forty-second Street. It was September, a day of bright sunshine and bracing air. On the short taxi ride to the Hotel Astor, Fritzi said, “How is Papa?”
“Constantly angry—with me, his workers, the prohibition people, but most of all with himself, I think. The heart attack damaged him more than I realized at first. Not only the illness itself, but the fact that he had it. The undeniable evidence of weakness made him furious. His physician told me in private that it’s a common reaction.”
Fritzi shook her head sadly. “And Carl?”
“Carl writes a letter as often as snow falls in August. It’s better that way. If I knew exactly what he was doing, I couldn’t sleep.”
“What about Joey?”
“What can I say? Joey is Joey. No change.”
“I saw Paul. He gave me a copy of his book. Have you read it?”
“Ja, wunderbar. Who would have dreamed little Pauli would be a writer too?”
At the Astor, an assistant manager showed them up to a one-bedroom suite. Fritzi had offered to share her bed with her mother, but Ilsa politely refused. When the Crowns traveled, they stayed in deluxe hotels. Joe said he’d earned it.
Ilsa unpacked with Fritzi’s help. They hung up her dresses and arranged her hats and shoes in the closet. “Are you tired, Mama? Do you want to rest?”
“No. I would like to have a look at your flat. Last year you wouldn’t show it to me.”
“We never had time. Actually, it’s just one room. But very nice,” Fritzi added hastily, suggesting an opposite meaning. “We’ll take the elevated railroad. It’s cheaper than the cars or subway, and everyone rides it.”
They walked east, buffeted by morning crowds. Everyone seemed surly and in a hurry. Ilsa was winded by the time they reached a covered wrought iron staircase. Over Fritzi’s objections she paid for their tickets. A man with a metal box collected the tickets, and they passed through a ladies’ waiting room to the open platform, thronged with ill-clad New Yorkers who rudely walked in front of Ilsa at every opportunity. She was shocked by a man pounding a vending machine with his fists, as though it were a human enemy.
“Where exactly is this railway taking us?”
“Downtown. This is the Second Avenue line, but it runs along First Avenue below Twenty-third. Here comes the train.”
Ilsa and Fritzi crowded into a claret-colored car with the company name, MANHATTAN, blazoned in gold along the roof line. A man stepped on Ilsa’s foot in his haste to beat her to a seat. She wanted to swat him with her handbag.
Even with the windows open, the car was a stew of smells—onions, sausages, garlic, sweat, cheap perfume, and someone’s flatulence. Ilsa sat with her handbag clutched on her knees, half expecting to be robbed at any moment. The train swayed and shook. Fortunately, the ride was short. As they descended the stairs at their destination, Ilsa studied the street, latticed by sunlight and shadow from above.
“What kind of neighborhood is this?”
“A German neighborhood, Mama.”
“I don’t see any people who look like Germans. I see pawnshops, a tavern—a lot of pushcarts.” One cart piled high with sorry-looking cabbages bore down on her, but Ilsa refused to give ground. The pushcart vendor veered and shouted, “Watch out, lady!”
“Actually, it’s an old German neighborhood,” Fritzi said. “Most of the families have moved up to Yorkville. Now it’s what we call mixed.”
“Mixed what? Drunks and bums?” One was noisily vomiting in the gutter. “Why did you have to rent a room on a street with trains running up and down?” Tiredness edged her voice. She already knew the answer; she didn’t need a detective to find out that her daughter was doing poorly.
“Rooms on the El line are much cheaper,” Fritzi said.
Ilsa was appalled by the filthy, littered sidewalk in front of the building to which Fritzi led her. “Which floor is yours?”
&
nbsp; “The third. That window is mine.”
“The same as the elevated? They can look right in.”
“That’s why the third-floor front is always the least expensive.”
They ascended three dark flights. The room was worse than she’d imagined. No sofa, not even a nice potted palm, just a bed, a wardrobe, an old dresser, one chair. An elevated train approached. Ilsa had all she could do not to shudder as the entire room and its furnishings shook.
“Is there a private bath?”
“It’s private if you lock the door,” Fritzi said blithely. “Half a dozen people use it. I keep a chamber pot under the bed.”
Down on First Avenue a woman screamed, and Ilsa ran to the window. She saw a fat man pursuing someone into an alley, waving a meat cleaver. She felt profoundly depressed.
Seeing this, Fritzi said, “I have a gas ring. There, in the alcove. Why don’t I fix a nice lunch?”
Recalling some of Fritzi’s terrifying and inedible fiascos in the kitchen, she said, “No, dear. You need a hearty restaurant meal, you’ve lost too much weight. We’ll dine out while I’m here.”
Lüchow’s on the south side of Fourteenth Street was the only suitable choice. While a waiter uncorked a bottle of Liebfraumilch, a four-piece band oomphed away with von Tilzer’s “Down Where the Wurzburger Flows.”
“These days you hear all kinds of songs about brands of beer,” Fritzi said. “Has Papa commissioned one yet?”
“No, he thinks they’re cheap. I can tell you privately, he isn’t sorry that ‘Under the Anheuser Bush’ is no big hit.”
Ilsa studied her daughter. She thought Fritzi too careless about her grooming. Of course, she couldn’t afford a fine wardrobe or expensive beauty preparations. Still, she should take better care of herself. Tame her hair, iron her frocks—be a little more feminine. She seemed to have no sense of what an attractive person she was and therefore didn’t care much about appearances.