“Well, let’s hope she hasn’t stood you up.” He went back to his reading.
Paul didn’t understand “stood you up,” unless it meant Julie wasn’t coming. He hadn’t seen her for six weeks. Nor had Cousin Joe. He was going crazy with worry and longing. He hoped he hadn’t made a terrible mistake last night, paying one of the Vanderhoff stable grooms fifty cents to smuggle a note into the house. “I will,” said the groom. “But she may not read it right away. She ain’t been well.”
“She’s sick? What is wrong?”
“I hear it’s female complaints.”
He paced again, twisting his cloth cap. He was still in his work clothes. He’d let his hair grow long, almost to his collar, over the mild objections of Aunt Ilsa.
She isn’t coming, it’s all over, I don’t know what happened, I’ll never see her …
The tiny bell at the front door whirled him around. A girl was silhouetted in a blaze of midday sunshine. Outside, dirty snowbanks were melting.
He recognized her, elated. She hurried down the aisle, darting looks at the clerk and another customer. His heart pounded.
She didn’t look well. Her skin was very like the color of new-fallen snow. Great bluish shadows around her eyes subtly changed their color, dulling the sparkle he remembered. Paul took her gloved hands in his.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes, fine.”
“You got the note.”
“Yes, and no one knows about it except the man who brought it.”
“He told me you have been sick.”
She glanced away. “A nervous condition. I’m getting well.” It might be so, but she seemed to lack the jaunty confidence that he thought was part of her nature.
“Why aren’t you working?” she asked. “It’s Saturday.”
“I begged a few hours off. The brewmaster likes me, he didn’t object. I had to see you. Julie, the ice on the lagoon is gone.”
“The skating club’s closed?”
“Days ago. We must find another way to meet every week. That is why I wrote the note. Do you cycle?” Surely she did; everybody was cycling. America had a mania for it.
“I do, but Mama doesn’t like it. She feels it’s vulgar. Why do you ask?”
“Because I have a plan. You must start cycling in Lincoln Park. You can rent a wheel there, I have already inquired. I will pretend to be your cycling instructor.”
At that she gasped. “My—?”
“Lehrer. Your teacher. What name shall I have? Leopold? Thomas? Sammy? Thomas, that sounds respectable. Thomas the expert wheel man. My teaching, it’s—uh, zuverlässig—” He struggled for the English. “Reliable?” She nodded approval. “Reliable, with utmost courtesy at all times.” He bowed, pulling faces, trying to cheer her. The clerk sidled along the next aisle, whisking a feather duster over the books while he attempted to eavesdrop.
“I will come on Sundays. I can stand outside your house, respectfully, and you can join me there. I will wear clips on my knickerbockers. You can point me out to those inside. My humble attitude. You can even appear to pay me. I’ll return the money.”
She laughed. “Oh, Paul. I don’t know what to make of you and your schemes.”
“I like to get things done. If not one way, then another.”
“You’re scandalous.”
“Oh, no, I don’t make a scandal—never. I will always protect your honor.”
“You misunderstand.” She touched his hand; let her gloved fingers drift across his skin. “I like your daring.”
“Ah. Daring. Wagemutig. Now I see. Thank you.” He grinned. He felt like one of those daredevils he’d read about, the ones who illegally plunged over the Niagara Falls in a barrel. He felt himself plunging, just like them.
“I want to see you, I have to see you.” Now it was his turn to touch her, fingers gently closing on her sleeve. “I cannot stop. Ever.”
She seemed to take heart from his words. Her expression changed, more resolute all at once. He saw the young woman of strong will and bright temperament with whom he’d skated that first day.
Softly, she said, “Nor I.”
The prissy clerk was staring, not a yard away across a book bin. He tap-tapped his duster on the spines. Paul stepped between Julie and the bin, blocking his view. He leaned close to whisper.
“Ich liebe Sie, Juliette.”
“What did you say?”
He blushed. “I don’t have the courage to say it in English.”
“I think I know what it means. I feel—the same thing.”
“Then please, let me pretend to be your cycling teacher.”
“Oh yes. But I don’t think it’s wise for you to come to the house. I’ll tell my parents that I heard about you from a friend who belongs to the Saddle and Cycle Club. That you come well recommended, with good references. Mama will fuss, but I think I can deal with her. I’ll do my best.”
“This will be on Sundays.”
“Yes, Sundays.”
“Soon?”
“We can start tomorrow. I’m so glad you sent the note. You’re brave, Paul. Brave, and sweet—” She was close to tears, but there was happiness, too. “Will you say the words again?”
“Ich liebe Sie.”
As if the limit of his patience had been reached, the clerk opened his mouth to say something. Paul tugged Julie’s arm. The reporter, Mr. Field, was watching, amused. He reached into his vest for a little notebook and pencil.
Outside, they felt a lake wind. They stood in the balmy sunshine with cool drafts from the wet snowbanks blowing over them. Paul’s heart was thundering.
“Will you say it to me?”
“Ich liebe Sie, Paul. If I knew a thousand languages, I’d say it in every one. I love you.”
He was in heaven. The Lorelei singing on her great rock in the Rhine couldn’t have made sweeter music. He knew his life had been changed forever.
Part Five
Pullman
1894
If ye be ill, or poor, or starving, or oppressed, or in grief, your chances for sympathy and for succor from E. V. Debs are one hundred where your chances with G. M. Pullman would be the little end of nothing whittled down.
1894
EUGENE FIELD of the Chicago Daily News
Unless you take decided action at once the riot and rebellion will be entirely beyond your control and much property and blood will have to be sacrificed. … I pray God to guide you and show you the terrible volcano on which we stand.
1894
Message from a Chicago businessman to President Cleveland
38
Joe Junior
THROUGHOUT THAT WINTER, JOE Junior spent less time with his cousin. Paul no longer needed his services as a go-between at Lincoln Park. He and Julie were smitten; they hardly noticed anyone else.
Joe Junior questioned Paul about his plans to see Julie when spring came and the club pavilion closed. Paul grinned and said he’d already concocted a scheme. Joe Junior congratulated him but warned his cousin again: “You damn well better not let old man Vanderhoff find out.”
Joe Junior didn’t mind being relieved of duty as Cupid; he had his own girl to think about. Visiting Roza Jablonec required a trip of almost ten miles out to the model town of Pullman, founded in 1882 as a residential community for five thousand workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company. To reach the town, he had to take a horsecar line part way, then change to another.
He didn’t mind the ride because he didn’t mind being alone with himself. He usually carried a book in his pocket. He liked the solitary pleasure of sitting and reading; always had. He liked sports you could enjoy by yourself. He wasn’t like Carl, he didn’t like playing on teams.
Riding the horsecars south on a Sunday, he would sometimes imagine in vivid detail how it might be that day if he were lucky. Rosie on her back, groaning, pushing herself up beneath him, crying out for him to go into her faster. Then again, it might not happen. It all depended on whether Rosie’s pare
nts, Tabor and Maritza, went out for a while. Joe Junior and Rosie always made love in the house. Their first attempt to do it elsewhere, in the haymow of a livery barn, had ended in discovery by the owner, and flight, moments after Joe took his pants down. Another time, in some shrubbery out in the country, a hornet had stung Rosie twice. That ended the search for a bower of love remote from Pullman.
He didn’t always think of sex on his Sunday morning trips. Sometimes he read and reread difficult passages of some book, until he understood it. Sometimes he speculated about the future of the country, or about his family. Pop, who would never lift his heavy hand from the backs of his employees, his wife, his children. Never curb his lust for control of everything that touched his life. Never change.
And sometimes he would think about Cousin Paul. Paul was a good kid. Young, though. Deplorably green. And a dreamer, a stargazer. Paul thought America was better than the old country. Better than any other place on earth. He thought that in America, nobody schemed and cheated and killed to get what they wanted. Nobody bought off politicians. Nobody treated the ordinary working stiff as a pawn, a chip in a big-money game controlled by a very few players.
Joe continually tried to enlighten his cousin. It didn’t seem to take. And although they’d come to like each other, the cousins argued a lot. Once they’d had a real blowup. After work Joe Junior sometimes stopped at Donophan’s Pool and Billiard Hall on Lake Street. Donophan’s was a noisy, smoky place, popular with a working-class crowd. And they didn’t serve Crown’s beer, only Budweiser from Busch of St. Louis.
At Donophan’s, Joe Junior sometimes played a friendly game of billiards with someone else. He also shot pool alone, against himself, his past performance. Paul asked questions about the game, so Joe had invited him along one night. He chalked his cue, handed another to his cousin, and said, “This isn’t a contest, remember. I’m demonstrating.”
He racked the colored balls. Paul broke them. He couldn’t get the feel of the cue. They played rotation and Joe sank all but one. After three more equally lopsided games, they stepped up to the brass rail of the bar and ordered nickel steins of beer. The pug-nosed bartender eyed them.
“How old are you boys?”
“Old enough,” Joe Junior said. “Just get us the beers, will you?”
“All right, all right, keep your pants on.”
Joe Junior rested his elbows on the scarred mahogany. “I’m spending a dime so we can have the free lunch.”
“But if you paid for it, it isn’t free.”
“That’s right.”
Paul shook his head, perplexed. “America.”
They walked down the bar to the plates laid out on soiled white napkins. There were slabs of rye bread, hard-boiled eggs, salted fish, pickles, a bowl of sauerkraut. Joe Junior ate two mouthfuls of the kraut and handed the fork to Paul, who broke off a bit of fish. Someone else asked for the fork—it served the entire bar—and Paul gave it to him.
The pug-nosed barkeep served their beer. Paul blew foam off and tasted. “It isn’t as good as ours.”
Joe Junior laughed. “Spoken like a faithful wage slave.”
“Joe,” Paul said, serious all at once. “I have read about the trouble at the Pullman factory. What will happen there?”
“Not a damn thing, if anyone’s counting on fair play from the bosses. They’re like all the rest of the capitalists in this country. You’d find out if you’d read some of the—”
“I know, I know. The books. Right now I’m studying a new English grammar I bought.”
“You won’t find the truth in there.”
“You talk so much about the truth, but what is it?”
“Something you don’t want to hear. You don’t want to hear that our glorious freedom isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. You’re free, all right. Free to exploit anyone who’s weaker. Free to make little kids slave on dangerous machines in a filthy dark factory. Free to grow up a slave yourself.”
“Suppose I work in a factory that’s as bad as you say. I am free to quit, isn’t that true also?”
Joe Junior’s laugh mocked him. “Of course. You’ve got all the freedom in the world to walk out, starve in the streets, wear rags—die. You think we’re so special here? We’re not. This America you’ve cooked up is just in your head, Paul. A fantasy. You think every man who works hard and sticks by the rules will end up rich as Pop? The hell he will. A few get to be bosses and they rig the game. They rob and cheat and run your life! That’s the truth.”
Paul was silent, frowning. “Joe, answer this. If America is no better than anyplace else, why do so many people risk everything to come here? Why did I come here?”
Joe Junior threw an arm around his cousin’s shoulders. “I won’t answer the second question, kid. But I’ve got the answer to the first one. We have a man in Chicago named Mike McDonald. Big Mike. He’s a gambler. He’s rich. He runs a joint called the Store, at Clark and Monroe. He also runs the aldermen and politicians in the Democratic Party. Big Mike has a saying. ‘There’s a sucker born every minute.’ ”
“What does it mean—sucker?”
Joe Junior picked up his stein and drained it. “Somebody who believes anything you tell him.”
Paul slammed his stein on the bar. High color rushed to his face. “You think that is what I am? Well—”
“Now wait, I—”
“—thank you very much.” Paul took his foot off the brass rail and stalked away.
Joe Junior chased him; caught him near the front door. “Hey, don’t get sore. I wasn’t calling you a name, I was just trying to explain. Tell you the truth. You asked.”
“The truth you see. I see something else. I see all the people on a ship looking up at the great Liberty statue in New York Harbor, hoping she guards the doorway to a better place than the one they left. I was one of those people.”
Joe Junior sighed. “All right. Let’s leave it. I didn’t mean to make you feel bad.” He offered his hand. “Pals?”
Paul relaxed. The color went out of his cheeks. “Sure. Pals.” They shook. They walked up Lake Street, arms linked. That ended it for the night. But of course it didn’t settle anything.
April came. America was still in the strangling grip of the depression. Ordinary people felt powerless—somehow controlled from afar by forces they couldn’t defeat or even understand. There was much talk of “bosses” and “trusts” and “gold bugs”—distant, sinister cabals manipulating the economy and playing with the lives of poor men, never caring whether they lived or died.
In Ohio, one Jacob Coxey of Massillon had organized several hundred of the unemployed with the intention of leading them on a protest march to Washington. Coxey was a farmer, a devout Christian, Populist, Civil War veteran, and genuine small-town eccentric; he’d named his youngest child Legal Tender Coxey.
A small corps of journalists followed “General” Coxey’s Army as it tramped east through cold spring rains. Spirits didn’t seem daunted by the weather or sore feet, the reporters wrote. A small musical aggregation called the Commonwealth of Christ Brass Band played tunes for marching and singing. A favorite was a parody version of “After the Ball.”
After the march is over,
After the first of May—
After the bills are passed, child,
Then we will have fair play.
Doubtful. Very doubtful, Joe Junior decided.
On the twenty-eighth of April he would be eighteen. He had reached his physical maturity; he would always have the small, slight frame inherited from his father. But his shoulders, arms and legs were thick with muscle. The palms of his hands had grown hard from toil. With the unconscious arrogance of the young, he thought of himself as a man.
That April the man of almost eighteen was unlucky in Pullman two Sundays in a row. Tabor Jablonec went out but his dowdy wife Maritza stayed home.
Tabor was a worried man, like most everyone who worked for George Pullman. Consequently he drank. To get a few glasses of cheap r
ed wine, he had to walk over to the neighboring village of Kensington. By decree of Mr. Pullman, there were no saloons for workingmen in his Utopian town. One small bar in the seventy-room Hotel Florence, named after Pullman’s favorite daughter, served drinks to managers and executives, but the drinks were priced so high, hourly workers couldn’t afford them. Mr. Pullman believed that men who sweated all day were less efficient and productive if they drank at night.
Tabor Jablonec had reason to drink and to fret. He was a carpenter in the Pullman repair shops, where cars were received, refitted, and sent out again. Pullman’s cars could be found on three quarters of the trackage in the United States, but not one car belonged to the railroads. The company operated the cars on contract, hiring its own conductors, porters, chefs. It collected a fee of two cents a mile for repair.
At the start of 1894, Tabor’s hourly wage had been reduced 20 percent, and another 15 percent in late February. After the second cut, Tabor added up the sums he owed his landlord and others, drank half a bottle of red wine on his lunch hour, and did something he’d never done before, or even contemplated. Standing in front of the desk of his foreman, Castleberry, twisting his cap in pale scarred hands, Tabor protested the latest cut.
Castleberry replied in a way that was condoned, even encouraged, by those at the highest levels of the company. He stormed from his chair, knocked Tabor to the floor and cursed him, calling him, among other things, a “dirty ungrateful shit of a Bohunk.” The foreman warned Tabor that one more complaint would cost him his job. As it was, Tabor was punished with a month’s layoff and felt lucky.
“Why don’t you move out of Pullman?” Joe Junior had asked once when Tabor was sitting idle at home. “You shouldn’t stay here, paying these rents, letting them abuse you.”
Tabor replied in his heavy accent, “I got to stay if I don’t want to be out for good. When the company calls men back to work, anybody who ain’t renting in Pullman goes to the bottom of the list.”
Joe Junior’s only comment was a muttered, “Jesus.” Which earned him a look from Rosie’s mousy mother. Maritza Jablonec counted on her Lord Jesus Christ to set Mr. Pullman on the path of righteousness. If not in this life, then the next.