“Not nearly ripe, though,” Mamah said.
“Don’t worry, I got some, fresh pick.” She bent over and yanked up a handful of chives and parsley.
Back in the kitchen and covered in an apron she’d brought, Gertrude wrapped a bright scarf around her head. Mamah’s jaw fell slack at the food she took out of the pillowcase. Guavas. Okra. Limes.
“My land, where did you find those things?”
Gertrude laughed. “Mr. Carlton got friends.” Her voice had a sunny, singsong quality. In that moment Mamah saw a girl more than a woman. How old could she be, twenty-two?
When Gertrude’s hand brought out jars of red and yellow spices, Mamah sighed wistfully. “Mr. Wright prefers simple food. Fish and chicken. Potatoes.”
Gertrude smiled. “Just you wait. I make simple food.”
“We have chickens. Do you want to cook a chicken tonight?”
“Tomorrow. Tonight fish from the river. Mr. Carlton will catch some.”
“Mr. Wright doesn’t like fried things.”
“I won’t fry, madam.”
“Or spices.”
Gertrude wore a look of forbearance. “Just a little ’pon the fish, madam.”
JULIAN CARLTON SEEMED an odd match for his wife. He was about thirty, small but well built and handsome, with a serious demeanor made more so by his immaculate shirt and tie. His English was clipped and British, unlike his wife’s lilting dialect.
In the courtyard outside, Frank was pointing to windows that needed to be washed.
“Let Julian go fish,” Mamah called to him. “He’s going to catch our main course.”
The couple spent that Saturday in a flurry of activity. By two o’clock Julian had caught six fish. Smells of garlic, onions, and curry soon wafted from the kitchen into the living room, where they met the lemon scent of the furniture polish he was spreading over the chairs and table. For the past couple of hours, he had been a blur of motion, polishing silver, pressing linens, climbing up a ladder to clean windows.
At dinnertime Mamah and Frank walked into the living room to find him dressed in a white jacket.
“Madam,” he said, nodding slightly. He escorted Mamah, followed by Frank, to the dining table, where he pulled out a chair for her, then one for him. The napkins he had pressed that afternoon were arranged in elaborate folds on the plates. In a matter of moments he was bringing food in to them on a covered silver tray he’d found, carrying it above his shoulder on his palm. When he returned to the kitchen, Mamah shot Frank a worried look.
“This is too much,” she said. “This house is too small for formalities.”
But when they cut into the fish, it was tender and savory, seasoned in a delicate, unfamiliar way that had to be Caribbean, and when dessert arrived—a simple apple pie but perhaps the best either of them had ever tasted—they looked at each other and grinned.
“Where did Gertrude learn to bake like that?” Mamah asked Julian when he came back to clear the plates.
“I made the dessert tonight, madam.”
“When did you have time? And where did you learn to make an apple pie?”
“I was a Pullman porter, madam, before I went to work for the Vogelsangs. I learned how to do whatever needed to be done.”
“So that’s it,” she whispered when Julian was out of earshot. “That explains the formality, the way he carries the tray. My father always said that Pullman porters are better trained than the world’s best waiters. That white jacket he’s wearing? It’s a porter’s jacket. They buy their own when they go to work for Pullman.”
Her father had been a great admirer of the men who worked the sleeping cars. Julian’s formality suddenly seemed familiar and endearing. His bearing was dignified, respectful, but not fawning.
“And I know where the guavas came from. New Orleans. I’ll bet he has his porter friends bring food up to Chicago for him.”
“Well, the fish couldn’t be better,” Frank said. “What do you think? Should we hire them?”
“If they’ll have us.”
WHILE THE CARLTONS cleaned up inside, Mamah and Frank sat out in the garden under the big oak. It was early June, and the mosquitoes had not yet become a menace. Frank was rarely home now. Midway Gardens was to open June 23, and the place was nowhere near finished. Everyone was in a panic, he told her, from the construction foreman to the orchestra conductor to the investors.
Frank regaled her with stories about life at the construction site, about the sylphlike young woman working as a model for Iannelli, the sculptor, who was creating the mold for the concrete sprites that would decorate the winter garden. He described how she walked every day past the leering union men to the sculptor’s shack, her head held high. How the sculptor faced away as she stripped off her clothes, then turned back when she gave the word. How the girl stood with both arms raised over her head for hours on end holding an imaginary sphere, while the artist shaped her round breasts and muscular thighs from his block of wax.
“What a professional,” Mamah said admiringly.
“I wish Iannelli were half the pro.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Ah, he’s bullheaded. I told him precisely how to change the tilt of her head, and he ignored me. He spent an entire week making another model that was no better.”
“What did you say to him?”
“Words are useless with him.”
Her eyebrows went up when she saw Frank’s face flush. “What did you do?”
He shifted in the slatted chair and played with the crease in his pants. “Poked a couple of holes in the damn thing.”
The air went out of her chest. She waited. As Frank let go of a few details, the scene began to form in her mind. Frank entering the sculptor’s shack alone, raising the cloth covering over the wax model only to discover a new version as wrong as the last. Frank lifting the tip of his cane reflexively and thrusting it into the soft eyes of the figure, then covering up the model for Iannelli to make his own rude discovery.
“I lost my head,” he said.
Mamah considered the battle at hand, judging whether to choose it. Frank was under pressure; everyone at the site was short-tempered. She began to speak but held her tongue. She did not belong in this fight.
“I’ll start over with him on Monday—apologize,” he said.
Mamah relaxed and leaned back in her chair.
The only sound in the evening quiet was the clatter of pans in the kitchen. When the noise ended, she saw the light in the bunk room go on.
“Do you think the Carltons will survive all right?”
“They want the job. Vogelsang says they’re churchgoers. I’m sure they’ll hook up with a congregation.”
“That’s just my point. In Chicago, even in Oak Park, there’s the Colored Baptist Church. They would find friends there, go out in the evening. But up here I don’t know what they’ll run into.”
“They’ll make their way. I’m not worried about it.” He ran his hand along her forearm. “What are you going to do now that you’ll have some spare time?”
She breathed in contentedly. “It’s a luxury to think about.”
“Is Ellen out of the doghouse?”
“You mean will I go back to translating for her? Yes, I will.”
“And all this business of who she authorized to do what?”
“Oh, I’m not letting her off the hook on that account. And heaven knows, I don’t agree with her that women will somehow doom the human race if they go out into the workplace in large numbers. Still, I don’t believe anyone else has written as powerfully about personal freedom or reforming the institution of marriage. What can I say? She’s not perfect, but I can’t forget what she did for me.”
“She should be grateful to you. Ralph Seymour called the office this week and said sales of The Woman Movement have been quite brisk.”
“Pardon me while I gloat.” Mamah chuckled to herself. “That’s good news for Ralph, too. I remember when his head proofreader came t
o him midway through Love and Ethics and said, ‘Mr. Seymour, I have been with you twenty years, but I would rather give up my job than finish this book.’ Ralph had the courage to publish Ellen when others wouldn’t.”
“Ralph agrees completely with us. Ellen Key is the new star of the movement in this country. She never would have gotten to such a place if you hadn’t translated her.”
“Wouldn’t it be nice if she would just acknowledge that? We shall see. I have a couple of essays to do still. But I’m nearly finished with the work she authorized. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about doing something of my own.”
Frank’s face lit up. “Funny you should mention that. I ran into Arnell Potter at the station when I came in this morning. He’s ready to retire. Sell the newspaper. And I was just thinking, why don’t we buy it? Why don’t you become the new editor of the Weekly Home News? You’d be dazzling. I could write a guest editorial every once in a while.”
Mamah began to laugh. “You’re not serious.”
“Don’t say no yet. Just consider it.”
“Ah, the ironies are rich.”
“I know a country paper is small potatoes. But think of the potential. If you wrote your own stories—and you probably would at first—you’d have an official reason to call people up and say, ‘May I come out and look at that prize hog everybody’s talking about?’”
Mamah smiled at the prospect.
“You think I’m kidding, but I’m not. You’d be brilliant at it. The minute people meet you, they’ll love you. Everyone does. And you’d actually care about their damn hogs. I know you. Anyway, it’s something that could work for you, especially if you’re not going to come to Japan for the whole time.”
Mamah had already told him that she would not be going for the duration when the Imperial Hotel work began in earnest. Her mind was made up. Six months had been too long the last time. Frank had not taken the news well, but the fact that he was discussing it meant that the idea was finding some acceptance.
“Look, Mame, if you want your own project, this is a great one. God knows it would change our profile around here. And you don’t have to do it Arnell’s way. Break some new ground—introduce Ellen Key to the ladies of Iowa County. Get them buzzing about erotic love.”
Mamah chuckled again. “Now, there’s a notion.”
“Sleep on it a couple of nights. That’s all I’m saying.”
THE NEWSPAPER IDEA kept her wide awake that night.
Mamah played with the editor role, imagining herself reading the wire service messages as they clacked over the telegraph machine. What could be sweeter than to commandeer the enemy’s ship? But another idea had taken hold in her mind. She believed she was ready to write her own book.
Freedom of the Personality. She said it out loud. Too stuffy for a title, she thought, when it came into her ears. But that would be the gist of it. The book had to be less philosophical than Ellen’s dense prose. Simpler, more direct.
By morning the concept had shaped itself into something new. She woke up knowing she would collect stories of contemporary women, all kinds of women who had struggled against the odds to make authentic lives for themselves.
The idea made Mamah’s heart leap. It was too expensive to travel around interviewing. For now she would make up a sheet of questions to mail to those who immediately came to mind. Ellen Key. Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Else Lasker-Schüler. And others who weren’t famous at all. If things got better between them, she would ask Lizzie, too.
She wouldn’t lie, though. She’d tell about more than the triumphs. She would write about the pitfalls—the way some women mistook sexual freedom for true selfhood. She would write about walls up ahead that were waiting to be hit. The mistakes. The guilt and regret. Not just the chances seized but the chances missed.
The problem with Ellen’s books was that they were too philosophical, with few real-life examples. What would she have given back in Berlin to read true stories of other women’s journeys toward personal freedom? Everything. If she could collect real accounts from women who’d gotten past their fears and the scorn and gossip to find their own worth in the world, to author their own futures, how powerful that would be.
She would have to tell her own story, too, though she didn’t know where to begin. For now she would write in her journal simply to get words on paper. She would imagine Else’s face, that’s what she would do, and tell it as if her friend were sitting across from her in the café.
Mamah felt an excitement she hadn’t experienced since she discovered Ellen’s work. Ideas were snapping like sparks inside her head, and she was afraid she might lose them. She ran out of the bedroom to fetch a pen and paper from her office and nearly knocked Julian to the ground, so surprised was she to find him standing quietly in the hallway, straightening a Japanese print.
CHAPTER 48
JUNE 23, 1914
BREAK OUT THE BEADED DRESS.
F.
The telegram arrived the day before her departure for Chicago. She had told Frank she would wear the beaded dress on the twenty-seventh. What he didn’t know was that the gown he’d bought her in Italy had long since been “broken out.” During the past month, she had put on the slip and gauzy beaded overdress a dozen times, turning in front of her bedroom mirror to assess her backside, then her silhouette, debating whether to wear it to the Midway Gardens opening. In the four years since he’d given it to her, the dress had hung unworn in a series of closets while her body rearranged itself.
Mamah had always hated vanity in middle-aged women. She and Mattie had promised each other they would let age take them gracefully, without the henna and powder. But looking at her reflection now, she hated what she saw. It wasn’t the dress, which was loose and forgiving. It was the softer, less-vivid, slightly out-of-date woman who stared back at her. At forty-five, she didn’t mind gray hair coming in or the crease between her brows. What she despised was the pull of gravity, because it made her look tired, while inside she felt young, with the crispest clarity of mind she’d known since she was twenty-five.
She tugged off the dress, folded it, and put it in her suitcase. How she looked wasn’t the important thing. It would be Frank’s night, anyway—a celebration long overdue.
Frank had not been home at all for two weeks, and only intermittently for the month before that. They had missed observing each other’s birthdays. In the last days before the opening, he wasn’t even returning to his pied-à-terre, sleeping instead on a pile of moving quilts and who knew what at the Gardens. He was working into the wee hours until he couldn’t anymore, then rising at six to work again.
During his last visit home, he had paced the floor, spilling out his worries. The developers hadn’t been able to raise adequate funds to cover building costs, but, overconfident, they had begun the construction anyway. They’d paid him five thousand dollars but now they were talking about settling the rest of his fee with stock. Poor Mueller, the contractor, had been forced to break the news to his workers on Friday that their wages for the week would be late.
Still, the place was going up, he told her, by God, it was going up. And what a cast of characters was on-site every day—painters, sculptors, master tradesmen, engineers, musicians, chefs. All of them talented, all trying to make their mark. Between the artists and the union reps, the place was crawling with more prima donnas than an opera company reunion. Iannelli was but one. Frank had the creeping fear that he’d made an awful mistake in hiring a couple of well-known Modernist painters to do murals. He’d given them general guidelines and specific colors to use. What he’d seen so far, however, was all wrong.
“The murals are going to fight the architecture,” he told her. “I know it already.”
“Then stand your ground,” Mamah said. “You’re worn down, but now is not the time to falter, not on a job this important. This is the first time the public will really experience one of your buildings. It’s going to open the eyes of thousands—millions—over time. Why use murals tha
t don’t make you happy? You can do them later.”
“You’re right, of course.” Frank squeezed her hand.
She knew he didn’t need her advice. It took immense ego to build an enormous structure the likes of which had never been seen before, all the while assuring doubters that it would turn out brilliantly. But it took courage and vision, too. What he needed was her support, and she gave it without condition.
Break out the beaded dress. She laughed out loud. With bricklayers and angry artists to deal with, he was planning each little detail of opening night, down to what Mamah would wear. It was pure Frank, orchestrating every bit of the experience. And in his way, Frank was telling her what they both knew—the opening was a coming-out for them. It would be the unveiling of his first public building in Chicago, and their first public appearance together since the scandal. He wanted the whole thing, including her, to be perfect.
WHEN SHE ARRIVED in Chicago, she left her bags at the coach house and hopped on the El train to the south side. She got off at Fifty-ninth and Jackson Park, the same stop she had exited so many times when she was attending classes at the university. Looking at the young people passing her along the Midway Plaisance, she imagined what a curiosity she must have seemed ten years before, when she was studying the novel with Robert Herrick. She had thought of the students as peers. But these college kids—had she grown hopelessly old, or were they babies even then and she just hadn’t noticed?
In the distance, she saw that the two square towers anchoring either end of the long yellow-brick building had risen higher since she was last here. Frank had stacked up more balconies, one on top of another, in a feat of derring-do. He called these towers belvederes, and she could see that the balconies would offer fine views. Above the top floor, a cantilevered roof seemed to float free of the building beneath it.
As she got closer, she saw how complex the surface texture of the building was. How playful. Every plane seemed to be decorated in some pattern, from the yellow-brick-and-mortar base to the concrete-block walls above that were patterned like woven fabric. To announce the carefree atmosphere of the space within, Frank had stationed statues of sprites on either side of the main entrance, their heads bent down. They seemed to wink at Mamah as she passed through the entry.