Читать книгу Abbeville - Jack Fuller - Страница 12

EMIL SCHUMPETER WAS NOT A LETTER writer. About the only time he felt the need was to offer condolences upon someone’s passing or to scold Sears, Roebuck. Then he would spend countless hours worrying the language, which never seemed less like his first than when he dipped his pen into the black void of an inkwell. It took a lot to get Emil to confront that abyss.

So when Karl found on his bed a letter in his father’s Saxon hand, he broke the seal with trembling fingers. But instead of heralding death or illness or telling him to come home, it announced that Cristina Vogel had left for Chicago to spend the summer as a seamstress, staying with her mother’s sister, who had escaped Abbeville at nineteen to marry a man more than half again her age. His father thoughtfully included the address.

The news was welcome, but not without complication, coming as closely as it did upon Karl’s evening at Luella’s flat. And oh, what an extraordinary evening it had been. Luella had been more openly affectionate with him than anyone in Abbeville would have dared. When they’d parted, disheveled, Luella had thanked him for having more discipline than she. Still, things had happened under her caresses that before had only happened to him in dreams. He said he would, of course, do the honorable thing. She seemed to find that amusing and sent him on his way.

After receiving the letter Karl went directly to the place where Cristina was staying. The man who answered his knock wore a white dress shirt without its collar and a pair of bright red silk suspenders that secured his pants loosely over his belly like a cartoon barrel around a poor man’s middle.

“No solicitors,” the man said.

“I’ve come to call on Cristina Vogel,” Karl said.

“Oh, you have, have you? I don’t wonder that she already has begun to attract the bees. Unfortunately, you will have to fly honeyless back to your hive.”

“I’m Karl Schumpeter,” he said. “Cristina and I knew each other in Abbeville.”

“Well,” said the portly man, “that is another matter entirely.”

It was not at all clear whether he meant entirely better or entirely worse.

“We were friends,” said Karl. “I think she would tell you that.”

“If you are friends,” said the portly man, “then you must know that she is engaged to be married.”

All Karl was able to manage was a whisper.

“I have been away.”

“Engaged to Harley Ansel,” said the portly man.

Harley Ansel. How could she promise herself to Harley Ansel?

“You seem stricken, young man,” the man with suspenders said. “Why don’t you come in? I’ll get you some water. Cristina is in her room.”

“Maybe I’d better just go,” said Karl.

“If she wants to say hello to you,” the man with suspenders said, “I see no reason why she should not.”

Harley Ansel. Karl had misjudged her, misjudged the reason she had ventured to Chicago, too, pathetically misjudged that.

Cristina entered the room.

“You came,” she said.

“I just heard,” he said.

“I hoped that you would.”

“So you wouldn’t have to tell me yourself,” he said.

“Hoped that you would . . . come,” she said.

She was dressed more stylishly than he had ever seen her. A woman like this could live in the world Karl was now exploring as gracefully as she had in the one they had both left. But it was not to be with him.

“My father wrote me,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “I asked him to.”

“But he didn’t say anything about Harley Ansel.”

Karl tried not to let the name sound bitter, but he could taste it.

“Your father doesn’t know,” she said, sitting down in a big, over-stuffed chair. Karl seated himself across from her. “I told my parents that if they said a word before I was ready, I would never return home.”

“Ready?”

“I needed,” she said, “this one last chance.”

Karl sat back.

“Chance,” he said.

She lowered her eyes to her lap.

“Do you hate me for it?” she said.

“I didn’t even know you liked Harley Ansel,” he said. Then he stopped himself. There was no point doing this to her.

“I didn’t like him,” she said. “Don’t.”

“Well, you sure enough found an odd way to express it,” Karl blurted out.

This time she did not avoid his eyes. She stood right up to them.

“I do not want to marry someone simply because my father thinks well of his prospects,” she said.

Her hands lay crossed in her lap. Karl stood and went to the window, which was hung with brocade. His hand upon the curtain stirred a mote of dust.

“I have felt the same,” he said, “not wanting the life I have waiting for me back in Abbeville.”

“I came to Chicago because I needed to find out what my own prospects are,” she said.

“You want to be a seamstress?” Karl said.

“What is it that you want, Karl?” she said.

He stuffed his hands into his pockets, looked downward again, put his toe into the carpet as if it were loam.

“What I can’t have,” he said.

“Maybe you’re giving up too easily,” she said.

“I’ve gotten a taste of certain things here,” he said.

“Well, then, let’s stay.”

He was sure she didn’t really mean to speak of them as an “us.”

“But at the same time I have felt the pull of home,” he said. “Frankly, Cristina, you have been a big part of that.”

There, he had said it.

“If you do go back, you should bring with you the things from here that you have come to love,” she said.

“And what about you?” he said.

“You could bring me, if you wanted,” she said.

On the street outside the window an ice cart was clop-clopping up the stone. A dog poked his nose against the arm of a boy seated on a stoop. A woman across the way was shaking a tablecloth out an upstairs window.

“I would try,” he said, “if you weren’t spoken for.”

“I came here to find out whether I had any chance of avoiding being pushed into a terrible mistake,” she said.

“What do we do?” he said.

“I guess we should take some time and find out,” she said.

For the next several months Karl spent his days in the chaos of the pit just waiting for the moment he could leave and call on Cristina at her aunt’s. Sometimes they stepped out for dinner, and he could barely control the surge of feeling he had with her on his arm. On a number of occasions they visited the sprawling white World’s Columbian Exposition on the lakefront and witnessed all the marvels of the globe and the colonnaded promise of the future.

It took weeks before they dared to embrace. Then weeks more before she offered her lips. Even then she did not open them as Luella had.

At some point Karl felt compelled to tell Uncle John what was happening.

“We don’t want to go back and work the farm,” Karl said.

“There are other ways,” Uncle John said.

“Abbeville is so small,” said Karl.

“In the center of a very large world,” said his uncle, “and increasingly connected to it. Today the train and telegraph. Tomorrow, who can know? But whatever develops will offer opportunity, opportunity that a man of promise such as yourself is uniquely prepared to seize. Become large in a small place, and eventually you can make the world come to you.”

“But things are so tough right now,” said Karl. “Businesses going under. Banks failing.”

“The very time to be bold,” said Uncle John.

Over the next several days the two of them studied large books at the Board of Trade that showed patterns of membership. As Karl’s uncle had suspected, Abbeville was a niche waiting to be filled.

With Uncle John’s financial backing Karl got a place on the Board of Trade. Karl signed a contract that bound him to a relationship with Schumpeter & Co. for ten years, during which time he would pay off the loan. Karl’s board seat would allow him to avoid the gouging price every Chicago elevator and trading firm extracted, so even with loans to pay, he could make a decent income for himself and still do better for his neighbors than any of the competition.

Next he planned the construction of a modern grain elevator. Abbeville’s farmers had to take their crops either to Simon Prideaux, the Frenchest of the French, or to distant locations, which cost them precious time and forced them to deal with strangers. The construction of a new facility would be costly, of course, but land was readily available along the railroad, and any bank would see that Karl’s proposition was nothing short of inevitable.

Uncle John took Karl to his own personal banker to do the deal. It was a simple mortgage, structured so that no money moved until Karl needed it and thus no unnecessary interest accrued. At his uncle’s suggestion Karl made the instrument out to cover another property upon which he had secured an option. This was to be the location of a grand new home across the tracks from the elevator.

“Be careful, Karl,” Cristina said.

“Don’t worry,” he said.

“I mean thinking it is easy,” she said. “You have fought a horse and plow. You know the kind of effort this money is based on, the seasons of disappointment.”

They were walking at the lakeshore. A light breeze kept them cool under the sun of a perfect day. It also blew the city smells back inland so that, as they looked outward, to all their senses they might have been five hundred miles from anywhere.

“I think it is time,” he said.

“I’m afraid to ask for what,” she said.

“To go home,” he said, “together.”

She stopped and faced him.

“Are you asking me to marry you, Karl Schumpeter?” she said.

“I know you are promised to someone else,” he said, afraid now to look at her.

“I am promising myself to you now,” she said.

“What about Harley Ansel?”

“He already knows,” she said.

Then she kissed him the way Luella had. Before God she did.

They wed in the church next to her aunt’s flat, honeymooned at a hotel near the Auditorium, where they went to a concert. They also took in the majestic Columbian Exposition one last time. Karl wanted another look at the machine that fired the lights so bright that they said the man in the moon could see them.

Before leaving for Abbeville, he entrusted to Uncle John the funds he had accumulated in the pit.

“I will treat your money as if it were my own,” Uncle John said. “By the way, have you had any further contact with that girl who worked here? What was her name?”

“I wrote her,” said Karl. “She didn’t reply.”

Strictly speaking, this was true. He was afraid to tell him anything more.

“Good,” said Uncle John.