Against the Day (8 page)

Worst of all, Lew’s adored young
wife, Troth, when she found his breezy note, headed straight for the interurban
and up to Chicago, intending to plead with him to come back, though by the time
she got off at Union Station, reflection to the pulse of the rails had done its
work.

“Never more Lewis, do you understand,
never under the same roof, ever.”

“But what are they saying I did? I
swear, Troth, I can’t remember.”

“If I told you, I would have to hear
it once again, and once has already been more than enough.”

“Where’ll I live, then?” All through
their long discussion they had been walking, walkers in the urban unmappable,
and had reached a remote and unfamiliar part of the city—in fact, an
enormous district whose existence neither, till now, had even suspected.

“I don’t care. Go back to one of your
other wives.”

“God! How many are there supposed to
be?”

“Stay here in Chicago if you like,
it’s all the same to me. This neighborhood we’re in right now might suit you
perfectly, and I know
I’ll
never
come here again.”

In an ignorance black as night, he
understood only that he had struck at her grievously, and that neither his
understanding nor his contrition would save them. By now he could not bear her
woundedness—the tears, through some desperate magic, kept gelid at her
lower lids, because she would not let them fall, not till he had left her
sight.

“Then I’ll look for a place here in
town, good suggestion Troth, thank you
. . .
.
” But she had hailed a hansomcab, and climbed in without looking back,
and was quickly borne away.

Lew looked around. Was it still
Chicago? As he began again to walk, the first thing he noticed was how few of
the streets here followed the familiar grid pattern of the rest of
town—everything was on the skew, narrow lanes radiating starwise from
small plazas, tramlines with hairpin turns that carried passengers abruptly
back the way they’d been coming, increasing chances for traffic collisions, and
not a name he could recognize on any of the streetsigns, even those of
bettertraveled thoroughfares
. . .
foreign
languages, it seemed. Not for the first time, he experienced a kind of
waking
swoon,
which not so much propelled as allowed him entry into an urban
setting,
like
the world he had left but differing in particulars which
were not slow to reveal themselves.

Occasionally a street would open up
into a small plaza, or a convergence with other streets, where pitches had been
set up by puppeteers, music and dance acts, and vendors of
everything—divination books, grilled squabs on toast, ocarinas and
kazoos, roast ears of corn, summer caps and straw hats, lemonade and lemon ice,
something new everyplace he turned to look. In a small courtyard within a
courtyard, he came upon a group of men and women, engaged in slow ritual
movement, a country dance, almost—though Lew, pausing to watch, was not
sure what country. Soon they were gazing back, as if in some way they knew him,
and all about his troubles. When their business was done, they invited him over
to a table under an awning, where all at once, over root beer and Saratoga
chips, Lew found himself confessing “everything,” which in fact wasn’t
much—“What I need is some way to atone for whatever it is I’ve done. I
can’t keep on with this life
. . . .
”

“We can teach you,” said one of them,
who seemed to be in charge, introducing himself only as Drave.

“Even if—”

“Remorse without an object is a
doorway to deliverance.”

“Sure, but I can’t pay you for it, I
don’t even have a place to live.”

“Pay for it!” The tableful of adepts
was amused at this. “Pay! Of course you can pay! Everyone can!”

“You will have to remain not only
until you learn the procedure,” Lew was informed, “but until
we
are sure of you as well. There is a
hotel close to here, the Esthonia, which penitents who come to us often make
use of. Mention us, they will give you a good discount.”

Lew went to register at the tall,
rickety Esthonia Hotel. The lobby clerks and the bellmen on duty all acted like
they’d been expecting him. The form he was given to fill out was unusually
long, particularly the section headed “Reasons for Extended Residence,” and the
questions quite personal, even intimate, yet he was urged to be as forthcoming
as possible—indeed, according to a legal notice in large type at the top
of the form, anything less than total confession would make him
liable to
criminal penalties.
He tried to answer honestly, despite a constant
struggle with the pen they insisted he use, which was leaving blotches and
smears all over the form.

When the application, having been
sent off to some invisible desk up the other end of a pneumatic housetube, at
length came thumping back handstamped “Approved,” Lew was told that one of the
bellmen must conduct him to his room. He couldn’t be expected to find it on his
own.

“But I didn’t bring anything, no
luggage, not even money—which reminds me, how will I be paying for this?”

“Arrangements are in place, sir.
Please go with Hershel now, and try to remember the way, for he won’t want to
show it to you again.”

Hershel was large for one of his
calling, looking less like a uniformed jockey than an expugilist. The two of
them scarcely fit into the tiny electric elevator, which turned out to be more
frightening than the worst carnival ide Lew had ever been on. The blue arcing
from loosely dangling wires, whose woven insulation was frayed and thick with
greasy dust, filled the little space with a strong smell of ozone. Hershel had
his own notions of elevator etiquette, trying to start conversations about
national politics, labor unrest, even religious controversy, any of which it
might take an ascent of hours, into lofty regions no highiron pioneer had yet
dared, even to begin to discuss. More than once they were obliged to step out
into refusefilled corridors, negotiate iron ladders, cross dangerous catwalks
not visible from the streets, only to reboard the fiendish conveyance at
another of its stops, at times traveling not even vertically, until at last
reaching a floor with a room somehow cantilevered out in the wind, autumnal
today and unremitting, off Lake Michigan.

When the door swung open, Lew noted a
bed, a chair, a table, a resonant absence of other furnishing which in
different circumstances he would have called sorrowful, but which here he was
able, in the instant, to recognize as perfect.

“Hershel, I don’t know how I’m
supposed to tip you.”

Hershel holding out a banknote,
“Reverse tip. Bring me a bottle of Old Gideon and some ice. If there’s any
change, keep it. Learn frugality. Begin to see the arrangement?”

“Service?”

“That, maybe some conjuring too. You
disappear like an elf into the woodwork, the more professionally the better,
and when you reappear, you’ve got the hooch, not to mention the ice, see.”

“Where will you be?”

“I’m a bellhop, Mr. Basnight, not a
guest. There ain’t that many places a guest can be, though a bellhop can be
just about anywhere in the establishment.”

Finding bourbon for Hershel was a
breeze, they sold it here out of every streetdoor from drygoods shops to
dentist’s offices, and they all waved away Hershel’s greenback, being strangely
happy for Lew just to start a tab. By the time he tracked down the bellhop
again, the ice had all melted. Somehow this got back to Drave, who, deeply though
perhaps unhealthily amused, struck Lew repeatedly with a “remembrance stick.”
Taking this as acceptance, Lew continued to perform chores assigned him, some
commonplace, others strange beyond easy reckoning, transacted in languages he
didn’t always understand, until he began to feel some approach, out at the
fringe of his awareness, like a streetcar in the city distance, and some
fateful, perhaps dangerous, invitation to climb aboard and be taken off to
parts unknown
. . . .

Through the winter, though it seemed
like any Chicago winter, that is a subzerodegrees version of Hell, Lew lived as
economically as possible, watching his bank account dwindle toward nothing,
haunted both sleeping and waking by unusually vivid reveries of Troth, all
stricken with a tenderness he had never noticed in their actual life together.
Out the window in the distance, contradicting the prairie, a mirage of downtown
Chicago ascended to a kind of lurid acropolis, its light as if from nightly
immolation warped to the red end of the spectrum, smoldering as if always just
about to explode into open flames.

Now and then, unannounced, Drave
showed up to review Lew’s progress.

“First of all,” he advised, “I can’t
speak for God, but your wife is not going to forgive you. She’s never coming
back. If that’s what you thought the payoff here was going to be, you need to
reevaluate.”

The soles of Lew’s feet began to
ache, as if wanting to be taken all the way to the center of the Earth.

“What if I didn’t care what it took
to bring her back?”

“Penance? You’ll do that anyway.
You’re not Catholic, Mr. Basnight?”

“Presbyterian.”

“Many people believe that there is a
mathematical correlation between sin, penance, and redemption. More sin, more
penance, and so forth. Our own point has always been that there is no
connection. All the variables are independent. You do penance not because you
have sinned but because it is your destiny. You are redeemed not through doing
penance but because it happens. Or doesn’t happen.

“It’s nothing supernatural. Most people
have a wheel riding up on a wire, or some rails in the street, some kind of
guide or groove, to keep them moving in the direction of their destiny. But you
keep bouncing free. Avoiding penance and thereby definition.”

“Going off my trolley. And you’re
trying to help me get back to the way most people live, ’s that it?”

“ ‘
Most people,
’ ”
not raising his voice, though something in Lew jumped as if
he had, “are dutiful and dumb as oxen. Delirium literally means going out of a
furrow you’ve been plowing. Think of this as a productive sort of delirium.”

“What do I do with that?”

“It’s something you don’t want?”

“Would you?”

“Not sure. Maybe.”

·
    
·
    
·

Spring arrived
, wheelfolk appeared in the streets
and parks, in gaudy striped socks and longbilled “Scorcher” caps. Winds off the
lake moderated. Parasols and sidelong glances reappeared. Troth was long gone,
remarried it seemed the minute the decree came down, and rumored now to be
living on Lake Shore Drive someplace up north of Oak Street. Some vicepresident
or something.

One mild and ordinary workmorning in
Chicago, Lew happened to find himself on a public conveyance, head and eyes
inclined nowhere in particular, when he entered, all too briefly, a condition
he had no memory of having sought, which he later came to think of as grace.
Despite the sorry history of rapid transit in this city, the corporate neglect
and high likelihood of collision, injury, and death, the weekdaymorning
overture blared along as usual. Men went on grooming mustaches with graygloved
fingers. A rolled umbrella dented a bowler hat, words were exchanged. Girl
amanuenses in little Leghorn straw hats and striped shirtwaists with huge
shoulders that took up more room in the car than angels’ wings dreamed with
contrary feelings of what awaited them on upper floors of brandnew steelframe
“skyscrapers.” The horses stepped along in their own time and space. Passengers
snorted, scratched, and read the newspaper, sometimes all at once, while others
imagined that they could get back to some kind of vertical sleep. Lew found
himself surrounded by a luminosity new to him, not even observed in dreams, nor
easily attributable to the smokeinflected sun beginning to light Chicago.

He understood that things were
exactly what they were. It seemed more than he could bear.

He must have descended to the
sidewalk and entered a cigar store. It was that early hour in cigar stores all
over town when boys are fetching in bricks that have been soaking all night in
buckets of water, to be put into the display cases to keep the inventory
humidified. A plump and dapper individual was in buying domestic cheroots. He
watched Lew for a while, just short of staring, before asking, with a nod at
the display, “That box on the bottom shelf—how many coloradoclaros left in
it? Without looking, I mean.”

“Seventeen,” said Lew without any
hesitation the other man could detect.

“You know not everybody can do that.”

“What?”

“Notice things. What was that just
went by the window?”

“Shiny black little trap, three
springs, brass fittings, bay gelding about four years old, portly gent in a
slouch hat and a yellow duster, why?”

“Amazing.”

“Not really. Just, nobody ever asks.”

“You had breakfast?”

In the cafeteria next door, the early
crowd had been and gone. Everybody here knew Lew, usually, knew his face, but
this morning, being transfigured and all, it was like he passed unidentified.