The Fifth Heart (66 page)

But Henry James’s thoughts and feelings are hidden behind an even thicker layer of psychic armor. Like Holmes, James has created himself—the artist Self, the Master Self, the married-only-to-his-art bachelor Self—out of whole cloth and through sheer effort of will, perhaps following John Keats’s dictum of “That which is creative must create itself.” But unlike the detective, James has attempted to hide the core of himself even from himself. Every word he has ever written—in letters, introductions, and fiction—threatens to reveal something, however ephemeral, that the writer does not want revealed. His self-discipline in avoiding such revelations has been painfully effective. His success in keeping his inner thoughts and his reasons for most of the decisions in his life secret has led us to this point where we can only stand outside that tightly banded and seemingly contradicted construct that is Henry James and wonder at his choices.

At any rate, James has chosen to follow Holmes to Chicago and I ask his pardon and yours for jumping ahead a couple of days in the strict chronology of the tale before doubling back to earlier events.

On their second day in Chicago, Sherlock Holmes insisted on taking Henry James on a brief morning excursion tour by boat of the new White City of the Columbian Exposition. The small steamship left from a pier in downtown Chicago not far from the hotel where they were staying. While never stopping at the Exposition and carefully avoiding the huge pier with its automated people-mover still under construction and extending far out into the lake from the World’s Fair site, the tour gave gawkers a ninety minute glimpse of the Exposition structures from Lake Michigan.

“I’m not sure of the purpose of this outing,” James said as he stood near Holmes at the starboard railing of the noisy little tour boat. The modern, three-decked steamship with rows of seats on each of its roofed levels could safely carry about 300 people—the ship was named
Columbus
and would be a ferry to the Exposition after the official opening on May 1, coming and going every hour to carry new revelers to the Exposition grounds and exhausted fairgoers back to their downtown hotels—but today there were about fifty people aboard to take the short scenic cruise down to Jackson Park, and with the exception of James and the almost always impassive Holmes, all aboard seemed profoundly excited about the simple act of glimpsing some unfinished buildings.

“I’m showing you the future,” said Holmes.

There had been a haze along the lakeshore when the tour boat left the downtown Chicago pier but now, as they approached the Jackson Park area which held the Fair, the haze lifted and the sunlight took on an almost personal presence, warming the tourists and illuminating everything along the shoreline as if a huge searchlight had been trained on it. James knew that, technically, Jackson Park had been a southern extension of Chicago proper—away from the shore, 63rd Street had boasted a few shops and homes already—but this square mile of lakefront now housing the Exposition had been the worst sort of swampy, sandy, dead, and desiccated place, unwanted even by the land speculators who’d hurled the boundaries of Chicago further and further out onto the prairie following the deliberate extensions of the city’s railroad system miles beyond the edges of the existing Chicago.

America’s newspapers, for almost two years, had enjoyed telling the tale of how the famous eastern architects—the best in the nation—chosen by the Exposition czar Daniel Hudson Burnham, had been horrified to learn that under a foot of black soil all throughout the swampy islands of this Jackson Park site, construction diggers would encounter only more unsettling sand and super-saturated soil. Burnham had been asking these famous architects to design what would, for the duration of the Exposition, be the largest structures in North America (and, when Mr. Ferris’s Wheel would be completed in June, the tallest) on mud—quicksand, really—rather than on the bedrock these architects were so used to in New York and elsewhere in the East.

It took about an hour for carriages to travel from downtown Chicago to the Fair site in Jackson Park, less time for the many yellow rail-cars—called “cattle cars” by the Exposition-savvy Chicagoans—that had been laid on to take the special spur line south straight to Jackson Park and the gates of the Fair. When speculators had refused to rent or sell airspace over the avenues leading south to the Fair for less than 100% profit for themselves, the railroad execs had designed the elevated special rail line to the Fair with its constant stream of yellow cars tailored to fit down the narrow north-south alleys where no air-space needed to be purchased.

It took the
Columbus
tour boat about twenty-five minutes to reach the Fair site in Jackson Park.

“Good heavens,” said James.

In almost three decades of living and traveling abroad, James had seen enough architectural wonders that most of the new structures that Americans seemed so proud of seemed small or ugly or far too utilitarian in comparison to the millenniums of beauty he’d seen in Europe. But the White City was something totally new to him. For a moment he could only grip the rail and gawk.

“My heavens,” he said again after a breathless moment.

What had been swampland had been transformed into more than a square mile of white stone walks, countless white buildings of immense and staggering size, soaring sculptures, giant domes, gracefully arching bridges, green lawns, a forested island, and fields of flowers.

The daylight on the white buildings seemed to make the White City incandescent. James found himself squinting. Downtown Chicago was a relatively new city—most of the buildings had been built since the terrible 1871 fire—but now the author realized that it was a dark, dirty, Black City compared to the vision before him. In Chicago itself, dark brick buildings grew ever taller to block the light from reaching the shorter buildings and sidewalks all around them. The cavernous streets were made even darker by the tracks for the elevated trains running overhead. Except for the rare buildings facing Lake Michigan, Chicago was a box-canyon city of darkness, dirt, noise, and grime. James knew that his beloved London was equally dirty—or more so—but at least it had the good grace to hide its filth in the thick, dangerous coal fogs a good part of the year.

Quiet until now, Holmes suddenly started playing the part of tour guide.

“There are fourteen of those so-called Great Buildings in the White City. The huge one we’re approaching now is called the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building and encloses one point three million square feet of space. The roof itself is a clear span some three hundred sixty-eight feet long and two hundred and six feet high. It alone had thirteen acres of surface to paint. Besides the Great Buildings, there are two hundred more buildings in the White City, including one representing each of the forty-seven states in the Union plus all territories.”

James smiled, amused at having his own tour guide with a British accent. Some were edging closer along the railing to hear what Holmes was saying.

“When President Cleveland turns on the switch on the first of May,” continued Holmes, either not noticing or simply ignoring the other listeners, “the White City’s dynamos will provide three times the total amount of electric power available in Chicago and more than ten times that provided for the eighteen eighty-nine Paris Exposition. The White City has more than a hundred and twenty thousand incandescent lights, and seven thousand arc lights to illuminate its boulevards, grounds, pathways, and fountains. There will be very few if any dark corners in the White City and the designers have hired their own police force—the two thousand members of the Columbian Guards—not only to apprehend those who have committed crimes or disturbed the civic peace but to stop those crimes
before
they occur. No other city in Europe or America has what I consider so enlightened a law-enforcement policy.”

“What’s the huge but ugly and unfinished thing there, some distance north and a bit west of the big Manufactures Building?” asked James, gesturing with his walking stick. “It looks as if they are building the hull for Noah’s Ark.”

“That’s to be the White City’s answer to the Eiffel Tower that was such a hit at the Paris Exposition,” said Holmes. “A certain Mr. Ferris is building a giant Wheel that theoretically will carry up to forty people in each of its thirty-six railcar-sized viewing cabins. The passengers will ascend some two hundred sixty-four feet into the air at the height of each revolution, giving—Mr. Ferris and the White City designers promise—an amazing view of Lake Michigan, the White City including the Midway Plaisance with all of its other diversions, and the Chicago skyline. What you see there is only the framework of the bottom half of the huge Wheel. They’ll soon be bringing in and mounting an axle that I’m told is the heaviest piece of steel ever constructed on this continent. The axle shaft will be some forty-five feet long and will weigh forty-six tons and will have to be strong enough to bear a burden of the Wheel’s own steel, carriages, and people that will amount to six times the weight of some cantilever bridge across the Ohio River at Cincinnati that you Americans seem so proud of. The White City people and Mr. Ferris keep promising that the great Wheel will be finished and carrying passengers by the middle of the summer, if not earlier.”

“Where did you get all this information, Holmes?” said James. “All these facts and figures don’t sound like you.”

Holmes turned his back on the White City, leaned back against the railing, and smiled. “It’s true that I’m often arithmetically challenged, as my brother Mycroft has pointed out on far too many occasions. But I had a private tour yesterday while you were in the hotel talking to the ailing Mr. Clemens and even a dullard can remember certain facts for a short period of time. It’s how one passes through Cambridge or Oxford with Honors, as I’m sure you know.”

James watched the White City as the
Columbus
made a wide, cautious arc around the 2,500-foot-long pier extending into Lake Michigan, its surface covered with workers and carts as the linear and then circular Movable Sidewalk took its final shape down the center of the wide pier.

“It will cost ten cents to ride on the Sidewalk the length of the pier where the steamers will drop you the half-mile to the entrance of the Exposition,” said Holmes without turning around to look at it. “My guess is that most first-time visitors will try it just for the novelty.”

James marveled at the tidy lagoons and carefully groomed streams that ran through the entire White City. Someone had turned a muck-ridden swamp into a cleaner, wider, airier version of James’s beloved Venice.

“All in twenty-one months,” said James as if reading the author’s mind. “Where then will President Cleveland be doing his opening speech and switch-turning?”

Holmes turned and pointed with his own stick. “Do you see through the pillars or the Peristyle to that dome rising at the far end of the Lagoon—right in line with that canvas-shrouded tall pedestal that will be revealed as Saint-Gaudens’s huge Statue of the Republic? Yes, the one with the four pavilions, one at each corner. That is the Administration Building where the president and other dignitaries will speak. They will be facing this way—east, toward the Lake and the statue—and one assumes that all the concourses will be flooded with excited American humanity, all the way back to the Peristyle gates.”

Holmes handed James a small, folding telescope. The author put the object to his eye, brought the dome into focus, and said, “Are those angels on the upper promenade of that Administration Building . . . right below the dome?”

“Eight groupings of angels, actually,” said Holmes. “All trumpeting the victory of Peace, although I fear they may be a bit overly optimistic about that reality. Besides hundreds of incandescent lights outlining the upper reaches and dome of the Administration Building at night, that upper promenade you’re looking at is ringed with those huge gas torches designed to illuminate the golden dome.”

“Good heavens,” said James, turning his telescopic gaze on the myriad of what looked like huge marble palaces, each festooned with its own multitude of statuary, pinnacles, towers, arches, entablatures, and wildly decorated friezes. “I’m surprised that the denizens of Chicago won’t wish to move into the White City once the Exposition is over,” he said softly.

“They’d be out of a home after a winter or two, or even after a few months of strong Chicago rainstorms,” said Holmes.

James lowered the telescope. “What do you mean?”

“While there’s plenty of steel and iron—more than eighteen thousand tons of those metals in the Great Buildings alone, I’m told—not to mention wood, most of what looks like white marble to you is actually made of staff.”

“Staff?”

“That’s what it’s called,” said Holmes. “Evidently it’s an exotic composition of plaster, cement, and hemp—or some similar fibrous material—that was sort of painted on or sprayed on to look like permanent stone. All of the Great Buildings, most of the State Buildings, and a vast majority of the statuary and bas relief you see is made of staff . . . in its semi-liquid form a very plastic material, I understand. And lighter than wood. Still, they used more than thirty thousand tons of the stuff to create most of the White City’s structures.”

“Not meant to be permanent?” asked James with a strange pang of disappointment. He found himself, against all reason and odds, taking pride in what his fellow Americans had created in so short a time.

“No,” said Holmes, “although if painted regularly, it might last several years. Left to the elements, all those amazing structures you’re admiring are going to melt and rot like Miss Havisham’s wedding cake in a year or less.”

James handed back the telescope, which Holmes folded and set in his large outer pocket. The
Columbus
made a wide easterly arc and headed back along the shoreline toward the Black City. He was thinking that no nation was better at creating metaphors for itself than America; in this case, the vision of a beautiful, sane, safe, marble future that is all dream and no marble to sustain it.