Abbeville (8 page)

“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.

B
Y THE TIME
K
ARL AND
C
RISTINA RE
-turned to Abbeville, the tough economy was beginning to ease. The price of corn rose, and Karl was ready to capitalize on it. Just as Uncle John had said, the moment to be bold had been when everyone thought you were a fool to dare.

Foremost among Karl's doubters was his father.

“They say you are building a monument to yourself along the right-of-way,” he said, “and a palace to go along with it.”

“One day that elevator will overflow,” Karl said.

“And the house with all the rooms?” his father said.

“That, too,” Karl smiled.

His father rose from his desk, using tightly clenched fists to push himself up. It was the first time Karl had ever noticed the wear of time on him.

“Have you seen Harley Ansel?” Karl's father asked.

“He hasn't been to town since Cristina and I came home,” Karl said.

“I imagined he is pleased to see you so far in debt,” said his father.

“Debt creates wealth,” said Karl. “That is what your brother taught me.”

“Brothers,” said his father.

“I have seen it work,” said Karl.

“You have seen it,” said his father.

“Look at how successful he is,” said Karl.

His father glared at him as if Karl had just broken a perfectly good plow on a rock.

“Be careful of Harley Ansel,” his father said. “He has not been pining away for loss of love. He has been bettering himself. He will go to Urbana in the fall. He plans to become a lawyer.”

“Good for him,” said Karl. “When he returns, maybe I will send some business his way.”

“It won't be business that he'll want from you,” said Karl's father.

E
VERY DAY
K
ARL
and Cristina visited the site of their new house, which Cristina had dubbed the “Karlesium.” First came the hole, then the skeleton, then the skin. One particular morning as the project neared completion, Cristina went to check on the summer kitchen and Karl squatted down to watch a colony of ants that had established itself next to the front walk. The insects bustled in and out of the hill, industrious but seemingly without a purpose, like the men in the pits. So must all of our activity look to the eye of God, Karl thought. And He must want it this way, since He rewards it so richly.

“Those little critters get their building done a little faster than you do,” said a voice behind him.

When Karl had left Abbeville, Fritz had still been singing alto in the children's choir. Now he possessed a basso as big as the pedal tones on the church organ and stood taller than Karl by almost a head. He had also become a bit of a dandy. A boater sat atop his head at a jaunty angle, and he had clad himself in a silk vest, despite the sun.

“Henry said you put in copper wire for electric candles,” he said. “I suppose it'll be electric horses next.”

Karl stepped onto the porch and then into the house, which still lacked a front door.

“I'll show you,” he said, leading the way to the one wall that still stood open to the studs. With his hand he felt the timbers until he found the rubber-encased wire where it went through the beam in a ceramic tube.

“Here,” he said.

Fritz put out his hand hesitantly.

“There's no electricity yet,” said Karl, “but eventually Samuel Insull's reach will extend to Abbeville, and then there will be enough to light every room in the house.”

“You can only be in one room at a time,” said Fritz.

“He makes the electricity out of moving water,” said Karl.

“If he can do that,” said Fritz, “maybe he can turn the shit on my soles into gold.”

Karl looked down and saw a fresh shine.

“You already look like a thousand bucks, little brother,” Karl said and gave Fritz a fraternal shove.

Fritz shoved back with greater force. Karl saw it coming, and braced himself. And yet he was not ready for the fierce honesty of it. He regained his balance and prepared to return the stroke. Cristina reappeared.

“What are you children up to?” she said.

W
HEN THE NEW GRAIN
elevator was finished, German farmers began pulling their business out of Simon Prideaux's. Karl's main competitive advantages were his membership on the Board of Trade and the telegraph line that linked him to the floor. Corn quotes came over it at the same moment they reached Uncle John's office. For the farmers
of Abbeville this dulled the blades of the speculators' scythes. When the work in the fields was done, the men would gather in the steamy little plank-floored office at the elevator. Karl had a chalkboard behind his maple desk. Whenever he heard something important in the dots and dashes, he would swivel in his chair and post a number.

“The prices bob around so,” said Fred Krull. “How can a man know he's being treated square?”