American Dreams (3 page)

From another room a girl called out, 'Ma? I need the pot.'

'Hettie,' the widow said. 'Broken ankle. Tools are in the shed.'

'Yes, ma'am, I'll get right to it while it's still light.' Carl gave her one of the warm smiles that came naturally to him. He was good-looking in an unobtrusive way. He had his father's short legs, his mother's long upper body; he resembled lisa rather than the General. His hair was thick like hers before it grayed. His brown eyes shone bright like his sister's.

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No longer suspicious, the woman with the lined face smiled back.

'Knock when you're done.' She closed the door as her daughter bleated again.

Carl crossed the yard. The cottage was set on a little rise, with a spectacular view of the graying valley over intervening rooftops. The sky was clear and filled with flawless colors -- dark blue shading down to lavender, then vivid red along the palisades. The air was cold and bracing to breathe.

He found the damaged two-wheeler in the shed. It was a black Wight Safety Cycle, manufactured in Dayton by the brothers who'd started in that business while they pursued their studies of aeronautics. Now the Wrights enjoyed worldwide fame and prosperity as a result of their flights at Kitty Hawk and elsewhere; they no longer needed to make or repair bicycles. Aeroplanes and all the mechanical wonders of the age fascinated Drifter 11

Carl. He just didn't have the opportunity, or the wherewithal, to learn about them.

He crouched with one hand resting on the bicycle's triangular frame.

After a minute of study he searched in the shed, found a shelf of old tools.

He shoved aside a pile of hacksaw blades and files, picked up a wrench and pliers brown with rust. The pliers slipped from his fingers. As he stepped sideways to catch them, his shoulder hit another shelf, tilting it off its brackets and throwing half a dozen empty fruit jars to the dirt floor.

Two broke.

He looked around for a broom. He couldn't find one. He picked up the largest pieces of glass and after a moment's consideration dropped them into an empty nail keg. He was annoyed with himself because he'd never licked an unconscious clumsiness born of great strength, high energy, and an urge to get things done fast. All through his childhood and adolescence, his mother had feared for her fine furniture and dishes. He never meant to damage things, but it happened. Sometimes it left a mess that he didn't know how to clean up. This time it wasn't so hard, a matter of minutes to put the other large pieces in the keg and with his heel grind the smaller ones to gleaming dust.

A dog barked in the distance. Someone played 'My Gal Sal' on a parlor reed organ. For a moment he felt lonely and lost, drifting through life without a plan, a destination, or two nickels to rub together most of the time.

He tried not to think about it as he set to work.

He demounted the front wheel and patched the flat balloon tire, punctured in the mishap. He straightened the bent fork with his bare hands.

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He finished the job in twenty minutes. He didn't want to tell the widow how easy it was, so he wiped his greasy fingers on a rag and walked to the picket fence, gazing at the enormous western sky. The vista brought memories of the years spent in New Jersey during his disastrous college career.

He still remembered vividly the day it had ended. On a Friday in May 1904, Carl's father arrived in Princeton in response to a letter from the university president. The General stepped off the local from New York at two in the morning, grimy, tired, and in short temper. "I do not like to be taken away from business because of your scholastic failings,' he said as Carl conducted him to the Nassau Inn for what remained of the night.

The General was calmer, refreshed with a shave and talc on his cheeks,

^,when he preceded a nervous Carl into the president's office at nine the next morning. Dr. Woodrow Wilson, a lawyer and the son of a Presbyterian cleric, was a prim and austere man whose smile always had a forced 12

Dreamers

quality. Pince-nez on a ribbon only heightened his severity. The General took the visitor's chair. Carl stood behind him, praying this would go the way he hoped.

Dr. Wilson reviewed Carl's record at the university. He had attended for four academic years and still had the status of a junior. Wilson made only passing reference to the accomplishments of the Princeton eleven's star lineman. The president's conclusion was dry and devoid of sympathy:

'Facts are facts, General. I am afraid we have no choice but to suspend Carl until such time as remedial work elsewhere merits his reinstatement.'

Carl wanted to jump up and shout hurrah. He loved the sociability of college, the hard knocks of football, the thrill when Princeton scored on a bright autumn afternoon. But he didn't love academics.

The General placed both hands on the silver head of his cane. "I do want to observe that I've made substantial contributions to this school, Dr.

Wilson.'

'I am certainly aware of it, sir. Princeton is grateful. But we can't afford to mar our reputation with any taint of special privilege. Failing grades are failing grades.' He removed his eyeglasses. 'I'm sorry.'

At the depot afterward, as the New York local clanged and steamed in, the General said, 'Many fathers would disown a son who behaved so recklessly. I did that to your brother Joe and regretted it later. I won't
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repeat my mistake. But neither will I support a son who has failed to repay my investment in his education. You may have a job at the brewery, and earn your keep henceforth.'

It took all of Carl's nerve to say, 'I'm sorry, Pop, I don't want to work in the brewery the rest of my life.'

Carl could see that the words hurt his father, but the General's response was tightly reined anger. 'Where, then, may I ask?'

'I don't know.'

'Well, until you decide, you're on your own. Just don't look to me for help. Is that understood?'

'Yes, sir.'

'You're a grown man, Carl. Matured physically if not in character as yet.' That stung. 'Look out for yourself. Avoid bad companions. Maybe this spell will pass in a few weeks. If so, we have a place for you at home. You mean a great deal to your mother and me, never forget that.'

Father embraced son, the General boarded the car, and the train pulled out. . . .

At the picket fence Carl shook himself out of the reverie. He still believed I

Paul and His Wife

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in all the possibilities represented by the new century and its wonderful new machines. But where in that great landscape of adventure and opportunity did he belong? He hadn't found the place -- maybe never would.

His cousin Paul had faced the same grim possibility for years; he'd confessed it once in a long talk with Carl. Paul found his place, behind a camera. 'You'll find yours unless you give up too soon. But you won't, Carl.

You're not that kind.'

He knocked at the kitchen door to tell the widow he'd finished the job. She paid him, then fed him supper and handed him two blankets.

'You can sleep in the shed if you want. I should tell you that the sheriff and his men are hard on tramps. In the morning I'd advise you to move on.' '

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'Sure,' Carl said, smiling in a wry way. 'I'm used to that.'

3 Paul and His Wife

A day later, across the Atlantic in crowded and clamorous London, Carl and Fritzi's cousin Paul was anxiously pacing on the north side of Derby Gate where it intersected Victoria Embankment by the river. It was Friday; Parliament was not sitting. Most MP's would be found in their offices in the building across the way.

'See them?' Paul asked his friend Michael, a reporter for the London Light.

'Not yet,' Michael called from the corner. He was looking south toward the Underground entrance near Bridge Road, with Big Ben and the Gothic splendor of Westminster Palace just beyond.

Paul Crown was twenty-nine. He was a professional cameraman who filmed 'actualities' -- dramatic events and rare sights from all over the globe. He'd learned his trade in Chicago, working for a profane genius named Colonel R. Sidney Shadow. Before the colonel died he sold the assets of the American Luxograph Company to a British press baron who kept the company name and its star camera operator; Paul had moved his family to London three years ago.

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Dreamers

Paul's camera stood on the curbstone, amid a cluster of reporters and still photographers. There were three other cameras similar to his, belonging to competitors. The WSPU march had been planned for some time, though not publicized. Somehow word of it had reached the authorities and the press.

The man from Pathe said, 'Hey, Dutch, what happens if they toss your missus in the clink?' In America, all Germans were 'Dutch.' The nickname had stuck.

'Then I guess I'll feed the kiddies for a while,' Paul said with a forced grin. He worried about Julie taking part in marches, but he knew better than to ask her to stay home. Paul's wife was an ardent 'New Woman.'

Perhaps it was a reaction to her girlhood in Chicago, when her nervously sick mother had repressed Julie's every impulse toward independence and forced her into a short-lived and loveless marriage.

Michael hurried back from his outpost. 'They just came up from the
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tube. Oh, what a bloody menace to society,' he said with his usual sarcasm.

Paul

sprinted to the corner, heedless of an aggravating pain in his lower back. Some weeks ago, in French Morocco, he'd lifted a crate the wrong way and wrenched something. Though the pain woke him at night, he never complained.

He saw the women marching north in the middle of the road, twelve or fifteen of them in two ranks. They walked like soldiers in long skirts and plumed hats. Each woman carried a rolled-up paper. The driver of a hansom blocked by the marchers demonstrated his disgust by whipping his horse. Paul spied his beautiful wife in the second row, her face a porcelain white oval beneath her hat brim. Julie and the others belonged to Mrs.

Emmeline Pankhurst's Women's Social and Political Union. 'Their militant middle-aged leader marched in the front rank, flanked by her daughters Sylvia and Christabel. Mrs. Pankhurst, child of a free-thinking Manchester industrialist, was the widow of a barrister of even more liberal bent.

Tying up more traffic, the marchers were smiling, chatting among themselves. Though the day was raw, with a sooty sky, they might have been enjoying a picnic outing in May.

Paul strode back to Michael, shaking his head. 'Seems like there are more damn demonstrations all the time. Shorter workdays, temperance, disarmament, votes -- everyone wants something. The world's going crazy.'

'That's your profession speaking. Disturbances and disasters are your I

Paul and His Wife

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livelihood. You see little else.' It was true enough; earlier in the year Paul had rushed from Manila to San Francisco after the devastating earthquake and fire. His pictures had caused a sensation, and copious weeping, wherever they were shown.

'Besides, these little set-to's are nothing compared to what's coming,'

Michael said.

Michael Radcliffe was a tall, cadaverous man ten years older than Paul.

His paper, the London Light, was owned by his father-in-law, Lord Yorke, who was Paul's boss as well. Born Mikhail Rhukov, and existing for years as a stateless and starving freelance, he had turned up in Paul's life with mysterious suddenness several times. After an affair with Cecily Hartstein, the press lord's daughter, he'd undergone a remarkable conversion: cut his hair, Anglicized his name, muffled his nihilism, and married Cecily, who
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loved him without regard to his gigantic deficiencies of character.

The two men presented a sharp physical contrast: from his gleaming shoe tips to his bowler hat, Michael was smartly turned out, while Paul's clothes might have come from a church rummage sale. His shoes were scuffed, his corduroy trousers wrinkled. His single-breasted khaki coat had a black stain on the sleeve. His plaid golf cap had traveled around the world and looked it. Few would take him for what he was -- a star of his profession.

'You never stop beating the war drums,' he said with a sigh. Michael shrugged and tossed his half-smoked cigarette into the street.

'Merely describing the inevitable, old chum.' Paul remembered his friend talking drunkenly in a cantina in Cuba in 1898: 'I have seen the great ships building. I have seen the rifled cannon. Armageddon in our lifetime

. . .' He'd pounded the table, quoting Revelations. ^And there were lightnings, and thunderings - and the cities of the nations fell . . :'"

Michael mocked Paul's dreams of a contented life in a peaceful world. He said they'd turn to nightmares sooner than anyone imagined.

Paul stuffed his unlit cigar in a pocket and checked his tripod for steadiness.

He sighted over the camera to the office building. A dozen policemen from the station in Richmond Terrace guarded the doors, the picture of authority with their tall hats and truncheons. Some of Mrs. Pankhurst's women - the Daily Mail had christened them suffragettes - had already been arrested and forced to serve short terms in Holloway Prison for attempting to question speakers at Liberal Party meetings, the self-promoting Winston Churchill among them. Women weren't permitted to speak out, or have any role, in politics. Mrs. Pankhurst vowed to change that.

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Dreamers

The marchers swung around the corner into Derby Gate. Paul began cranking the camera with a practiced, steady rhythm -- one, two, three; one, two, three. Julie saw him and waved. Paul waved back with his free hand.

On the Embankment, auto drivers sounded klaxons in derision. Men leaned from their cabs to swear and jeer at the suffragettes forming a semicircle in front of the constables. The policeman in charge, a slightly built fellow with a gray mustache and a tough demeanor, strode forward to confront Mrs. Pankhurst.

'Good day, madam. May I ask why you're interfering with traffic?'