Thunder City (11 page)

Twice each week, one of the letters she wrote in the morning room was addressed to “Katherine Crownover Gorlich, in care of Ogilvie’s General Merchandise, Guthrie, Oklahoma Territory.” Gus Gorlich was the name of the man with whom her firstborn child had disappeared at age fourteen, not to be heard from until a letter arrived at the Jefferson Avenue address identifying Ogilvie’s store as the place where she could be reached. It went on to describe the brief ceremony that had wedded them in the home of a justice of the peace in a place called Stilwell, with a witness who signed himself Pete Stands-in-Water; she and Gorlich, a man of forty and a widower, had drawn a wagon loaded with foodstuffs and farming equipment up to a starting line at the edge of a three-thousand-square-mile section of land called the District, then at the first note blown on a cavalry bugle had raced to a 160-acre lot marked off by federal surveyors and claimed it as their own. Abner’s sole comment, upon reading the letter, had been a muttered observation that she had not said whether the wagon was a Crownover. He had not spoken of their daughter from that day to this, other than to forbid his wife to answer her letters or to accept them when they were delivered. Edith’s first act had been to arrange for a box in her name at the Detroit Post Office. She then wrote Katherine, congratulating her upon her marriage, warning her of the pitfalls to avoid in farming, as outlined in various novels, and instructing her to address all future letters to her mother in care of the box number. In this manner the correspondence had continued for thirteen years. Abner, who never entered the morning room, did not know that among the pictures standing atop the spinet desk were cabinet photographs of their two grandchildren. He either did not notice or ignored his wife’s grief when she received notice that both had died within three weeks of each other of cholera in 1894. She did not mention it to him, nor to her sons, for fear that one of them—most likely Edward, whom she loved equally with the others but did not trust—would let something slip to their father. She alone shared in the couple’s anguish over the deaths and, six years later, when drought destroyed their crops and forced the bank in Guthrie to foreclose upon their farm, the failure of their dreams of success. Both were now living in town, where Gus worked in a livery stable and Katherine cleaned the rooms in a hotel, supplementing their income with odd jobs and the small amounts of money Edith managed to send them without alerting Abner. Katherine answered her mother’s letters once a month. Invariably she apologized that her workday left her little time to do anything but sleep, and too exhausted to write.

Edith fretted that her daughter was working herself into an early grave. At night, when she lay in bed thinking, she resolved to sell off some of her shares in Crownover Coaches—an anniversary present from Abner when he was too poor to give her anything else—and send the money to Katherine. In the light of day she cowered from the scene that would take place when her actions and their purpose were discovered. She owned thirty-eight percent of the company stock, the largest single block aside from her husband’s forty-two percent. With six percent owned by stockholders outside the family, the remaining fourteen had been distributed among their sons in descending increments according to their ages—excepting Harlan, whose meager promise had entitled him only to three percent, below his younger brother Edward’s five. Abner was determined that none who did not bear the name Crownover would ever wield power sufficient to direct the company’s fortunes. Edith had no doubt that he would divorce her if she parted with a single share.

When she allowed herself to dwell on the situation, she despised herself for her cowardice. Katherine’s recent letters had been spiritless; exhausted chronicles of her daily routine containing few details that she had not already reported. Although she was too much like her mother to express her defeat in so many words, it was clear that her resiliency was gone and that she was tending to the minutiae of her life in a trance. Once, a carriage in which Edith had been riding had been stopped behind a police van and forced to wait while a band of ragged men in scrubby beards and handcuffs were driven by policemen armed with clubs up the steps of the county jail. It was an election year, and ninety days of incarceration and hard labor awaited them for the crime of vagrancy. Edith remembered the emptiness of the eyes in the gaunt faces, and the feeling that she could see clear through to the backs of their skulls. They were ambulatory dead men, nothing more. She saw newspapers rarely, but she had read in one of a tramp pursued by policemen who had thrown himself beneath the wheels of a freight train rumbling along the Michigan Central tracks. The reporter was incredulous, unable to understand why a man would choose death over a short sentence. And she remembered those empty eyes, and knew what the reporter did not, that freedom took more than one form. She wondered what Katherine’s eyes looked like as she went about the unchanging details of her confinement.

On this Saturday, however, as she pinned in place an orchid-colored hat that matched the yoke of her linen dress, Edith looked forward to an hour during which she could put aside her concerns about her daughter. She had an appointment to take tea with her favorite son.

She was the only Crownover who continued to observe the ritual of afternoon tea. Nine years earlier, when the prospect of a commission to build an opera coach for the Prince of Wales appeared certain, Abner had decided to adopt the practice. He employed the services of an impoverished English baronet then living with distant relatives in Ann Arbor to instruct the family in the protocol. Edith in particular had taken to the translucent cups and saucers and round-bottomed spoons and buttery scones. Long after His Royal Highness had bowed to the pressure of an indignant British press and a stern home secretary and selected a London carriage maker to fill his order, 4:00
P.M.
still found Mrs. Crownover seated in her parlor or her favorite outside venue, the tearoom at the Wayne Hotel, while Abner and his sons reverted to their previous afternoon routines. It was one more thing to fill her day, and although she would have been scandalized at the suggestion, she took a certain quiet satisfaction in the knowledge that her loyalty to the custom irritated Abner. But he had spent far too much money on the baronet’s lessons to object out loud. She would never have admitted even to herself that upsetting her husband with impunity was one of the few pleasures that remained to her in life. In all innocence of this self-awareness, but with a pang of guilty joy that she convinced herself came from the anticipation of visiting with her son, she tugged on her gloves, hesitated over the collection of parasols in the wicker stand in the corner of her dressing room, then decided against taking one and descended the stairs to the foyer. There her driver waited to escort her outside to the two-seater she had ordered, an open buggy that struck her as less stuffily imperial than the closed brougham preferred by Abner.

Her upbringing in the genteel pastel society of Rhode Island had ingrained in her a distaste for ostentation. This was an unfortunate prejudice to carry into the Midwest, whose self-made millionaires emulated their New York models. These Gothamites had in turn borrowed their minareted and gingerbread-laden architecture from the Italian villas and castles on the Rhine they had seen on tours abroad. She thought the turrets and gimcracks of the Jefferson Avenue house vulgar. When she could not escape an invitation to the salons of her husband’s colleagues, she smiled to herself at the spectacle of so many bricklayers’ daughters flaunting their diamonds on the arms of escorts in immaculate shirtboards with old mortar-dust ground into their knuckles. These were observations she could share with no one, even if she could find someone who would understand them. Along with a love of coarse display, the circles in which she and Abner traveled shared an austere and obvious absence of irony.

Her antipathy extended to the greater Wayne Hotel. The cheap gloss of its marble floors, the depth of its carpets like sphagnum moss, and the Wagnerian massiveness of its fireplaces combined to create the sort of place where stove makers in derbies preferred to smoke cigars and talk about their trade. For this the hotel offered three bars, five restaurants, and a basement tonsorial parlor with ten chairs and all the major out-of-town newspapers. Every spring at the Shipmaster’s Ball these tightly wound entrepreneurs climbed into tailcoats and trotted out their marriagable daughters for the admiration of young men with whose fathers they drank, dined, and barbered the rest of the year. None of these were things that could not be found in the East, of course. The difference out here, where less than a hundred years ago the city had maintained a stockade to keep out feathered savages, was the inflated, pasteboard quality of the pretense. The men’s evening dress and women’s ball gowns appeared to be wearing the wearers, like costumes in an amateur theatrical; patent learners pinched toes that would be more comfortable in brogans, corsets creaked like hawsers, all in the name of borrowed propriety. The dog aped the master, and the cat the dog, on down to the goldfish swimming around its bowl wearing a miniature hat. It was all so much burlesque.

One of the reasons she looked forward to time spent with her second son was the conjecture that she could confide in him her feelings about the entire shabby exhibition. She did not share the general conviction that Harlan was backward. True, he was silent when others were vocal, and the male world was an argumentative one in which nonparticipation was interpreted as lack of an intelligent opinion. Nevertheless she had thought she detected, whenever the conversation had grown particularly complacent on the subject of this competitor’s shortcomings or that politico’s approachability, a
sparkle
in Harlan’s eye. It was suspiciously similar to the one she saw in her own when something struck her as wickedly amusing while she was looking in a mirror. In every other aspect the eye was so much that of his father. But the thought that there was something so un-Abner-like behind it encouraged her to believe that her own sense of the absurd would not depart the family entirely when she was no more. It made her feel less alone.

She yearned to communicate to Harlan that he himself was not marooned, that here was the connection he could find nowhere else in the Crownover household. She had not as yet, nor did she think she ever would without some sign that the information would be welcome. There was a seriousness about Harlan, not to be confused with his father’s sobriety or the pomposity of his younger brother, that kept her from committing what might be an embarrassing error. It made her question the evidence of her own eyes, and wonder if the glitter she thought she had seen was just an empty reflection from a window. She knew this was not so, yet she feared the consequences of being wrong. The discovery that he was no different from any other Crownover would be too devastating to withstand. Better not to know, and to nurture the unrealized hope.

Despite its posturing, the Wayne was very much a part of the new century, for which she was grateful. Her husband unequivocally was not, and the fact that the hotel’s proprietor, Jim Hayes, had had the effrontery to host an automobile show there the previous year was another log on the fire of Abner’s annoyance that his wife should take tea there. Edith had not, of course, attended the show. The prospect of bumping up against a roomful of freshly scrubbed machinists drinking champagne and throwing open the bonnets of their contraptions to point out this or that greasy feature had not appealed to her. Noisy, odiferous machines that frightened horses and children and belched great choking blue clouds into the open air with sharp reports like gunfire repelled her, but she refused to fulminate against them. What was the point? One could not reverse time and uninvent something that should not have been invented. To protest would make as much sense as a woman complaining about politics, just as if she had the vote.

In any case, she understood that Harlan had some interest in motorcars. If it was a subject that could bridge the gap that separated mother and son, then the Wayne seemed an amiable choice.

She thoroughly approved of the tearoom. It was her personal fancy that the room had been added as an afterthought and decorated by an outsider. Its proportions were anything but grand. Hayes, it seemed, had balked at wasting his overwrought chandeliers and imitation medieval tapestries upon a space so unassuming. The person left in charge had papered it with tea roses on a black background, installed Tiffany fixtures, and stood flickering candles in rose-colored glass bowls on the tables. The stiff white linens and delicate stemware discouraged the bray and clatter that filled the other dining rooms. Even the waiters whispered, and moved about as silently as monks. To pass through those French doors was to leave behind the enervating racket of the Industrial Revolution and enter a place where quiet and repose were something altogether deeper than just an interval between steam whistles. It seemed to her that the very air was lighter and easier to breathe.

She was shown to a small corner table by a bald waiter with immaculate white side-whiskers like the late Mr. Gladstone, who held her chair and bowed when he took his leave. She was aware of the attention her arrival had drawn from the other diners; she did not acknowledge it. The celebrity of her union with the richest man in town left her cold. Back home, society cared little how much a woman’s circumstances were reduced provided she belonged to an old family. In Detroit, she could have had a long past as a harlot, with a murderer for a father, without raising so much as a Japanese fan as long as she was the wife of Crownover Coaches.

When the bald waiter returned with her favorite Indian blend she informed him that she was meeting someone and would order her meal when he arrived. She sipped from the paper-thin cup, found the contents too hot, and replaced it in its saucer to cool while she listened to the muffled sounds of the Wayne. Silver tinkled, male and female voices murmured in hushed conversation, a rather insipid violin rendition of “Lorna Doone” drifted out of the morning-glory horn belonging to an unseen phonograph. Beneath it all, steel skate wheels rolled over the varnished boards of the rink in the Pavilion with a shuddering rumble like thunder. The windows were open on the side facing the river; the smell of sun on water reminded her of Newport. She felt a flash of homesickness. The sensation was recent, and still quite novel. After thirty years in Detroit she had thought it had died with her mother.