Homeland Page 20

  Resentment bubbled up in Paul. He felt his uncle had been discussing a choice between a gallows and a firing squad. He drew himself up tall and straight. Looked his uncle in the eye.

  “I would rather not go, sir. I would rather work.”

  “I know that. But it’s settled. Good night, Paul.”

  He had turned back to his desk before Paul reached the door.

  Saturday night another snowstorm struck Chicago. It passed through swiftly, leaving half a foot of new snow on the sidewalks surrounding the Crown mansion. After Sunday morning church—which Joe Junior seemed free to skip, perhaps with parental consent—Paul, Carl, and Joe Junior dressed warmly and started shoveling the walks.

  After a few minutes, Joe Junior leaned on his shovel and said to Paul, “Tomorrow’s the big day, huh?” Joe Junior’s vivid blue eyes sparkled in the sunshine. His smile was sardonic. “Don’t tell me you’re eager.”

  “No, no, I hate it.” Paul’s breath formed a plume as he spoke.

  “So did I. I got out of it. You can too.”

  “I don’t know how.”

  “Refuse.”

  Paul gnawed on his lower lip; it was raw and cracked from the cold weather. “I can’t, I said I’d go.”

  “Damn shame. It isn’t the real world. The rough and tumble. Teachers have got nothing to say that’s worth a nickel. But I’ve got some friends at the brewery who could teach you plenty.” With a glance at the windows of the house, panes of glass flashing back the sunlight, he growled it again. “Plenty. Put your mind to getting out of school and you will. Don’t study. Act like a dunce when you recite. Raise a little hell—play tricks. Make the teacher hate you. I got out of three schools that way. You can do it, you seem pretty smart to me.”

  Paul searched his cousin’s face. So far as he could tell, Joe Junior meant the compliment sincerely. Paul was thrilled to realize that his cousin wanted him for an ally—perhaps a friend eventually. Nothing would have made him happier, except for the price Joe Junior wanted him to pay.

  “Joe—your mother, your father—they have been so kind. If I did what you say, they’d be sad. They’d be angry. I could not do it to them.”

  “That’s how it is, huh?” Joe Junior’s face twisted with contempt. “They’ve got you hornswoggled.”

  “Horn—? I don’t understand horn—”

  “Forget about it,” Joe Junior said, walking away. He bent over an uncleared section of walk and began to shovel with quick, angry motions.

  At the conclusion of supper on Sunday night, Aunt Ilsa rose from the table, smiling. “We have a surprise for you, Pauli.”

  She came out of the kitchen bearing a large plate with a Zuckertüte. A large horn of plenty, made of flaky pastry and crammed full of hard candies, cookies, walnuts that threatened to roll off the plate.

  Aunt Ilsa set the plate in front of him. “You might consider yourself much too old for this, but it’s an important tradition, the Zuckertüte for the first day of school. When you come home tomorrow afternoon, having completed your first day successfully, you may have everything you see here.”

  Uncle Joe smiled. Fritzi cried, “Hurrah!” Carl shouted, “Can I have one of the jawbreakers?” Joe Junior folded his arms and leaned back, silent. Paul was almost moved to tears. How could he rebel against people who were so kind to him?

  Monday morning, gray as death. A freezing damp day. A few snowflakes drifting down. The carriage pulled up before the two-story school. It seemed huge, forbidding, an ugly hulk of bricks and granite. A prison, save for the absence of bars on the lighted windows.

  Moments later, Paul and his uncle were moving up the worn wooden steps. They had been asked to come to the office an hour after the regular schoolday began. At the top of the steps, Paul looked over his shoulder at the quarter landau, the steaming muzzles of the bay horses, the drab empty street beckoning with a thousand imagined allurements …

  His uncle’s face intruded, the dark eyes intimidating behind the silver-wire spectacles.

  “Go in, please,” Uncle Joe said impatiently.

  The principal, Mr. Relph, shook Paul’s hand and said to Uncle Joe that, because the new pupil was undoubtedly not acclimated to America as yet, he should have every advantage, and would therefore be placed in the class taught by one of the school’s finest, Mrs. Petigru. Uncle Joe said that sounded excellent. He wished Paul well and bade him goodbye.

  Paul followed the principal down a musty, gloomy hall to a wooden door with a small pane of glass set in. In horror, Paul saw the pupils in the room. Many looked at least a year younger, and many were smaller; mere children. The principal opened the door; led him in.

  “Mrs. Petigru, this is your new student, Paul Crown.”

  The principal left. Paul waited beside the teacher’s desk. A dozen heads were turned in his direction. A dozen pairs of eyes scrutinized him. The room was an oven. With frost patterns on the windows, how could that be?

  “Take your seat in the second row. The last desk. There.” Mrs. Petigru pointed. She was a plain, drab woman with a heavy bosom, graying hair in a severe bun, a slit for a mouth. And a tongue like a whip.

  She pointed downward with one chalk-dusty hand. Mortified, Paul saw melting slush forming pools under his shoes. “When you report tomorrow, make sure your feet are wiped before you enter. And comb your hair, you’re a sight.”

  “Please, I combed it before—”

  “Don’t answer back, young man. If you answer back, you and I will have trouble.” Her smile was chilly. “That’s rule number one. Rule number two, I demand neatness from my pupils. You don’t appear to live up to that standard, but you’ll live up to it in my class. Sit quietly today. Don’t speak unless you’re addressed. Come to my desk at the end of the day and we will draw your books. That’s all.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, as he’d often heard Carl say to his mother.

  The day passed in a haze of misery. In the lunchroom, a few of the pupils from his class spoke to him, but no one sat with him. He had a table and bench to himself, among hundreds of staring eyes.

  He rapidly ate two sausages, then pulled a hard-boiled egg from the sack Aunt Ilsa had packed personally. She had included a small glass salt cellar; Paul liked salt on his hard-cooked eggs. He had the egg halfway to his mouth when something stung his left ear and made him yelp.

  Nearby, he heard giggles. He could only see the thin face of Mrs. Petigru, who had stolen up behind him and thwacked his ear.

  “Look at the mess. Salt all over the floor.” She leaned down. She smelled of mothballs, like Aunt Ilsa’s closets. She banged the glass salt cellar on the table. “Take this home tonight and never bring it back.”

  She folded her arms and glanced sharply at some of her pupils at the next table. They quickly bowed their heads over their lunch sacks and pails.

  “I’ll be frank with you, Paul,” the teacher said. “I did not want you brought into my class. I protested, and I was overruled. I’ll tell you why I didn’t want you. First, you are too old. Second, your uncle is a brewer, and he’s German. I consider that a Satanic combination. I am a religious God-fearing woman. My husband Samuel is a lay preacher. We don’t like godless Germans who profane the Sabbath with revelry and strong drink.”

  Paul couldn’t endure it. His chin lifted. Anger danced in his eyes. “Mrs. Petigru—Germans go to church on Sunday. Only after do they enjoy a little glass of—”

  “I distinctly told you not to answer back.” Again that cold smile. “I have had other pupils who tried to get the better of me. They always lose.”

  17

  Joe Crown

  JOE CROWN DUTIFULLY NOTED that, during his nephew’s first weeks at school, the boy was withdrawn, and much less prone to smile. Paul excused himself after Abendessen every night and disappeared to his room, presumably to study. Several times, Joe made a point of asking Paul how he was getting along. The answer was always the same.

  “Fine, Uncle.”

  Joe was soon
suspicious. And when he looked into Paul’s eyes, he saw something that hadn’t been there before. A look that reminded him of a whipped dog. Shaken, he thought, I had a premonition about this. Has it come true already?

  April arrived, brushing the city with warmth and sunshine; a foretaste of summer. At Joe’s request, Mr. Mars was now coming to the house two nights a week. The tutor’s obvious intelligence and devotion to his task had quite overcome Joe’s initial aversion to Mars’s glaring effeteness. Still, it seemed to Joe that the additional tutoring changed nothing.

  Throughout Chicago, municipal crews were cleaning and watering the main thoroughfares regularly, to prepare for the opening of the Exposition on May 1. Old buildings were being repainted; parks had been reseeded and replanted with young trees. A festive mood seemed to prevail. But men in the business community knew that clouds were lowering. More banks were in trouble, whispering of possible closure. Prices of shares were sliding downward. Already there were hundreds of unemployed men adrift in the streets.

  Although this disturbed Joe, little of it touched his household. Ilsa was cheerful and busy, looking forward to the opening day. One morning Joe came to the breakfast table to find her immersed as usual in her newspapers. After they kissed, he took his seat and he asked, “What are your plans today, my dear?”

  With a teasing smile, she said, “Shall I tell you? What kind of a mood are you in?”

  “Good enough to withstand anything. It looks like a lovely day.”

  “At noon I’ll be dining with Ellen and Jane.” Ellen Starr and Jane Addams, her friends from the Hull House settlement.

  “This afternoon we’re all attending a discussion program on prostitution and the double standard.”

  “I see.” He didn’t want to be annoyed with her, but he was. He saw no point in women upsetting the status quo by delving into radical or unsavory issues.

  “By the way—” She reached for a newspaper. “I read in the Inter-Ocean that Stead is coming to Chicago.” Joe consulted his pocket watch and quickly poured more tea. “Mr. Stead, the English journalist. The reformer.”

  “I know who he is. Stead the busybody.”

  “Perhaps he can do some good in Chicago, Joe. You know this is one of the wickedest cities on earth. Gambling, thievery, murder—” She touched another of the papers in front of her. “Just last night, a young woman was fatally stabbed on State Street. No purse, no identification—and there are no clues to the killer. Is it any wonder we lead in the nation in the number of criminal arrests? Chicago is fearfully corrupt. The aldermen—what do they call them?”

  “The gray wolves.”

  “Yes—well, they’ve all but published their prices for a vote, or a city franchise. Stead may do some good.”

  “I can certainly predict one of the first things he’ll do. Condemn the saloons. Every self-appointed savior of mankind includes that in his program. We’ll have the reformers after every brewery in town, wanting to close them down. Frankly, I wish you’d stay away from Miss Addams and Miss Starr, and especially that harpy Frances Willard.”

  “Joe, Mrs. Willard is a fine moral person. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union advocates moderation, and there is nothing wrong with—”

  “Oh yes, there is. Because first it will be moderation, then prohibition. The word has been bandied about before.”

  “I won’t have you saying things about the W.C.T.U. that aren’t true. The organization works in many social areas, worthy ones. Child labor. The welfare of unfortunate young women lured to the streets—I’m proud to contribute money to that effort.”

  “Money earned from beer sales, don’t forget.”

  “Perhaps my activities can wash away some of the taint, then.”

  Joe flung his napkin down beside his plate. “Damn it, woman, that’s uncalled for.”

  Contrite, Ilsa rushed around the table and threw her arms around his neck. “You’re right, I’m sorry. I just don’t want you to run over me, I have opinions of my own. But I have no right to be mean about it. Forgive me?”

  “Always.” He kissed her warm cheek, mollified.

  In the carriage on his way to the brewery, instead of opening a folder of technical articles he’d torn out for quick scanning, he reflected on Ilsa’s continuing dislike of his business. She certainly was not alone. And her attitude remained perfectly understandable in the light of what had happened to her father. Yet he continued to resent it. He especially resented it because the climb to his current prosperity had been long and difficult, and sometimes even physically dangerous.

  Did she have any real sense of all he’d gone through to achieve success? He told her a lot about his daily affairs, and he had never lied to her. But he sometimes spared her feelings by keeping certain information to himself. For instance, to build Crown’s, he had done much more than slave over formulations, ingredient price lists, sales ledgers, architect’s blueprints, label designs, payroll books. In the early years he’d worked himself to complete physical exhaustion every day for months at a time. What’s more, the brewing trade could be dangerous.

  Going after anything worthwhile in life entailed risk, of course. A man of ambition and courage didn’t let that stop or delay him. A man accepted the dangers, the element of chance. If he didn’t, he won nothing.

  But there were dangers. For example, brewery workers were routinely crippled by rheumatism, sometimes turned into living gargoyles, because they worked for years in dampness and cold.

  During the first month of operation of the Crown bottle house, Joe and his foreman were trying to correct an equipment problem one morning, when suddenly a man reading a gauge shouted that pressure was shooting up too fast.

  “Shut everything down,” Joe screamed above the clank of the conveyors. At that moment, the first bottle burst. Ten more exploded, and another ten, shooting shards of glass everywhere. Joe was nearest the part of the line where the bottles were bursting. Had he not been wearing his spectacles he might have been blinded. As it was, both lenses were starred with cracks, and his exposed face was lacerated. The foreman was on his knees, a palm over his left eye, blood oozing between his fingers.

  Weeks later, the foreman came back to work. He had a new glass eye that perfectly matched the other. Joe paid for everything.

  Sometimes the hazards arose not from accidents, but were a consequence of human frailty, human avarice. When pasteurization and refrigeration made possible long-distance shipping of bottle and keg beer, Joe conceived a plan to market his product where there were many Germans but few breweries. South Carolina and Texas were among his first targets.

  In Austin, shortly after he opened his third Texas agency, a saloon owner showed him a competitor’s price sheet. Joe saw instantly that the numbers were ridiculous; no one could sell keg beer that cheaply. The owner shrugged off Joe’s questions and insisted that he meet the sheet prices if he wanted the establishment to serve Crown’s.

  Joe asked to see the price sheet again. He studied it silently. Then he said he’d think about it, and asked if he could have the sheet. The owner didn’t object. On the street in the hot dusty sunlight, Joe looked at his thumb. It was smudged with ink.

  He made inquiries and passed money around in local print shops. No one was helpful. Finally, he found a printer in a dirty little shop on an alley, a man obviously hurting for business. Joe questioned him hard. The printer finally admitted it was he who had printed the sheet for the saloon owner the previous week. He confessed because Joe offered him half again as much money as he’d gotten for the original job.

  So Joe’s suspicions were right, the sheet didn’t come from the competing brewery. He carried the sheet back to the saloon owner and told him to eat it.

  The man shouted threats. “You’re lucky I don’t put the law on you,” Joe said, and walked out. That night, someone fired three bullets through the flimsy door of his hotel room. Fortunately, at the time, he was sitting on the commode behind a door at the end of the hall, paying the price for
eating the town’s highly spiced food. He had never told Ilsa.

  Just five years ago, he had gone to St. Louis, to call on Adolphus Busch. He wanted to buy six cars from Busch’s subsidiary, the St. Louis Refrigerator Car Company. About fifty years old, Busch was two or three inches shorter than his guest, rather heavy around the middle, with long wavy hair and a mustache and goatee that gave him a distinguished air.

  He received Joe in an opulent office in his mansion, known as Number One Busch Place. At first Busch was cordial. He recognized Joe as a shrewd and aggressive competitor. He said, yes, certainly, he’d be happy to sell the refrigerator cars at a friendly price. Then he rang for his butler, who brought a silver tray bearing delicate goblets and a bottle of Mr. Busch’s fine French wine.

  Joe drank some wine to be polite. Quietly, Busch proposed that the two of them agree on a fixed price for barrel beer in territories where they competed head to head. Joe politely said no.

  Busch asked him twice more, with increasing petulance. His queerly hooded eyes lost all pretense of friendliness. After Joe’s third refusal Busch stood up so violently, he knocked the silver tray off the desk. The bottle smashed, the fine wine gurgled away.

  “You son of a bitch, I’ll drive you down, you and all the other sanctimonious sons of bitches who haven’t got the sense to throw in with me. Get out of my house, God damn it, right now. Right now!”

  Joe had been a particular target of Busch’s enmity ever since. Crown’s was repeatedly attacked in selected districts with low prices that could only guarantee a loss for Busch. Joe’s response was always the same. Drop his own prices slightly, and personally call on his accounts to reassure them and ask them to ride out the war. Busch always grew tired of selling his beer at a loss, and prices went up again. But Joe was never foolish enough to think that the king of St. Louis had forgotten, or ever would. It was just another hazard of the trade.