The buildings are crazy; the colors are crazier, and the whole is a peep into fairyland transcending in beauty the dreams conjured up by the wildest imagination.
—L.A.S. Wood, manager of the lighting division of the Westinghouse Company, addressing the Convention of Illuminating Engineers on the eve of their mass pilgrimage to the Century of Progress World’s Fair in Chicago, 1933
Chicago Police Department detectives were investigating the theft, from a visiting Wisconsin automobile, of two century-old beehives filled with live bees, each containing twenty-five pounds of honey. The bee-napping was apparently a crime of opportunity committed while the thieves—who, it could be inferred, were specialists in automotive accessories—were stripping the vehicle to its axles.
Dawn Rae O’Faolain, aka Dawn Glendive, aka Aurora Maximovna Artemyeva, slept in the garret of a house two blocks from the crime scene. Even in early June, it was warm, and she left the windows open. No more than crickets did the nocturnal depredations of automobile accessory thieves trouble her sleep. But something about the keening of the lady apiarist at six in the morning brought her to a wakefulness she knew it would be bootless to oppose. She threw on a robe, scuffed her feet into a pair of down-at-heel men’s slippers, and embarked on a descent to the street to find out what was the matter. First and chanciest was the shivering hinged construct, as much ladder as stair, that let her down to the uppermost of the building’s proper stories. Padding along splintery floorboards and down two rude flights made for servants and juveniles, she reached the levels intended for the Gilded Age petit-bourgeois who’d had this place built. Now she treaded on cherrywood steps between a paneled wall and a carved banister, widening as it banked round to flood into a foyer. This was Tiffany-windowed where it faced the avenue. Pocket doors closed it off from the parlor where the German Communists were snoring loudly enough to drown out the trouble in the street. They had just arrived, the scent of burning books still in their clothing. These were brave men and women—you had to be brave, to be a Communist in Germany—but it was difficult to make any serious progress toward the worldwide socialist workers’ paradise in a country where Communists, and even Socialists, could be kicked to death in restaurants with impunity. Which had been the case in Germany for about the past three months.
Two months ago, Himmler had called a press conference to announce the foundation of a new detention facility, specifically for Communists, at Dachau, near Munich. The men and women currently sleeping in the parlor had begun edging toward the borders of the Third Reich. In coming weeks, if they did not wander off, they would percolate higher and deeper into the kommunalka, in true American melting-pot style, sharing rooms, soap, and food with the two dozen or so quasi-permanent residents: the University of Chicago graduate students who seemed to form its Politburo, their writer and artist friends, card-carrying Wobblies who had drifted in from the Englewood yards to the west or the Illinois Central line along the lakeshore, American Communists, Russians who had come either because they supported the wrong variant of Communism or because they did not wish to starve to death, and miscellaneous comrades from all over who had been drawn to the South Side by the combined attractions of free speech, cheap rent, nubile college students, a vast and rumbustious proletariat, jazz, and lots of people in surrounding neighborhoods who could cook them the food, and speak to them in the languages, of Poland, Lithuania, Germany, Ukraine, Yugo-Slavia, Hungary, and the shtetl.
She unlocked the front door and took evasive action against the usual avalanche of newspapers in all of the above languages, some of which were mere flyers that were kept from blowing away only by the boat-anchor heft of the Trib. Today this sported a banner headline about the opening of A Century of Progress, which was what they were calling the World’s Fair.
She paused only a moment before stepping out of doors in her robe and slippers. She had spent her early years in another kommunalka, in what had then been Petrograd and was now Leningrad. After her parents’ divorce and her mother’s move back to Montana, her favorite woman had been Veronika, a machine gunner by trade, a member of the Red Women’s Death Battalion. Owing to some unpleasantness involving White Cossacks during the Russian Civil War, Veronika lived her life in a state of hypervigilance and presented a steely demeanor to the world, or at least to the street. She would not have ventured out before throwing on her Workers-Peasants Red Army greatcoat, pulling on her black boots with the hidden dagger along the right shin, and checking the action on the semiautomatic pistol on her right hip. For in those heady post-revolutionary days it had been usual for Reds to go about armed.
Since then, Dawn had grown to womanhood, and also had learned her way around a machine gun. Unbeknownst to anyone else in the house, she kept a disassembled Thompson submachine gun and a loaded hundred-round magazine in the eave space adjacent to her garret. But along the way she had learned some things that Veronika had never quite got the hang of about being a woman—a tall and noticeable woman—in a complicated urban society. She knew that, at six in the morning, when some other woman was wailing in the street, it was fine for her to go abroad in a robe thrown over a nightie, and that, just like Florence Nightingale at the front, she would go unmolested by the men, and like a nun at a wedding, unfrowned-at by the ladies. She loved Veronika, thought of her every day, and wondered whether she was still alive in Russia. But she had come to know that she did not have to be just like Veronika in every particular; and she believed that Veronika’s very sternness, her ferocity, her unwillingness to feel vulnerable, had in the end made her more so.
Lacking a mother these past couple of years, she had learned all of these things from observing the women who crossed her path: not just cowgirls and Communists but, as a result of some unexpected turns, society ladies, generals’ wives, showgirls, beggars, and prostitutes. She had been learning that getting respect was a matter of acting like you deserved it while pretending you didn’t care; and she guessed that if she were really willing to put her money where her mouth was, she might in theory walk across the south side in her nightie without incident. It would horrify the men of the kommunalka, who, in spite of their love of jazz and political cant, were uneasy with Negroes. And it would outrage Veronika. But Dawn believed it was possible, and, as proof, looked to the Negro women waiting for the streetcars on Sunday mornings in their clean dresses and white gloves.
Before advancing to the sidewalk she gripped the Trib firmly in both hands and heaved it over to see if there were any below-the-fold stories about Bonnie and Clyde. Seeing only material about Hitler, Mussolini, and the Depression, she felt her chest relaxing. Her fascination with Bonnie Parker, and her daily terror of learning that the cigar-chomping gun moll had been killed in a pitched battle somewhere (or, worse yet, taken alive) was strange enough that it had led to a certain amount of introspection—or as it was styled in the house she had just walked out of, psychoanalysis. In a more properly brought-up young lady, obsessive identification with a woman who careered around the Midwest in stolen eight-cylinder automobiles spraying bullets at lawmen would have been strange, and worthy of note. But in Dawn the same symptoms were pretty banal. If she were going to be a woman of mystery with hidden contradictions, she would have to reach deeper into what passed for her psyche.
Of Clyde Barrow it was said that he had been a run-of-the-mill juvenile delinquent until he had, at the age of seventeen (Dawn’s age now) been sentenced to a term at the Eastham Prison Farm, which had turned him into the most dangerous gunslinger in America, driven by a half-insane grudge against Texas, her lawmen, and her prisons. Or, in the poetry of Bonnie Parker herself:
They class them as cold-blooded killers,
They say they are heartless and mean,
But I say this with pride:
That I once knew Clyde
When he was honest and upright and clean.
Though it wasn’t written up in the newspapers, the few American Negroes who got invited to take meals at the kommunalka spoke frankly about what was obvious to them—namely that young Clyde had been the victim of homosexual rape, probably repeated and sustained, during his term there and that this explained him just as (in Dawn’s way of thinking) Cossacks explained Veronika.
Stretching across the front walk was a graceful crescent of dust, one limb of a dune that had appeared in the yard a week earlier, during a black blizzard. It was former topsoil from Kansas or Nebraska. Since then, the dune had been migrating gradually across the property in a blind eastward progress toward Lake Michigan. It was trodden down during the day and reconstructed, as they slept, by the west wind. Dawn stepped over it, partly because she didn’t want to get Nebraska between her toes but partly because she loved its streamlined shape, its angle of repose.
A loose cordon of women in bathrobes, men in pajamas, bemused itinerants, and curious dogs enclosed one cop taking down a description of the stolen property from the boreal beekeepers and another staring, with a kind of professional admiration, at the hulk of the car. So thorough had been the work of the thieves that Dawn impressed herself by pegging the vehicle, as it were from its dental records, as a Willys Whippet.
She found it difficult to take Chicago cops with the seriousness that was probably warranted. This was because, like just about everyone else on Earth, she had seen them mostly in gangster movies. A little act of will was always needed to remind herself that they were not just actors awaiting their cue to clutch at imaginary gunshot wounds and collapse to the pavement.
Zipping like spent bullets through the crime scene were alienated bees who had apparently flown the coop during the robbery and been left behind by the bee-nappers’ Clyde Barrow–inspired getaway. These drove the lady apiarist into even more operatic levels of despair as she brooded upon their inevitable doom, which was to die, but not before descending into madness and going on a pointless stinging rampage. Dawn wondered if similar things might be true of exiled German Communists.
By the time she had made it back to the kommunalka, a plenary meeting was under way in the kitchen to contemplate the preparation of breakfast. Dawn had no appetite for the food, or the political hugger-mugger surrounding its preparation. Each ethnicity had its own set of instincts around the cuisine of poverty: kasha for the Eastern Europeans, grits for Southerners, oatmeal for Northerners. All beside the point, since even these people—three dozen or so hobos, refugees, and grad students crammed into a commune—were not actually poor and hungry. Not by the standards of the wide world and especially not by those of Russia, whose silence hinted more eloquently than shouting newsreels of famine and mass death. Even in the midst of the Depression and on the edge of the Dust Bowl, there was plenty of food, if you didn’t mind biscuits and gravy and beans.
Women, thrown together thus, looked to by the men to cook, jury-rigged a system of communications, or at least gestures, around food to make up for the want of a shared tongue. Most of what was being conveyed had nothing to do with “what shall we have for dinner?” and certainly not with “a dash of vinegar would go well with that!” but instead was about precedence, seniority, and respect. Some of the women were educated—wives and colleagues—but the stalwarts of the kitchen were the mothers-in-law, shirttail relations, peasant grannies, or unlettered hobo girls. It was among these that the politics of stove and pantry raged beyond all credible bounds. The drama surrounding the preparation of each meal was like a Moscow show trial: not actually what it claimed to be, but a stage on which actors could adopt stances, declaim lines, and collect from onlookers political specie. Had she really depended on that kitchen for her daily bread, Dawn might have been persuaded to take at least a bit part. Unbeknownst to the others, however, she had some money, and was not above spending it at cafés and lunch counters around the university. It was Comintern money, entrusted to her by her father before he had fallen in battle last summer, within sight of the United States Capitol. As such it was not hers to spend. Had certain men in this house known of it, they would have expropriated it, and she could not have gainsaid them. And so every Danish she bought in a coffee shop was a little sin against the Revolution. Something in her upbringing—not the Red one in Petrograd but the American one in Montana—told her that she would have to atone for each sip of coffee, each nibble of bacon. Judgment would one day be rendered in some scientific weighing of accounts in the Kremlin or the Lubyanka, where commissars, paging through massive OGPU dossiers, would draw up a register of her accomplishments and a sum of her outlays.
On this day she had breakfast with the rest of them, since going back to the house to change, then out again, seemed overly elaborate when oatmeal was there for the taking. Sitting with some of the Americans, and with a few Germans who were just trying to soak up English, she related the story of the beekeepers. She got off on the wrong foot by mentioning that they had come down from the Badger State. The Chicagoans had a visceral, Reds-vs.-Whites, Jews-vs.-Cossacks hostility toward Wisconsinites. They cloaked it in majestic robes of political discourse, but she knew it to be rooted in, or at least proceeding from the same ultimate cause as, the football rivalry between the Bears and the Packers. The beekeepers’ concerns were treated in a way that Dawn found high-handed, given that they were, after all, proletarians. The fact that they were en route to display the prodigious hives at the Century of Progress—an event whose name they could speak only by enclosing it in the verbal equivalent of quotation marks—pushed her listeners from mere indifference to out-right derision. The Chicagoans anyway. The German Communists just listened alertly, muttering back and forth as they debated the meaning of such unfamiliar terms as “hive”—a word apparently without a German cognate—and “Packers,” trying to wrap their lips around the initial W in the name of the state to the north.
Just because of that, Dawn decided she was going to go to the Century of Progress.
It was only a few miles away. It seemed to possess a power of magnetic attraction on more than just beekeepers. One day, for example, she saw a dwarf buying a paper at a newsstand, and the next day, a pair of them on a streetcar, and then suddenly they were everywhere, as often as not dressed in miniature lederhosen and dirndls. Indian chiefs, or at least Indians with imposing headgear. Busloads of showgirls, yodelers, Civil War veterans and bathing beauties, flatbed trucks with alligators, ostriches, vintage locomotives, giant pumpkins, Frigidaires, jinrikishas, X-ray machines, and potted Florida orange trees, all went north on Drexel and did not come back. A man identified as C. C. “Slim” Williams trundled down the street behind his dogsled and his team of huskies, which he had driven all the way from his home in Copper Center, Alaska, the first 1,800 miles on snow and the balance on a wheeled contraption interposed between skids and pavement. A quarterback from Dallas strode up Drexel with a 135-pound bale of cotton on his back; he had toted it 1,200 miles so that the world would not live in ignorance of the glories of Lone Star agriculture. Not far behind him was a boulevard-filling cotton-picking machine, drawn by the largest tractor in the world (ITW), said to be capable of replacing forty-eight Negroes. All of these pilgrimages created an almost palpable gravity drawing Dawn toward the Century of Progress, though, in a funny way, what really got to her was Slim’s huskies: not just pulling that sled as fast as they could but fighting and fucking each other the whole way and leaving the street half paved with redolent shit. Not to follow them seemed mean of spirit.
So Dawn let herself be entrained in that flow, using as an excuse that she wanted to show the newly arrived Germans around. As card-carrying persecuted Communists, there was little chance they’d fall for the propaganda. Anyway their kids were underfoot and their perfectly non-English-speaking womenfolk were trying to clean and organize parts of the kommunalka that, in the view of more tenured residents, could not be improved upon. Instead of which they now devoted their husky-like energies into the projected fair visit. Dawn had floated the idea of hoofing it, so as to avoid crammed streetcars and give the little Huns a chance to blow off steam. When translated into German, that took on a range of significations that were unclear to Dawn but extremely well understood by the matrons. These threw themselves into hamper-packing and knapsack-mending as if they were getting ready to be hounded over Alps by Brownshirts. These people were to going for a walk as the forty-eight-Negro machine was to harvesting cotton.
She was forced to consider the matter of attire. The only shoes she owned that were equal to the trek were a pair of men’s work boots, recently resoled. She couldn’t wear them with a dress unless she wanted to end up in a sideshow booth as the Amazing Montana Bumpkin Gal, so she put on jeans, a long-sleeved shirt to protect her arms from sunburn, and a straw cowboy hat to shade her face. On the Loop she’d draw stares but at the fair she might go unnoticed among midgets, quarterbacks, the Fattest Farmer in the United States, Miss Japan, Chief Evergreen Tree, and Duke Odzikuro Kwei Kuntu of the Gold Coast and his Ashanti warrior dancers, slated to perform the Golden Stool Ceremony in the Darkest Africa concession.
Somewhat getting into the Germans’ intrepid spirit, Dawn opted for a less direct but more scenic route striking due east and crossing the Illinois Central sooner rather than later. There she quietly amused herself by imagining how her charges would react were she to propose that they go down to the line and hitch a ride on a northbound freight. But they were already looking uneasy about the number of hobos and the smell of their encampment, and so Dawn led them on east until they found the shore. Placing the blue water of the lake on their right hand they proceeded up the chain of parks on its shore. Consequently they saw the Century of Progress from afar and went on seeing it for a long time as they strode along swinging their alpenstocks and singing jaunty German hiking songs.
It was shockingly enormous. She was a little mortified that such a thing—all by itself bigger than most things that styled themselves cities—had been created, without her altogether knowing, out of nothing a few miles away from where she’d been living. It brought back a few memories, in a funny way, of a year ago, when she had ridden the rails to D.C. with her father, and first come in view of the Bonus Army camp on Anacostia Flats. But where that had been a stinking Hooverville, this was a glorious fairyland, or what such a thing would look like if fairies toted slide rules instead of wands and made magic of electricity. The temperature was seventy-two degrees, climbing to seventy-six during the last hour of the hike; she knew this because of the Havoline Thermometer, a two-hundred-foot-high obelisk supporting a bolt of red neon luminous enough to be read in direct sunlight. It was far from the tallest thing on the fairgrounds. That honor went to a pair of towers, steel trusswork, thrice as high as the thermometer. Cables between them supported a sky train of rocket cars. Above even that hovered the silver seed of the Goodyear Blimp and a droning swarm of aeroplanes variously towing banners or shedding daredevil parachutists. From half a mile away they could hear stentorian announcements on the largest loudspeakers in the world, relayed over the largest private telephone exchange in the world. In due course they bought the tickets—50 cents for adults, 25 cents for children—that got them through the largest and most expensive metal fence ITW and onto the Midway, passing between a pair of statues that seemed to be its household gods. Both were seated, low-slung, not posing like the idle gods and heroes of old but hunched forward at their work: on the left a bald, bearded savant peering at a test tube in one hand while running his index finger down the page of a tome in his lap. On the right a young man, powerfully muscled, enthroned on a massive gear and reaching out with both hands to control the wheel of a consequential valve.
Which put Dawn in mind of something she had read in the Trib within the past day or two.
Some ribbon-cutting worthy had made a speech to the effect that this fair was all based upon a great theorem—namely, that industry, manufacture, and commerce depended “almost immediately” on the pure sciences.
The temperature was eighty-two when the Havoline Thermometer disappeared from their sight line, swallowed in the clutter of Progress. Every so often it would spring into their view as they rounded some corner, the neon inexorably mounting through the eighties. From the fair’s midst, getting a synoptic view of it was impossible, which probably explained the need for rocket cars and airships. Merely walking its length was half a day’s journey, not so much because of the distance as the impossibility of simply placing one foot in front of the other. A troupe of a hundred women dancers in sailor costumes collided with a contingent of Mounties in a strait between a reproduction of a hillbilly shack from the Ozarks and a crowd that had gathered to watch a squad of Chicago firefighters extinguishing a burning popcorn hut; the hillbilly looked on curiously as the Mounties doffed their hats and made way for the sailor girls to squirt out through a gap between the Negro Fair Visitors’ Office and a Potawatomi wigwam in which a whisky bottle once owned by Abe Lincoln was on display. Dawn seized the chance to draft behind the sailor girls. The German Communists followed her smartly. Soon they were picking their way over thrumming pipes feeding the fake alpine waterfall in the Midget Village but had to pull up short to make way for a lady lion tamer being rushed off the property on a stretcher.
For lack of any other clear goal they struggled for hours in the direction of the German-American Building. En route they passed analogous structures for Yugo-Slavs, Italians, Bulgarians, and the South Manchuria Railway (thronged because Miss Japan was in there). An echelon of well-dressed society girls, volunteering as tour guides to a horde of underprivileged children, were having difficulty keeping them from disrupting the watermelon-eating competition. Makeup running and coiffures drooping in the heat, hats askew, they struggled with the impossible challenge of maintaining decorum at such an event in a world so hungry. Fortuitously, the stately façade of the German pavilion hove into view and they made for it on the reasonable assumption that things would be more orderly there. But they stopped in a little cluster on its threshold, suddenly preferring the crowds and the ninety-one-degree air to whatever might be inside. Dawn, deeming herself immune to whatever it was that was troubling them, led them through the doors into its cool shade. After a pause for their eyes to adjust, the Germans all made astonished but happy noises. Seeing the curiosity in Dawn’s eyes, Dr. Vogt took half a step toward her and allowed himself a slight relaxation of the face that was the closest he’d ever come to smiling.
“No swastikas,” he explained. Which meant little to Dawn.
“Look about!” the professor explained. “No swastikas.”
She must have looked uncertain still, so he explained, “In Germany they are everywhere now. Here, not a single one. Someone made a decision not to put them here. And someone else is very angry about it, I promise you.”
For the mothers and children, a cool place where German was spoken, Nazis unwelcome, and beer served (for FDR had legalized it on the same day as Himmler had opened Dachau) was difficult to leave, and so they built a revetment of chairs in the beer garden and hunkered down while Dawn and some of the men made exploratory sallies. Dawn had felt something akin to nausea during their initial sweep down the Midway—some combination of heat, humidity, crowds, chaos, and the heavy scents of butter and caramel and hot grease. Sitting in the ladies’ for a minute to collect herself, she remembered the embodiments of Science and Technology flanking the gates … and the theorem. When next she went out, she willed herself not to be distracted by the close, low clutter of all fairs: the bumper-car pavilion, the prodigious vegetables displayed on pillows like severed tsars’ heads, the food stalls and the banjo pickers. She raised her sights and looked for higher and grander things that related to the theorem, and found them in plain view, rising above the Midway like colossi erected by scientific pharaohs. Save that unlike the monuments of Egypt these were never meant to endure for more than five months. Unburdened of the requirement to survive even a single Chicago winter, the fantasists—“architects” was probably the wrong word—had diverted all resources normally spent on practical considerations to the true purpose. The names blazoned on them in modern sans-serif letters were Ford, General Motors, Westinghouse, Firestone. She knew what the German Communists were thinking and what the people at the kommunalka would say, which was that this only proved that it was all just a propaganda festival for capitalism. Dawn, who had been raised on propaganda, saw that this was not the entire truth. One could easily imagine going to a party congress in the Soviet Union or a rally in Germany and finding the same buildings celebrating the same things, only the typefaces changed. As much as they might like to believe that they were competing with one another, all were a conjoined program for the theorem. When the fair closed on November 1, the statues flanking the entrance could be packed up in shipping crates and sped in streamlined dirigibles to Berlin or Moscow to inspire Nazis and Communists to do precisely the same things.
On an island linked to the streets of Paris by a curving causeway, past Hollywood, the Pabst Blue Ribbon Casino, the Horticultural Building with its pumpkin-sized cauliflowers and its cow-sized pumpkins, just to the north of the Enchanted Island, was the magnet-shaped palace of the Electrical Group. It was near the base of one of the rocket-car towers and hence, from a distance, seemed low-slung by comparison. But when they wandered closer it proved equal to any triumph of Italian Futurism, and in colorfulness exceeded any building ever made. For in studied contrast to the White City of the previous Chicago Fair, forty years ago, Century of Progress was a fair of many colors, and there was no better place to flaunt them than the humming and crackling Electrical Group with its RCA organ that translated music into fluctuating tints projected onto a screen, and the hurtling rainbow of the neon waterfall. Gaudy though it all was, Dawn—who had been raised by Reds and, during her adolescence, read of the rise of Blackshirts in Italy, Brownshirts in Germany, and last year witnessed the spontaneous eruption of the Khaki Shirts in the vet ghettos of Washington, D.C.—was happy to be in any place where more than one color was permitted. She went back to the German Building and fetched a few of the older children who needed airing out, and brought them back and let them sample the wonders of the Westinghouse Hall of Electrical Living and its Playground of Science. Her favorite exhibit was an X-ray machine that enabled her to see the bones in her hands. She went back to it several times, bending forward to press her face into a mask-shaped hood that projected from its lid, sliding her hands into a warm slot beneath. X-rays from a tube in the pedestal shone up through her hands and struck a fluorescent screen above them, which outlined all of the little bones in black against a field of spectral green.
She was amusing herself by pretending to write something, watching the way her finger bones articulated around an imaginary pen, when the “Hey, cowgirl!” guy finally caught up with her.
She knew him only by his voice. Bonnie-idolizing Red revolutionary though she was, she adhered strictly to the rule that you did not turn to meet the eye of a strange man calling out to you. But her peripheral vision, the amused reactions of onlookers, and something about the man’s voice told her that he was nothing more than a pest. Finally at bay, she withdrew her hands from the machine, stood up as straight and tall as she could, and looked down her freckled nose at a man in his fifties, a head shorter, with protuberant dark eyes, a mostly bald head no longer hidden under a natty Panama, which he was doffing to her. He wore spats over two-tone oxfords that had been shined within the last few hours. He had spied her earlier in the day, and called out to her, beginning with “Why, hello!” and escalating to “Hey!,” “Hey, cowgirl!,” “Hey, tall cowgirl!,” and, now that luck, electricity, and X-rays had brought them together, “Hey, tall, pretty cowgirl!”
“A. T. Green,” he said, and, though standing well clear, bent forward at the waist in what was either a vestigial bow or an attempt to get within handshake range without dislodging his shiny oxfords.
“Dawn Glendive,” she said, and, in the awkward moment that followed, took half a step forward and extended her hand. He took it and air-kissed it from a lip-to-knuckle separation of at least six inches, a gesture so peculiar as to draw uneasy chuckles from nearby fairgoers.
“You’ve been persistent, Mr. Green. As you can see, I am at the fair with little ones—foreign visitors.”
“Oh, how lovely!”
“I’ve no doubt that making a good impression on them is uppermost in your mind.”
This was calculated to make A. T. Green slink away. Instead he brought his heels together, drew his Panama hat to his chest, and, sweeping the other hand across his front, snapped his fingers in an almost vaudevillian gesture, like the posturing that a music-hall singer might use to segue into a number. “Why, I have just the thing!” he exclaimed.
“You do?” she said, a bit off-guard.
“Indeed. For one as interested as you clearly are in the juxtaposition of the anatomical and electrical sciences? Absolutely.”
It seemed fraught with barely ponderable double entendres, but there were witnesses, and they were at a fair. In the end, she and the Germans followed him. Her mental map of the Century of Progress had become all crumpled in upon itself. They crossed a causeway beneath the taut steel spiderweb of the rocket-car line, cut across a pavilion of flags streaming gorgeously in the breeze off the lake, and diverted round the north wing of a stately edifice with a tall central tower: the Illinois Host Building. Cutting between that and a sort of pagan temple to Sears Roebuck, fighting through the crowd eager to get into the Hall of Science, they entered into the late-afternoon shade of Soldier Field, where a line of small concessions had been set up, peddling souvenirs, notions, patent medicines, film, and other sundries.
A. T. Green made no attempt to walk alongside her or make chitchat along the way but ambled along about twenty feet ahead of Dawn and her band of mystified but game Communists. Not once did he look back. In another man this might have seemed arrogant but in him it seemed naïve. She ended up following him for no reason other than that if he turned around to find them all missing he would feel that a cruel and low-down prank had been played upon him, forever smirching the character of the tall, pretty cowgirl.
He was selling shoes.
Or rather he was the proprietor of a booth in which a heavy, sweating, red-faced woman—his wife? His sister? His mother?—was selling them. Setting A. T. Green’s operation apart from ordinary shoe stores were two innovations: first, that he sold only one shoe: a “sensible but trim and stylish ladies’ oxford” specifically designed for walking around the fair all day. The linchpin of his business strategy was making the existence of this product known to women who had made the mistake of showing up at the Century of Progress in high heels. And second, an X-ray machine, similar in principle to the one Dawn had been using a few minutes ago to look at the bones in her hands, but configured so that it shone the penetrating rays up through the feet, enabling customers to see how the little bones in the toes were distributed around the insides of their shoes. Because Dawn was in well-broken-in work boots, her ghoul feet, seen through the machine, were surrounded by a neat picket line of hobnails, and the overall distribution of her metatarsals more or less conformed to that portrayed on a photograph conveniently posted on the machine’s lid and labeled as HEALTHY FEET. Unsurprisingly, most of the lid’s real estate was given over to pictures of not-so-healthy feet, and with the exceptions of a few sideshow anomalies thrown in for pure amusement (CLUB FOOT, FROSTBITE, SHRAPNEL) these were UNHEALTHY because of ill-chosen footwear. No fairgoer could do so much as scan the gallery of excruciation that was the lid without being very forcefully struck by the utter foolhardiness of the typical dame. The machine had been dragged out in front of the booth so that it literally stopped traffic. All of the Germans had a go and satisfied themselves that their metatarsals, too, were, as one would expect, sorted.
But it was not Mr. Green’s purpose to sell shoes to huddled masses. He was playing a deeper game. A game hinted at by his last-ditch inclusion of “pretty” in the list of adjectives modifying “cowgirl.” Dawn well knew of how she stacked up against other young women, and she knew that “pretty,” while not a bald-faced lie, really meant something like “you stand out in a crowd.”
The next day Dawn was striding about the fairgrounds in a conspicuously easy and comfortable gait, sporting sensible but trim and stylish oxfords. At the other end of Dawn was a ten-gallon hat with a placard stuck into its band reading ASK ME ABOUT MY SHOES! She handed out leaflets to anyone who did, and some who didn’t.
The cowgirl outfit came first because it was easy and obvious. From time to time she would catch sight of another tall striding girl in the same shoes, handing out the same leaflets, but dressed instead as a Grace, Valkyrie, Princess, or Angel, and generally better put together than Dawn. A. T. Green, through the mediation of Mrs. Green (so it was either his wife or his mother, but she daren’t ask which), found reasonably inoffensive ways of getting Dawn’s oxfords pointed in the direction of beauty parlors, of which there were several at the fair. Thus did she find herself being evaluated and set to rights by women capable of uttering with a straight face such phrases as “the Silhouette Reform of the late Twenties” and “victory in hair beautifying.” For as fair beauticians they were missionaries of a sort, not preaching to the already converted sophisticates of the Loop but grimly spreading a radically disruptive creed to downstate matrons and 4-H Club bumpkins. Dawn was going to wear a hat? Why, then it needed to be fashionably tilted down over the right eye; and in that case she required an asymmetrical variant of the Century of Progress Bob, a new style that, with a frame of fin-de-siècle curls, made a knowing wink at the styles of the previous fair while adding a healthy dollop of modern sauce.
On the streetcar home she would tone the look down a little, but the transformation was obvious, and she had little choice but to explain what she was doing and let the chips fall where they might politically.
She had literally nothing else to do. In theory she was still part of the Wobblies, but they had been split open by factional strife and then scooped empty by government action, and finally supplanted by the much more vigorous and better-financed Communist Party. She knew that working as a capitalist shoe strumpet at the Century of Progress would raise eyebrows among the same. But she had learned that she could get away with just about anything by calling it tradecraft and implying that she was gathering intelligence on the habits and vulnerabilities of the bourgeoisie.
Not just any young Red could have gotten away with it, but what Dawn had gotten up to last summer in D.C., and become somewhat locally famous for, gave her a long leash. And even had that not been the case, it wasn’t clear, now that both of her parents were dead and she was not working for anyone in particular, who should be holding the end of any leashes.
More and more, it was as if last summer’s events in D.C. had never even happened. She had lost contact with all of the survivors, with the sole exception of one Bob Overstreet, an engineer from Wisconsin, about thirty, now employed by a steel mill in Gary, Indiana. He was one of those fully committed socialists who somehow managed to blend in perfectly with the establishment. Short brown hair, well groomed, good manners, genuinely considerate, particularly of women. Probably homosexual, but he didn’t know her well enough to confide that. Bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Wisconsin, master’s from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Yes, when the management of the WESL squat had needed to send someone out to talk to cops or lawyers, Bob had always been their man.
After the debacle in D.C., Bob and Dawn had ended up in the same boxcar, along with a dozen other refugees. He’d kept an eye out while Dawn slept and she’d returned the favor. Though, if armed hobos had set upon Bob while he slumbered, her only recourse would have been to unlock the violin case, patiently assemble the tommy gun, snap on the hundred-round magazine, and stage a massacre. Still, the mere fact that she could gave her a kind of uncanny confidence that seemed to intimidate those men whose eyes were drawn to Bob’s wallet and his suitcase while he was snoring. She wondered if Veronika had possessed such a weird power of intimidation. It wasn’t as if she carried a machine gun around all the time.
Bob had invited her to hop off the train with him as it rolled slowly along a siding in Gary, and she’d done so without hesitation. He’d put her up in his house for several days, given her a chance to clean up and acquire some new clothes while he went back to his job at the steel mill as if he hadn’t just spent his summer vacation fomenting a Communist revolution in the nation’s capital. In the attic of his big old house in Gary there was an empty steamer trunk that had been left up there by the previous owners because it wasn’t worth the trouble of wrestling it down the ladder. At Bob’s invitation, and with his help, she got it down into the neat little workshop he kept in his basement and did a few simple repairs. Some Germans had apparently used this thing to immigrate to the United States fifty years ago. It had a system of internal compartments suggesting that the Bavarian carpenter who’d knocked it together had a feverish mind and a lot of time on his hands. No carpenter herself, Dawn still had enough basic farm-girl skills to modify the thing so that it would accommodate the violin case on its bottom level. On top of that went a false floor and other internal partitions. She loaded in what she’d been able to acquire in the way of garments from thrift stores and pawnshops around Gary. That left the trunk only about one-third full, but it was a start.
Bob had been telling his vigilant neighbors that Dawn was a country cousin making a brief stay during her summer vacation. Before that story had time to wear thin, he took her to the railway station and she rode a proper passenger train into Chicago, arriving in that city as a girl from small-town America, not a person of means but a damn sight more respectable than the Dawn who had ridden a boxcar out of Potomac Yard with only the clothes on her back.
Once she’d got settled in at the kommunalka, she’d found that the trunk just barely fit into the eave space next to the garret she was going to share with the other girls. This was closed off by a removable panel to stop dust, drafts, and bats. She emptied the trunk of clothes, save one set that she kept stashed in that shoulder bag, just in case she ever needed to leave in a hurry. The bag went on top of the trunk, which disappeared behind the panel, which in turn ended up mostly hidden by Dawn’s bed. No one but her even knew it was there.
She arranged all of these things just-so during the two hours after she first set foot in the kommunalka. As she was doing so she was thinking that someone from the International might get in touch with her one day soon to inquire as to the whereabouts of the twenty-fourth tommy gun. For the triumphal press conference that the FBI had staged at the barn in Springfield, Virginia, a few days after the sack of Camp Marks, had featured twenty-three. Dawn had read the newspaper articles at the Gary Public Library, examined the photos, counted the weapons neatly laid out on the tarp. Silent Al had obviously put his newly acquired tommy-gun-assembly skills to use, just to provide a more menacing backdrop. Surely someone from the International had read the same articles, scoured the same photos, tallied the same numbers, noted the discrepancy. They knew where she lived. As soon as they showed up at the kommunalka asking questions, she’d hand over the violin case and the little key on its pink ribbon, which she liked to carry around with her as a frail precaution against the case’s being opened by curiosity-seekers. She’d never opened it since the moment Silent Al had helped her snap it shut.
But that day never came. Days, then weeks would go by without Dawn giving a moment’s thought to what was on the other side of the panel next to her bed. Sometimes the men downstairs would talk boldly of what might happen if the kommunalka were to be raided by the FBI, and then Dawn would feel an icy spike through her heart as she imagined them ransacking the garret, noticing the panel, hauling out the trunk, prying open the suspiciously heavy violin case. But that day never came either. Dawn came to understand that these conversations were all in the realm of fantasy. Refugees from Germany who really were worried about secret police raids, stoking the bloodlust of homegrown would-be revolutionaries who were bored of sitting around the kommunalka waiting for something to happen.
IT WAS BOOTLESS TO STRIVE AGAINST THAT PART OF THE FAIR THAT EXISTED TO PROPAGANDIZE, for everyone was doing that. It was more productive, or at least more interesting, to apply herself and attend to those parts of it that seemed universal to all propagandists in all countries. It just so happened that this was also more fun for a seventeen-year-old girl with no friends and nothing else to do. And so once again Dawn got to enjoy the somewhat delicious naughtiness that she felt when using the Comintern’s greenbacks to purchase a cup of coffee and a jelly doughnut. Each leaflet that she handed out she had marked with her initials, and every one that turned up at Mr. Green’s booth earned her a nickel, and so soon enough she was paying her own way. She went to the fair early and stayed late, for the work was easy and there were plenty of diversions—that being the point of a fair. Her perambulations soon made her as conversant with the place as if it were an old city, and she a native: she could direct lost visitors to the stands where the jinrikisha boys and roller-chair pushers stood waiting (rich hunting grounds for sore-footed women); the Indian Village (actually five of them, showcasing different tribes); the Largest Picture Ever Painted (a cyclorama of the Great War circumscribing a Pantheon all to itself); the Mayan Temple; the Italian Pavilion with its shrine to Mussolini; the Ukrainian Pavilion echoing to the strains of the Chicago Ukrainian Chorus some days and the Gypsy Ukrainian String Orchestra on others, competing sometimes with the Weekly Community Sing at the Hall of Science or Seth Parker and his Hymn Singing Neighbors of Radio Fame. Chatter on the loudspeaker system was cut drastically during the second week, when deafened management clamped down on amorous youths sending personal messages to their sweethearts. Dawn knew where to find Darkest Africa, featuring cannibals of the Ubangi Tribe; the Log Rolleo; the insulin checkroom, where diabetic visitors could stash their medicine in refrigerated lockers; the small but completely functional factory in the Firestone Building where you could watch tires being made for the custom automobile being built to your specs in the General Motors exhibit and drive home on them at the end of the day. Her tasteful oxfords took her down the avenidas of Old Mexico, over the canal bridges of the Venetian Carnival, along the Streets of Paris, where Freddie Williams’s Gold Coast Orchestra—the only Negro dance band on the fairgrounds—held forth at the Café de la Paix. Her encyclopedic knowledge grew to cover lesser-known attractions: the three-foot, million-volt spark gap from MIT; the largest map ITW (a sixty-three-by-forty-three-foot relief of the United States); the largest exhibit of miniature paintings ITW; the longest soda fountain ITW, being hastily extended by panicked Walgreens executives because it wasn’t nearly long enough; the Mechanical Wonderland; the African Dodger concession, aka “Hit the Coon,” where you could drop a Negro into a tub of water by striking a target with a fastball; and the Midget Village, where midget drivers raced in midget cars with one-cylinder engines and midget boxers pummeled each other in a wee ring.
As they were meant to, these things drew visitors: 600 Norge salesmen on the B & O from Philly; 176 newsboys on the New York Central from Buffalo; 60 Episcopal bishops; 180 Civilian Conservation Corps workers en route to turpentine camps in the southeast; 100 Minnesota National Guard troops. Paramount Studios executives from Hollywood, Lions from St. Louis, Shriners from Fort Smith, Plymouth workers from Detroit, credit men from Milwaukee, rubber workers from Akron, rose growers from Pasadena, all rolled in on special trains on the Rock Island Road, the Santa Fe Line, the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie, the Chicago & Eastern Illinois. Five hundred employees of the National Carbon Coated Paper Company of Sturgis, Michigan, arrived on the same train as 270 members of the Jewish Socialist Verband from New York City. The New York Central line rehired 5,000 Depression-idled workers just to handle the demand for special trains. Bypassing the congested rails, an invasion force of Ohio pharmacologists packed a lake liner that steamed right up to the fair’s extensive system of coves and quays, scattering a flotilla of paddlers limbering up for the Canoe Jousting semifinals. They made a beeline to the Food and Ag Building, where Aunt Jemima, a 300-pound Negro mammy, served them a flapjack breakfast. The voracious Buckeye druggists overflowed into a storage area housing 200,000 samples of canned, bottled, and preserved food products entered for competition, and some stayed long enough to enjoy an Old-Fashioned Georgia Watermelon Cutting before dispersing and mingling hopelessly with the Missouri Osteopaths, the Texas Grand Opera Association, the Chicago Cactus Club, a Postum delegation from Battle Creek, and the Brick Manufacturers’ Association, all of whom were out in force. The next day it was the Association of Military Surgeons; a battalion of kids in wheelchairs from the La Crosse Crippled Children’s Home; the Italian National Fascist Syndicate of Engineers; the United Typothetae of New England, New York, and New Jersey; the Braille Theater Guild; and the Anciens Combattants, a veterans’ group from France.
Large as these groups were, their numbers were as nothing compared to those attending the fair en famille, coming in by train, bus, or motorcar from all over the continent. The Trib sent undercover reporters, disguised as typical fairgoers, to bus terminals in Omaha, Dayton, and Amarillo to rip the lid off the seamy conduct of ticket clerks who, by spreading rumors of traffic jams and parking problems, were trying to discourage would-be fairgoers from driving to Chicago. Bus-company spokesmen issued a formal apology and disciplined the offenders.
Most certainly not arriving on buses were such prominent individuals as: the English vice consul, celebrating George V’s birthday at Story Cove on Enchanted Island. Prince Ludovico Potenziani of Italy, inspecting the Italian Pavilion in advance of the feverishly anticipated transatlantic odyssey of Air Marshal Balbo’s air armada. George Ferris, of the Wheel. General John Thompson, of the submachine gun. Mr. Firestone, of the tires, and Mrs. Johns, the asbestos dowager. Of interest to Dawn: Princess Alexandra Kropotkin, a lineal descendant of Rurik the Varangian. She was met at the Twelfth Street Gate by mounted Cossacks, who escorted her about the fair in a wheelchair—the spawn of Rurik had sprained an ankle in Iowa. Mayor Kelly of Chicago was presented with a miniature key to the Midget Village by the midget mayor. Governor William Langer of North Dakota, Prince Iesato Tokugawa of Japan, the maharaja of Baroda, and the chargés d’affaires of Rumania and of the Irish Free State were all heralded by greater or lesser salutes from the field artillery. Lieutenant Tito Falconi, the Italian air ace famous for having flown upside-down from St. Louis to Joliet, made an inverted pass over the grounds, landed right side up, and spent a day at the fair whipping up excitement about Balbo’s approaching fleet of colossal seaplanes, and a night whooping it up at Texas Guinan’s Pirate Ship Cabaret, enjoying fantastical or hilarious displays of ballet dancing, stunt-skating, knife-throwing, and midgets. Jack Johnson was boxing all comers, paying $25 to any man who could go a round with him. Marchese Guglielmo Marconi showed up to tour the Radio Building and to appreciate a mechanical diorama endlessly reenacting a shipwreck with, and without, the intercession of radio; the death toll was reduced in the latter case to a negligible figure. He spoke fluently in English without notes, but when the time came to speak, using his invention, to the people of Italy, he pulled a page from his pocket and, under the watchful eye of Prince Ludovico Potenziani, read something with frequent references to Mussolini.
Not all of the fair’s visiting “royalty” were so exalted; Dawn had a brief and pleasant conversation about shoes with Miss Myrtle Suave, winner of the Iron River popularity contest. Also receiving zero-gun salutes from the field artillery were Lady Anthracite of Minersville, Pennsylvania; the Fur Queen, parading in triumph through the Streets of Paris, blissfully unaware that the French Consul had filed a diplomatic protest with the State Department demanding that the whole sorry thing be dynamited into the lake; Miss Bertha Binder, the Sugar Beet Queen of Sebewaing, Michigan; Miss Ardoth Schneider, California’s Sweetheart of the Rodeo; Fannye Nutt, winner of the Georgia, and a small contingent of the winners of the South St. Paul, popularity contests. Helen Johnson, who, at the National Dairy Show in St. Louis, had been elected the Most Typical 4-H Club Girl in the United States. The oldest living midget and the youngest amateur radio champion. The Queen of the Michigan Cherry Festival. Miss Verna Socket, elected Most Charming Girl at the bathing beach. The Oklahoma triplets.
Dawn let herself drift free on the ebbing and flowing tides of visitors, shining her oxfords twice a day, swapping them for a fresh pair each fort-night. The Century of Progress grew a collective mind of its own, which persisted even as spent visitors were replaced with fresh. The Illinois Host Building, one of two structures on the grounds equipped with an air-cooling system, became a favored refuge for tired female visitors nursing diverse womanly complaints. Its big shaded verandas, looking out over the Avenue of Flags and catching the lake breeze, gave lemonade-sipping pilgrims the feeling of being in the middle of everything and yet at a calm remove, and a modern air-cooled lounge provided a refuge for the overstimulated and iron-poor. At the other end were reproductions of Abe Lincoln’s living room and a shrine to the Emancipator, and in the middle was an auditorium decorated with murals of cows and other bucolic Illinois scenes. More or less important persons spoke there to greater or lesser audiences. It got heavy use in connection with various special Days (Luther Day, Philippine Day, Bulgarian, Utah, Jewish, American Home, and South Side Days), but Dawn had no personal interest in most of these except insofar as they drew sore-footed Filipinas or Utahans—10,000 of them every day—to the veranda and the lounge, complaining to one another of gynecological matters.
This building was but a short distance from Mr. Green’s shoe booth and so was the most obvious and profitable location for Dawn and her lissome colleagues, or competitors, to troll for women who had been let down by their shoes—so much so that Mrs. Green had to resolve a spate of tiffs by posting a rota dictating which girl was allowed, and expected, to be there when. Dawn, as a rule, preferred striding about to standing still, but she enjoyed cool air and easy money as much as any capitalist, and made the most of her shifts there.
Almost perfectly useless from a shoe-selling point of view was Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist, who spoke in the auditorium one evening and drew a predominantly male audience. The few ladies in attendance tended to be far more rationally shod than average, and in any event had come specifically to hear about physics, not to wander at large about the fair. Dawn played hooky and attended the lecture, partly because she had heard of this Bohr, and partly out of respect for the Century of Progress’s fundamental theorem. Like a loosely observant Christian who only went to church on Easter, she felt a nagging sense of duty to attend a free lecture by Niels Bohr as long as she was spending all her time at, and making her living from, a fair that, when you stripped away the upside-down Italian air aces, the Log Rolleo, midgets, and stunt skaters, was supposed to be about science.
Besides, no girl had ever been more perfectly turned out for an occasion. Mr. Green had caused to be made an outfit copied in every particular from a Century of Progress promotional poster now seen all over Chicago. Its central and dominating figure was a tall, lithe, yet muscular young woman standing atop a globe, her Wisconsin-sized big toe pointed directly at Chicago, throwing her bare arms up above her head to gather in a beam of radiant energy shining down out of the heavens. The iconography owed a lot to churchly depictions of virgins getting supernaturally impregnated, or at least inspired, but from the context it was pretty obvious that this was some other kind of radiance, perhaps like the X-rays that Mr. Green’s machine shone through his customers’ feet, except coming the other way, like cosmic rays. Anyway, the woman on the poster wore a fantastical getup: a long, diaphanous skirt fluttering prettily in astral winds, and above the tiny waist, a gleaming breastplate (approximated by Mr. Green’s costumières with silver-painted papier-mâché) with streamlined steel cups over the boobs. Inscribed in the vacancy between those—for the woman’s breasts were very widely spaced—was the legend I WILL in block letters. For reasons of both modesty and commerce, Mr. Green had, in the version actually worn by Dawn, appended TELL YOU ABOUT MY SHOES below it. The ensemble was completed by a headdress in the form of a young eagle spreading its wings as if to spring into flight straight from the woman’s brain. Dawn and the other girls took turns wearing it. The breastplate could get a little stuffy on warm days. At any rate, she was careful not to sit directly in front of anyone at Niels Bohr’s lecture. If someone were to request that she take off her hat, she would just have to leave, or go and stand at the back, since the eagle (pawnshop taxidermy) was inextricable from her hairstyle.
In any event her inspiring persona, while it drew admiring looks from many, including even Niels Bohr, did nothing to enliven the lecture. She was just as bored and crestfallen as any child who goes to Easter services expecting Jesus to descend from heaven in glory, only to find a pallid minister mumbling about Homoiousianism.
She’d read about Bohr last summer, when she’d got in the habit of spending long, hot afternoons in the Library of Congress reading world newspapers. 1932 had been a great year for physics and so plenty of ink had been spilled on the topic, much of it by reporters of the smart-alecky school who only wanted to know whether any of it could be used to beat the odds at Pimlico. Some of them seemed to understand it, though, or at least could write a decent story about it, which amounted to the same thing as far as Dawn was concerned. The big news last year had been Chadwick’s discovery of a new particle called the neutron, which seemed to account for roughly half of all the matter in the universe. As such, it seemed like something whose existence ought to have been known to science a little sooner. But because of its neutrality it was apparently hard to notice. Its existence could only be inferred by solving a sort of logical/mathematical detective story whose clues and evidence must first be brought forth by doing very particular sorts of experiments. Joliot and Curie had done them in Paris and misread the evidence; Chadwick at Cambridge had puzzled out the correct interpretation, inventing or discovering the neutron in the process and confirming it with more experiments in a similar vein. The chain of reasoning, though long, wasn’t that difficult to follow. It could be expressed in terms of billiard balls. The somewhat less obvious part had to do with splitting the atom. In order to perform such experiments at all, Chadwick and Joliot and Curie had to break protons and neutrons free from their prisons in nuclei, a feat achievable by so arranging things that shrapnel from the fortuitous disintegration of a conveniently unstable nucleus would bang into targets of another type and shive parts off. Which could be explained to a lay audience with analogies such as “splitting a piece of cordwood with a bullet.”
The difficulty being that, in that analogy, the splits of wood didn’t just fall meekly to either side of the chopping block; they went screaming off in opposite directions with more energy than the bullet had brought to the party in the first place. And this was all proof of Einstein’s equation E = mc2, for the energy given into the splits was accounted for by a slight reduction of the amount of mass in the log. Mass could be converted to energy, and indeed such conversions were going on all the time in stars, the fantastical amounts of energy thus produced being known to all persons by the warmth of the sun and to scientists by less obvious phenomena.
All of that could be read about in finer newspapers and, in some sense, “understood” by lay readers; it was billiard-ball physics juiced up by the matter-becoming-energy phenomenon. It was not, however, what Niels Bohr wanted to talk about. He wanted to talk about other things that had been brewing in physics during the mid-to-late-’20s and that, he seemed to feel, had been unfairly neglected by lazy journalists who found it easier to write of billiard balls and bullets. Easier because this other stuff was difficult to understand—so much so that Bohr didn’t seem to think that he really understood it. The lantern-jawed Danish savant had been chatting with Einstein about it in England and Belgium, which was where Einstein had been living the past few months owing to the $5,000 price that had been placed on his head by distinguished civic leaders in his native country.
That the material was abstruse might have been all right had he explained it well. Even a sloppy explanation might have counted for something had the microphone worked properly (or, barring that, had he raised his voice a bit). But when all of these things failed at once, and a baby began crying, it became quite difficult for Dawn to convince herself that she really knew any more of these matters than when she’d walked in. The same could almost surely be said of just about everyone else in the audience—save for the boy sitting in front of her.
The boy was about her age. He looked vaguely familiar. This wasn’t the first time he had placed himself in her way. He had been trying to catch her eye for a day, maybe two. Nothing unusual about that in a fair drawing millions where she had a job that consisted of being noticed by as many as possible. Boys varied in their level of persistence. It was difficult to say why some, but not others, gave her the creeps. This one didn’t, despite being more persistent than many who did. Following her into a lecture on quantum mechanics was taking it a bit far, but she liked that he had taken a seat in front of her so that she could evaluate him rather than feeling his eyes on the back of her Century of Progress bob. He was wiry, with thick, wavy hair brushed back from a high forehead. He’d gone too long without a trim; excess hair, piled up on top of his head, was going curly in the humidity. He was wearing shorts, which was a bit unusual. Niels Bohr seemed to be talking about how things could exist in two different states at the same time, and she thought it well applied to this fellow whose shorts gave him an indeterminate position on the spectrum between boy and man. If there was anything to Dr. Bohr’s theories, this specimen was both boy and man at the same time, and by observing him closely, performing certain experiments, she could find out which. But it was more than that; until she did the experiment, this youth would remain in the indeterminate state. It was not, in other words, a matter of her finding out whether he was actually boy or man, for the question, so phrased, had no meaning; she could cause him to become definitively one or the other simply by doing the experiment. Whereupon his boyhood or manhood, and her consciousness thereof, would all become part of one larger, entangled state of affairs. So she continued to observe him. The close attention that he paid to the lecture struck her as unusual. She assumed he’d only come in to get in her eyeline. She was therefore fascinated to see him reach into a skinny satchel and pull out a schoolboy’s notebook. He flipped through it in a kinetoscopic blur of tabulated numbers, equations, and diagrams. He paused for a moment to gaze upon a page inscribed in a hand so large that Dawn could read it clearly:
4/33 THE MOST REMARKABLE FORMULA IN MATH
eiπ+1 = 0
And after looking upon it for a few moments in what seemed a reverential manner he licked his finger, turned a few more pages of equations—apparently written down in the past few weeks, since this was 6/33—and came to a blank page on which he wrote BOHR.
He must have then sensed her eyes on him, for he turned around before she could avert her gaze, and looked straight into her eyes for the first time. He had arched eyebrows and a fine, elfin face that could have seemed mischievous or even a bit wicked, but at this moment he just looked astonished, and embarrassed. Escaping from the awkward moment with an attempt at a smile, he turned back around and let Dawn watch the back of his neck and the rims of his ears turn a purplish shade of scarlet. She did not know what to make of it, but guessed that, in whatever school he attended, to play hooky from watermelon-eating contests and Hit the Coon to go to physics lectures, and to keep such notebooks, were not how to make it with girls. Dawn couldn’t help but feel bad for him, even as some part of her suspected that this was at least half an act. The boy scratched down a few sentences, but a few minutes later she noticed that he had struck out the name BOHR and replaced it with an even larger BORE!!! He then began drawing sketches in the time-honored tradition of idle schoolboys, beginning with a flying vehicle that seemed to be a hybrid between the rocket cars cruising high above them on stretched cables and one of the huge Italian seaplanes that, according to breathless announcements coming in over the biggest loudspeakers ITW, were even now bending their courses south out of icebound latitudes toward eastern Canada. Below that he scratched in a few buildings apparently meant to represent the fair, and in the middle of those a high pedestal, and on it a globe, and standing atop the globe a slender, long-legged woman, arms upraised to bathe in cosmic radiation. His sketching abilities were nothing to write home about, but he had a knack for geometry and proportion that kept the rendering from being downright insulting, and as it went on he began to sneak glances back at her, furtively at first, then, when she tolerated it, longer looks that he would no doubt justify by claiming that he was only trying to do justice to her.
The last detail, added in the space between the artillery-shell breast shields, was the i will, which he enhanced with a string of question marks.
This was his first wrong move. It must have shown in her face, for he went red in the neck again, turned the question marks into a row of figure eights, and wrote in,
HAVE A SODA WITH DICK.
To this she was helpless to do anything but smile. Snap went the notebook. A few seconds later, having disturbed one row of Bohr-watchers on his way to the aisle and a second on his way to the empty seat next to Dawn, he was saying, “Hey, you gettin’ any of this? ’Cause I can explain it to ya. And we won’t need microphones or nothin’.”
Dick was from Brooklyn. She knew it because she had learned how to peg accents while hanging around with itinerant veterans.
“What he’s saying is—”
“Dawn.”
“Dick. What he’s trying to say is—nice to meet you, Dawn—that truths come in complementary pairs, and you can’t have one without the other.”
A lady in front of them, a downstate matron who had not caught on to Silhouette Reform or Hair Beautifying, turned around, glared at Dick through heavy-rimmed glasses, and shushed him.
Seconds later they were out on the Midway headed for the Longest Soda Fountain ITW.