Three days later the Generalissimo of the Skies flew his armada to New York, and Dick, in the backseat of the family automobile, began traveling in the same direction. She saw him one more time. It wasn’t so much that he was avoiding her (though he might have exerted himself a little more) as that she never knew when Balbo would make another visit to the fair, attracting Blackshirts, who drew bureau agents. Reading about the quadrumvir’s official schedule in the paper wasn’t foolproof, since he liked to come incognito when he wasn’t attending polo matches in posh suburbs or high mass at the Cathedral of the Holy Name. So she told the Greens she was taking a few days off. She spent them in a cheap hotel. She could afford a place of her own now—could have done all along, to be honest—and her surprising encounter with Silent Al had put her in mind of what ought to have been obvious, which was that living with a bunch of known Communists was a bad idea. Her backup plan of packing up the tommy gun and going to enlist in the Barrow Gang seemed impractical, given that neither G-men nor Texas Rangers could establish their where-abouts.
Her last contact with Dick was another soda-fountain date at a time when she knew Balbo and his supporters to be at the Dante Alighieri Society fete. This was pleasant enough, but she knew she was losing his attention, and small wonder since he was about to leave and they’d never see each other again.
She did not regret it. She’d satisfied her curiosity as to sex. It had not been as bad the first time as some said. Dick had satisfied his, and seemed to find it altogether a fine thing. They ended up doing it again in the shoe stall after closing, Dawn sitting atop the dormant X-ray machine with her skirt around her waist and the flat heels of her Century of Progress oxfords digging into Dick’s skinny, clenching butt as he stood there on the fluoroscope. This time, he had come prepared with a rubber. Like the suitor who forgot the bouquet on the first date but brings it out with a compensatory flourish on the second, he produced this with a certain degree of ceremony, and donned it with a single clean stroke of the fist, suggesting he’d been practicing on inanimate objects. The first time, in the machine room on the boat, he’d murmured something about protection while she had been throwing herself on him. She thought well of him for it. Her biggest regret, perhaps a little strangely, was not getting to meet Dick’s parents, for she thought that they had brought Dick up not so much well (as that was usually defined) as artfully. For anyone could be made polite with enough beatings. But Dick had a knack not often seen for combining rude horniness with always putting out some effort to be mindful of others, all the more affecting for being so self-conscious.
The next day Dick, and Balbo with his hundred dashing aviators, were gone, within a few hours of each other. The latter’s departure was, as usual, more dramatic, consisting of a parade up Michigan Avenue, lined ten and fifteen deep with spectators airing out the green-white-and-red banners one last time and women holding babies above their heads calling out, “This is for Mussolini!” After taking in a polo match at Fort Sheridan, Balbo then jumped into his Savoia-Marchetti and blasted off at the spearhead of his stormi for New York, passing, somewhere en route, Dick’s family car, which had slipped out of town that morning sans cavalry escort, Fascist salutes, brass bands, or polo exhibitions.
Dawn wondered whether it was smart to stick with such a conspicuous job. Safest would have been to go far away. But how far was far enough? Home to Montana? Seattle? All the way to Russia? And how great was the risk really? She had never been arrested. There were no mug shots of her, no fingerprint cards. Silent Al had no doubt entered a description of her into his report, but he was the only cop, as far as she knew, capable of recognizing her. He did not know her real name; she did not even have a real name. And now that Balbo was gone, there was no particular reason for a G-man specializing in foreign-influenced subversives to be wandering at large around Century of Progress.
The oddest notion came to her, which was that she would be safe if Silent Al were dead.
She did not act on this. Despite owning a submachine gun, she wouldn’t have had the first idea how to go about finding and slaying a G-man. But the mere thought of it affected her thinking as magnets torqued the tracks of cosmic rays. It brought her in mind of the Soviet Union, where such calculations were made, and acted upon, all the time. As if the doings of the Cheka and the OGPU produced a signal that, like Marchese Marconi’s marvelous emanations, traveled invisibly round the world and resonated in some crystal that had been planted in her young skull when she’d seen, but not understood, the purges in Petrograd. And just as nearby frequencies would interfere with each other on the radio, she heard a little of Bonnie and Clyde when she was listening to that transmission. Redbaiters in the States liked to say that the people running the Soviet were little better than gangsters. Dawn could hardly gainsay them, given that, last year, she had, at her father’s direction, bought guns from gangsters. But when she re-read Bonnie Parker’s poem, she saw it more and more clearly as a revolutionary document, a protest against prison camps as bad as any in Siberia or Germany. It was not so much that Bonnie, and the Soviets, were interfering with each other’s broadcasts as transmitting on the same frequency.
She went back to work as if nothing had happened. It might be a foolish invitation to revolutionary martyrdom, but she somehow felt a little bit safer with every person who saw her face, as if hiding in plain sight were the best trick of all. And a lot of people saw her face. The fair welcomed its ten millionth visitor. There were only 125 million people in the whole United States. Then just a little later it was fourteen million. Or perhaps time was passing more quickly. The place felt altogether different to her. On that first day she had paid her 50 cents and walked onto the Midway fully armored against what she knew to be a barrage of propaganda, and had ended up liking it nonetheless—delighting in its absurd vanity and drawing vim from its stupid, relentless pep. Now it all seemed a bit much, a bit forced. The exhibit of barking sand from Kauai, the armless and legless painter from Canada, the Swedish singers from Sioux City, the exhibits of men’s collars, of purple wood from Costa Rica, of a beating replica of a human heart, of a piano with two keyboards, of the Sultan of Sulu’s personal Koran, the oldest Czechoslovakian bible in the United States, demonstrations of scoutcraft, the gorilla impersonators from Hollywood in their yak-hair suits, they all now seemed as if they were reaching for something of what the Century of Progress had genuinely had in its early weeks.
She kept perambulating back to a gag in the Westinghouse Pavilion: $20 in gold coins, and a plate of cookies, displayed in an open window. Whenever someone reached for them, their hand would break an invisible ray, casting shadow on a photoelectric cell, and a barrier would rise up to close the window. Dick had talked to her about it, and explained the photoelectric effect and told the story of how Einstein had figured it all out thirty years ago—and now here it was being used in an automatic machine to keep children away from cookies! He had found it amusing, albeit old hat in the same way as the shoe-selling Jules Verne X-ray tube. Dawn, as the summer wore on, saw it more and more as a metaphor for everything about the fair—including Dick himself. She had made love to him in the full knowledge that she was interrupting an invisible ray, triggering the descent of a barrier. He would leave and forget about her. Perhaps she had been emulating her mother, who had fucked the outlaw Jim O’Faolain to get pregnant with Dawn. Perhaps she was putting revolutionary ideals around sex and morality into practice. Perhaps she was just putting her body on the line for the thrill of the physical risk, as a Komsomol boy might have enlisted in the Red Army and gone to fight Cossacks. But as July gave way to August her mood changed, and she remembered the look that her mother had used to get after the cancer had gone to her brain and she would reminisce about Jimmie, and the lamentations of the women in the kommunalka in Petrograd when they had been fucked and abandoned by men given official leave to do so by Soviet theoreticians. It became clear that the climax of the Century of Progress had been the arrival of Air Marshal Balbo’s flying armada, and having sex with Dick. Everything after was just a slow dwindling.
Except for the thing in her belly, which was unquestionably growing.
She had certainly missed one period and was overdue for another. The changes in the way she saw things and reacted to them might have been put down to simply being tired of the fair, or changes in the fair itself, or the natural alteration in perspective that came of being a grown woman who had Done It with a Boy, but as weeks went by with no menstrual flow she began to think it was actually a result of changes in her body, and her mind, resulting from pregnancy.
The shoe store—in the evening anyway—was literally in the shadow of Soldier Field, and so she was among the first to be aware of it when the usual round of athletic competitions was suspended and the great stadium’s entrance ramps and loading docks were claimed by trucks blazoned with the trademarks of Dow Chemical, Goodyear Rubber, the United States Navy, the University of Chicago, and Union Carbide. Not twenty feet from where Dick had picked the lock, a meteorological station was hoisted from a flatbed truck to the roof, its anemometers and vanes stirring in the eddies alee of the stands until they caught the unsullied air. A caravan of trucks rumbled in, each carrying on its open bed a phalanx of steel cylinders stenciled HYDROGEN. For a whole day the empty stands resounded with the trundling noises of them being rolled down ramps to the ground, and when the work was done, seven hundred of them stood in a great horseshoe round the edges of the field where Tunney had once bested Dempsey in the Long Count.
Dawn had grown used to the stadium’s east front looming over the shoe stall, but she had not actually gone inside until now. It was only a few years old but made to look ancient, like a Roman ruin before it had become ruined. Not so much Colosseum as Circus Maximus, with long Doric colonnades ranking above the east and west sidelines, terminated at each end by tidy little temples. Below them, acres of plain fir benches terraced down to the field. Dawn picked her way up and down those vast, splintery ramps as the days passed, seeking the shade of a neoclassical pediment or making a foray for a discarded Trib, hiking up when the meteorologists were prepping a weather balloon in the colonnade, down when Arthur H. Compton was holding forth for a cluster of journalists. She wondered what Italo Balbo must have made of it, flying all that distance from Rome to find a Roman stadium bigger and better than any in the Old World.
Three busloads of sailors went over the field on hands and knees, plucking away every twig and pebble. Next came a pair of trucks laden with nothing but white drop cloths, which were spread out on the gridiron as if it were an operating table being prepped for surgery on a Titan. Then a giant truck all covered with tarps, which when peeled back revealed infinite convolutions of cream-colored fabric. With maddening deliberation this was unpleated by the navy men and spread across the white drop cloths under the eyes of clustering officers, executives, and scientists on the field, and a few curious spectators who’d begun to gather in the stair-stepped plane of fir, and radio announcers sharing the high places with meteorologists. Dawn was there when a special flatbed rolled in bearing the sigil of DOW, and supporting a spherical object seven feet in diameter in a padded, halo-shaped creche. When the tarps were flung off to a spattering of applause, the words CENTURY OF PROGRESS could be seen painted on the whitish metal of its lower hemisphere, where they’d be visible from the ground. On the upper were eight mooring points where ropes would be attached. All about it were tiny windows.
To non-scientifically-minded onlookers it might now appear that everything, save actual balloonists, was in place for a launch. But sorting out the details seemed to be much more engrossing. Another whole day passed. Arthur H. Compton, a big, handsome man and a magnet for journalists, was given to standing before tables strewn with scientific-looking junk and gesticulating, occasionally raising his hands on high, prompting his interlocutors to stand up straight and squint into the radioactive sky.
Dawn would sit there on her breaks, sipping lemonade, scribbling her initials on shoe flyers, and watching the scientists. Discarded newspapers blowing around the stadium informed her that the sphere was made of a wonder metal called magnesium, electrically produced from a special brine found only at Midland, Michigan, and that it was an eighth of an inch thick. Seemingly quite valuable and delicate contraptions were ferried out to the magnesium sphere by junior scientists, then brought back when they’d failed to fit, or to work.
Dawn, in her current state of mind, could not rid herself of what was admittedly a very obvious and sophomoric comparison between the perfect silver sphere and an egg making its way down the old fallopian. If one were resolutely to prosecute that analogy, then the scientists clambering into its hatch with their dark nests of apparatus, all a-dangle with disconnected wires and tubes, were the sperm; but a more visually pleasing sperm analogy lay in the nimbus of vertical steel hydrogen cylinders, which seemed to be spreading out to envelop the target.
The more time she spent watching the scientists, the fewer flyers she handed out at the fair, and the less money she made; but she was finding it difficult to care about that, the weather was fine and hot and she felt lazy. Mrs. Green sensed that something had changed—probably had sniffed out the pregnancy through some arcane female power. She gave Dawn penetrating looks but did not trouble her—probably wouldn’t until she began to show. Dawn learned from more derelict newspapers that some of the instruments had been shipped in from Caltech by Dr. Millikan, and understood that this flight was to be a sort of eschatological showdown between Millikan’s theory that cosmic rays were the birth cries of new matter, and Compton’s annihilation hypothesis. Her own delicate condition inclined her to the birth-cry view, but she found it interesting that Millikan entrusted his instruments to a rival who wished to prove him wrong. She wondered if Compton weren’t tempted to sabotage Millikan’s contraptions, but reckoned it would violate some sort of gentleman’s code. A code stiffened, come to think of it, by the fact that any lie would out in the due course of scientific progress and its perpetrator put down in the logs as not just a villain but a fool.
The aeronauts—a Swiss named Jean Piccard and an American, Lieutenant Commander Thomas G. W. (“Tex”) Settle of the U.S. Navy—arrived the day before the flight and, after a round of press interviews and posed photographs, set to work checking the balloon’s controls. Inflation commenced that evening and carried on into the night. Dawn sent word to the German Communists and saved some good seats. They arrived just after dark, as banks of portable lights were thudding on all around the field, and balloon-watchers beginning to stream in by the thousands. The Germans had come victualed to hike all the way to Hudson’s Bay should need arise, which was why Dawn had invited them. Suddenly ravenous—for she was not one of those pregnant girls who felt sick all the time—she inflicted so much damage on one of their hampers as to draw keen looks from a German crone who had probably sussed out the whole thing, gazing straight into her uterus with X-ray vision.
They fashioned a nest of blankets and a battlement of hampers and sat together deep into the night, drinking 3.2 beer and watching the bulge of hydrogen swell and rise in the slack folds of the balloon. The clanking of the cylinders as they were moved to and from the filling point, the hiss as they were discharged into the balloon, made a music that lulled her. For a while she was kept awake only by the MPs patrolling the stands to prevent people from smoking, and the jostling of nicotine fiends making their way to or from the exits. But eventually the old German lady made a little gesture and drew Dawn’s head into her lap and stroked her hair with her leathery hands, and then she was out, just like that.
She woke from a jumbled dream of fire and fear. Sensing she’d been asleep for some hours, she sat up and pulled her loose, wild hair out of her face to see a smooth orange bubble rising from Lake Michigan, as if the magnesium factory over there in Midland had gone up in a terrible spitting flare of burning metal. But it was of course just the sun rising in a mostly clear sky, striped by the stolid entasis of the Doric columns. Answering it on the fifty-yard line of Soldier Field was a giant sphere of gas straining to be free of the slack pleats of the great balloon. The lower cone of it, converging toward the magnesium pellet, was striped by the shadows of the colonnade, but the smooth dome rose far above the highest reaches of the stadium’s enclosing roofs, an orange-yellow ball that Compton had drawn up out of the sod to answer the one God had hung in the sky. Twenty thousand people were in the stadium to watch America venture into the stratosphere, higher than humans had ever gone, but they were rapt like churchgoers, not raucous like a football crowd. And no wonder, since the balloon was so huge and so close and seemingly balanced on such a tiny ball bearing. All normal intuition warned of its toppling over into the stands. Dawn knew now why her dreams had been troubled. Part of it was the orange sun shining through her hair, making it the color of fire. But more than that was the tone of the men’s voices below. She could make out few words but they sounded like men responding to an emergency. And so they were—but it was an emergency they’d willingly and with forethought created by emptying seven hundred cylinders of buoyant flammable gas into a bag surrounded by twenty thousand men, women, and children. The balloon was too big for the stadium, the tension in the bar-tight mooring ropes was palpable. For those who knew anything about the properties of hydrogen, the possibility of a colossal fireball, the immolation of tens of thousands, was obvious. Releasing the balloon was as much a desperate measure to avoid catastrophe as it was a planned and orderly start to a scientific expedition. The crowd wouldn’t have had it any other way; they’d come to be near the danger and the power, as the spectators on Navy Pier had gone to feel the rumble of the Fraschinis in their bones and bellies.
It went up in an explosion of silence. Air rushed down toward the center to replace that voided by the rising balloon, entraining cigarette papers, ticket stubs, peanut skins, and human hair, all bright in the light of the sunrise, a chaos of litter when you were amidst it but intelligible as a system of flows and vortices when viewed across the gridiron. Born from the stadium, the bald baby jumped straight up a few thousand feet, caught an upper-atmosphere breeze, and began to drift away from the lake. And Dawn began to think in a serious way of what she was going to do now.
They were getting updates over the loudspeakers. Scientists, meteorologists, and aeronauts were taking their turns at the microphone as they bided their time waiting for radio updates from Piccard and Settle. The general strategy was to vent gas, stabilizing altitude, and soak up heat from the sun for a while. Dawn, still coming awake, drifted between listening to their commentary and pondering her situation.
She had money for a train ticket. She wouldn’t have to travel hobo-style; she could ride in a pullman to Montana and go to ground.
She could find someone to give her an abortion in Chicago, but she well knew the dangers of placing herself at the mercy of an illegal practitioner, the infection or scarring, or both, that could leave her infertile or dead.
No, if she wanted that she should go to the Soviet Union, where she could get it done for free, by a real doctor. She could get there by going east, but the old familiar way for her was west, to Seattle, thence Vladivostok.
She would buy a ticket on the Empire Builder today and go to Montana and see how matters stood there, whether the loose network of cousins and uncles and aunts would have her, and maybe she would stay and have the baby, and maybe she would keep right on going to Vladivostok.
She was brought back to the here and now by a gasp from the crowd. All were shading their eyes to look up at CENTURY OF PROGRESS hanging in the dawn light a mile above them, drifting slightly to the west. She had missed an announcement—a dire one. The Germans were demanding a translation. She heard it said that a hydrogen vent had got stuck open. Gas was rushing uncontrollably from the balloon. It was on its way down. It was coming back.
The stadium was emptying out. The marines were piling into troop carriers, rolling out onto the streets. Spectators with vehicles began to pursue them; but the marines knew no better than anyone else where the balloon was going to crash. All one had to do was watch it. And it was coming down so nearby—headed for the adjoining railyard—that vehicles were of little use. People were swarming fences and fanning out across the tracks. Appearances had deceived them—it landed a good two miles away—but that was only a few minutes’ good run. Impelled by the curious magnetism of the crowd, Dawn and the Germans crossed a trampled-down fence and reached the site a bit late. The first spectators to reach it had descended on the flaccid envelope with pocketknives to cut away souvenirs. Marines had then arrived and driven them off with rifle butts, leaving the creamy fabric marked with arcs of blood. What Dawn and her party found was a cordon of marines with fixed bayonets, dense around the dented magnesium sphere, where Tex Settle and Jean Piccard were being stethoscoped under the eye of the local and international press corps, and sparse around the piled envelope of the crashed balloon.
Dawn was on the Empire Builder that night.