Chicago, 1922
Downstairs, Ruth scanned the situation: A girl was torturing the keys of the piano on the stage. Across the hall, the dining room rang with the clink of china as the Three Arts staff set tables for dinner. A matron with a shiny bun like Olive Oyl sat near the entrance hall door, writing at a desk.
Acutely aware of the frustratingly attractive man inside the red and black checkered wool coat sleeve she was tugging, Ruth plucked her sister’s boyfriend across the hall and into an empty sitting room, where a fire was dying in the green-tiled fireplace.
She mustered a tough front to cover her fluttering insides. “Let me talk to that dragon at the drawbridge. I’ll distract her and you can sneak out.”
He threw an amused glance at her hand on his arm and let himself be led, as would a benign St. Bernard being bullied by a child. “You’re as crafty as your sister.”
She drew back. Her angelic sister was crafty? “June?”
“How do you think I got up there?” He stepped back into the shadows and shooed her on. “Go.”
She stared at him a moment. He was treating her like a friend. Like she wasn’t a little sister, or a loser, or a whore.
The matron—a different one than who had checked in Ruth, luckily—fell for Ruth’s line about being a needy art student interested in renting a room there. Maybe it was the patch that Mother had carefully sewn on the sleeve of her long maroon coat, not so invisible after all. The old bat at the desk looked at it then got out a clipboard with an application. Didn’t matter. It was worth the temporary wave of shame to see a six-foot-four man in a lumberjack coat go tiptoeing by.
Minutes later, she fell in step next to him in front of the apartment buildings out on Dearborn Street. Gusts of wind pierced her coat as automobiles stuttered past. Between crusty black banks of long-ago shoveled snow, a man in a baggy coat strode by, then a pair of women, their cloche hats pulled down low and their bare knees pinched and red above their rolled-down hose. Grand iron-railed stairways led up into sumptuous houses with lamps turned on against the early evening gloom. Ruth peered through windows, wondering about the sophisticates inside, as foreign to her as Martians. How happy they must be, living their exotic lives.
“There might be a phone booth on Clark, down near all those cheap hotels,” John said.
Although he’d worn what apparently was his Sunday best—the same that he’d worn to visit June at home over Christmas—Ruth could see now that he didn’t fit in here in Chicago. His opened red and black coat was too short; he wore no tie; his white shirt was buttoned up to his chin; his flat cap with ear flaps was no debonair fedora. He was perfectly dressed . . . to deliver wood in the city.
Good-looking as he was, for a moment she was embarrassed to be seen with him, before fury at herself torched up in her chest. Who was she but a small-town flat tire? Unlike all the ducky dolls sashaying by, her knees were buried beneath her pinched-waist long coat, a full skirt, and white cotton stockings. She might as well have worn a sign that read OLD MAID IN TRAINING. She saw her future and was frightened.
“Hey,” he said, “what’s your hurry?”
“I’m going to Death Corner,” she snapped.
“You mean where the police look the other way as gangsters shoot each other up and innocent bystanders get killed every other day?”
“I believe that would be the ‘Death’ part.”
“Not under my watch, you’re not.”
She kept walking. That’s how she got anything done—she just kept doing it even though people told her otherwise. She’d surveyed the map of Chicago before coming. She needed to stay on Clark to the Newbery Library, turn right on Oak Street, and then forge down several blocks to arrive at Death Corner and all the tenements there. But when they got to the stone pile of the library, he grabbed her hand and placed it on his arm.
“Telephone is this way.” He kept them going straight.
She suspected they looked ridiculous, a giant farmer and an adolescent old maid, promenading down the street, although having her hand on his arm did please her. She let him guide her on, regardless of the fact that her nose ached with the cold, a blister screamed from her heel, and the way to Death Corner was receding in the other direction.
On the other side of the library, under some bare young trees in a little park, an older woman stood on a wooden crate and shouted into a megaphone, her baggy flapper garb billowing around her. Ruth’s heart quickened: they were in Bughouse Square! Dear Lord, let it be as wild as the guidebooks said.
“Women!” the old flapper cried into her megaphone. “Are you letting your destiny be controlled by the fear of unwanted pregnancy? Let me tell you what your doctor, your husband—maybe your own mother—will never tell you. There are ways to protect yourself!”
A crowd formed around Ruth to hear the woman speak. Ruth planted her feet on the wet sidewalk when John tried to move her on. “I want to listen.”
A sightseeing bus stuffed with tourists under its canvas lid turned the corner and slowly rattled down the street between the library and the park. Several passengers had Brownie box cameras raised, in wait for the bus to come to a stop.
Next to Ruth, a laborer in bulky coveralls yelled at the tourists. “Hey, what are you gawking at?”
“You all are going straight to Hell!” a camera-toter shouted back.
“Well, that’s good news.” A stocky man in shirtsleeves and suspenders spoke around his cigar as he handed out flyers near Ruth. “Heaven’s fine for climate but give me Hell for the society.” He shoved a bill into Ruth’s hands. “Can’t take credit; that’s Mark Twain’s quote.”
She had just enough time to read the paper between her wool-encased fingers.
TONITE!
“IS
FREE
LOVE
POSSIBLE?”
DEBATE
“Prof.” Jack Dunham, University of Chicago Campus
Vs.
Fred Hardy, Bookman
Dil Pickle Club
Thru Hole in Wall at 10 Tooker Place
Down Tooker Alley to the Green Lite Over the Orange Door
Members of the Dil Pickle Club furnish the “swell” music at our Friday Nite Dancing Classes
John took it from her. “She’s just a kid,” he told the man, handing it back.
He looked John up and down. “Say, a big man like you—are you a nut about anything? Farm debt? Decreasing prices for crops? Corruption in Washington? Want to come talk to the Picklers?”
“No.”
John positioned himself between Ruth and the man. She asked around him, “Who are the Picklers?”
“Oh, you know.” The man gave his cigar a chomp. “Just authors. Hoboes. Professors. Every kind of nonconformist or rabble-rouser passing through Chicago. Rich slummers. Me. Sinclair is supposed to grace our party tonight. We’ve got good jazz. You like jazz?”
Ruth maneuvered past John. “Upton Sinclair?”
“None other.” The Pickler poked a handbill into the next person’s ribs.
“Forget about the telephone,” said John. “I’m taking you back to June.”
The Pickler kept a keen gaze on John as he delivered another flyer. “Who are you, big guy, to boss this woman around?”
“Oh, he’s all right,” said Ruth.
“You sure? I don’t tolerate bullies.”
“He’s fine.”
The man scowled and moved on.
“Your sister was right about you,” John said.
“Upton Sinclair!” Ruth breathed. She hardly felt John aiming her over the trampled snow of the park lawn back toward Dearborn Street. “How brave Upton Sinclair was to go to the stockyards and expose the conditions there. And not just for the people, but for the animals. The poor lambs! It’s the lambs that upset me the most. Trusting those Judas goats.”
John searched over the heads of the crowd closing in to hear the speaker. “Goats?”
“Haven’t you ever heard of the stockyard Judas goats?”
“No.”
“They’re actually rams, though they call them goats. They’ve been trained to lead the lambs to slaughter.”
“This way.” He put pressure on the small of her back to get her moving again.
His touch weakened her. She let herself be guided toward the lower edge of the park, across the street from the townhouses of Gilded Age millionaires. “The little lambs come crying in from the trains, and these Judas goats calm them down, nudging them with their heads until they get quiet. When they have the lambs’ trust, off they trot, gay as a boy at a fair. The little lambs follow them down the chute, kicking up their heels, happy—until the men meet them with sledgehammers.”
“Excuse us.” John pushed his way through stragglers.
“What kind of person would think that was okay to do to a little creature? Yet that person, some meatpacking baron, is living over there on Lake Shore Drive right now, drinking whiskey with the mayor and having his shoes buffed.”
He looked down at her. “Why are you so angry?”
Her heart took a jolt, as if he’d flung a tub of cold water on her.
“I’m not angry.”
“Yes, you are. And so is your sister. Only she hides her anger, and you wear yours like a badge of honor. Is that the only way you know how to get attention?”
Words were her shield between people and herself, flashed to make her look smart and dangerous. They were supposed to ward people off, people like Robin’s old steady, who wrote Ruth Dowdy goes all the way on the back of the girls’ bathroom door.
But the words weren’t supposed to keep you away. Not you.
She wheeled onto the street and into the path of a car. Its ah-OOH-gah blasted her back to her days with Robin and his Bearcat, in which she did not go all the way, although close, because she was so stupid, so desperate, that she had wanted him to like her.
John grabbed her. “You trying to get yourself killed?”
She marched diagonally across the street, causing a car to screech to a stop, then darted down the first alleyway, into a crowd of ladies and gentlemen in stylish dress shuffling toward what looked to be a bricked-up stable. A single green bulb shone down on the entrance, its weird light illuminating the word DANGER daubed on the crumbling bricks. More words were splashed on the orange-painted door, but Ruth couldn’t make them out through the furs, veiled hats, and fedoras blocking the way.
“What is that place?” she asked a woman nested within a high silver fox collar. An ostrich feather wafted from a band around her head.
She crooked bright red lips. “The Dil Pickle Club.”
Ruth shrugged away from John to get in the line behind her.
He sighed wearily. “What are you doing?”
“Seeing Upton Sinclair.”
“You know you shouldn’t go in. Why do you have to give me such trouble?”
She turned away from him. Was causing trouble the only way she knew to get what she wanted? What was it exactly that she did want?
The furs and fedoras parted, revealing the splintered orange door. Ruth read out loud: “ ‘Step High, Stoop Low, and Leave Your Dignity Outside.’ ”
“Great,” John muttered.
She pushed the door open.