“And who would you be proposing to present him to, Miss?” said the man. With his accent and lovely tenor voice he seemed almost to be singing. “Would it be your family, then?”
“Oh, my, no,” said Luella with a little more vehemence than Karl wanted to hear. “This is the nephew of Mr. Schumpeter.”
“Well, then, he could buy the whole store,” said the salesman.
Karl looked around him. Nobody had enough money for that.
“I’m just a farmer and a logger,” he said, “and I’m here to get an education.”
“Then let’s find you a suit of clothes befitting the educated man you are to become.”
Karl followed the two of them to a rack that must have held fifty suits. When they reached it, the salesman took a step or two back and looked Karl up and down.
“I’d say a 40,” said the salesman. “Now here is a classic.” He pulled a dark-blue suit off the rod and sent the other clothes dancing. “Can you feel how smooth that is?” he asked, inviting Karl to finger the weave. Under Karl’s callused fingers, the fabric might as well have been silk.
“I am under strict instructions to make sure he comes home with something with a vest,” said Luella.
“Ah,” said the salesman, thumbing the edge of his own. “I think Mr. Schumpeter is correct, though a waistcoat is not for everyone. It takes a certain bearing to carry it. But let’s first think only of fit.”
He lifted the dark suit he had taken down.
Karl reached for the hanger, but the man turned and walked away. Karl looked at Luella.
“You have to try on the pants, too, silly,” she said.
Karl was still confused.
“Not right here in the middle of the floor,” she said. “Just follow him.”
The next hour was extraordinary. Luella chose suits and shirts for him to try on. She touched each of them all over, inspecting the weave and the stitching inside, before handing it to him so he could go into the little closet and place it, fresh from her hands, directly against his skin. Then he would come out and model for her how the shirt or suit or jacket looked on him, and sometimes she would actually touch it on him, the shoulders, the calf—even, praise God, the waist. What’s more, she did not seem the least hesitant about it. What kind of incredible women did they raise here?
When they were finished shopping, Karl noticed in the mirror Luella looking at both sides of him.
“You wouldn’t be reconsidering now, would you, Miss?” said the salesman.
“Reconsidering?”
“Bringing this one home.”
“He does look nice, doesn’t he?” she said, and Karl felt like a stallion that had taken a ribbon.
Luella signed the store ticket. Though Karl knew his uncle’s generosity would pay the bill, his gratitude went to her, and he said so.
“You are a real gentleman,” she said. “Do you know that? For someone raised with goats.”
OVER THE NEXT SEVERAL days his uncle tutored Karl in the firm’s basics.
“My company deals in promises,” Uncle John explained. “Promises to sell a certain quantity of grain at a certain price on a specific date in the future. People buy and sell those promises until the day arrives. Then whoever has sold it last must fulfill the promise, either in grain or cash.”
“What is the point?” said Karl.
“The only way to control the future is to pay its price today,” said Uncle John.
Within a few weeks he moved Karl from the office to the Board of Trade itself.
The trading floor spread out over what seemed like an acre under high, grimy windows. Above it stood enormous clock-like devices. An attendant manned each, following the action on the floor and moving the dial’s single arm, clockwise on a rising market, counterclockwise on a decline.
Karl’s first job was to take orders over the leased telegraph line that connected to Uncle John’s office down the street. When he received an order, Karl dispatched it via one of a half-dozen young toughs who ran them to the Schumpeter traders in the pits.
Karl was amazed at how this stone-hard city transformed grain into an abstraction, but it was not as though the physical world did not intrude. A surfeit of rain moved the market, though no one on the trading floor suffered a drop of it falling on his shoulders. A military upheaval in Europe stampeded the market, though no one here heard a cannon.
Every day as Karl walked home to the boardinghouse, he passed a little square where street-corner orators condemned everything Karl was learning how to do:
“Who are the wolves who wager on our toil?” Predators speculating upon the very food in our children’s mouths. They buy and sell you as surely as slave masters. They stir great waves of panic, then mount the crests for gain.
“There is nothing in this world that is not material. Love? Religion? The milk of human kindness? Money and class crush them.
“But one day the contradictions will all lie bare before you. The workers of the world will come together in the great, inevitable surge of history. Class will battle class, and the weak shall rise up as one and bring the predators down!”
The next day Karl told Luella about the man.
“You should have seen him,” he said. “He had a head of hair out to here and a beard scragglier than any I saw in the woods. And the mouth on him. He doesn’t stop for a breath.”
“Maybe he has a lot to say,” said Luella.
Less than a week later, one of the regular traders fell seriously ill. Uncle John asked Karl if he was ready to take his place.
“You have everything in your head that you need,” Uncle John said. “Now we must find out what’s in your belly.”
That afternoon Karl pulled at his starched collar, cleared his throat, and asked Luella to dinner. She accepted immediately, and he wondered why he had waited so long.
As afternoon wore into evening, his uncle left for some engagement or another, and the activity in the office slowed. Luella came to Karl’s desk, and side by side they looked out the window into LaSalle Street. The city lay before him as if it were his. Luella on his arm, he tipped his hat to one of the clerks and winked at the doorman, who got them a carriage and received a nice gratuity for his trouble.
Karl had chosen a fancy place on the Gold Coast north of the river near where Uncle John lived—along with the Swifts and Armours and Potter Palmers and everyone else with a name. As soon as the two of them stepped into the restaurant, he realized he had made a mistake. Luella, who had always before appeared cosmopolitan in her bright white shirtwaist and black skirt, here seemed totally out of place. The preening little maître d’ did not even meet her eyes as he suggested that she leave her knitted shawl at the coat check in the tone he might
