was dressed more stylishly than he had ever seen her. A woman like this could live in the world Karl was now exploring as gracefully as she had in the one they had both left. But it was not to be with him.
“My father wrote me,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “I asked him to.”
“But he didn’t say anything about Harley Ansel.”
Karl tried not to let the name sound bitter, but he could taste it.
“Your father doesn’t know,” she said, sitting down in a big, over-stuffed chair. Karl seated himself across from her. “I told my parents that if they said a word before I was ready, I would never return home.”
“Ready?”
“I needed,” she said, “this one last chance.”
Karl sat back.
“Chance,” he said.
She lowered her eyes to her lap.
“Do you hate me for it?” she said.
“I didn’t even know you liked Harley Ansel,” he said. Then he stopped himself. There was no point doing this to her.
“I didn’t like him,” she said. “Don’t.”
“Well, you sure enough found an odd way to express it,” Karl blurted out.
This time she did not avoid his eyes. She stood right up to them.
“I do not want to marry someone simply because my father thinks well of his prospects,” she said.
Her hands lay crossed in her lap. Karl stood and went to the window, which was hung with brocade. His hand upon the curtain stirred a mote of dust.
“I have felt the same,” he said, “not wanting the life I have waiting for me back in Abbeville.”
“I came to Chicago because I needed to find out what my own prospects are,” she said.
“You want to be a seamstress?” Karl said.
“What is it that you want, Karl?” she said.
He stuffed his hands into his pockets, looked downward again, put his toe into the carpet as if it were loam.
“What I can’t have,” he said.
“Maybe you’re giving up too easily,” she said.
“I’ve gotten a taste of certain things here,” he said.
“Well, then, let’s stay.”
He was sure she didn’t really mean to speak of them as an “us.”
“But at the same time I have felt the pull of home,” he said. “Frankly, Cristina, you have been a big part of that.”
There, he had said it.
“If you do go back, you should bring with you the things from here that you have come to love,” she said.
“And what about you?” he said.
“You could bring me, if you wanted,” she said.
On the street outside the window an ice cart was clop-clopping up the stone. A dog poked his nose against the arm of a boy seated on a stoop. A woman across the way was shaking a tablecloth out an upstairs window.
“I would try,” he said, “if you weren’t spoken for.”
“I came here to find out whether I had any chance of avoiding being pushed into a terrible mistake,” she said.
“What do we do?” he said.
“I guess we should take some time and find out,” she said.
For the next several months Karl spent his days in the chaos of the pit just waiting for the moment he could leave and call on Cristina at her aunt’s. Sometimes they stepped out for dinner, and he could barely control the surge of feeling he had with her on his arm. On a number of occasions they visited the sprawling white World’s Columbian Exposition on the lakefront and witnessed all the marvels of the globe and the colonnaded promise of the future.
It took weeks before they dared to embrace. Then weeks more before she offered her lips. Even then she did not open them as Luella had.
At some point Karl felt compelled to tell Uncle John what was happening.
“We don’t want to go back and work the farm,” Karl said.
“There are other ways,” Uncle John said.
“Abbeville is so small,” said Karl.
“In the center of a very large world,” said his uncle, “and increasingly connected to it. Today the train and telegraph. Tomorrow, who can know? But whatever develops will offer opportunity, opportunity that a man of promise such as yourself is uniquely prepared to seize. Become large in a small place, and eventually you can make the world come to you.”
“But things are so tough right now,” said Karl. “Businesses going under. Banks failing.”
“The very time to be bold,” said Uncle John.
Over the next several days the two of them studied large books at the Board of Trade that showed patterns of membership. As Karl’s uncle had suspected, Abbeville was a niche waiting to be filled.
With Uncle John’s financial backing Karl got a place on the Board of Trade. Karl signed a contract that bound him to a relationship with Schumpeter & Co. for ten years, during which time he would pay off the loan. Karl’s board seat would allow him to avoid the gouging price every Chicago elevator and trading firm extracted, so even with loans to pay, he could make a decent income for himself and still do better for his neighbors than any of the competition.
Next he planned the construction of a modern grain elevator. Abbeville’s farmers had to take their crops either to Simon Prideaux, the Frenchest of the French, or to distant locations, which cost them precious time and forced them to deal with strangers. The construction of a new facility would be costly, of course, but land was readily available along the railroad, and any bank would see that Karl’s proposition was nothing short of inevitable.
Uncle John took Karl to his own personal banker to do the deal. It was a simple mortgage, structured so that no money moved until Karl needed it and thus no unnecessary interest accrued. At his uncle’s suggestion Karl made the instrument out to cover another property upon which he had secured an option. This was to be the location of a grand new home across the tracks from the elevator.
“Be careful, Karl,” Cristina said.
“Don’t worry,” he said.
“I mean thinking it is easy,” she said. “You have fought a horse and plow. You know the kind of effort this money is based on, the seasons of disappointment.”
They
