"To the Negro district," Virgilia replied. The driver made a face and drove away.
"Bison?"
"Bunk, by God!" Charles whooped and dashed forward to his friend just coming down the marble stairs. People in the lobby stared at the lanky man in frontier costume bear-hugging the proper little fellow in a business suit. Questions and answers tumbled one over another.
"You brought Brett and the youngsters?"
"Yes. They're upstairs. Where's your wife? I'm eager to meet her."
"Conferring with the head porter about train schedules. She wants to go to New York to see an old friend."
They went to the saloon bar. Each studied the other, noting many changes. And although they spoke with enthusiasm and warmth, each felt a little shy of the other; it had been a long time since their postwar reunion at Mont Royal.
Children seemed a bridge over the years. "I'm hoping for an Academy appointment for my oldest son if my brother Stanley can stay in Congress three more terms. Isn't your boy about the same age as G. W.? They could start together, just the way we did."
Soberly, Charles said, "I'm not sure I want Gus to be a soldier."
"He wouldn't have to stay in forever. And it's always been the finest education offered in America."
Charles's eyes seemed to drift away, past the layered smoke and the gaslights, past the noisy regulars and the visitors at the long oak bar, to some distant time, some distant place beside a river in the Indian Territory.
"I'm still not sure," he said.
Willa found America's Ace of Players in a dirty Mulberry Street rooming house that was almost a tenement. She knocked twice, got no answer, opened the door, and saw him seated in a rocker, staring out a grimy rain-washed window. The view was a wall. He didn't turn when she closed the door. He must be going deaf.
The sight of the small room crowded with old trunks, piles of wardrobe items, and clipping books broke her heart. Above the door he'd hung a horseshoe. The chrysanthemum in his lapel was wilted and brown. A black cat in his lap arched and hissed at her. That made him turn.
"Willa, my child. I'd no idea you'd be here today." Her telegram had stated both the exact date and the probable hour of her arrival. "Please, come in."
When he stood, she noticed his swollen, misshapen knuckles. The contrast between his wrinkled skin and ludicrous dyed hair was sad. She hugged him lovingly. "How are you, Sam?"
"Never better. Never better! For a man sixty years old, I am fit as a young bachelor." She knew he was seventy-five. "Come sit down and let me share my exciting news. Any day now, I have it on good authority, none other than Mr. Joe Jefferson is going to ask me to step in for two weeks and play Rip Van Winkle while he enjoys a seaside holiday. The part is around here somewhere. I've been studying."
Under the rocker, next to a glass of water and a bowl of cold oats, he found an old side, from which he blew dust. Willa swallowed, congratulated him, and visited with him for the next two hours. He was dozing in the chair when she stole out. One of Trump's crippled hands rested motionless on the head of his purring cat.
Before she left the building, she located the woman who owned it and paid her fifty dollars, twice the amount she mailed from Texas every month, secretly, for Sam Trump's board and room.
On Monday, they all set out to visit the exhibition. George provided a carriage for each group, two for Billy and Brett's family, and the vehicles took them swiftly and elegantly past crowded horsecars and Pennsylvania short-line trains to the carriage park on the grounds.
They saw exhibits of Pratt and Whitney's metalworking tools, Western Electric's railway signal devices, Ebenezer Butterick's paper dress patterns, Gorham silver, Haviland and Doulton stoneware, LaFrance fire engines, Seth Thomas clocks, McKesson and Robbins medicinal roots and barks, Pfizer chemicals, Steinway and Chickering and Knabe and Fenway pianos. They saw locomotives, underwater cable equipment, tall glass cylinders containing dirt from various counties in Iowa, giant bottles of Rhine River wine on pedestals, portable boilers, wallpaper printing presses, glass blowers, Gatling guns, Mr. Graham Bell's curious talking device called the "telephone" (George thought it impractical and silly), huge polished reflectors from the Light House Board, fifteen-inch ears of corn and seven-foot stalks of wheat, bentwood furniture, sculptures in butter, Swedish ornamental iron, Russian furs, Japanese lacquered screens, Army, Navy, and Marine uniforms of the last seventy-five years, the innovative new European school for young children called the "Kindergarten," thriving orange, palm, and lemon trees in Horticultural Hall, Tiffany's twenty-seven-diamond necklace worth more than eighty thousand dollars in gold, exhibit cases containing crackers, stuffed birds, blank books, mineral samples, carriage wheels, bolts and nuts, corsets and false teeth, a seventeen-foot-high crystal fountain hung with cut glass prisms and gas-lit for added brilliance, a plaster sculpture of George Washington, legless, perched on a life-size eagle (Madeline covered her mouth and rolled her eyes), and five thousand models of inventions from the Patent Office.
They drank soda water from stands on the avenue and coffee at the Brazilian Coffee House. Stanley liked the French food at Aux Trois Freres Provengaux because it was so expensive. Brett liked the new way all the furniture was exhibited in realistic arrangements called "room settings." Virgilia liked the Women's Pavilion, and especially the newspaper office in the center, where women at desks wrote articles and other women set type and still others printed a newspaper called the New Century for Women; she took two copies. The young boys liked Old Abe, the pet bald eagle of a Wisconsin Civil War regiment; Abe was a veteran of more than thirty battles, and for long periods he sat so still on his perch he looked stuffed, but once, after a lengthy wait, he spread his great wings and turned his fierce eye on the boys, who were thrilled. George liked the round four-inch bronze medal with a female figure holding a laurel wreath which Hazard's had received for its ornamental iron; the Centennial judges awarded twelve thousand such medals for outstanding exhibits. Madeline liked the Mississippi state cabin because it was decorated with Santa Cruz Railroad and the mammoth grapevine shipped all the way from California and erected on a great overhead trellis; visitors strolled beneath the living vine. Charles didn't like the display of Indian tipis, pipes, pots, costumes, and other artifacts assembled by the Smithsonian Institution, but he said nothing about his feelings, merely passed quickly through the exhibit with a grave expression. George frequently said things like, "It's the beginning of a new age," or, "And the skeptics say we have nothing worth showing to foreign powers," but everyone was so interested in what they saw, they didn't comment or even hear him most of the time.
Brett's daughters Maude and Luci could hardly be pried away from the Nevins's tiny Constance Anne. Everyone kept mixing up G. W. Hazard and George Hazard Nevin, whom his parents called G. H. Willa, who always spoiled Gus, bought him too much popcorn and he got a bellyache and had to rest an hour at a comfort station. Fremont Junior got lost for ten minutes near the Otis Brothers steam elevator exhibit in Machinery Hall. Brett's youngest girl, Melody, just three and a half, pulled tulips from a bed outside Horticultural Hall before her mother stopped her and spanked her. A couple of oafish white men accosted Virgilia and Scipio, and he started swinging. Centennial Guards swooped in and broke up the clumsy flight. They gave the mixed couple no sympathy. Stanley and Laban, though still in Philadelphia, were nowhere to be seen. Nearly every exhibit that Billy passed inspired some comment about California. Everything was better there, more healthful there, more modern there. To Virgilia, her brother sounded like an abolitionist whose new cause was mammon. Scipio quietly suggested she curb her criticism for the sake of family harmony. George offered his arm to Madeline and with great interest listened to her describe the new house and Mont Royal. He promised everyone that there would be spectacular fireworks the next evening, the fourth.