Once outside, Frank couldn’t stop talking about it. “That’s the future, Maud. Right there. The future.”
“It’s fascinating,” Maud said. “No doubt about that, and yet, I don’t quite understand what it’s for. Real moving people are all around us. Why do we need to see them moving in a picture?”
“Because—oh, Maud. Do you really not see it? Everything it touches becomes immortal!”
Maud shrugged. She liked the morning light shining through the elms at home in Fayetteville; she loved the way the clouds skidded across an endless Dakota sky. She didn’t need a photograph or a moving picture to remember it. She did not understand what Frank saw in this machine.
Maud wanted to linger and look at the displays, but Frank was dragging her along at a rapid clip, as if he had a specific mission. In the distance, the giant Chicago Wheel, studded with its thirty-six swinging cars, loomed up against the sky. When they had brought the boys to visit the fair, they had stood for hours, mesmerized, watching the wheel lift the lucky riders high into the air, then gracefully turn, each seat balancing so that the riders remained level even as the world turned. Frank had explained, to the boys’ fascination, how the engineer, Ferris, had designed the wheel to rival the grand Eiffel Tower in Paris. At first everyone had been afraid to ride it. The spindly steel spokes didn’t look as if they could support the massive lacquered cars, fitted with grilles, that could hold up to sixty people at a time. But Frank had read all about the wheel in the newspapers, and he explained that the structure was based on the most modern mechanical and electric techniques, including a double-sized Westinghouse air brake, just like those used on trains, as a safety feature. The idea of soaring through the air had intrigued the boys, but Maud had to put her foot down. They had paid fifty cents each to gain admission to the park, and another fifty cents each for five tickets to ride the Ferris Wheel was out of the budget. They would have to watch from the ground.
This time, Frank hustled her along without stopping for a second look at anything, until they reached the base of the giant wheel. The sun was hanging low over the lake now, the sky turning brilliant shades of purple and orange, and the fair’s white buildings tinged with pink. Then suddenly, in an explosion like fireworks or a hundred shooting stars, the entire wheel burst into a confetti of electric light that danced and shimmered as the wheel spun through the air.
Frank pulled a shiny one-dollar coin from his pocket and laid it in the palm of Maud’s hands.
“We are going for a ride in the sky.”
For once, Maud couldn’t say no. She couldn’t give another speech about counting pennies. She held tight to Frank’s arm as he paid for their tickets and they clambered aboard the giant wheel and settled into their seats.
Maud had never before felt so exhilarated as the wheel swung up into the sky. Her stomach lurched, then settled into pleasant butterflies. The wheel climbed higher and higher, and when it reached the pinnacle, they seemed to hang in the sky. The entire expanse of the White City was laid out below them, glittering with thousands of bright white electric lights. It was as if the night sky on the dark Dakota prairie were now spread out below them in all its sequined glory. As the cage hung there, rocking gently, Frank reached into his vest pocket and pulled out a pair of spectacles. “Quick, put these on,” he said. He slid the spectacles into place, and Maud gasped. The entire dazzling White City was transformed into a bejeweled sparkling expanse of emerald green.
“You see it?” Frank said.
“Oh, Frank! It’s beautiful!”
“Emeralds!” he said.
Frank cupped his hand around the back of her head and kissed her so passionately, right there, in front of everyone, that as the wheel dropped down again, she could no longer tell if the flying sensation came from the car’s movement or from the stirrings of her heart, thawing, so slowly, from the ice that had encased it for the last three years.
* * *
—
AFTER DESCENDING FROM THE Ferris Wheel, Frank and Maud strolled along the crowded avenues of the White City, mostly silent. As she looked at her beloved husband’s face, she felt as if she were twenty years old again, a Cornell coed, smitten with the most handsome young gentleman in the world. So much had happened between them, and yet, here they still were.
After a long stroll in companionable silence, Frank stopped and turned to Maud.
“The only thing I ever wanted in life was to be my own man, to have my own business, work for myself, earn my own fortune, and be beholden to no one. Your father kept his own shop, my father started his own business, my brother founded Baum’s Castorine Company. But at last, my dear Maud, I’ve come to the conclusion that I am simply not fit for that life. I can sell other men’s wares and make a decent living—or not so decent, I confess, but enough to keep a roof over our heads and the boys in shoes and clothing. And even if I’m chained down, my mind can still be free, can’t it?”
“Of course it can, Frank.”
“Maud, you are the kindest and most patient woman that God ever put on the face of the earth, and I think I never would have proposed to you at all if I’d known it was my fate to take you out of your elegant home in Fayetteville and drag you hither and yon, and still find myself unable to keep you in the fashion that you so well deserve.”
Maud reached out and placed her index finger gently upon his lips.
“Please don’t,” she said. “This day has been enchanted, this night magical. Please remember that I walked right out of my home with both eyes open because of one thing. I wanted to be with you. That has never changed.”
“Then can I just ask one small thing? Just a tiny thing from you, Maud?”
Maud stiffened a little bit. Was he going to propose another wild plan for their future?
“In a place like Chicago, it’s easy to feel like a tiny piece of a huge machine, as if a man is no more than a single rivet in a giant structure like the Ferris Wheel that spins on a motor that the rivet has no control over. We can shout and roar and try to make ourselves bigger than we are, but in the end, we are just rivets. Yet at the same time, we’re part of something that is big and fancy that transports us to the future itself, and that is Chicago. Where men are small, but they are also part of one of the grandest experiments that mankind has ever known.”
“And womankind,” Maud added.
“Of course, womankind,” Frank said.
“So, what do you want from me?” Maud asked. From their vantage point on the promenade, the lit-up White City resembled the magical block city Frank had constructed that first Dakota Christmas, as if the stuff of fairy stories had come to life. Frank’s tall, slim frame was shadowed against it, his face dark except for the whites of his eyes.
“If you could just…” Frank paused. Maud could tell that he was searching for the right words.
“If I could just…?”
“If you could just try to have faith in me,” Frank said.
“But, Frank! How can you say that? Of course I have faith in you…it’s just that…”
“Just what?”
“It’s just that—well, you see, you are a good salesman, and you earn enough for us—we don’t need so much. Anything extra, the little things, I can earn enough from my sewing to put something aside. You are too hard on yourself.” Maud didn’t mention that she also always set aside money to save for Julia, no matter how little.
Frank reached up and rubbed his thumb against Maud’s cheekbone.
“No, Maud. I’ll do what I have to do as long as I have to, but I promise you that somehow, someday, I’m going to do better for you. I may not have figured out how yet, but one day, I’m going to find a way. I want you to feel just the way you felt as we were sweeping upward on the Ferris Wheel, and teetering all the way at the top, where you could gaze out as far as the eye can see. I want you to see emeralds.”
Maud opened her mouth to protest. To tell Frank once again that what he had given her was more than enough, even if his flights of fancy had sometimes led them down a difficult path. The hard times were not what she remembered about their life together. It was the moments, incandescent, transcendent—the silvery arc of a theater light, a marching band skidding across a Dakota sky, a rainbow against storm clouds, the nighttime expanse of the White City suddenly transformed into a kingdom of glittering jewels—when she could catch a glimpse of a world beyond. This vision, this second sight, was what Frank Baum had given to Maud. Without him, she trod along the pathways of the ordinary. A molten heat shivered down her sides, her knees went weak, and her cheeks grew hot. There was nothing she could do about it. This was the man she loved.
* * *