followed, its beam clearly outlined in the sulphur cloud that trailed the balloon. Seconds later rockets began arcing over the lakeshore. Men with flares raced along the beach lighting mortars, as other men aboard barges set off large rotating flares and hurled bombs into the lake, causing the water to explode in extravagant geysers of red, white, and blue. Bombs and rockets followed in intensifying numbers until the climax of the show, when an elaborate wire network erected at Festival Hall, on the lakeshore, abruptly flared into a giant explosive portrait of George Washington.
The crowd cheered.
Everyone began moving at the same time, and soon a great black tide was moving toward the exits and the stations of the Alley L and Illinois Central. Holmes and the Williams sisters waited hours for their turn to board one of the northbound trains, but the wait did nothing to dampen their spirits. That night the Oker family heard joking and laughter coming from the upstairs flat at 1220 Wrightwood.
There was good reason for the merriment within. Holmes had further sweetened the night with an astonishingly generous offer to Minnie and Anna.
Before bed Anna wrote home to her aunt in Texas to tell her the excellent news.
“Sister, brother Harry, and myself will go to Milwaukee tomorrow, and will go to Old Orchard Beach, Maine, by way of the St. Lawrence River. We’ll visit two weeks in Maine, then on to New York. Brother Harry thinks I am talented; he wants me to look around about studying art. Then we will sail for Germany, by way of London and Paris. If I like it, I will stay and study art. Brother Harry says you need never trouble any more about me, financially or otherwise; he and sister will see to me.”
“Write me right away,” she added, “and address to Chicago, and the letter will be forwarded to me.”
She said nothing about her trunk, which was still in Midlothian awaiting shipment to Chicago. She would have to get along without it for now. Once it arrived, she could arrange by telegraph to have it forwarded as well, perhaps to Maine or New York, so that she could have all her things in hand for the voyage to Europe.
Anna went to bed that night with her heart still racing from the excitement of the fair and Holmes’s surprise. Later William Capp, an attorney with the Texas firm of Capp & Canty, said, “Anna had no property of her own, and such a change as described in her letter meant everything for her.”
The next morning promised to be pleasant as well, for Holmes had announced he would take Anna—just her—to Englewood for a brief tour of his World’s Fair Hotel. He had to attend to a few last-minute business matters before the departure for Milwaukee. In the meantime Minnie would ready the Wrightwood flat for whatever tenant happened to rent it next.
Holmes was such a charming man. And now that Anna knew him, she saw that he really was quite handsome. When his marvelous blue eyes caught hers, they seemed to warm her entire body. Minnie had done well indeed.
Worry
AT THE FAIRGROUNDS LATER that night the ticketmen counted their sales and found that for that single day, July 4, paid attendance had totaled 283,273—far greater than the entire first week of the fair.
It was the first clear evidence that Chicago might have created something extraordinary after all, and it renewed Burnham’s hopes that the fair at last would achieve the level of attendance he had hoped for.
But the next day, only 79,034 paying visitors came to see the fair. Three days later the number sagged to 44,537. The bankers carrying the fair’s debt grew anxious. The fair’s auditor already had discovered that Burnham’s department had spent over $22 million to build the fair (roughly $660 million in twenty-first-century dollars), more than twice the amount originally planned. The bankers were pressuring the exposition’s directors to appoint a Retrenchment Committee empowered not just to seek out ways of reducing the fair’s expenses but to execute whatever cost-saving measures it deemed necessary, including layoffs and the elimination of departments and committees.
Burnham knew that placing the future of the fair in the hands of bankers would mean its certain failure. The only way to ease the pressure was to boost the total of paid admissions to far higher levels. Estimates held that to avoid financial failure—a humiliation for Chicago’s prideful leading men who counted themselves lords of the dollar —the fair would have to sell a minimum of 100,000 tickets a day for the rest of its run.
To have even a hope of achieving this, the railroads would have to reduce their fares, and Frank Millet would have to intensify his efforts to attract people from all corners of the country.
With the nation’s economic depression growing ever more profound—banks failing, suicides multiplying—it seemed an impossibility.
Claustrophobia
HOLMES KNEW THAT MOST if not all of his hotel guests would be at the fair. He showed Anna the drugstore, restaurant, and barbershop and took her up to the roof to give her a broader view of Englewood and the pretty, tree-shaded neighborhood that surrounded his corner. He ended the tour at his office, where he offered Anna a seat and excused himself. He picked up a sheaf of papers and began reading.
Distractedly, he asked Anna if she would mind going into the adjacent room, the walk-in vault, to retrieve for him a document he had left inside.
Cheerfully, she complied.
Holmes followed quietly.
At first it seemed as though the door had closed by accident. The room was utterly without light. Anna pounded on the door and called for Harry. She listened, then pounded again. She was not frightened, just embarrassed. She did not like the darkness, which was more complete than anything she had ever experienced—far darker, certainly, than any moonless night in Texas. She rapped the door with her knuckles and listened again.
The air grew stale.
Holmes listened. He sat peacefully in a chair by the wall that separated his office and the vault. Time passed. It was really very peaceful. A soft breeze drifted through the room, cross-ventilation being one of the benefits of a corner office. The breeze, still cool, carried the morning scent of prairie grasses and moist soil.
Anna removed her shoe and beat the heel against the door. The room was growing warmer. Sweat filmed her face and arms. She guessed that Harry, unaware of her plight, had gone elsewhere in the building. That would explain why he still had not come despite her pounding. Perhaps he had gone to check on something in the shops below. As she considered this, she became a bit frightened. The room had grown substantially warmer. Catching a clean breath was difficult. And she needed a bathroom.
He would be so apologetic. She could not show him how afraid she was. She tried shifting her thoughts to the journey they would begin that afternoon. That she, a Texas schoolmarm, soon would be walking the streets of London and Paris still seemed an impossibility, yet Harry had promised it and made all the arrangements. In just a few hours she would board a train for the short trip to Milwaukee, and soon afterward she, Minnie, and Harry would be on their way to the lovely, cool valley of the St. Lawrence River, between New York and Canada. She saw herself sitting on the spacious porch of some fine riverside hotel, sipping tea and watching the sun descend.
She hammered the door again and now also the wall between the vault and Harry’s breeze-filled office.
The panic came, as it always did. Holmes imagined Anna crumpled in a corner. If he chose, he could rush to the door, throw it open, hold her in his arms, and weep with her at the tragedy just barely averted. He could do it at the last minute, in the last few seconds. He could do that.
Or he could open the door and look in on Anna and give her a big smile—just to let her know that this was no
