This Terrible BeautyA Novel by Katrin Schumann

Author:Katrin Schumann [Schumann, Katrin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

26

Chicago

Summer 1965

When Bettina went to deposit the two-thousand-dollar check on the Monday after the award ceremony, she was struck with the irrational fear that the bank teller might tear it up right there and then, telling her it was a forgery. The edges of the pale-blue paper as she handed it over were damp from her fingertips.

The woman barely looked up at her, not even registering the vast sum of money, and only asked, “Cash or deposit?”

“Deposit,” Bettina said. “Please.”

It wasn’t until she’d been handed the receipt that it began to seem real: the money was actually hers to do with as she pleased. There had never once been enough in her bank account for anything more than her daily needs. Now various possibilities unfurled in her imagination like a magic carpet, leading her to her child. She exited the building and stood on the pavement in the morning light, squinting. The crowd of people heading to work paid no attention to her, and this anonymity was fine, good—it allowed her to think, to plan.

Her thoughts were chaotic, but there was an energy to them, a hopefulness that she hadn’t felt since she’d set foot in this country. Her Rollei hung from her neck, and she fiddled with the plastic beads she’d laced onto the leather strap—some slippery new ones she’d bought when her strap had broken a while ago, some old. As she always did, she imagined her daughter, her everyday life. All the ordinary things that made up the seconds and minutes of a regular day, things that seemed precious only when you couldn’t see them for yourself, when they were denied to you.

Right now Bettina’s imagination was all she had, but maybe that would change. A crack had formed in the wall between mother and daughter, and—now that she had the means—she could try to slip through it.

After a week, the riots in Wilcox died down, but the story was still keeping her busy. Since then she’d been roaming various neighborhoods, from the old Lithuanian center in Bridgeport near the canal (now more Irish than Russian) to Englewood a little farther south, which had pockets of racial diversity but was becoming more and more monotone. George asked her to scout up north too: Lincoln Park, with its beautiful old brownstones, had experienced a rash of gang graffiti on its buildings last year. She took a photo of a building on Orchard and Dickens, a faded Coca-Cola sign hanging from the window, Young Lions spray-painted over the boarded-up storefront: evidence of a gang. In that one, she focused the picture on a young tree that had managed to weave its branches through the broken boards and was sprouting new leaves, weedy but green.

Change came so quickly, George always complained; it was happening when people weren’t even looking. No one had taken the time to document how these neighborhoods cycled through different cultures, swapping Italian for Czech, white for black. He was thinking of a spread he might be able to place in the Sunday Metro section, and he wanted to be prepared.

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