Chicago

Chicago is both a stage of family administration and a brief refuge from it. As Tante prepares to take the boys back to Germany, the city is where the family must complete passport arrangements before continuing to New York City and their ship; during those arrangements, Delphine turns an assigned educational outing into two days at a circus, making Chicago a place of shared wonder amid an impending separation.

Departure plans and family stakes

Tante persuades Fidelis to let her take the boys, apart from Franz, back to Germany, where she will raise them with their grandmother. The plan is presented as temporary: Tante expects Fidelis to bring the boys back after a year or two. Their departure is also tied to the family’s strained circumstances. The shop’s bills, the cost of clothing, and the demands of looking after the boys weigh on Fidelis; their clothes have become too small, and Markus resents still wearing short pants. The family’s decision to leave is therefore not simply a visit to their grandmother but a response to practical pressures and the prospect of giving the boys more help and responsibility.

The route makes Chicago the first administrative threshold. Fidelis, Tante, Delphine, and the boys are to drive there in the DeSoto, leaving in the middle of the night and arriving in the morning. Over the first two days, they will handle passport procedures and consular red tape. Tante and the boys are then to travel by train to New York City, where their ship is scheduled to leave the following day. Their passage has been reserved in a single cabin with an additional floor pallet and a small window. While the boys are away, Franz will run the shop for three days.

Delphine and the boys in the city

Delphine is assigned to take the boys around Chicago while Fidelis and Tante deal with the paperwork. She brings an ordinary suit and coat, along with a smart wool suit and a green hat, but her attention is on getting through the arrangements rather than making an occasion of them. At first she consults a guidebook and marks out educational sights, making the boys memorize facts about the places they are supposedly there to see. Then she takes them to the circus instead.

They spend two days feeding peanuts to elephants and visiting the sideshow. The cold, raw weather and small crowd leave room for conversation: Delphine and the boys talk with the performers, and the boys’ open fascination helps them make friends. Delphine’s choice is characteristic of her practical, people-oriented attention. The prescribed outing would have kept them moving through official and monumental accounts of the city; the circus lets them linger with its workers and attractions, whose lives and peculiarities interest her as much as they captivate the boys.

One performer, Seal-O, mocks the boys’ worn, shrunken clothes. Delphine answers him sharply, telling him that he should be balancing a red rubber ball on his nose, then removes the boys from the encounter before he can say more. The moment makes the outing more than a diversion: while the family’s finances are visible in the boys’ clothing, Delphine refuses to let their embarrassment go unanswered. Elsewhere, the boys try unsuccessfully to rub the stripes from Mr. Tiger, and Delphine asks Girl Wonder Calculator why she is not at a university. The exchanges show the three of them meeting the attractions through direct curiosity rather than simply observing a display.

Paperwork, memory, and significance

The passport proceedings take place in a monumental stone building arranged around a central open shaft, with office corridors and balconies rising beneath a vaulted skylight. The family joins a long line outside the room where photographs are taken. Tante, tired but still upright in her stiff suit, insists that the boys need food; Delphine sees an opening to take them for sandwiches, though Tante immediately says they are not hungry. The small disagreement underscores the competing demands of the trip: the boys’ immediate needs, Tante’s control of the arrangements, and the bureaucratic timetable that will carry them out of Chicago and toward Germany.

Much later, Delphine remembers the Chicago stay with Markus not through the guidebook’s landmarks but through the circus: they spent two days feeding peanuts to the elephants. The memory preserves a pocket of intimacy and pleasure within a journey organized around passports, travel, and family separation. Chicago’s role in the story is thus sharply double: it is a necessary checkpoint on the route to New York City, and the setting for an unscheduled experience that Delphine and the boys can recall as their own.