But I was concerned now only with this corner book store and how it looked today. Coming out from New York, I kept thinking how it would look and how the square would look and whether there would be any of the old atmosphere about the schools or the lakes, or our two houses, or the houses of my friends, or the Catholic Church or anything. I wanted to see our ex-homes and the schools and all these things. Turning into the square after passing the first two houses mentioned, I looked at this corner, and here was this new bank building and nothing more. It looked cold and remote. A through car of a state-wide trolley system, which ran all the way from Michigan City and Gary on Lake Michigan to Indianapolis, Evansville, Terre Haute, and other places in the extreme south, stood over the way. There had been no street car of any kind here in my day. The court house was the same, the store in which Nueweiler’s clothing store used to be (and because of Frank Nueweiler, an elderly figure in “our crowd,” one of our rendezvous) was now a bookstore, the successor, really, to the one I was looking for. The post office had been moved to a new store building erected by the government. (I think in every town we passed we had found a new post office erected by the government.) The Harry Oram wagon works was in exactly the same position at the northwest corner of the square, only larger. There was no trace of Epstein’s Wool, Hide and Tallow Exchange, which had stood on another corner directly across the way from the bookstore. A new building had replaced that. All Epstein’s children had gone to Chicago, so a neighboring hardware clerk told me, and Epstein himself had died fifteen years before.
But what of the Yaisleys? What of the Yaisleys? I kept asking myself that. Where had they gone? To satisfy myself as to that, before going any farther, I went into this new bookstore in Nueweiler’s old clothing emporium, and asked the man who waited on me while I selected postcards.
“What became of the Nueweilers who used to run this place as a clothing store?” I asked as a feeler, before going into the more delicate matter of the Yaisleys.
“Nueweiler?” he replied, with an air of slight surprise. “Why, he has the dry goods store at the next corner—Yaisley’s old place.”
“Well, and what has become of Yaisley, then?”
“Oh, he died all of twenty years ago. You must be quite a stranger about here.”
“I am,” I volunteered. “I used to live here, but I haven’t been here now for nearly thirty years, and that’s why I’m anxious to know. I used to know Frank and Will and Dora Yaisley, and even her elder sister, Bertha, by sight, at least.”
“Oh, yes, Will Yaisley. There was an interesting case for you,” he observed reminiscently. “I remember him, though I don’t remember the others so well. I only came here in 1905, and he was back here then. Why, he had been out West by then and had come back here broke. His father was dead then, and the rest of the family scattered. He was so down and out that he hung around the saloons, doing odd jobs of cleaning and that sort of thing—and at other times laid cement sidewalks.”
“How old was he at that time, do you think?” I inquired.
“Oh, about forty, I should say.”