The Wide House

by Taylor Caldwell

  Unfortunately, Stuart’s ambitious plans for his house had not been able to extend to large grounds; his money had disappeared in the most disconcerting way. He had been able to purchase only two acres from Joshua Allstairs, after the cost of the house and its furnishings had been estimated. Nevertheless, on this small plot Stuart had demonstrated amazing and unexpected taste. He allowed no trees or high shrubbery to hide the vista of the river, which flowed below the strong slope from the house. From the doorway extended a gently winding path of flagged white stones, so that the river seemed part of the house and its grounds, and a delicate extension of them. But on each side of the house, and behind it, grew high and noble elms and chestnuts, established trees which gave the house a look of agelessness and security. Stuart had made the most of the land behind his home and so artfully were the gardens and the paths and the grottoes arranged that they appeared much larger and more extensive than they were. Then, as the house was in an isolated plot, quite a distance from the center of the town, the outlying land was still unsettled and wild. Stuart never informed new acquaintances that these woods and these stretches of tangled brush were not his. He enjoyed them serenely, and indeed, he had plans for extending his property from time to time. He hunted in them with a good conscience, despite the fact that Joshua had grimly posted them, and conducted his guests through the glades and the thick forest of virgin timber.

  He had even gone to the extent of situating his stables on the very borderline of his property, and even slightly beyond it. Fond of horses, he had eight of them, of good blood and breeding. He also had four carriages, of the best workmanship. Near the stables stood a small building where he housed his servants, all five of them.

  Stuart cared little for the opinion of those who could neither help nor harm him, and would naively quote the cost of his house and its furnishings to anyone who had the impudence to ask. Therefore, when Janie craftily suggested that all this splendor must have cost more than two thousand pounds, he readily agreed. “I had ten thousand dollars of my own,” he said, “and I borrowed ten thousand more from that old bastard Joshua. First mortgage on the bloody shop,” he added, ruefully. Janie was tactful enough not to express her opinion. However, she remembered what her father had once said, in speaking of an extravagant new neighbor of no discernible antecedents and family: “A beggar always builds a palace when he can borrow a few pounds.”

  It was a constant joy, and justification, to Stuart to know that he possessed the finest and most spectacular house in the country. When, on a Sunday, gracious carriages drove nonchalantly along the path near the river, the passengers elaborately unaware of the lovely mansion on the high slope beyond, he exulted and chuckled. “Ah, it’s not looking they are, the fools, but it fills their eye!” he would exclaim. When ill-natured comments were repeated to him, that he was a fool and would go bankrupt and eventually become a beggar, he was not infuriated. He was only delighted. Only when it was reported to him that old Joshua had sourly remarked that he did not like the black granite entrance hall, and would change it at once when he came into possession of the house, did Stuart privately grind his teeth. So passionately did he love the house he had built that he secretly vowed that he would burn it to the ground before it should pass into the hands of Joshua Allstairs. “It will break the heart in me,” he would whisper to the darkness, as he lay in bed, “but that I shall do.”

  But in his heart he did not truly believe that his beloved house would pass from him. He would fight to the death for it. It was his treasure, his heart’s treasure. It comforted him like a woman; it filled his life like a dozen children. It was the reason for his living and his work. It was the expression of his soul. He never tired of wandering through each room, and rejoicing in it, rubbing the wood with his hands, and exulting over its furnishings. In a way, it was his religion, the consoler of his weariness, the satisfier of his deepest instincts. Also, in an odd way, it had so completed him that he felt no need for any woman to share it with him. Sometimes, for long minutes, he would stand before the great gilt pier mirrors, and smile at himself with tears in his eyes.

  Janie, suspecting much, was highly and cruelly amused at this folly, this devotion of a man to a house, and finally admitted to herself that there must be more behind this splendor and beauty than a mere revolt against a deprived childhood. In a sense, the house was Stuart’s soul, part of the fantasy that lived in it, part of its mystical and dreamlike quality. Stuart might be hard and grasping, even greedy, in his desire for money. But this hardness and grasping greed were dedicated to a living beauty.

  Stuart had inherited his father’s store. Casual and lighthearted by nature, he would have been contented to make a small and easy profit, and to have gambled it away among happy companions, or to have roamed the country at intervals, or to have spent it on women. By temperament he was no clever business man, no bargainer. The house changed his nature, gave him restless and unsleeping and ruthless ambition. It was no longer his. He belonged to it.

  The best rooms had been given to Janie and her children. Their presence hideously depressed and revolted Stuart. He shuddered inwardly when one of the boys scuffed a floor, or ran across a polished expanse. He was in misery when the children invaded the parlor or the study. He sweated inwardly when they sat on his furniture. He knew, then, that he must rid himself of them, when, of course, he had acquired Janie’s money on loan. In the meantime he kept his grinding thoughts to himself.

  Grandeville was an ugly city of some twenty-five thousand souls. It consisted of a long middle street, called Main Street, with smaller thoroughfares branching desultorily from it on each side. The “old” section of the city was grouped along the river also, but at least three miles from Stuart’s house, and here lived the “old” families, who were rapidly becoming rich from the tanneries, slaughter-houses, horse-trading stables and shops of the community. Some, too, like old Joshua, made great fortunes in mysterious ways. Others were traders, and owned barges and lake vessels that brought and carried away commodities from and to other Lake cities. The “old” families were no longer adventurers. They were the fat bourgeoisie, smug and content, but rapacious, greedy and opportunistic into the bargain.

  They lived in the ugliest of tall, narrow, red-brick houses, all with cupolas and turret-work and wide dark verandahs, with stables and gardens behind and grim iron-fenced lawns before. Here, in their section, they had their hideous churches, gray-stone or brick or wood, filling the Sabbath air with a strident iron clangor. Along their cobbled streets moved their stately and gleaming carriages, filled with their haughty and uneasy women. The walks were either stone or planks, and were kept in a reasonably clean condition. The only aspect of beauty was the enormous old elms and chestnuts which bordered the streets, and filled the northern summer with sonorous murmurs. However, they darkened a scene already dark and gloomy, and gave to this section a somber and desolate air, unfriendly and repellent.

  The houses themselves were furnished in execrable taste, to match the exteriors. The choice of the householders ran to black walnut and heavy mahogany furniture, to horsehair and crimson plush, to hideous ornamentation and Brussels carpets, to curtains of stiff Nottingham lace and balled velvet. “They’ll be Manchester English if they suffocate for it,” Stuart had once said, laughing contemptuously at the stained-glass doors and windows, so narrow and slit-like, whose draperies rejected the last wan gleam of sunlight which penetrated through the dark trees. He shuddered at the memory of oak-panelled dining-rooms, of tall, vault-like rooms, narrow and dim, of square oaken stair-cases and spectral narrow corridors. He remembered shivering in many of these houses on gaunt winter nights, curving his body towards meager fires lurking far back in marble fireplaces. Even the gardens were dank, on the warmest of summer days, smelling of mold and sour earth, and immense respectability.

  The largest and ugliest red-brick house of all on the best street (which was called River Road) was the mansion of Joshua Allstairs, and all the hideousness of hi
s neighbors’ houses could be found here on a grand scale. Stuart swore to his cronies that when he left that house he would immediately fly to his own, there to change his clothing which had become green with mold and damp in Joshua’s parlor. “It’s plucking the worms I’d be, out of my hair, for an hour after,” he would say.

  Far from this stately quarter, on the other side of Main Street, was the “new” city, composed of little red-brick houses, or, in the majority of cases, of clapboarded shacks and cottages. Here lived the newcomers, the detested Germans, the boisterous and drinking Irish, and the other nameless and despised races. Here were strange names, alien and revolting to the fastidious descendants of English and Scottish adventurers who had settled here more than sixty years earlier. Here were the humble workers who toiled in the vile tanneries and slaughter-houses and the two little iron foundries and the shops, who kept the stables and cleaned the streets and the sewers, who labored on the docks during the open summer months, who furnished the female servants for the denizens of the great houses, and who were employed in many other capacities. As they were still fresh from Europe, they maintained towards their haughty employers that nice combination of servility and devotion so proper to their class, and when these were combined with a large dash of fear and the threat of imminent starvation upon the whim of their masters, they could be depended upon to remain docile. Here, too, in this section, were the thriving taverns (owned by the great) where a man, and sometimes a woman, could drink that draft of anesthesia which made life bearable. Joshua owned many of these taverns.

  The one beauty in this depressed section was the tiny little Church of Our Lady of Hope. Stuart, though no Catholic, had, with one of his supremely reckless and generous gestures, supplied the frightened little Catholic community with the same white stone of which his own house was built, for their church. One reason for this gesture was his new friendship for Father Houlihan, but the strongest reason of all was that he loathed the inhabitants of the “old” city and hated their oppression of the weak and silent populace of the “new” city, for which, however, he had the same contempt. Flushed with the intoxication of his own amazing magnanimity, he spent his money heedlessly for the building of the church, furnishing half the cost. Father Houlihan, too dumfounded, too moved and full of emotion, could do little more than feebly protest at the young man’s wild extravagance. Mosaics were brought from Italy, fine laces for the altar cloths, and a beautiful little organ was shipped to Grandeville all the way from New Orleans. It was only when Stuart enthusiastically suggested that Carrara marble be brought for the floor that Father Houlihan awoke from his daze, and roundly refused, though with tears in his eyes. Stuart it was who tried to buy the land on which the church stood from Joshua Allstairs, and was promptly refused. Nevertheless, Allstairs finally agreed to lease the land on the payment of a certain sum, which Stuart guaranteed.

  Later, Joshua sourly asked the young man, with a sidelong glance from his wicked gray eyes: “Why are you so tender with these heathen Papists?”

  Stuart had shrugged carelessly, but he could not prevent his cheeks from flushing with a kind of sheepish embarrassment. “Ah, how can I know?” he replied. “‘Grundy’ is a friend, and a good one, and the poor devil has no decent place of his own.”

  He could not confess that he was already cursing himself for his foolhardy generosity, and as usual he sat down in bewilderment to scrutinize the impulsive blindness of it. He had more than a faint suspicion that his motive was an impudent and contemptuous defiance of the people of the “old” city, who had hardly accepted him, and still fastidiously despised him. When the priest suggested that the real reason for any action, good or bad, lay too deep in the soul for any analysis, Stuart scoffed, though secretly he was a little startled and pleased. He hoped, rather than believed, that the true impulse which had sent him furiously spending money in behalf of the “heathen Papists” was a reputable one, out of the deeps of some unsuspected stature of soul. He lost this one small hope when he glanced at his bank balance, and cursed himself. He simply did not know why he did certain things.

  Nevertheless, there was hardly a Sunday when he did not drive his carriage slowly past the church during high Mass, and did not bring his horses to a halt not far from the door. He would sit there, a strange smile on his lips, listening to the fresh voices of the choir, and the noble grandeur of the music which came from his organ. He would watch the sunlight glittering on the golden Cross, and turning the small stained windows to colored fire. But, though Father Houlihan had informed him that there was a tablet on one of the walls with his name upon it as donor, nothing could induce him to enter the church. Why this was, he again did not know. He only knew that the gemlike beauty of the little church inspired in him the same passionate affection—to a lesser degree—as did his beautiful house. It was his creation, his monument.

  Stuart’s repentances did not last long. When he was again solvent he paid for the Italian statues of the Virgin and St. Joseph. It was enough for him that the church was lovely, that it was like a white jewel shining in the mud.

  Nor was he insensible of the fact that his generosity had resulted in his shop’s prosperity. The people he had befriended patronized his establishment exclusively. But, to do him credit, he had not thought of that in the beginning, though he accepted, with a surprised smile of mock modesty, the compliments on his sagacity paid to him by many of his peers, and even by the redoubtable Joshua himself. Ah, they thought him a knowing fellow, did they?

  The lower reaches of Main Street consisted of many shops and taverns. There were harness shops and clothing emporiums, feed stores and tool shops, boot shops and food markets and butcher shops. But they were like pigmies compared with Stuart’s store, which was managed by Sam Berkowitz.

  It was called “The Grandeville Supreme Emporium.”

  CHAPTER 9

  In the beginning it had not been the “Grandeville Supreme Emporium.” It had been, simply, “Sam’s Shop,” or, without prejudice, “the Jew’s Shop.” Fifteen years before, Sam Berkowitz had arrived in Grandeville with his old mother, and a peddler’s pack on his shoulders. Grandeville had had an air of bustle and vitality even then, and here Sam, exhausted, had decided to stay. He had rented a small dusty harness shop, and had laid out his meager wares. He had not exactly prospered, for though he was full of brilliant theories which Stuart was later to exploit, Sam was no business man. It was not that he had no Knack for trade. It was just that business, in its more sordid aspect of buying at as low a price as possible, and of selling at a price consistent with the incomes of customers, did not interest him. Moreover he was too old, spiritually, to care much for profits. A roof over his head, peace, bread and a little meat, was enough for him. His chronic exhaustion was more of his soul than of his body. And his old mother could no longer help him.

  The Coleman family had arrived in Grandeville for no discernible reason. There were greater and more flourishing cities than this. But here they were: Gordon, with less than two hundred dollars, a young son, and a wife. Gordon might never have met Sam Berkowitz had it not been for the fact that, on a certain hot summer’s day, he had wandered disconsolately down to the canal docks to watch the unloading of a big barge from down-state. Finally he became aware of some argument near him. He saw a tall thin man with reddish hair protesting to a sharp little dealer who stood near a pile of unloaded wares. Gordon scowled. The lean and red-haired man, so shabby, was speaking in foreign and uncertain accents. He had the gaunt and prominent features of a Jew. He was no match for the dapper little dealer, who blew clouds of smoke from his cheroot into the Jew’s face, and shrugged his shoulders airily. “Price’s gone up,” he said, with high indifference. “Pay, or don’t pay. Don’t matter to me, bo.”

  Sam lifted his hands and shoulders in an attitude of resigned despair. He looked down at the pile of goods, and shook his head. “I can’t pay,” he said. The little dealer grinned, shifted his tall hat to a jaunty angle, and looked very knowing. “
Come off, come off!” he exclaimed. “You Jews’ve got all the shekels in the world! Don’t I know!”

  Sam said nothing. He lifted his despondent head, passed his hand over his face, and began to turn away. There was a look of suffering and hopelessness in his hooded brown eyes, and of ancient resignation.

  Gordon Coleman was a taciturn and unfriendly man, full of gloom and suspicion. Had the dealer been less sharp and jocular, had he had less of an English accent, had he been possessed of a less self-satisfied and cunning air, Gordon would have turned away indifferently. But, being what he was, Gordon hated him instantly. All his life he had hated the keen and the self-possessed, the hard and the prosperous. It was this hatred which made him growl diffidently: “What’s all this, eh?”

  Sam, who had been about to pass him, stopped and glanced at him shyly. He touched the cloth cap on his head, and said with gentle courtesy: “My goods. Promised for fifty dollars. Now, the price—seventy-five dollars.” He shook his head. “I haf only fifty dollars.”

  There was something about Sam Berkowitz, gentle, sad and simple, which made Gordon unwillingly sympathetic. He was not an impulsive man, but he hated the little dealer, who was watching them with a wide and glittering grin.

  He said: “What goods? What are they?”

  It was only angry curiosity which made him speak, and he flashed the dealer a dour and sullen look.

  Sam lifted his hands eloquently, and let them drop. “I haf a little store. Goods for the vomen’s kitchens. Pots. Pans. Thread. Calico. Such things. Now, I haf no goods. Tomorrow, I haf no store.”

  Gordon was somberly silent. He had less than two hundred dollars. He had no prospects. His interest was awakened. If he should lend Sam Berkowitz twenty-five dollars, there might be a profit in it for him. He hesitated. Then, he thrust his hand in his pocket and withdrew some money. He laboriously and deliberately counted this abominable American exchange. Sam, amazed, watched him. The little dealer drew near, like a small, compact and well-groomed rat, all alertness and interest.