He found the cabinet key in his desk and unlocked it. He set two rifles on his desk to get at the red leather ledgers. The paper still smelled of smoke. Joseph picked through the books, stopping occasionally to compute Stanton’s neat figures at the end of their orderly columns and rows. Jefferson’s blessing worried Joseph. He had his own ideas. Fine goods were the future. The Southern menace already controlled half the coarse-cloth market. Soon they’d own it all. Cleveland Mill would diversify and upgrade equipment. He’d projected lower stockholder returns for three years to offset capital investments. He’d hear the flack. With Jefferson’s voting stock he could win any battle, though that wasn’t Joseph’s style. But Borden was right: decisions had to be made.
In the hallway outside, Lizzy tiptoed past her mother-in-law, with Will and Hollister and her cousins in tow. His mother trampled into the vestibule, her skirts ruffling, prodding her grandsons for information. Joseph’s cousins-in-law brought up the rear, pulling up their wool overcoats. The boys raced halfway up the staircase and wedged their faces between the balustrades as their mother eased the study door open, entered, and shut it without a sound.
The fire didn’t throw much light, so it took Lizzy a moment to spot the tall outline of her husband across the room. In the weak light, his face appeared bruised. She crossed the room and struck the desk lamp. Joseph stood near the open gun cabinet fingering a book. His willingness to show his anguish over Stanton’s death made her love him more. But eight months? Her own sister’s death hadn’t taken more than four out of her. Oh, Joseph. What shall I do with you? Perhaps I don’t understand the depth of this man, she thought. They’d been practically brothers.
His depression had returned the day they bought the house on June Street, and the talk of moving had only exacerbated his blue mood. He’d fought with the bankers and the movers, and then suddenly—recently, in fact—he’d dumped the whole affair on Lizzy.
She crept behind him and slid the ledger out of his hand and set it on the desk. She then set about replacing the guns in their carved slots in the cabinet.
Joseph watched her do this, thinking how much he loved his wife. Uncle Matt’s endorsement had broken down all barriers to their marriage, but for the first few years, Joseph had found himself the odd man out at family gatherings. Joseph had put on airs for her people by studying up on the Fall River School of Art and chasing golf balls with her brothers on steamy summer beach days. He had lived among the New Yorkers, as the Fall River elite fancied themselves, and still he found himself lowering his voice when his parents’ Lancashire brogue slipped out while cheering at a ballgame or singing holiday carols.
Lizzy found his efforts endearing, and let them continue, not wanting to displease her father. But when the old man died, she told Joseph to stop trying so hard. She’d said, “You’re stuck with me, Bartlett, so you can quit losing golf balls. It’s costing us a small fortune.” Joseph knew shooting par could not change his birthright, but he had kept trying until Lizzy released him. She’d had to. With the old man gone, she was totally dependent on her husband.
She locked the gun cabinet, tucked the key in her waistband, and then led him to his leather reading chair. She unlaced his black wingtips and set to rubbing his feet. Where has my brave man gone? she thought. Why such remorse for an accident?
She’d questioned her relatives’ mean-spiritedness their first years of marriage, going so far as to reproach her sister-in-law when she overheard her say Joseph would only make Lizzy common. He had carried her higher than most of her cousins. They would now frequent her parlor. A full-time cook would follow, a second girl to clean during the day, a touring car for Joseph.
He didn’t disapprove of Elizabeth wanting the spoils of her cousins. For this reason, he neglected to tell her that Jefferson Cleveland had not transferred Stanton’s shares to him; instead they were put in a revocable trust until his wife Hannah’s death. So when Lizzy called him the new majority stockholder of the Cleveland Mill, he didn’t correct her. His considerable raise would offset any doubts. He would provide Lizzy with the means to be active in society, but with one caveat: he would not always be at her side. Respecting each other’s personal foibles and biases had been an unspoken arrangement since the first year of their marriage, and periodically each added his or her own amendments to this contract.
“Darling.” She lifted his feet to her lap.
Her silky red hair was pulled straight up on the sides into a thick knot stuck through with ivory combs. He remembered the shopgirl who had sold him the combs at Bloomingdale’s. She was lovely girl—a reader too. That had been in New York, after he’d first met Elizabeth Bartlett at her uncle Matt’s lake home in New Hampshire. Then, as now, Lizzy looked up at him with her blue eyes, making him a bigger man.
The wind beat against the windowpanes. Did she say something? He felt her hands rolling his socks off. She laced her fingers between his toes. The wind died.
“The party was for all of us. To say goodbye to Snell Street. This is the only home the boys have known.”
Joseph pulled his feet off her lap and stood up. He saw his reflection in the glass of the gun cabinet and shut off the desk lamp. He poked at the fire. He hated his behavior and ground his teeth so hard his jaw ached. Blood pumped under his temples. Shadows shifted under the door sweep. He’d done right by the Sheehans by allowing them to move rent-free into the house to care for his mother. And it was his idea that the mill complex would bear Stanton’s name. It’s a start, he thought, a retreat from perdition.
“There was nothing you could have done.” Elizabeth stood facing her husband. For all her love, she couldn’t take much more. She had waited too long for this ascension. She held Joseph’s chin in her palm. “This will stop at June Street.” She stepped to the door. Young Will’s wooden toy train set lay in a heap in the corner.
Joseph said, “I’m responsible.”
“Rubbish.” She threw up her hands.
Joseph shook his head. “It was an accident, but one I caused,” he continued, his voice barely audible. “There’s blood on my hands.”
Elizabeth turned to the fire. Her shoulders fell. Impossible. Suddenly she didn’t trust her legs and sat down on the leather ottoman. “No,” she said. The tightness of her corset was suffocating.
“Yes.” The pounding in Joseph’s head abated. His toes released the carpet. “Stanton kept crooked books. The red ledgers. On that night—”
“Stop talking.” Elizabeth put her hands over her ears. A second set of books? Fires? Four men dead. Four wives abandoned. Eight children. And her Joseph at the center of it? Not possible. But what of her boys? June Street?
“Oh, Lizzy. How I’ve wanted to tell you.”
The Durfee blood in Lizzy thumped from her chest as it had never before. She said, “Now you have.” She stood. All the light in the room seemed to emanate from her eyes. “The die has been cast. As Minister Johns might say, ‘By mercy and truth iniquity is purged: and by the fear of the Lord men depart from evil.’”
Joseph hated when Holy Rollers used the Bible as an index, simply flipping to an obtuse passage that justified their every thought or action. But alas, Joseph replied with a scripture passage of his own: “The labor of the righteous tendeth to life: the fruit of the wicked to sin.”
She countered, “The lot is cast into the lap; but the whole disposing thereof is of the Lord.”
“Oh, Lizzy.” Joseph slumped in the chair. “How I have prayed.”
“Put trust in Him.” She knelt before her husband. “And come with me.” She waited for him to look up.
Minutes passed. He began to weep.
Elizabeth crossed her arms. “You have this night. Tomorrow we reshuffle our cards. The boys and I are leaving with or without you. What’s done is done.” The room began to spin. Another word and she would collapse to the floor. She steadied herself on the ottoman and walked to his desk a
nd picked at the ledgers with her middle finger, swiping the yellowed pages to and fro. She looked at her husband slumped on the couch. Her heart beat faster. No bogus arithmetic, she thought, is taking my family down. She thumped the ledgers closed and tucked them under her arm. She stepped to the hearth and tossed one then the other into the fire, and then marched across the room.
“Lizzy?” She stopped at the door but did not turn. In three weeks they’d be married ten years.
“Yes, Joseph.”
“Oh, Lizzy.” He wept. “What can I do?”
“I’ll be waiting outside this door.” She paused and turned to the hearth. The fire raged, filling the room with red light. “You have the night.” As she turned the doorknob the shadows lurking beneath it scattered.
Joseph heard a balloon pop followed by laughter. The wood smoke mixed with the smell of pumpkin pie and coffee. The moving party went off as planned.
part iii
1912
You made me what I am today,
I should hope you’re satisfied,
You dragged and dragged me down until
My soul within me died.
You’ve shattered each and every dream,
You fooled me right from the start,
And though you’re not true, may God bless you,
That’s the curse of an aching heart.
—“The Curse of an Aching Heart”
(You Made Me What I Am Today)
Henry Fink, Lyrics / Al Piantadosi, Composer
young soldier
Despite changing out of his gabardine suit and into a light blazer and cotton slacks, Joseph perspired the entire drive. North of Boston, the high clouds lost their sinister blackness and the driving rain decreased, but the persistent drizzle was enough to keep the windows sealed and the breeze out. It was an unseasonably warm April day, the hottest Patriots’ Day in recent memory. Thankfully, young Will had dozed most of the trip after a sleepless night anticipating seeing his brother for the first time in nine months.
As Joseph pulled through the gates of the White Mountain Military Academy, his palms moistened. When he had told Will that they were going to visit his brother, Will ran screaming to his room, shouting he was sorry for whatever wrong he’d done. “Please don’t dump me, too, Daddy,” he sobbed. Joseph’s heart broke.
Joseph had yet to hear from his older son. He assumed he had not escaped or shot an instructor, but a letter from the boy was long overdue. Joseph expected a long rant. This lack of news made Joseph more skeptical that the academy, regardless of its reputation for saving “problem boys,” could rehabilitate Hollister. What Joseph didn’t know was that Hollister’s letter writing had been prolific. The campus postmaster gave the first letter to the school’s commandant, retired Major General Darby Blunt, who after reading the beginning salutation, Dear Jailer, knew the letter was headed, not to Joseph, but into Hollister’s already thick file, which he kept under lock and key. After Labor Day, he sent Hollister another envelope with instructions to try again. Blunt commandeered that effort, too, in which Hollister compared his father’s backbone to that of a slug’s penis.
Hollister thrived at White Mountain. He demonstrated superior aptitude in mathematics, science, military history, and strategy, though his instructors warned Blunt that in war games designed to reenact scenes from the Spanish-American War, Hollister had a tendency to replace the San Juan Heights with Fall River, decimating his hometown on paper. In a report on modern warfare he estimated the damage land- and sea-based artillery might inflict on a certain house on June Street. It was exacting work to be sure, and Hollister’s painstaking detail—including work camps in the mills, and a floating prison on the South Wattupa—was what troubled the commandant, though the military man in Blunt thought the work showed promise. He wrote to Joseph, saying the boy had a real aptitude for warfare but suggested he keep him sequestered for the holidays, and for Joseph to delay his planned visit until the next term. For Christmas, Blunt gave his new protégé Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. In the winter term, Blunt extended the boy’s privileges, keeping him out of only one activity: the shooting range. During live-fire exercises, Hollister was summoned to Blunt’s office, where the two discussed historical battles over games of chess. Blunt spoke in a circular manner that began and ended with a story about his father, another decorated soldier, and the importance of his family in his military career. Hollister knew what the old man was up to, but listened quietly, not wanting to ruin their time with the nonsense he threw at the younger instructors. If Blunt wanted to believe he could make a soldier out of the boy, then he’d let him dream. In spite of himself, Hollister was fascinated by the stories, particularly Blunt’s taking San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. As winter thawed into spring, Hollister came to realize that the military might be his route out of Fall River forever.
* * *
Joseph parked the Pope-Hartford next to the large touring cars and Cadillacs near the administration building. Across the lot, rusted carriages and tired steeds idled in the shade. Patriots’ Day brought the rich and scholarship families together at the school. Joseph hoped his tuition dollars supported a few good boys as he and Will fell in with the crowd. The drizzle had momentarily stopped. The trees on the woody campus had just begun to bud. A mild winter and soggy spring had turned the grounds a lush green.
Wooden bleachers had been erected on either side of the main road that ran through the campus. In the ball field at the far end, the student regiments stood in full parade uniform. The school band led the procession, the skins of their drums read white mountain inf. regt. in red ink. The drum major lifted his baton, and the drummers began tapping out “Hail, Columbia.” The crowd sang as the horns blew. Following the band, four old gray mules pulled the school’s only mobile firepower: two decommissioned Civil War cannons. Four cadets rode atop the guns. Red, white, and blue bunting fluttered off the rear of their wagons.
The youngsters, the nine- and ten-year-olds, followed the cannons, their heels tapping out a synchronized beat. Wooden rifles rested on their shoulders. Parents stood and pointed as their boys passed. Each cluster of boys turned and saluted Commandant Blunt, their stout leader, and the academy instructors sitting on the review stand opposite their parents. Blunt stiffly saluted each passing unit. Joseph was surprised to see a few women in the teaching ranks, though they were not in uniform, and all rather dreary looking—English teachers, he surmised. He wouldn’t mind if Helen were sent to such a place. As far away from Will as possible.
“Where’s Hollister?” Will stood on the bleachers squinting into the crowd. “They all look the same.”
In Blunt’s invitation to the event, he had mentioned that Joseph might not recognize his son; and indeed, as much as he craned his neck scanning cadets, Hollister had vanished. I am a horrible man, he thought. The boy couldn’t be motivated to participate in team sports in Fall River, thinking that he could be won over by this type of discipline was ludicrous. Will soon gave up searching for his brother. He pulled his coat tight over his shoulders, bracing against the drizzle. Joseph wrapped his arm around him.
“We’ll find him,” he said as a bolt of lightning flashed across the darkening sky. “Perhaps he’s won a special commendation and is waiting for his introduction.”
When the drizzle turned to a downpour, Blunt announced they were cutting the parade and speeches short and the families should head to the cafeteria. The cadets lined each side of the brick walk holding black umbrellas for their guests. Inside, another set of cadets handed each mother a scarlet carnation as she entered the mess hall. The room was long and white with state flags hanging from the rafters. At the far end there was a stage. Old Glory hung from the ceiling over the pulled navy drapes. White tablecloths covered the mess tables. Joseph sent Will off to the seating chart to find their place. Mothers held their boys by the hand, many speechless at how c
lean their boys looked, though a few weren’t satisfied and began applying wet thumbs to errant hairs. The fathers who hadn’t served told their sons how girls went weak in the knees over a bloke in uniform. Others stood back-to-back with their boys, impressed how much they’d grown, as if the school had altered their biology as well as their attitude. The military fathers stood silently behind their wives, never taking their proud eyes off the miniature versions of themselves. Joseph recognized a few of the men from the photos that hung in the administrative office.
“Over here,” Will shouted above the din. Joseph spotted him next to a table set near the kitchen. Each time one of the student waiters swung through the doors a blast of warm air followed, carrying with it the smell of roasted beef and potatoes. “Have you found him?”
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