by John Jakes
“Give me one of the children.” He held out his arms. Behind him she glimpsed Stanley struggling along the corridor. He was pushing Maude and dragging Isabel, who had a twin in each arm.
Constance passed William to George. Carrying Patricia, she stepped over the high sill created when the car inverted. She dared not listen to the cries or the sounds of the spreading fire. It ate into the wall behind her, its heat scorching.
“Go on, George. I’m all right.” With her free hand she lifted the hem of her nightgown so that she wouldn’t fall. She began coughing; the smoke was thickening rapidly.
She followed her husband out of the compartment. The corridor was blocked by wreckage in one direction and by Isabel in the other. Isabel had suddenly lost control. She dropped the twins at her feet and surrendered to hysterical screaming.
The smoke reddened as fire consumed the car. The three-year-old twins wept and tore at their mother’s legs, hoping she’d notice them. She didn’t.
“We’ve got to get her out of the way,” Constance shouted, thrusting Patricia at her husband. He maneuvered William into one arm and with a grunt hefted the girl onto his shoulder. Constance slipped around him, seized Isabel by the shoulders, and shook her. When that did no good. Constance slapped her. Isabel staggered against Stanley, who seized her wrists and dragged her away into the ruddy smoke.
“Laban—Levi,” Constance gasped, crouching by the twins as George squeezed past and struggled along the corridor. She had only seconds now; the compartment behind her was aflame. Tongues of fire shot from the doorway. The pudgy-faced twins huddled against her as she fought to keep her nerves from betraying her.
She gave them her hands. “Hold onto me, boys.” She led them down the corridor the way George had gone. He had disappeared in the smoke. So had everyone else.
The wooden wall on her right felt blistering. Three feet ahead the wall abruptly split and buckled outward, dissolving in fire. No exit that way. There was a barrier of fire behind her, too.
The windows, then. She kicked one with her bare heel. It shivered but didn’t break. She kicked it again. A crash; glass tore her heel and lacerated the sole of her foot.
The air rushing in fanned the flames. What was out there? How far was the ground? Was there only dangerous wreckage below? She couldn’t see, but she had no other escape route. She tore a piece of wood from the buckling wall and enlarged the ragged opening by smashing out more glass. She had no recollection of cutting herself, but by the time she finished, her wrists bled from a dozen wounds. She dropped the wood and lifted Laban.
She flung him outward through the opening, and his brother after him. Then she jumped, a moment before the car disappeared in a Niagara of fire that ran toward the sky.
She hit a slope covered with sharp rocks just seven or eight feet below the car. She rolled a short distance, stunned. Above her, the burning wreckage lost its brilliance as her vision dimmed. She gasped for air, powerless to move, close to losing consciousness.
Everywhere, screaming. Drifting smoke. The roar of the fire and the shrill hiss of steam still escaping from some valve in the ruined locomotive.
Hurt and dazed as she was, Constance still managed to separate one sound from the others: the sound of Laban and his brother weeping in fright as they wandered the hillside. They needed someone.
She willed herself back from the darkness that had nearly taken her. She flung red hair off her forehead with red hands and tottered along the sloping side of the gully until finally she reached the twins. She made queer gurgling sounds as she picked them up; it was the closest she could come to laughter.
“Boys, we’ll be fine now.” She held one under each arm and climbed the slope. The rocks bruised and cut her already bleeding feet. “Just fine. We’ll find your mother. We’ll find her right away.”
If she weren’t dead.
Would the little boys remember the shrieks of those victims buried at the bottom of the pile of cars? Would they remember the strident, choking cry of someone trapped in a burning car and roasting alive? She would. God above, she would.
The death toll in the wreck, which the penny press later dubbed the West Haven Catastrophe, was twenty. Fourteen passengers and six employees of the line, including the engineer. None of the casualties turned out to be a Hazard, although the family’s Negro chef had died with a broken timber driven like a spear through the bosom of his nightshirt. The center of the train proved to have been the safest spot; all the deaths had occurred at the forward end or in the last two passenger coaches.
One by one Constance found the others. Billy first. Then Maude; she sat on the ground, dazed and unable to rise. George and their children. And Stanley, trying to comfort and quiet Isabel, who alternately sobbed and ranted.
Last of all she spied Virgilia, over on the far side of the wreckage. George’s sister had torn up her dress to make bandages. In her undergarments and filthy dirty, she ran up and down hills of teetering rubble like a mountain goat, hunting for survivors and helping to free them. As for the Pride of Hazard, it no longer existed.
Constance rubbed her eyes. She saw Stanley kneeling by his sons, examining their bloodied feet.
“How are they?” she asked.
“I don’t know. How did their feet get cut so badly?”
Constance didn’t answer. She was only able to shake her head. The fool was angry with her. Incredible.
“Who’s cut? Are my children hurt? Let me see.”
Shrill, but evidently herself again, Isabel rushed past Maude and dropped to her knees beside the twins, who were trying to hold back tears. “Laban—Levi—oh, my poor dears. Look at that blood. Those terrible gashes. What did she do to you?”
She gathered the boys into her arms and peered between them, her eyes brimming with hostility. “Constance, if either of them is permanently injured, I’ll never forgive you.”
“Permanently—?”
Constance found it so ludicrous she couldn’t go on. She threw her head back and laughed, raw, hysterical laughter that brought a scowl to Stanley’s face, and George’s too. “My God, Isabel,” she gasped finally. “Do you have the slightest idea of what you’re saying?”
Isabel released the boys and lurched to her feet. Strings of hair fell across her forehead as she stumbled toward her sister-in-law. “I certainly do. Look at them. Look at their feet.”
“I’m sorry you don’t approve of what I did, Isabel. But then you never do. I was trying to save the twins. No one else was helping them. Certainly not you. You were screaming, hysterical. You had abandoned your children to a horrible fate.”
George spoke softly to her. “I don’t think you need to say any more.”
Constance knew he was asking her to end it there; not demanding that she do so, but asking, so that trouble wouldn’t keep piling on trouble. She heard that clearly and understood. Yet it made no difference. Her brush with death had unleashed feelings long suppressed.
With her eyes on Isabel, she said, “Oh, yes, there’s a lot that needs saying. You should be horsewhipped for being so ungrateful. I’d do it if you weren’t such a pitiable creature—”
“See here—” Stanley began, but Isabel’s cry drowned him out:
“You Irish bitch!”
She scooped a jagged rock from the ground and ran at Constance. George jumped in front of his wife, tore the rock away from Isabel, and hurled it toward the blazing pyre of the train.
Isabel whipped up her fist to strike him. George seized her forearm in his left hand and gradually but firmly forced her hand down. His voice shook.
“She’s right, you’re ungrateful. You’ve done nothing but heap unkindness on Constance ever since she came to Lehigh Station. She’s looked the other way—tried to forgive you—and so have I. But this is the end. She saved the twins, and instead of thanking her—”
“George, you’ve overstepped,” Stanley rumbled behind him.
George didn’t look at his brother. “Keep out of this. Isabel, I will
always insist that my family be civil to you, but that’s all. Henceforward I don’t want to see you at Belvedere. Don’t ever set foot in my house.”
“You will not speak to my wife that way,” Stanley exclaimed, grabbing George’s shoulder. Stanley’s impulsive act was a match touched to an emotional fuse. George spun, slammed Stanley’s hand away by striking his forearm, then stepped back to set his stance just right.
Stanley was spluttering. Steady on his feet, George ignored the last faint plea of reason and did what he had long dreamed about. With all his might he hit Stanley in the stomach.
Isabel shrieked. Stanley gasped and so did George; he had struck so hard he thought his hand was broken.
“Papa,” one of the twins howled, and burst out crying. Stanley attempted to stay on his feet, but the blow had knocked him off balance. His arms windmilling, he staggered backward, then collapsed on his rump. The light of the burning cars made his cheeks glisten red. As he gazed up at his younger brother, a forlorn comprehension crept into his eyes. He struggled for breath. He was paunchy, soft-looking, as he sat there. Old, suddenly. Impotent.
God, I wish I hadn’t done that, George thought. But the blow could never be called back. It would exist in memory forever, an embarrassment to him and to all of them. It was odd that he could regret what he’d done and at the same time feel relief and a sense of pride.
He walked forward and held out his hand to his brother. “Let me help you up.”
Stanley grasped George’s forearm and pulled himself to his feet. He acknowledged the assistance with a flicker of his eyelids, but there was no gratitude in the glance—not that George expected any. There was, however, something else. An emotion George had seen, or at least suspected, before. Now it was unmistakable.
He’s afraid of me. He’s always been afraid of me.
If George had recognized that fear in the past, he had never recognized the power it gave him; not until now.
Stanley sidled past and reassured Isabel that he was all right. Then he turned to the twin who was crying. He picked the little boy up and comforted him. George and Constance held their children close. Billy went to Maude and stayed with her. No one said much during the next few minutes. A kind of shock had set in. George wasn’t sure whether the cause was the wreck or the fight afterward.
Stanley and Isabel avoided looking at George and his family. George’s guilt was fading rapidly. An accounting with Stanley was long overdue.
Some twenty minutes later, Virgilia arrived with five men from the hamlet of West Haven. Two of them bore Maude away on a pole-and-canvas litter. By then George had made up his mind to stop regretting his action.
When the sun rose, a couple of hundred railroad workers and volunteers were swarming over the site of the wreck. The Hazards were by then resting in a New Haven hotel. Virgilia decided to go on to Newport. Several servants were already there. The New Haven tradesmen, responding to the emergency and the chance for profit, brought stocks of clothing and fully outfitted the entire Hazard family.
By late morning rail service in both directions was restored. Virgilia’s train left at three. Billy volunteered to watch the children while they napped, so George and Constance accompanied Virgilia to the station, then went off to shop for some additional items. When they returned to the hotel, they looked in on Maude, who was still in bed. Two of her ribs had been broken, but apart from some dizziness, she claimed she felt fine.
“That’s good news, Mother,” George said. “I believe I’ll try to find Stanley.”
Maude looked at her son without reproof. “Where has he been all morning?”
“I don’t know.”
“He and Isabel and the children disappeared into their rooms right after breakfast,” Constance put in.
Maude sighed. “I’m happy you’re going to talk with him.”
George stroked his mustache with the tip of his index finger. “Not solely to apologize. Stanley and I have some things to straighten out.”
Resigned to it, she murmured, “I understand. I have seen it coming for quite a while. Perhaps this is as good a time as any.”
She closed her eyes and rested her hands, one on top of the other, on the clean counterpane. He was glad she understood. It made what he was about to do considerably easier.
He knocked softly at the door of his brother’s suite. Isabel answered, informing him coldly that Stanley was downstairs, in the saloon bar.
George found him hunched over a large glass of Kentucky whiskey.
He ordered one for himself but left it untasted. He made an effort to maintain a temperate tone as he said:
“I am going to assume responsibility for the company bank accounts.”
“Oh? You’ve spoken to Mother?” Stanley asked with weary bitterness.
“I have not. This is solely between the two of us. When we reach Newport, we’ll compose a letter to each of the banks we use.” His heart was beating fast. “From now on, my signature will be the only one that can authorize expenditures above fifty dollars. There’ll be no more private rail cars for a while.”
Stanley stared into the mahogany-bordered mirror behind the bar. Above it an antlered stag looked over their heads with glassy disinterest. Abruptly, Stanley laughed.
“I thought something like this was coming. I don’t give a damn. I’ve never liked the iron trade anyway, and you’ve pushed and pushed to take over the whole thing.”
George suppressed anger and continued to speak calmly. “I can give it my full attention. You’re developing other interests. I gather you wouldn’t be averse to holding political office.”
“Eventually,” Stanley agreed. “For one thing, it would get me away from Lehigh Station.” And you was the unspoken conclusion.
George avoided the bait. “Then I’m glad we’ve reached an understanding. I’m sorry for what I did last night.”
He held out his hand. Stanley glanced at it, then curled his fingers around his glass and bent forward, as if to protect it. “If you don’t mind, I’d rather drink by myself.”
“Whatever you say.”
George left the bar.
The others sensed that a change had taken place within the family. Isabel didn’t hide her resentment, but Stanley showed occasional flashes of relief. He laughed and joked as he hadn’t for years.
They remained in New Haven an extra day, completing and signing depositions about the accident for the railroad’s management. The following morning they rather nervously boarded another train for Rhode Island. They had been traveling about an hour when an incident took place that signaled that the transition of leadership was complete, and final.
They were talking about christening their summer place; all such estates in Newport had names. Stanley mentioned that in front of the house there was a broad and beautiful expanse of grass. He suggested the name Fairlawn.
“Very pretty,” Maude said. “But what do you think, George?”
George thought the name unimaginative. Then he remembered one of the lessons of West Point. It behooved an officer to show courtesy to a beaten opponent.
“I like it,” he said, smiling at his brother.
Disdainful, Isabel said, “Then I suppose that settles it.”
It did. Stanley looked boyishly grateful.
25
FAIRLAWN WAS A SPLENDID, airy house, three stories high and gleaming with a new coat of white paint. The landscaping had been neglected, however. Weeds choked the flower beds; dead limbs disfigured the trees. And the low brick wall surrounding the property needed mortaring. At George’s request, Stanley supervised the masons and gardeners. He appeared to enjoy himself.
The price of the house had included all the furnishings. The women liked very few of the pieces, however, and spent the first couple of days ordering replacements. Constance deferred to Isabel whenever possible. The effort did nothing to moderate Isabel’s animosity.
Everyone in the family kept as busy as possible, sensing it would help them forget the wr
eck. Maude’s injuries were the most obvious reminder. Her dizzy spells persisted, and she moved slowly because of the broken ribs. Constance suffered from nightmares, always a recapitulation of her struggle to escape from the burning car. William dreamed of the accident too; he awoke crying and thrashing every night for nearly two weeks.
The Mains arrived on the fifth of July, one day after President Taylor ate too many cucumbers and drank too much cold milk at a patriotic celebration and fell ill. On July 9 he died of cholera morbus. Some editorialists said he had really been killed by worry and the pressures of office, particularly those created by sectional antagonism. Millard Fillmore assumed the presidency on July 10.
By then the Mains had settled into their rented house, just a short distance away on Old Beach Road. Both families eased into the abundant pleasures of a Newport summertime. There were pony-cart rides and outings to the beach during the day, lawn games during long evenings sweet with the smell of freshly scythed grass. Newport Beach was close by but crowded; the family preferred a more private bathing area at the south end of the island, within sight of a jutting offshore formation local people called Spouting Rock.
At first Tillet seemed uncomfortable on Yankee soil. Soon, however, he renewed acquaintances with several other families from South Carolina, including the Izards, and after that he relaxed and enjoyed himself.
Except when he read the news from Washington. Fillmore intended to support Clay’s compromise bills, which were now seen as certain to pass, probably before the end of the year. A group of younger congressmen led by Stephen Douglas of Illinois had pledged to break the voting stalemate created by the old guard.
The four young people spent a great deal of time together. Both Ashton and Brett got along well with the stocky, cheerfully pugnacious Billy Hazard, though he was chiefly interested in Ashton. He was fifteen, she one year younger; Brett was a mere child of twelve.
