The Eagles Gather

by Taylor Caldwell

  But they had believed in the sanctity of money, and so had dealt reverently with it. The Sessions House had been the most magnificent, but they had fallen heir to that as they had fallen heir to all the good things in this new world, which they had been strong enough to take. The homes they had built, however, with the exception of Robin’s Nest in Roseville, had all been as sturdy, strong, heavy-walled and earthy as themselves. Even Jules Bouchard’s home, and his brother Leon’s, were without exotic magnificence, and inclined to bad plumbing and unreliable electrical fixtures, for all the good colorful rugs and books and massive furniture. They had bought these homes ready-built. In Jules, the delicate, despite his laughter, there had remained the old adoration of money, the realization that money in itself is worthy of reverence.

  But the sons of Jules, Leon and Honore Bouchard, had no awed reverence for the huge wealth they had inherited. It represented to them power and, almost as great as power, the things they could buy with it. In spite of the fact that the female Bouchards were busily engaged in building up a mystical and wholly imaginary aristocratic background for their family in France, and were constantly visiting that country and “discovering” ancient birthplaces and distinguished distant relatives, the fact remained that the male Bouchards were still not far removed from the stables and slum streets of England and France. They were not enervated. They were not purged of their peasant blood. They could still, regarding money, feel enormously excited. Armand Bouchard, nearly forty in 1925, had a habit of jingling money in his pockets as he walked or sat, thinking, at his “half-acre” of old polished-mahogany desk. He admitted it “comforted” him, and his friends fondly thought it a quaint and childlike conceit. But it was much deeper than that. His comfort was a true comfort. The sound of the coins soothed anxiety when he was confronted with a problem that meant millions of dollars one way or another. But even deeper than that, much of the soothing was due to the actual sound of the money itself, just the sound of a few silver coins.

  Emile frankly admitted he loved to look at money. He kept a locked box of gold coins in his own bedroom, and one of his most satisfactory pleasures was to take them out and pile them up into shining yellow towers.

  Plebeians, in spite of their chateaux in France, and their chateaux in America, and their armies of servants and flunkies and parasites, the sight of money, though having lost its power to awe them, excited, thrilled and maddened them. They were still close-fisted—to their servants. (The pantries were locked after meals had been served, and the cooks’ assistants had to account for every pat of butter and every spoonful of cold gravy.) But they spared no opulence for themselves, no magnificence, no appalling extravagance. The one exception might be Armand, but his wife was jealous of the other Bouchard wives, and made up for his natural parsimony by building the biggest cheateau of all, right near the Allegheny River. And then there was Armand’s brother, Christopher, who had a nervous horror of dark thick-packed rooms and soundless carpets and gloomy tapestried walls: he must have space and solitude, air and coldness and shining bitterness about him. He must have polished emptiness and glass and frosty metal. But these were expensive, and he spared no expense to create about himself an elaborate austerity without the softness and warmth that mysteriously repelled him.

  Then there were times, right after the War, when Emile, brother to Armand and Christopher, seemed seized with orgiastic madness. He bought five hundred acres of the choicest land in the environs of Windsor. He had it landscaped into sunken gardens, with conservatories growing delicate peaches and purple grapes and pomegranates, and fruits imported from India, and flowers of more than a thousand exotic varieties. Great ancient trees, like fountains of dark-green fire, were transplanted to the new rolling lawns. In the summer, the peace in this tended forest was too beautiful for description. The roads, smooth as glass, wound desultorily through the grounds, and tremulous gleaming fragments of sunlight fell on them through the trees that lined them. Through the tree-trunks one could see the calm sea-like rise and fall of grass brilliant in open sunshine, and banks of flowers, and distant white stone walls cataracting in blooms. Birds, high in the sky-soaring branches, sang and whistled and trilled and chattered in a silence that had something of holiness about it. Squirrels raced about, and rabbits, and here and there were flashes of wings, red and blue and black and scarlet. As one walked for this long time along the roads, or strolled along a gravelled bridle or by-path, cool and dim and green, one saw the distant glitter of the conservatories, the red wall of an outbuilding, or a tennis court, or a huge outdoor pool, or a golf-course. Then, one approached the many buildings where the army of over one hundred servants lived, valets and cooks and maids and butlers and chauffeurs and gardeners.

  But the house itself was the first of its kind in the whole State, and paralyzed the other Bouchards when first they saw it. Containing over one hundred seventy-five rooms, fifty bedrooms and bathrooms, it was a royal palace, indeed. In fact, Emile’s wife, the former Miss Fortune, had seen such a palace in France, but that had been over six hundred years old. She had immediately sent for her favorite architect, who had come out, at her bidding, from New York, and he was imperiously commanded to observe it, study it, and reproduce it, in Windsor. After a few weeks study, he announced that he thought it would be best to buy the mouldering old mass outright (as Jay Regan had done with one of his own palaces) and transport it all to America, where it could be rebuilt. The grasping former Miss Fortune had been appalled at first, and then delirously excited. (She did not like Miss Regan, Jay’s sister, who was a true aristocrat.) So the whole chateau was purchased, literally en masse, for an incredible sum sufficient to have rescued many of the malnourished and diseased little children of Pennsylvania and to have assured their decent future all their lives. But the plebeian Mrs. Emile Bouchard had, like all plebeians, no love for democracy or the acts of democracy, and if the idea had fantastically occurred to her she would, with hard light laughter, have said something about not “weakening” a race by rescuing its more unfortunate and helpless members. But the idea would not even have occurred to her, for she had never rescued anything in her life.

  The palace was set in the midst of the five hundred acres, and the work of reassembling its welter of ancient and hoary stones, and adding to it, and furnishing its interior, took much over a year. Not including the cost of transporting the palace, the total cost was several million dollars.

  And there it stood, upon completion, silvery-brown of rough wall, turreted, towered, mysteriously aloof on its green-carpeted terraces. Ivy was trained over it. The terraces were planted with lofty trees. It stood there as sublime and removed as though it still dreamt of its old environment. There was an air of isolation about it and timeless splendor, its slits of windows reddening in the western suns or shining in the flush of eastern skies. Not far from it was a large artificial lake, complete with a little bridge of white stone, like a fretwork of carved ivory, over its narrowest part, and swans gliding over their own reflections in the dark polished water.

  A number of struggling universities, four hospitals and ten schools could have been kept open and flourishing with the money that was spent for the furnishings. The dining hall was four stories in height, the ceiling brown-stoned and vaulted. Old, dim-colored tattered banners, Sienese, it was said, hung from the walls. Its immense fifteenth-century refectory table was almost lost in the quiet gloom. English silver, centuries old, candlesticks and tureens and platters and bowls and bottles, covered sixteenth-century chests and commodes lined against the walls. The floor was of red tile, almost black with age, and gleaming as though just wet.

  Other rooms were famous for their Gobelin tapestries and Rembrandts and seventeenth-century beds and armor and Gothic chimney-pieces. The salons and music rooms, the chambers and the libraries, were furnished with the loot of dozens of European palaces.

  A private corps of police were engaged to guard these treasures.

  Sunken gardens made their appearance to t
he west of the palace. Fountains, arcades full of rare statues, grottoes, woodland nooks, made the hottest day delightful. Often, during the summer evenings, Mrs. Emile would have, as her main attraction, the complete Philadelphia Orchestra transported to the grounds for the delectation of her hundreds of guests. (Frequently, each winter, famous orchestras like this were forced to appeal to the shabby populace of their respective cities for dollar contributions, “to uphold a tradition of culture and beauty in America.”)

  At first, the whole Bouchard clan was stunned and appalled at this magnificence and opulent luxury. The wives recovered first, as is to be expected. Shortly thereafter, the most feverish activity prevailed.

  The palace was not to be outdone in beauty and splendor, however, in spite of the golden rivers poured out, in spite of Mrs. Armand’s two-hundred room castle on the Allegheny. One palace after another rose in the midst of exquisite landscrapings. Almost in a body, the wives toured devastated Europe for new treasures, each more dazzling and ancient than the last.

  In Windsor the Bouchards held the place of a feudal family. There was no activity in which they were not the most prominent figures. Their philanthropies, their office-and-factory buildings, their schools and their hospitals, their music hall and their libraries, their parks and the avenue named for them, the art gallery (an exquisite example of pseudo-Greek architecture), the Museum of Natural Sciences, the beautiful Episcopal church of St. Mary-on-the-Mount, the small but perfect university, the public stadium where free and excellent band-concerts were given in the summer, their big homes and magnificent estates, all amazed and impressed visitors. They owned both of the Windsor newspapers, and controlled their policies expertly; they owned practically all the politicians, and controlled their policies expertly, too. They decided nearly everything, from the most insignificant to the most important, with gravity and consideration. Mrs. Francis Bouchard founded the State Milk Fund for deprived children; Mrs. Jules Bouchard opened three creches; Mrs. Andre Bouchard selected the heads of the Board of Education and expressed her constant opinion on the morals, manners and dress of school-teachers, also their salaries; Mrs. Honore Bouchard conducted all the charity bazaars, most of the affairs of the church, including the selection of the minister. Mrs. Emile Bouchard was active in all cultural matters. Mrs. Jean Bouchard trailed behind, confused, bubbling, bumbling and feverish, for she was not very bright, though handsome.

  One cynical young man, elaborately unimpressed by the Bouchard ubiquitousness, had remarked of the church: “That’s where the Bouchards, father, son and Holy Larceny, are worshipped.” This remark was widely quoted, and though almost everyone laughed, it was a laugh of respect, acknowledgment and obsequiousness. And pride! The city was proud of its feudal family.

  The Bouchards, their subsidiaries, and the companies they partially directed, owned (without publicity) the Benson-Winthrop publications, which issued the three most important and glossy fictional and factual magazines in America, eight of the next important and a little less glossy, and controlled eighty of America’s foremost newspapers.

  It seemed extremely modest of the Bouchards that these magazines and other publications were not “able” to secure many photographs of the palaces and chateaux of the Bouchards in Pennsylvania, New York, Long Island and Florida. Nor did Fortune or Esquire publish beautiful photographs of their incredible yachts and race tracks. But the modesty was well publicized, especially Armand’s “asceticism.” “Mr. Bouchard,” sang the New York Morning Courier, “lives a life of almost severe simplicity and self-discipline. He is in bed not later than eleven; he is at his office not later than eight-thirty in the morning. An occasional game of golf, or a quick canter or brief swim, are almost all the diversions he allows himself. His summer home is simple and austere, very little more elaborate than the summer home of the average salaried man. The average bricklayer (this was in 1920) has his white silk shirts and silk underwear, but Mr. Bouchard confesses that he never owned a silk shirt in all his life —and as for silk underwear! There are thousands of mechanics and electricians who live more opulently than does Mr. Bouchard, whose automobile is three years old.”

  Francis Bouchard was proud of his gardens, which, though smaller, were more beautiful than those of his second cousin, Emile. He took a personal and tyrannical interest in them, selecting the new plants himself, and because he had an artistic eye, directing the planting and pruning. Town and Country were allowed to photograph these gardens at will, the only stipulation being that they must show Mr. Francis Bouchard in them, clad in old overalls and armed with a spade or rake.

  But nothing was said of the renting of as many as four floors of Philadelphia’s and New York’s most famous and luxurious hotels when the Bouchards gave parties, or sponsored a debutante. Nothing was said of the commandeering of some of the world’s most acclaimed orchestras, to beguile them at their banquets and balls. One hundred thousand dollars, or twice as much, was frequently spent on a single night’s entertainment, though, in 1921, millions were unemployed, and the dress rehearsal of 1929 was taking place.

  (But much was said of “bolshevism” and “normalcy” and “true Americanism,” and the hearty bluff character of one, honest Warren Harding, President of the United States. These were subjects, thought the Bouchards virtuously, far more important to the American people than the mere recounting of boring parties, however drowned in champagne they were, and however glittering.)

  The noblest party of them all, however, was that given by the thin and vitriolic Christopher Bouchard in honor of his sister’s debut. (He was her guardian and the guardian of her fortune.) He chose to present her during the summer, at his summer home on Long Island, which was called “Crissons.” The newspapers lyrically sang of the “simplicity” of this party given for one of America’s most gilded heiresses. “Only one variety of flower, and that white, with a touch of mauve, was used, and not so lavishly used as at other and less important debuts. No intoxicating liquors made their appearance, for the Bouchards believe in observing not only the letter of the Law, but its spirit, also. Only one orchestra was engaged. The grounds were simply but prettily decorated with old-fashioned paper lanterns and tents. It was a scene very rarely reproduced in these days of workmen’s chauffeurs, silk shirts and luxurious motor cars.”

  But the newspapers delicately refrained from mentioning that the simple flowers “with a touch of mauve” were rare white orchids, costing nearly fifteen thousand dollars. There was no whiskey, to be sure, except that brought in gold and silver flasks by the younger guests, but the finest and oldest champagne had been especially imported from France, at a cost well approaching twelve thousand dollars. The “one orchestra” was the London Symphony, then touring America. The conductor was paid five thousand dollars for the night, and ten thousand was paid to his artists. The lanterns were there, it is true, but they were not old-fashioned, except in shape, and they were not paper at all. The tents were of the brightest, gayest silk, full of the rarest imported food.

  There was indeed a sort of simplicity and austerity about that debut, and a kind of sweet ingenuousness. But the other Bouchards were quite accurate in their estimate that the party cost as least one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. They envied Christopher, whose taste was exquisite, and not florid like their own. They thought his summer palace bare and too polished, but were not deceived into thinking that it was cheap. (“Poor little Celeste,” Mrs. Emile declared later, “is like a little white kitten in a huge hospital operating room, all steel and white enamel and tile.”) But even Mrs. Emile could rapidly calculate the expense of this glittering bareness and shining silver and sharp jetty black.

  CHAPTER V

  One of Christopher’s deepest satisfactions was his belief that he and his sister were extremely alike. For instance, they both avoided contact with numbers of people, but whereas Christopher avoided them because of his innate hatred of them, Celeste shrank away because of her intolerable and painful shyness. He suffered in crowds
, because of his loathing and contempt for noise and feeding and idiot hot laughter; she, because of hard prying eyes without sympathy or kindness. He was constantly rigid with his fear of a familiar and animal touch, which he felt invaded and insulted him. She was constantly rigid with her dread of being touched by hands and bodies of those who had nothing but envy and malice to offer her.

  She was constantly terrified. Terror in some manifestation was almost always present in her, except when she was with her mother, Adelaide, or with her brother, Christopher. She had always been more or less frightened and shy with strangers and in unfamiliar surroundings, but her father’s death had precipitated this state of chronic fear and shrinking dread. Jules had been her god, her hero, her protector, her wall of smooth impregnable steel. In some way she had always suspected the predatory world of unspeakable evil and viciousness. The wall once down, her innocence had been brutally assaulted. It took years before Christopher was able to build up another wall of steel behind which she could crouch and hide. She had loved Christopher next to her father; nevertheless, he had played with her in her nursery, and it took a long time before he could emerge from the status of affectionate older brother into protector.

  Her two other brothers, Armand and Emile, were fond of her, for who could help being fond of this little creature with her timid gaieties and small trilling voice? But she was afraid of them, somewhat. When they were married, she was more afraid of them than ever. Behind them, she saw the faces of their wives, who alarmed her. Smiles and affectionate touches and solicitude and chaffings did not deceive her. She had had no experience with hypocrisy, malice, greed and cruelty, but there seemed to be a mysterious memory in her of these things. She read them in the eyes and smiles and touches of her sisters-in-law, and their friends and relatives. She read them in the faces of passersby, in the faces of shopgirls and servants and millionaires and actresses and her own few “friends.” A threat to her life, some violence, could never have affected her so poignantly, so torturingly, as did the shadows of lies and hatred and envy in the smiling eyes of those about her.