The Lost Constitution

by William Martin

  “ ‘I don’t know, ma’am.’ “ Rosemary made a face. “ ‘These things is way above me.’ “

  “Don’t be talkin’ about all this votin’ business … you see how mad it makes Mr. Magnus. I should never have let you go to them suffragist meetings.”

  “At least I got some education there,” said Rosemary.

  “Education? Education is for … for … educated folks.”

  “I’d be in college now, but for you tellin’ me to take this job.”

  “I wanted you to get a good position is all,” said Maureen.

  Rosemary stood next to the six-burner that pumped heat, even on a hot June morning. This was her mother’s domain, warm and safe but structured and demanding, like a convent. “There’s a big world out there, Mama, with big folks and big ideas, and I mean to be part of it.”

  The bell rang in the breakfast room.

  “See what they want,” said Maureen, “and keep your mouth shut.”

  Rosemary looked toward the breakfast room, then pulled off her little white crest and headed for the door.

  “Rosemary! Where are you goin’?”

  “To find a document. It might tell what the Founding Fathers thought about votin’ women. Maybe it’ll shut up Mr. Magnus.”

  Maureen followed her. “What do you know about such a document?”

  The girl stopped in the doorway. “Grandma told me.”

  “Grandma? When?”

  “When she was dyin’. When I’d go to read to her from the papers. I read to her about Maud Wood Park and the N.W.S.A. tryin’ to get the suffragist amendment through Congress. It got her to talkin’ about the Constitution, and a man with a limp….”

  “Man with a limp. You know about him?” Maureen’s hands began to shake.

  The bell rang again, more insistently.

  But mother and daughter stood where they were, the daughter’s defiance an anchor set in her mother’s fears.

  After a moment, Maureen picked up the maid’s crest. “Do your job, dear, please.”

  Rosemary wanted to run right then, run and disappear into that big world she dreamed about. But her mother had sacrificed her own freedom to send Rosemary to school. She had dragged herself every day, winter, spring, and fall, from their South End tenement to the Perkins home in the Back Bay. She had worked even harder during her summers in the Newport kitchen. So if it took a bit longer to educate her mother, Rosemary would take the time.

  She put her little crest back on and returned to the dining room. “Yes, sir?”

  “Mrs. Perkins and I are very pleased with your service.” Mr. Magnus smiled.

  “Thank you, sir.” Rosemary did not smile back. She did not like the smiles of Mr. Magnus. They expressed many things, but never goodwill.

  “However,” he said, “don’t be getting too big for your britches.” He glanced at her apron, as though trying to see the britches.

  Mrs. Perkins looked up from the obituaries. “Bartlett Pike has died.”

  Bartlett Pike … a name that Rosemary had heard before, from her grandmother.

  “So,” said Magnus, “we finally get him off the Pike-Perkins board. He probably died when he realized that the end of the war means the end of the mill.”

  Mrs. Perkins angled the paper into the sunshine, “It says here—” She made a little shooing gesture with her fingers to excuse Rosemary.

  But Rosemary lingered to listen.

  “It says here that his memorial service is Wednesday in Millbridge.”

  And Rosemary had Wednesday off.

  GILBERT AMORY HATED Livermore.

  He stood on his father’s little porch, waved at the black flies, and looked out at the river, the sawmill, the ramshackle buildings, the old C.W. Saunders chugging down from the latest cuttings, and he decided that the days of logging in the Sawyer River Valley were numbered.

  He and his brother, Aaron, had grown up here and learned the three R’s in the little schoolhouse by the sawmill. They had wandered the hillsides and ridden the log trains with Frenchy. And they had rejoiced when their parents sent them to Phillips Exeter for the seventh grade.

  Aaron had become a doctor, Gilbert a lawyer. Both now made their homes in Portland, but since Aaron had a family, it fell to Gilbert to spend time with their father and bring him bad news like Bartlett’s death.

  “The giants are dead,” said George Amory, “and now the midgets are following.”

  In 1914, Chamberlain’s ancient wounds had finally killed him.

  In 1917, Daniel Saunders had passed, and Charles a year later. Their house, the largest in Livermore, was now occupied by their widows. Since there were no other heirs, the company had passed from timber men to estate managers who cared only about the last figure on the last line.

  The Henrys were gone, too, so the passage of time had been good for something.

  Old J. E. had died in 1912. The man who said, “I never seen a tree yet that didn’t mean a damn sight more to me goin’ under the saw than it did standin’ on a mountain,” had lived by his motto. Once he had stripped the primeval Zealand Valley, he had moved south and gone to work on the Pemigawasset.

  One of his sons had put it as starkly as the landscape: “There’s no secret to this business of ours. We own the land and the timber and we’re making every dollar out of it we can.” When they sold in 1917, they walked away with $3 million.

  The Saunders had cut less and made less for themselves and their partners, but it was a source of pride to George Amory that they had cut three times on their tract, while anything the Henrys touched was stripped for a generation.

  George was seventy-nine now, and as Frenchy said, he was still white-pine straight, ax-heft strong, and as smart as a jaybird. He credited his longevity to hard work, to friends who were loyal, to sons who respected him, to a wife who loved him.

  Gilbert knew that when his father spoke of the death of giants, Cordelia led the list. As they passed the little graveyard on their way to the depot, they left flowers. Then they boarded a train that would take them through the Gateway to meet a southbound connection for Millbridge.

  The Crawford House, the Fabyan House, and the White Mountain House glittered in the June sunlight, and two new hotels had risen to join them. The Mount Pleasant perched on a rise looking east toward the grandest of them all: the Mount Washington Hotel, which held its rocky eminence like Camelot, a great gray castle with a green roof, surrounded by fairways instead of moats.

  As the train steamed past the Fabyan House, George admitted that no matter how much he and Bartlett had contended, he felt a sense of loss at his cousin’s death. “We grew up together. Now I’m alone at the top of the mountain, waiting to be called.”

  As if to mirror George’s darkening mood, the train left the grand hotels behind, rounded a bend, crested a rise, and rumbled into the Zealand wasteland—miles of stumps, stripped hillsides, wasted trunks bleached white by time or burned black by fires, and dead in the middle of it, the remains of the logging town that J. E. Henry had left two decades before. But here and there, new trees were growing, and grasses carpeted the eroded hillsides.

  “Look up in the valley,” said Gilbert. “It’s coming back to life.”

  The forest was reclaiming the denuded slopes and the ridges, too.

  “One thing dies to make way for another,” Gilbert said.

  THE NEXT MORNING, mourners filled the Congregational Church in Millbridge.

  George and Gilbert took family seats in the fourth row.

  In front of them sat Bartlett’s immediate family, which had not been especially fruitful. Bartlett’s sons had each had a daughter, and each daughter had married, so the Pike line would continue though the Pike name would not.

  Sarah Pike, a heavyset, good-natured girl, had married a heavyset, good-natured son of Irish mill-workers named Bill McGillis. They had inherited the big house and the responsibility of running the mill.

  Bartlett’s other granddaughter, Audrey Pike, had gone to C
onnecticut College, where she met Samuel Bishop, son of a Connecticut newspaper publisher. Samuel edited his father’s little paper in Litchfield, but he had big dreams. He had spent the night before telling George and Gilbert about something called broadcasting.

  The heat wave had not yet broken. All across the church, programs and hats fanned the air. Light colors prevailed among the ladies, though black should have predominated. A few gentlemen had gone to shirtsleeves with black armbands.

  George whispered to Gilbert that Cousin Bartlett had earned many friends in spite of himself.

  Just as Bartlett had schemed to take control of the mill in the 1860s, and retain control in the 1870s, he had fought to keep it open when competition from the south had begun to siphon business in the 1900s and when Magnus Perkins had mandated layoffs after the Armistice.

  Waves of immigrants had found work in Millbridge. The Irish had been followed by the French Canadians, then the Italians and the Eastern Europeans. There had even been a few from the Middle East. And those who were willing to work had found something to work for in the mill by the Blackstone.

  So George thought it strange that no representative from Perkins Holdings had come to pay the company’s respects. What he did not know was that there were two women in the church who were Perkins employees, a cook and a maid.

  The cook was looking for her daughter.

  The daughter was looking for a man she did not know. He would be in his late seventies by now. He might still be handsome, because that was how her grandmother had described him. He most certainly would have a limp.

  A hymn began the service… “A Mighty Fortress is Our God.”

  Maureen was sitting in the last pew, her eyes scanning the crowd for Rosemary.

  A reading, the Twenty-Third Psalm, followed the hymn.

  Rosemary was sitting in the far corner, behind a pillar, well hidden from her mother, who had come in and stopped in the doorway as if expecting to be struck by lightning for entering a Protestant church.

  “Bartlett Pike was a man who cared about his fellow men…. About his friends and neighbors …“ That from the minister, eulogizing.

  Rosemary had left her mother a note, saying that she was going to Boston, to a meeting of the N.W.S.A. But mothers have a sixth sense.

  A eulogy from Bartlett’s older son about a man who loved his family.

  Maureen twisted her hands around her handkerchief and scanned the crowd.

  She had told Rosemary the whole story: One day she had admitted to her mother that she feared her children would inherit the family weakness for whiskey, since both her father and her stevedore husband had “had a taste for the creature.” Her mother had agreed that a hard-drinking father sometimes meant hard-drinking children, but that Maureen need not worry. Why? Because her real father was not the man who raised her.

  “Our Father, who Art in heaven …“ Recited by the whole congregation.

  Sheila Murphy had begged Maureen never to contact the man who had impregnated her in the summer of 1863 … for a dollar. No good could come from it, only embarrassment, heartache, and shame. And Maureen had begged her daughter. But …

  “Onward Christian Soldiers,” the exit hymn.

  The crowd was standing. The principal mourners were filing out. An old man was limping down the aisle now. He had proud posture and a gray Vandyke. And the young man beside him could only be his son, who stood as straight but substituted a black mustache for a Vandyke.

  And Maureen saw it … in the firm jaws, in the strong brows. Until this moment, she had not been certain that her mother had been telling the truth. But now she knew.

  George Amory noticed a woman looking at him … first at his foot, then at his face…. For a second, he felt as if he were back in St. Albans in 1864.

  Gilbert noticed, too. He thought to stop and help the woman, who looked as if she might faint from the heat, but the crush of people was carrying them out of the church, through the foyer, into the sunlight.

  Rosemary was already outside. She had slipped out by a side door and was watching for the man with the limp.

  She did not want to confront him like this. But what other chance would she have? There were only a few days left before the Boston rally. And how quickly could a girl gain attention, if she could impress the ladies of the N.W.S.A with her special knowledge of the document they were seeking to amend?

  So she went up to the man and said, “Excuse me, sir.”

  George Amory looked at the young woman … and looked … and looked … auburn hair, a tall, regal demeanor, a face from his youth…. First St. Albans had flashed before his eyes, now this strange echo of the first woman he had ever … Were these rising memories some harbinger of an affliction about to strike his brain? Or was it just the heat? Gilbert Amory stepped between his father and the young woman, doffed his straw boater, bowed. “Good morning, Miss …”

  “Ryan. Rosemary Ryan.” So taken was she by Gilbert’s manner that she curtsied.

  “And did you work in the mill?” asked Gilbert.

  “No, sir. I work for Mr. Magnus Perkins.”

  George stepped closer to her. “Are you his representative at the services?”

  “No. I’m … I’m a member of the N.W.S.A.”

  “Well, look here,” said Gilbert, “if you’re soliciting contributions at a funeral—”

  “Oh, no, sir. It’s not that.” Rosemary noticed her mother at the top of the church steps. Their eyes met, but Maureen seemed too paralyzed to move.

  “Then what can we do for you?” Gilbert Amory asked.

  Rosemary knew she had to get this business over quickly, so she turned again to the old man. “I bring greetings from my grandmother.”

  “Grandmother?” said George.

  “Yes, sir.” Rosemary swallowed and said, “Sheila Murphy.”

  George’s memory came to life before him. This girl’s grandmother had hiked her dress for him in an office in the huge brick building just across the river. A black spot began to float before his eyes, as though it had risen from the deepest recesses of his memory. For a moment, he thought he might faint.

  Gilbert said, “Is she in the N.W.S.A., too?”

  “Well … no, sir,” said Rosemary. “She’s, ah … dead.”

  Even in the choking heat, George suddenly felt a chill.

  While there might have been more sophisticated ways to approach this subject, Rosemary simply pressed ahead. “My grandmother told me about a draft of the Constitution, sir. She said you had it, and—”

  “What?” said Gilbert. “A draft of the—”

  George put his hand on his son’s arm. “We should join the family.”

  “Sir,” said the girl with sudden vehemence, “I am your family.”

  George’s legs buckled. He squeezed his son’s forearm.

  Rosemary realized that she had pushed too far. She wished that she had listened to her mother. She glanced back at the church steps. But her mother was gone.

  Gilbert Amory said, “If this is some kind of joke, miss, let me assure you—”

  “Excuse me.” Maureen Ryan appeared from the crowd. “I’m sorry if my Rosie has interrupted your mourning. But she’s a headstrong—”

  And George asked with a sudden, almost preternatural calm, “Are you Maureen?”

  Gilbert turned to his father. “You know this woman?”

  George Amory’s voice was as clear as his memory of a Boston tenement, a baby girl, a promise. “I haven’t seen her in fifty-five years. But … yes.”

  “Then you know why we’re here,” said Rosemary. “You said you’d help if we came to you and told you who we were.”

  “Help? What kind of help?” asked Gilbert.

  “I want the world to know about the Constitution,” said Rosemary.

  “Constitution?” Gilbert looked at his father. “What is this?”

  George swayed, wiped perspiration from his forehead.

  Maureen said, “I’m sorry, sir. I never meant to
bother you. I never wanted to know you.”

  Gilbert took control. “I’m not going to stand in the broiling sun while I’m told by total strangers that they’re part of my family.” He pulled a business card from his pocket and put it in the mother’s hand. “Any further contact should be through my office in Portland. Now, good day.”

  “A FIRST DRAFT of the Constitution?” whispered Gilbert to his father. “Annotated by the New England delegates? In the safe at Livermore? Why haven’t you told me about this before? Why haven’t you told Aaron?”

  “Because it wasn’t your place to know, or your brother’s.”

  The family had set up a receiving line and refreshment table under the maples that Bartlett had planted. People were offering condolences, then stopping by the table, then seeking out cool spots on the mill grounds or down by the river. For a single day, this place of hard labor seemed almost festive, but the celebration came at the end of a life that foretold the end of a way of life.

  George and Gilbert had found a quiet corner in the old boardroom.

  Gilbert drank down a glass of lemonade and said, “I’m your legal advisor in addition to your son. I should know if you’re holding national treasures as keepsakes, or if I have half sisters in service to rich Bostonians.”

  George pointed out the window to Maureen and Rosemary, who were shaking hands with Bill McGillis. “There’s your half sister out there, talking to her first cousin.”

  “McGillis? The millworker who married into the family? Talk about ambition.”

  “His Aunt Sheila had ambition, too. She took money to get out of the mill in exchange for … for … it was all before your mother consented to marry me.”

  Sons seldom consider their fathers as sexual beings, and Gilbert was a conventional sort of man, so he simply waved his hands and said, “Back to this Constitution. Did you promise it to that girl, that Rosemary?”

  “I promised it to no one. It’s a resource to be managed, protected, like the forest.”

  “It could be worth a substantial lot of money.”

  “But who owns it?” said the old man. “Do the descendants of Rufus King? Do the Caldwells of Vermont? They bought it. Do I? I stole it.”