Sons of Fortune

by Malcolm Macdonald

  “We’ll see about that!” Nora answered, with far more confidence than she felt.

  ***

  The Uptown Construction Company was in no position to start business. In fact, its position, as Nora and Winifred pushed through the quarter-open front door and wandered hesitantly up the rickety stairs, was on its knees, scrubbing the floor and bawling “Rule, Britannia” at the top of its cracked, unmelodious voice.

  “Caspar!” Nora called out in horror.

  He dropped the scrubbing brush, turned, and stood, all in one swift movement. “Holy Mother of God!” he shouted in parody-Irish. “Laney, would ye ever look who it is!”

  Laney came out of hiding from behind a tall cupboard. She, too, had a scrubbing brush in her hand, which she at once dropped.

  “Mater!” He came forward and embraced her warmly. “And Winnie, too!”

  “Hello, popsie!”

  “Hello, Steamer.”

  “Darling—no! I mean, mater and dear sister, may I have the honour to present Miss Leonora Delaney, known to all as Laney Delaney. Darling, this is my mother, Lady Stevenson, and my sister, Lady Winifred.”

  Laney wiped her hand carefully. “The cleanest hand in the Fourteenth Ward,” she said as she offered it. “Welcome to you both, ladies. And welcome to the future-greatest construction company this city has ever seen.”

  As Nora shook the proffered hand she thought she had never heard territory or relationships so adroitly and swiftly marked. No wonder Caspar had nearly introduced them to her, instead of the proper way around.

  “I see it is a hive of industry already,” Nora said. She decided to scratch at the girl a little to see what she was made of—also to see how Caspar responded. “And how democratic you have already become, my dear. Does Miss Delaney work for you?”

  “I work like a charm,” she said brightly and tickled Caspar in the ribs.

  “She works like a charm,” Caspar confirmed, grinning. “But I say! What are you doing here—both of you? Winnie, I’m so glad you’re free!”

  “Why were you singing ‘Rule Britannia,’ Steamer?”

  “Singing?” Laney sneered.

  He smirked. “I thought it was Laney’s father coming up. I just like to add a bit of variety to his life. All he hears are those dreadful jigs and Fenian songs.” He ducked a loose, playful punch from the girl.

  “Besides, she’s not supposed to be here. The doctor said she must rest.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard all about that from the wonderful Mr. Ford.”

  “It seems I owe your son my life, Lady Stevenson. Those Yankees were firing grapeshot into civilian crowds when he carried me to safety.”

  Caspar cleared his throat. “Not to mention those Irish rascals!”

  “No,” Laney said, pursing her lips together. “Don’t!”

  Caspar turned to his mother, with that especially serious face he wore only when joking, and said, “You know how our bruises go red, white, and blue? Well”—he pointed to a bruise on her forearm—“look! Orange and green.”

  “Hon’able!” Laney was really annoyed. “I’m trying to tell your mother how grateful I am and how rightly proud she can be of you.”

  Caspar shrugged, chastened.

  “Lady Stevenson, your son showed the sort of bravery that, on a battlefield, earns the big medals.”

  “Big as tombstones,” Caspar said. “Some of them.”

  Laney turned on him, flaring with anger. “You’re impossible today,” she cried. She left his side and went to the window. It was the sort of move that usually precedes a struggle not to cry.

  Nora thought the girl was nowhere near to tears; but it had been a neat hit of social engineering. Now she had to take the girl’s part—women together, aren’t men brutes, that sort of thing.

  “Miss Delaney,” she said, “we English have acquired the most unnatural habit of banishing our young males to remote schools at a very tender age. The result is that they can never accept praise or commendation from a woman, however well deserved. Nevertheless a good kick, aimed where it won’t blind them, will serve wonderfully instead.”

  She did not expect Miss Delaney to make a sudden rush at Caspar and, giggling like a schoolgirl, try to kick him on the shins. She certainly didn’t expect Winifred, who had rationed her laughs to one a day since her release, to join in, braying like a jackass. She almost found herself joining them as Caspar shrieked and hopped and skipped about the empty office. Until that urge took her she had not realized what aggressive feelings Caspar could arouse in people—even in people who loved him. Perhaps, she thought, especially in people who loved him.

  For Caspar it was long-ago, faraway Mrs. Purse again; the girls were careful to miss him by inches and to falter when he looked like being cornered.

  “Pax!” he cried. “I surrender. I surrender.”

  Both girls stopped, breathless, glad of the excuse. They looked at each other, a little hesitantly, and then, without thought, flung their arms around one another and embraced.

  “Steamer, you’ve met your match at last,” Winifred said, still smiling at Laney.

  “Say!” Laney said. “His name’s Caspar. You call him Steamer. I call him Hon’able.” She turned on Caspar. “Who are you?”

  Caspar grinned. “All things to all women,” he said.

  “Well!” Nora used her come-to-order voice. “We have obviously called on this busy firm at a most inconvenient time. So what I propose is that we”—she linked her arm with Winifred’s—“should invite its two principals to the dinner rooms of the Fifth Avenue Hotel at seven o’clock this evening.” She looked around with mock asperity. “At least they have chairs there.”

  Everyone laughed and agreed that would be splendid. As Nora was going down the stairs Laney ran to the landing above her and said, “Lady Stevenson, I’m sure you have many family and personal things to say to your son. I will come at seven. But he will be there at six.”

  Nora had to admit it was beautifully done. With supreme grace and confidence, with the gentlest of smiles, with the softest voice and the most considerate words, Miss Delaney had allowed Caspar to be alone with his mother.

  ***

  “A charming girl,” Nora said when they were back in the coach. “A very nice girl indeed. Yes!” She looked at Winifred. “And what does that smile mean?”

  “You don’t see it, do you?”

  “See what?”

  “Yourself! She is you. She is so exactly you, my hair stood on end. It is quite uncanny.”

  Nora felt winded. “How can you say so? What possible resemblance is there?”

  “If you can’t see it, I can’t make you see it.”

  “Name one point of resemblance!” Nora was bewildered at Winifred’s air of utter certainty.

  “Everything. Simply everything.”

  “A girl from an Irish-American slum and one of the leaders of London Society? Everything?”

  “Think, Mama dear! Those hovels you took us to—at Stockport. And now think of the circles Miss Delaney just ran around you and me. Can you imagine anything that would leave her at a loss?”

  For Nora it was as if the carriage seat and floor were sinking away beneath her. She suddenly saw how right Winifred was, and she marvelled that no hint of such an idea had occurred to her at the time. But now that she, too, was convinced of it, she had the most uncanny feeling of having gone a ghostly circle to meet herself.

  “Thank God Caspar had the luck to find her,” Winifred went on.

  “Can you imagine anyone else being able to control him? She is exactly what he needs. And Stevenson’s.”

  ***

  As soon as he heard that Boy had joined the army, Caspar asked, “Have you come to bring me back?”

  “D’you want to come back?” Nora asked. She and Caspar were alone in a corner of the hotel lounge,
drinking these newfangled “cocktails.” Winifred, tactfully, was still dressing with the help of Nanette.

  Caspar put on a broad, quizzical smile to mask anything his face might otherwise reveal. “What’s the betting? At Stevenson’s, I mean. What odds are you giving, mater?”

  “Don’t play games, Caspar.”

  “All right. I don’t think I will come back to England.” And when she showed surprise, he added, “You started from nothing. You know what an excitement it is to fight your own way up.”

  “It is when you succeed, popsie.”

  Caspar scratched his cheek. “I see that point.”

  “So—do you want to come back?”

  “I would make big changes.”

  “We would expect it.”

  “We?”

  “Your father assures me he would expect it. Of course you would not be given a free hand for some time.”

  Caspar laughed. “You make it sound so attractive. I have a very free hand here.”

  “If you are coming back, I don’t want there to be any misunderstandings.”

  How odd, she thought, to be bargaining and manoeuvring with her own son, exactly as she would with a stranger. But that was exactly what made Caspar right. You could never have talked with Young John like this; and that, by the same token, was what had made him wrong.

  “There would be the problem of Laney,” he said in a voice made carefully neutral.

  “You no doubt mean the problem that she is far too good for you?”

  His face lit up. “D’you mean that? Truly?”

  “I mean it so sincerely, Caspar, that I am thinking of making it a condition of your return that you bring her with you.”

  He was silent a while; obviously he had prepared for opposition on this point. The lack of it had disconcerted him. Some of the joy left his face. “Yet I don’t know,” he said. “We’ve stayed up late night after night talking about all our plans here. And she is New York. She’s a New York girl to her very core. Don’t be deceived by the Irish business. That’s politics, pure politics—meaning very impure politics, of course. She breathes this place. She…this place…they’re not…you can’t…they’re like that!” He clamped both his hands together, squeezing them white. “Take her away, put her in England, in English Society? I don’t know.”

  “Are you saying she must decide for you?”

  He pursed his lips and raised his eyebrows. “That’s the size of it. She’d be deciding for herself, too. We aren’t really so separate any more.”

  “Does she mean so much?”

  His eyes twinkled as he nodded and smiled. Nora, shamefully, found she had to stifle a pang of jealousy that love was still abroad in the world, was there for the finding.

  “It’s hard not to be stupid about it,” he said. “You know—to believe that something moved me at the very first, when I saw her in that mob on Wall Street. (Don’t ever call it a mob when she’s around, by the way.) Looking back, though, it’s easy to think it.” He was silent a while and then said, “She isn’t out of my thoughts day or night. Everything I do, you know, I have to relate to her, do it for her. I think she’s the most wonderful person who ever lived or breathed. If we each live to a hundred, it will not be long enough for me. And I don’t care if I never make a fortune. I know we’ll always get by. And as long as I am with her…” He had spoken all this into his dry martini. Now he looked up and saw, to his astonishment and dismay, that his mother was crying. “What did I say?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Nothing. Of course you…nothing.”

  “All I meant to show, darling,” he said—he had never called her “darling” before; it made her reach out blindly and grip his hand. He gripped back his reassurance—“was that it won’t be her deciding for me. There is no her and me anymore. Not where decisions like that are involved.”

  ***

  Nora was herself again by the time they all sat down for dinner. During the early courses her conversation was almost entirely with Laney. Winifred joined in from time to time, to prevent it from seeming an inquisition. Indeed it was a most thorough inquisition but, because Laney recognized she was in the hands of two experts and because she was on home territory and had nothing to conceal, it never appeared to rise above the level of the most aimless conversation. Caspar hardly took his eyes off her.

  The give-and-take had let slip a good deal of information on the Stevenson side, too. Laney soon knew that Caspar was one of the heirs to a business worth thirty to forty million dollars, one of the biggest in England. She already knew that Caspar had run away because he had been intended for the army, and that his mother had opposed the notion and wanted him for the business. The question that shrieked in her mind was: Had Lady S. come to call him back? And there was a subsidiary: Would he go? A subsidiary to that: Would she be asked to go, too? And, so, like a hall of mirrors the questions bounced back and forth, only half-illuminating one another: Would she go, if asked? In what capacity?

  The strongest theme in them all, like a common tint in the glass of every mirror, was money.

  What was even one million dollars like, let alone thirty?

  At last the main question had to be asked aloud: Was Caspar being asked to return home?

  Nora could sense the anguished suspense behind Laney’s calm words. She longed to say everything she had said to Caspar, but she still had to be sure of this girl—independently of anything he or Winifred had decided. “If he wishes to,” was all she said.

  Laney looked at Caspar. “Honey?” she asked.

  “I said you would decide for us,” he told her. “And we have a week to talk about it.” He turned to Nora. “I suppose you are going back on the Great Eastern?”

  “That was our plan.”

  “I think she sails again a week today. Friday. We will let you know before then, of course.” He gripped Laney’s hand above the cloth, in full view. Her return grip was even harder.

  Chapter 48

  Six days later, on the eve of the ship’s sailing, Laney and Caspar again dined with the two ladies. They had met, in various combinations, almost every day. Laney had taken Winifred on a tour of Manhattan schools where, armed with a letter of introduction from Governor Opdyke, she was given royal receptions, and even her closest and most incisive questions were not only tolerated but answered at length. Caspar had squired his mother to a number of Wall Street banks, where she, already something of a legend in financial circles, greatly extended her acquaintance and influence. They were all out to solicit funds, of course; but she considered the American system for regulating bank activities to be even more slipshod than the English one, and so she ended up investing very little. “Profit isn’t everything,” she warned Caspar, who had been very impressed with the banking wealth so in evidence on Fifth Avenue.

  During these and all other encounters they had studiously avoided broaching that central topic—will they, won’t they? But the questions fairly buzzed around its periphery. By the time of that final dinner Caspar knew that he would have complete control of the iron and steel section within a year, and of the firm in another five—except for railways, harbours, docks, and dams, which would always be his father’s. It sounded like a big exception, being more than half the firm, but Caspar was confident that, by his own efforts in the iron and steel division, he would soon reverse the balance. So that didn’t worry him.

  Laney knew that he would be building a very big country house of around two hundred rooms, with indoor servants numbering over a hundred, and with forty or so gardeners and groundsmen. She would be one of the leaders of Society, wherever the house was to be built, and she would have undisputed sway over the house, its contents, and its people. She could not believe it, of course. English people were noted for their reserve; it was well known they took five years to decide whether to try a different kind of knot in a cravat. How could they be offer
ing her all this so swiftly?

  “They’re desperate, darling,” Caspar told her. “In their hearts, for all that they like you, they are hating this rush. But also, they are Stevensons. They are not unused to quick decisions when the need strikes. My father proposed to my mother the day they met—I mean within twenty-four hours. And they were married inside three weeks.”

  That really impressed Laney.

  Caspar wasted no time that final evening. As soon as they were seated he said, “We haven’t been able to make up our minds.”

  Both ladies let out disappointed gasps.

  “I know,” Caspar said apologetically. “I said Laney would decide for us, but it didn’t prove so simple. I think, on the whole, she is in favour of our coming.”

  Nora and Winifred began to smile again.

  “But I,” he went on, “am against.”

  “Why, popsie?” Nora tried hard to keep a querulous edge out of her voice.

  “She’s convinced she can manage the house, the people, the whole Society nexus.”

  “On her head!” Winifred said.

  “Even in her sleep,” Nora confirmed.

  Caspar sighed.

  “What Caspar’s afraid of, Lady Stevenson, is that I will—both as an uncouth, cultureless American and, even worse, as an Irish-American—that I would be exposed to ridicule.”

  “She would suffer the cruellest jibes,” Caspar said. “You know exactly the sort of thing people would say. People—English people, I mean—make blunders and gaffes all the time. And no one says a word. They treat it as a delightful chance to show how tolerant and magnanimous they all are. But just let Laney make the same mistake—let her seat a maid of honour to the queen above the daughter of a baron—and listen to the malice ring around the county all season!”

  “But a maid of honour to the queen does sit above a baron’s daughter,” Winifred said.

  “No, dear,” Nora contradicted, “they rank just above wives of Knights of the Garter.”