by John Jakes
The lawyer had grown enthusiastic. He was leaning forward so that his huge paunch pressed against his thighs. His coat fell away and Courtleigh glimpsed the concealed pistol the other man always wore in a sweat-blackened holster tucked near his right armpit.
Fine thing, a W & P attorney walking around armed. Hubble claimed he’d acquired his first gun at age eleven, when he was guarding carriages at a bordello and needed to protect the vehicles from neighborhood toughs. Perhaps he still wore a weapon to compensate for his soft, weak body. But if he wanted to climb higher, he’d have to polish off those rough edges. He’d have to learn that gentlemen never overcame opponents with fists or revolvers. At least not their own.
Sweat began to slick Hubble’s face as he waited for a reaction. Courtleigh was moved to snicker and say, “Anxious for absolution, are you, Lorenzo?”
“Yes, sir, very. Philadelphia still weighs heavily on my mind.”
“And on mine,” was the unsmiling reply. “I laughed a moment ago because the matter I was going to raise with you was the very one you brought up. I was going to order you to see Kent was killed once and for all.”
The fat man breathed noisily, relieved. “What a fine coincidence! In view of your wishes, may I make a second suggestion?”
“What is it?”
“That we not limit ourselves to reprisals against Mr. Kent. That we also consider his family.”
Stillness then. From the lawn came the shouts and laughter of a boisterous croquet game. In the library, the air was stifling. Hubble’s cheeks ran with shining sweat. Courtleigh sounded eager as he whispered, “Go on.”
“Well, sir, Kent’s editorial stand on the strike is bound to run counter to that of most of the other New York dailies. That could cause”—a fat hand tilted back and forth—“let’s call it resentment. Now I’ve investigated, and I’m aware that Mr. Kent is no longer living at home. But that isn’t widely known. Also, the mansion in which his wife and children reside is located in a sparsely populated section of upper Fifth Avenue. Certain groups angry over Mr. Kent’s editorial policy, certain”—the hand waggled again—“patriotic citizens who believe he carries the Marxian taint, but who don’t realize he’s moved away—they might take it upon themselves to mob that house. My information says there’s no longer any love lost between Kent and his wife. Not since he took the Sedgwick woman as his mistress. But his children are an altogether different matter. In such a demonstration as I’ve just described, those children might be injured.”
Another silence, lengthening and lengthening—until Thomas Courtleigh smiled.
With an expression of false piety, Hubble went on. “We’d wish no harm to any man’s loved ones. But mobs do get out of hand. Kent’s children might even be killed.”
Unblinking, Lorenzo Hubble stared at his employer. Courtleigh glanced at the red-lit windows. Laughter pealed in the summer dark.
He had to be returning to his guests. But he took time to step to Hubble’s side and squeeze the lawyer’s flaccid shoulder.
“Implement both suggestions, Lorenzo.”
Hubble brightened. “Yes, sir. I’ll go to New York personally to arrange for the—ah—visitors.”
A warning glared in Courtleigh’s eye.
“Being sure that you in no way implicate the railroad or me.”
Almost as enthusiastically as a puppy, Hubble declared, “Oh, no, sir, you needn’t fret about that, not for a minute.”
“If both plans succeed”—Courtleigh tried to tease, but it came hard for a man of his turn of mind—“Pope Thomas shall grant the aforementioned absolution.” With obvious mockery, he drew a cross in the air. “He’ll give you an increase in your salary, too. A hundred a month.”
“Thank you, sir—thank you.” Hubble was very nearly fawning.
Courtleigh started out. “Oh—and you may hire that man you mentioned. Add another, if you wish. Two guards should be better than one. I want no more red-eyed radicals storming into the W and P building looking for my head.”
“I’ll take care of it, sir.”
Thomas Courtleigh felt an almost sensual excitement as he left the library. The thought of finally obtaining his revenge against Gideon Kent—and Kent’s family—was somehow more thrilling than intimate relations with his wife had ever been. Lorenzo Hubble was a crude, slovenly, deceitful young man, but he had his virtues. He wouldn’t flinch from organizing a mob that would maim or kill a woman and a couple of children.
Courtleigh stepped out onto the terrace in the cool darkness. It was difficult to keep his face composed. Despite the spreading strike, he was in a state approaching euphoria. Then he recalled one thing he’d overlooked.
He was surprised by the glaring omission, but he supposed it was understandable given the breadth of the discussion with the attorney. Courtleigh’s accounts with Kent wouldn’t be settled until he’d dealt with that Sedgwick woman too.
Well, he’d take that up with Hubble tomorrow. He was feeling so fine he’ could even begin to appreciate the lawyer again. Lorenzo Hubble definitely knew how to redeem himself.
Lorenzo Hubble knew how you got ahead in America.
Book Four
ELEANOR’S WAY
Chapter I
100 Years
i
ON THE EVENING Thomas Courtleigh conferred with Lorenzo Hubble, Matthew Kent was again in the pressroom of Kent and Son, Boston.
The July night was boiling. The dingy neighborhood near the North End piers resounded with quarrelsome voices and the squalls of fretful children. Matt felt the temperature had to be better than a hundred inside. He’d removed his shirt to proof the last three etchings.
The work seemed interminable. He’d mixed the proper proportions of copperplate oil with french black and frankfort black ink powders, but because of the heat, the customary mixing techniques didn’t produce the expected result. When he picked up some of the finished ink on a palette knife, it immediately dripped off the edge instead of hanging there, as it should have. So he’d mixed it again, increasing the quantity of both powders just a little.
Then something went wrong with one of the screws which adjusted the pressure of the top roller on the copperplate press, and that took another hour to correct. It was a quarter after three before he pulled a satisfactory print of the final etching, The Guide, and with more hope than certainty, lightly marked one corner with the notation 1/250—the first print of two hundred and fifty. He hoped this plate and all the others would last that long.
He was too worn-out to take time to dry, redampen and flatten the print properly. He grasped the sheet by its edges, yawned and carried it toward the stairway leading up to the office of Dana Hughes. He couldn’t quite believe his part in the project was finished, and he still had trouble believing that, toward the end, he’d actually generated some enthusiasm for it.
He still considered 100 Years a jingoistic book. But that was immaterial. When he’d arrived in New York a year ago, Gideon had been a man drowning. The book—and Matt’s participation in it—had been a sort of life preserver for him.
Incredible that I’ve put so much time into it, he thought. But how the hell did you walk away from your own brother’s cry of help? The answer was the same as it had been a year ago. You didn’t.
Since the summer of ’76, Matt had traveled more than twenty thousand miles studying locales and sketching figures for the plates for 100 Years. He’d crossed the Charles River to Breed’s Hill, where the family’s founder had fought, and he’d stood with a haunted feeling in the clump of trees at which Pickett had aimed his splendid, futile charge at Gettysburg. He’d fallen in love with San Francisco, and damned the dust of West Texas. He’d gotten splattered with oil from a derrick in Pennsylvania, and slogged around in water up to his hips in a South Carolina rice field destroyed by a hurricane. He’d savored strong cheese among shy Scandinavians in Wisconsin, and scratched at hellish little insects that crawled under his balls while he sketched a heron in the south of Flori
da. He’d been on riverboats and ranches, entered cathedrals and cathouses, heard the dead murmuring in the winds that blew over battlefields and burial grounds.
For every historical figure depicted in the plates, he’d used a living American as an anatomical model. For the plate of Martha Washington darning her husband’s stocking by candlelight at Valley Forge, he’d sketched a Quaker farm woman in Ohio. A Baptist parson in Oregon had posed for lanky, foulmouthed Andy Jackson, and a black sharecropper in Louisiana for Crispus Attucks.
And almost everywhere he went, if he grew discouraged because his hand wouldn’t do what his mind knew it could, he would discard the unsatisfactory sketches for a while and find a baseball game. Sometimes he played; sometimes he umpired. Either way, a few innings always restored his spirits and renewed his determination. That was true in spite of his realization that age was catching up with him. He could no longer sprint between the bases as fast as he once had, or throw the ball as powerfully or as far.
At first he’d been contemptuous of the purpose behind all his work and travel. But then a peculiar thing had happened. He’d forgotten all about the purpose and lost himself in the fascination of the work itself. It was as if he’d gone to a banquet against his will, loathing the host but ultimately forgetting about that as his senses surrendered in delight to the incredible variety of courses set before him. Unexpectedly, America was a banquet for his eyes and mind and, sometimes, when a particular scene or face moved him, for his heart.
The etching he’d just proofed was a study of Sacajawea, the young Indian woman who had guided the Lewis and Clark party to the western sea. As his model he’d used a Sioux Indian girl eight months pregnant. He’d been led to her in Cheyenne, Wyoming, by Michael Boyle, the hard-headed Irishman to whom his father had willed Jeremiah’s third of the inheritance.
After meeting Boyle, Matt understood why Jephtha Kent had taken that step. Damned if Matt hadn’t taken to the Irishman and his straightforward manner. Boyle made no secret of his ambition to earn a lot of money from the retail stores he and his handsome wife Hannah operated, and from the cattle-feeding operation they’d started more recently. He didn’t pretend he was watching his balance sheets for the sake of God, country, or “progress”—a puzzling term which seemed to be the mantle with which Americans cloaked an incredible number of stupid or dishonest acts.
Boyle’s candid admission that he wanted to make money because he’d starved in the slums as a child was in refreshing contrast to the pious cant Matt had heard down in Washington. Tom Nast had taken him there for a week, and introduced him to a flock of politicians. He’d met Nast through a mutual acquaintance at the Salmagundi Club, and they’d hit it off immediately.
Matt admired the Dutchman’s draftsmanship and imagination. Nast had invented marvelous animal symbols for political organizations—the Tammany tiger, the foolish Democratic jackass, the strong and likable elephant of Nast’s own Republican party. Matt was less enthralled by the man’s crusading nature, and by streaks of outright bigotry and cruelty in his cartoons. Nast loathed Catholics, and it showed. And in the ’72 election, when old Horace Greeley had campaigned as a reform Republican, opposing Grant’s bid for reelection, Nast’s artwork had lampooned the famous publisher without mercy. Many said the cartoons were a major factor in Greeley dying three weeks after the election, a broken man.
Nast had also been violent in denouncing Southerners during the war. But in his eyes Matt was more expatriate than Southerner. Nast knew of Matt’s work, especially the painting of Wilmington, for which a private collector had paid a handsome price the day the Centennial Exhibition closed.
Gideon was aware that his younger brother had poked around Washington with Tom Nast, but he knew nothing about Matt looking up the Boyles in Cheyenne and enjoying their fine hospitality—as when Michael took him to a private cattleman’s club, and bought him a dinner of the finest beefsteak he’d ever tasted. Matt just didn’t mention the visit because Gideon still disliked the Irishman and his wife.
Matt had gladly taken advantage of their knowledge of Wyoming, though. It was through Michael that he’d located the Indian girl.
He’d drawn her relatively small, laboring up the steep side of a low, round hill. A row of identical hills, each only half visible, diminished behind it like one of those visions of infinity you could create by arranging two mirrors face to face. The repetitive pattern of the hills was meant to suggest the distances Lewis and Clark had traversed. Sacajawea was walking up the hill rather than down because he was thereby able to portray physical strain.
He’d sketched his model in her pregnant state, intending to use only certain details of her face and costume. Then he’d discovered Sacajawea had delivered a child, little Pom, during the expedition. So the finished version showed her with a heavy belly, late in her term. Matt thought that made the plate much stronger.
Sacajawea’s head was turned, and her arm upraised to urge the unseen party of men to hurry along. He meant to imply the men couldn’t keep up with a pregnant but determined young woman. The touch amused him—not that anyone would catch it. Well, no matter. Gideon had agreed to let him handle each subject as he chose. And for him, it was a single strong young girl undaunted by a physical burden or by unexplored distances that symbolized the opening of the West.
He really liked the picture. He liked the work he’d done in America. That was the most amazing part of the year just past.
ii
Heat lightning flashed outside the window of Dana Hughes’ dim, stuffy office. Matt’s shoulders and forearms ached from working the copperplate press. A daub of ink smudged his nose. He stepped into the office and coughed to rouse the editor, who’d fallen asleep at his desk. They’d been working steadily for eight days and nights to meet the production deadline. Matt had taken all his meals at the publishing house and snatched a few hours’ sleep on the floor at night.
Hughes blinked and knuckled his eyes. “All finished?” Matt reversed the etching and laid it on the desk by way of an answer. The bland and phlegmatic editor clucked his tongue—for him, the equivalent of wild enthusiasm. He capped it by saying, “I like the work you did on the plate. The shadow on the skirt is much more natural now. This is one of my favorites.”
“Well, you can wake Frank and get him to start printing the balance of these.”
“Don’t you want to do it? An etching’s a delicate business—”
“And Frank’s a very capable fellow. He knows the effects I’m after. Besides, I’m sick of the project. Run the prints and let’s see what we have.”
Hughes said nothing. What they would have were two hundred and fifty portfolios, most of which were unsold.
Matt knew the editor and Gideon were disappointed in the low returns from their mail solicitation. How many orders had come in? Twenty? They wouldn’t even meet the cost of production, let alone achieve a surplus for charity.
Advance orders for the book itself were equally small. Perhaps the moment was wrong for a volume such as 100 Years. The centennial was over; perhaps the book had come too late. Or it might be enthusiasm for the celebration had dimmed as people saw hard times still gripping the land.
Hard, violent times. There was new labor trouble in West Virginia. Gideon had rushed off from New York to write about it.
Poor Gid, Matt thought as Hughes continued to admire the etching. An honest man. An idealist—and what had they done to him? Long ago hung him up on a symbolic cross labeled Radical. He’d carry the stigma all his life, and live forever on the fringe of respectability. That always happened when you championed unpopular ideas. It frequently happened from the mere act of involving yourself in public affairs. Paul Cézanne had known that long before he was Gideon’s age.
Matt jerked a grimy kerchief out of his back pocket and swabbed his itching nose. He discovered the ink, and got rid of most of it. He leaned on the windowsill; stuck his head out. There wasn’t much relief to be had by doing that. The stifling air bore the smells of
a seafaring town—salt and fish and tar and turpentine. Limpid white glares occasionally lit the chimney pots and roof tiles of the North End.
For his brother’s sake, Matt hoped 100 Years would eventually be a success. Or at least pay for itself. The four engravers who’d reproduced Matt’s sketches on wood blocks had done a remarkably good job. Gideon had written a paragraph of text to appear opposite each plate. But Gideon’s involvement went far beyond that. Far beyond even Matt’s massive investment of effort and time. Gideon Kent, Matt knew very well, was counting on 100 Years to succeed because so much else in his life was failing.
Gideon’s daughter refused to answer the conciliatory letters he doggedly mailed to her every four or five weeks. Even Gideon’s mistress, a woman Matt liked very much, was unable to minimize the pain caused by Eleanor’s failure to reply. If 100 Years failed, Kent and Son would survive and continue on its mediocre way. Gid would survive too—physically. But there were other ways a man could die, and over the past months Matt had watched his brother go through a slow erosion of hope and energy.
Several times Matt had been so upset by Gideon’s state that he’d almost taken it on himself to drive to Sixty-first Street and confront Eleanor, whom he’d never had occasion to meet. He hadn’t done it. His confidence always failed at the last moment because of his own sorry record as a family man. He was afraid he’d bungle a plea for reconciliation, and make the situation worse.
Hughes patted the margin of the print in a proprietary way. “Oh, I do like this one, Matt. The whole book is splendid. The illustrations, I mean.”
Matt turned his back to the stormy night sky and perched on the sill. Sweat ran down his breastbone to his navel. “If you’re going to commend the pictures, you have to commend the text as well. I think Gid packed a hell of a lot of information into very short blocks of space.”
