Titans

by Leila Meacham

  And finally, their last encounter had been at Billie June and Daniel’s marriage reception, Daniel shocked but ecstatic that his employer had accepted his invitation. He had hardly been able to believe it. I invited him, never dreaming he’d attend, he’d said. You’d expect Trevor Waverling to have more highfalutin engagements on his calendar than the wedding reception of an employee who hasn’t been on the payroll long.

  Billie June had gazed up at him dewy-eyed, and said, He came because he knows how important you are to the company, Daniel. I keep telling you.

  Was Trevor Waverling’s interest untoward as her father suspected? Samantha had not recognized it as such. Rather, during the short occasions they’d shared company, she’d found Trevor Waverling charming but bracingly friendly, courteous but not overly attentive. Yet there had been Billie June’s remark in the discussion following her and Sloan’s wedding. I do declare I thought I caught a glimpse of Daniel’s boss in a back pew. And Nathan had said that his father had read her note of condolence over and over.

  Was it possible that Trevor Waverling had discovered who she was and chosen to keep quiet about it? Could Samantha’s conjectures be based on mistaken impressions? But more important was the question of how she felt about the fact that Trevor Waverling was her father.

  Samantha rose from her chair to warm her hands before the fire. What did it matter in the long run? If her real father knew she was his daughter and kept the information his secret, he had his reasons, and if he didn’t know her identity, then what would be the point of revealing the truth to him now? She’d learned what she’d longed to know. The questions of her birth had been answered. What advantage would come from disclosing the revelations of Mrs. Mahoney’s letter to anyone concerned? Samantha did not wish even to put a thought again to the reaction of her adoptive parents. She had no desire to know her real mother or her stepsiblings. Bridget Mahoney’s letter clearly implied that if she had not nursed her, Millicent Holloway might have allowed her to die. Nathan, Samantha would love from afar. She would make a point of becoming an everlasting friend. He need never learn the reason for the birth date they shared in common or of the fact they’d been born of the same set of parents. He’d never hear of his friend’s relationship to their half sister, whose death Samantha mourned as deeply as he, or of her legitimate claim to the same grandmother who walked the earth only thirty miles away she’d likely never meet.

  Samantha slipped the letter into her skirt pocket. Its disclosures would remain her secret, even from Sloan. He would prefer she let go of what might have been. They were happy as they were. Their family unit was complete. Nothing was gained at the loss of something of equal value, Sloan would say, quoting his father, and in this instance that wisdom most assuredly applied.

  Emotionally drained, Samantha sat down again and laid her head back against the ridge of the chair, and it was there that Consuela, bearing in a supper tray, found her later with tears washing down her face.

  Chapter Seventy-Seven

  New York City was ankle deep in snow when Nathan finally located his half brother three days after his arrival. He had weighed the information Leon had given him and decided to try his luck on his first day in the city with Randolph’s girlfriend, who was employed as a waitress in a café on the fringes of the Columbia University campus. “Leticia Draper don’t work here no more,” he was told by her churlish employer when Nathan walked in on his squabble with a college student over an unpaid bill. When Nathan inquired if he knew where he might find her, the café owner looked at him askance and asked if he looked like a goddamn address book. Accepting that as an answer of no, Nathan left but was chased after by another waitress hurriedly pulling on the coat she’d grabbed to run after him.

  “What do you want with Leticia?” she demanded, drawing her coat tight.

  Nathan told her of the letter she’d sent his parents.

  “So you’re Randolph’s brother?”

  “I am,” Nathan said without explaining the exact relationship. “You know Randolph?”

  “Yeah. Leticia lost her job over him.”

  “Why?”

  “The boss is an ugly bastard to work for. He caught her giving food to your brother when he couldn’t pay. Leticia went home to her folks after the boss fired her. They live on a farm outside Albany, but I don’t know where it’s located.” The girl began to hop on one foot then the other, hugging herself against the cold.

  Nathan held out his gloved hand. “I’m mighty grateful to you, miss. You’d better go inside before you get too cold and your boss fires you.”

  She gave him a weak smile and shook his hand. “You’re nicer than your brother. Frankly, no offense, but I don’t know what Leticia sees in him.”

  “I’ll ask,” Nathan said, offering a grin.

  It was too late to take a train to Albany, and he might avoid the trip altogether if Randolph’s roommate could help him, so to make the most of the rest of his first full day in New York City, Nathan had hailed a horse-drawn cab to drive him ten blocks to Morningside Heights, an area in upper Manhattan where Columbia University was located. Dropped off at John Jay dormitory, Nathan felt immediately drenched in the august atmosphere of the place. He looked around at the majestic, ivy-draped campus, now shrouded in snow and mist, the book-laden students rushing to class and the professors in their flapping black robes, and he wondered how his brother could have blown it. This was Randolph’s element for sure. He had the brass and intelligence to fit in here despite his shame of having no pedigree to boast of. Or at least that was what his family had thought.

  “Randolph? Haven’t seen him in a week,” his roommate informed him hurriedly, his distracted air suggesting he didn’t care. It was Friday, and Nathan had interrupted him as he was packing to leave for the weekend, probably to catch one of the vehicles pulled up outside to take students to the train station.

  “I understand he’s frequenting opium dens. You have an idea which one?”

  The roommate, a slim young man with a lofty air—the perfect bookend for Randolph, Nathan judged—gave him the same look as the owner of the café. Do I, the son of so-and-so, look like I know the location of opium dens? The roommate hoisted his suitcase. “Sorry, no. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve a train to catch to my parents’ place in Connecticut.”

  Nathan stepped aside. “Sure,” he said.

  The next day, after an abnormally long train ride because of numerous stops and an avalanche of snow that had to be cleared from the track, Nathan made it to Albany, New York, then began the trudge over muddy streets to inquire from shop owners if they knew the whereabouts of the Draper farm. Eventually, in late afternoon, Nathan’s cab drew up before a run-down farmhouse with a sagging roof and snow-blown front porch piled with wood and squalid castoffs from the house. An assortment of dogs lying about like rugs stirred themselves to bark at Nathan’s approach but were too gripped by the cold to threaten him further. To his relief, Leticia answered his knock, every detail about her unsurprising given her living conditions and the illiterate letter Leon had read to him over the telephone. She was splinter thin, bedraggled, and plain as a broom, clearly enraptured with Randolph, who, it was painfully obvious to Nathan, had taken her for a ride. She told him to look on Mott and Pell Streets in Chinatown and said shyly as he bade her good-bye to return to the cab, “Tell Randy I love him.”

  He would, Nathan assured her, not that it would mean a cold bean to his brother.

  Late the next afternoon, Nathan found him in the third hot, dank, and foul-smelling den he plowed through, a basement in a Chinese-run laundry tightly sealed to prevent the escape of telltale fumes and to keep drafts away from the lamps that vaporized the opium drug. He’d expected the distilled poppy extract to have a sickly sweet smell like incense, but in every gloomy “joint,” so he’d learned the grubby holes were called, he was assailed by a thick brown smoke like burning tar. He discovered Randolph sleeping off the effects of his binge among other opium smokers lying about
in grimy beds attached to the walls like bunks in a slave ship. Beside them were tables spread with the paraphernalia of the opium smoker. At the sound of Nathan’s voice, Randolph opened his drug-glazed eyes.

  “Oh, God,” he moaned.

  “No, just your brother, come to take you home,” Nathan said.

  Leon said, “Millicent, I’m going to advertise for a job that calls for overalls. It’s the only kind of work I know.”

  “I will die from embarrassment if you do,” Millicent said.

  “Better than starvation.”

  Millicent wrung her hands. “What will our friends think?”

  “What will your friends think? Mine will think I’ve finally gone and done the sensible thing. Listen to reason, Millicent. I’m guessing you’re nearly broke. To live in the way we do, to pay for Lily’s schooling and Randolph’s treatment, I’ve got to go to work.”

  “Nathan said he’d pay for Randolph’s treatment.”

  Leon stared at his wife. Sometimes he couldn’t understand why he still loved and needed her, but he felt those feelings growing thin. “Listen to yourself,” he said in disgust. “You say that as if it’s no consequence to Nathan, the son you ignored and cast aside, to pay to fix up the son you’d counted on to ‘be in a position to help us.’ Isn’t that what you said? Well”—Leon rejected that fallacy with a backward wave of his hand—“some position he’s in!”

  Millicent clamped her hands over her ears. “Don’t say that. He’ll be a new person when he gets out of that place in Dallas.”

  “So say you,” Leon said, his lips twisting scornfully, “but I say I’m not countin’ on Randolph for anything. I’m puttin’ that ad in the paper, and we’re going to pay to jack our son into shape, startin’ by sellin’ that silly-looking surrey of yours.”

  His JOB WANTED ad was answered by letter five days into the New Year, 1901. On his park bench, Leon reread it in disbelief, then with tears in his eyes. He had been reading about the new agribusiness conglomerates springing up in the East and wasn’t sure he approved of them, but they were the answer to many a down-on-his-luck farmer willing to sell his place to a group of businessmen seeking to buy up vast croplands in order to control farm prices, food processing, and seed production. Leon had received an offer for employment from just such a corporation. It seemed that it had bought a once-upon-a-time wheat farm five miles from Gainesville from the Standard Oil Company. The land had been drilled unsuccessfully for petroleum, and the corporation wished to restore it to wheat production. Was Leon interested in overseeing its revival and serving as land manager of the property? A house was on the premises for his use. The letter included a contact name and address by which to send a telegram if he was interested.

  Leon pocketed the letter lest the prankish wind snatch it from his cold fingers before he could reach the Western Union office on Main. Afterward, Leon stopped in for a celebratory soda at the drugstore next door, lips smiling around the straw. Then he walked to the house he occupied with his wife, mindless of the blowing snow that blinded his way. Sometimes, he thought, a man couldn’t do better than to wind up where he started.

  Millicent was peeling potatoes at the kitchen counter when he blew in the back door. They’d had to let their cook go along with the maid. “You look happy,” she said, the observation sounding resentful. “What has you smiling?”

  “I’ve got a job,” he said.

  Her face hardened. “Oh. Doing what?”

  “Managin’ a wheat farm.”

  “You’d stoop to growing someone else’s wheat?”

  “Haven’t I always?”

  Millicent fell silent, peeling the potatoes with vigorous strokes. “Where then?”

  “Back at our old farm. Standard Oil came up empty. I’m goin’ home.”

  Chapter Seventy-Eight

  As the New Year got underway, they were all worried about Samantha—Sloan, his sisters and Daniel, Neal and Estelle, the household staffs and crews of both ranches. Since the first of November, they had noticed a change in her. She seemed distracted, pensive, sad. “Sam, honey, we’re going to be all right. The ranch has ridden out the worst,” Sloan said. “Let’s be thankful for no blackleg and that we got to the pneumonic cows in time to quarantine them from the rest of the herd.” He went on to point out several other silver linings. It looked like, come spring, they were going to have a better-than-expected crop of calves. The floods had revived sections of grassland formerly too dry for grazing. The heir to a ranch in Bexar County—a lawyer who had no interest in raising cattle—was selling off his father’s property and had agreed to sell the Triple S its silos of hay for a fair price. They would have enough feed to last the winter.

  Samantha forced herself to smile and to carry on as always, but she would be caught in still moments of absorbed thought and sometimes with tears in her eyes. She had lost weight and become forgetful. She misplaced things and had only a listless interest in reading, card games, needlework, diversions that had once brought her quiet pleasure at the end of the day before the fire with her husband. Sometimes she would lift her eyes and find Sloan watching her over his newspaper, worry deep in his gaze. When he reached for her in bed, she was unresponsive. “Honey, have I done something wrong?” he’d ask. No, never, she assured him. It wasn’t him; it was her. She was feeling depressed these days. She couldn’t tell him why. Be patient with her a little longer. She loved him so. He had no idea how much she loved him. Maybe she should go to a doctor, he suggested. Give it a little while longer, Samantha said, and she’d make an appointment with Dr. Madigan if her mood did not improve.

  Sloan was her husband. They were one. There should be no closed doors between them, and at times, Samantha was almost swayed to bare her secrets to him, but what would that achieve? There was no solution to her distress that lay low during the day but ballooned in the small hours of the night. She thought that by now, the first week of January, she would have put the revelations of Bridget Mahoney’s letter behind her. She had no curiosity or interest in the unconscionable woman who had given her birth and would have allowed her to die—why should she?—but then she’d wonder what kind of woman would refuse to nurse her baby, would willingly give her up for others to raise, and why? If Leon Holloway’s finger had pointed another way, Nathan would have been the twin placed with the Gordons. Did her mother know her whereabouts, the names of the people who had taken her in? Did she care? What was the story between her and Trevor Waverling?

  Samantha had thought of him constantly. She was now convinced that he knew she was his daughter. Why would he have come to her wedding if not to see his flesh and blood get married? Samantha had made inquiries and heard from guests that indeed there had been a handsome older man, a stranger with bluish-green eyes, seated among them in the back pew of the church. Samantha had been moved to tears at his imagined retreat before she spotted him during the recessional, her real father living like a shadow at the fringe of her life. She pictured him and Nathan and his grandmother mourning the loss of Rebecca in their house in Dallas while she, like a waif staring in at the family scene through a window from outside, remained in the cold.

  Uninformed that a telephone had been installed at Las Tres Lomas, Trevor Waverling had called in November to leave a message for Neal Gordon that he would be paying a visit to Windy Bluff in lieu of his landman the next day. Samantha had taken the call, and for a concerned, daughterly moment, she had considered inviting him to stop by for coffee to warm him before starting the cold trek to the drill site and before going back to Fort Worth to catch the train, but her resolve to let the whole matter go checked the offer. How did a daughter pretend not to know that the man come to take coffee with her was not her father? If he knew, how did he fake his ignorance of her identity?

  She’d asked Nathan to tell her about his grandmother, and he’d been happy to do so with no overt indication he suspected the reason for her interest. He spoke of Mavis Waverling in terms he never mentioned his mother, whose name never
passed his lips at all and of whom she never inquired. He adored the woman in whose home he lived with his father and dog and cat, and Samantha had suppressed a surge of longing that had made her think again of the little waif with her nose pressed against the window looking in.

  One day when idly listening to Nathan discuss grain varieties with Sloan, Samantha had learned some shocking information. The Barrows farm was really the Holloway homestead. Millicent Holloway was the owner of the farm near Gainesville whose FOR SALE advertisement Samantha had answered. Her mother was the haughty woman covered from hat to skirt hem who had popped in and out of the train depot coffee shop while she and Mildred waited for the man representing the Barrows farm to show up. She was the wife of the man at the fence post who declared himself a hired hand—Leon Holloway. Samantha had felt the blood leave her head. She had come within ten feet of her birth mother and not known it.

  So as time passed, the need to know everything about her birth and adoption would not go away. The strange yearning persisted. Samantha could not shake it from every distraction she put her mind to. Why had her mother not wanted her? Did her rejection of her daughter have something to do with Trevor Waverling? Was it morally wrong of Samantha to keep her identity secret from a brother, father, and grandmother who lived within miles of her home?

  Finally, she decided she must have answers. She had to know. She could not live without knowing. She had to find peace.

  Samantha said that evening, January sixth, “Sloan, how would you feel about my taking a trip alone to Gainesville tomorrow?”

  Sloan peered at her over the top of his Fort Worth Gazette. “Say what?”