Dust of Eden (44 page)
In 1856, the year before the
Sepoy
Rebellion against the British, a senior official of the British East India Company visited Calcutta. Chester Maynard Whitehall was a proud man, unbending, and with the wealth to make all his whims dictums. At home in England he had a wife and son. The son, Jacob Alexander, would be seven next monthâthe same age as the Indian prince of the false legend. The senior Whitehall saw the chair and learned the tale from a one-eyed
Bihari
who led him from his vat of boiling bones, where fat was being removed, to the gloom of some hellhole of contraband for the viewing. It was a magnificent piece of furniture, and Whitehall liked the pedigree of a prince become king in its embrace. There was no reason to doubt the tale; the chair had royalty in its grain. It was a thing of authority, an emblem of succession. Whether mandated by demonic forces and commissioned by an emperor who ate his male children or sanctified by fictitious Indian potentates, the chair was permanence and power. It invited occupation. Whitehall paid extravagantly and took it home to found his own dynasty.
"Jacob Alexander, you are my firstborn male and my heir," he said to his son when the boy turned seven. "Happy birthday."
Jacob sat in the chair and, though it was a bit lumpy, decided he liked it. "May I keep it upstairs?" he asked.
"It will stay in the drawing room. We will call it the patriarch chair. It is only the promise that it will be yours which I give you today. When I die, you may keep it wherever you wish."
Jacob wished his father would die soon. He even thought about murdering him. He would sit in the patriarch chair and formulate ways of accomplishing this. But it wasn't to be. Two weeks after his seventh birthday, the boy disappeared.
The gardener, who had a criminal record and had never gotten on with young Jacob, was suspected from the start. But he fled as soon as he was accused, and the allegations were never proven. Neither ransom demand nor body ever turned up, and when his wife also died, Whitehall went to America, where he had a second son by a second marriage. The chair, of course, went with him, and in due course his last issue was initiated.
"Arthur Clement, you are my only son and heir," Whitehall said on the occasion of the seventh birthday.
Young Clement grew up uneventfully and married in 1890, the year after Chester Maynard died and the family fortune passed to him. Perpetuity was established in the will such that the patriarch chair and the fortune went together, and the creation of the next will had to echo the conditions of the first. It was almost biblical in its chauvinism. There were four daughters and three sons from
Clement's
marriage. The second male was Robert Chester. Little Bobby Bastard, the neighbors called him.
He strangled a kitten when he was eight and a year later set fire to a playmate's garage. The playmate's father hauled him into court, whereupon little Bobby Bastard looked up at the judge with elfin innocence and declared, "I love Jesus, and Jesus says to do unto others as you would have them do unto you." The judge looked down, saw a nine-year-old boy in velvet Fauntleroy clothes who could not possibly have committed what the accusations said he had committed, and dismissed the charges.
"Did you, Bobby? Did you do it?" his mother pressed him for the half-
dozenth
time after the trial.
"If you loved me, you'd quit asking," he said, and his amber eyes took on the shade of impenetrable teak.
Lovelessness
is the guilt of every disappointed mother, and Bobby understood this. He used it. The role of victim suited him. He stole and lied and cheated, and the less remorse he expressed, the more his mother felt sorry for him. I am bad, and my mother is to blame because she didn't love me enough.
But when he was thirteen he did a very bad thing indeed.
He pushed his older brother down the basement stairs. The injury was severe but not immediately fatal. Moreover, his mother saw it happen. He had wanted her to see it. She was standing at the foot of the steps and he simply thrust forward, his face appearing briefly over the shoulder of his big brother. Bobby wasn't exactly smiling, but there was self-righteousness and triumph and challenge and absolute cold clarity in that fleeting look. Here is your choice of sons to love, Mother. Catch him. Save him. But it is I who am falling and whom you cannot catch! Thrust.
His mother saw it all, and though she was riveted upon her oldest son, the fleeting expression at the top of the stairs went deep into her soul for storing. Her voice cried out Bobby's name. It was that cry, echoing through the house and the chambers of his mind, which Bobby took with him to the study, turning it over and over for scrutiny of its elements: shock, fear, appeal, remorse. He took it apart while the house resonated with the frantic movements of others. Took it apart as he sat in the study.
In the patriarch chair.
When the aftermath subsided, they came looking for him, of course. Their footsteps broke the silence of shock, up and down, back and forth. But he was gone by then. He had gone without taking a blessed thing. His parents searched. The police searched. Finally, even the neighborhood searched. A man who sold newspapers thought he had seen him walking along the rail line through the town. But that was where the trail ended. No trace beyond that. A runaway. His distraught mother told the police she thought he might have been afraid he would be blamed for the "accident." It was an accident, she maintained. Bobby had been there when Kenneth tripped. So many times he had been blamed for things, he must have been afraid. Blame. A runaway.
She never told anyone the truth, and in her heart she knew that the rest of the neighborhood was glad Bobby Bastard was gone.
Arthur Clement grieved. One suffering brain damage, another fleeing, all on the same day. It recalled to him the dim tragedy of his own youth and a brother who had been kidnapped. As before, a portion of life suspended itself and the family did not move on. Bobby was not dead; he was somewhere. They waited. Grew but waited. Planned but waited. And when the plans and the growing could not be contingent anymore, they let Bobby go as surely as if they had buried him.
Peter Wilson Whitehall was the third son. He was not initiated into the chair until the age of twenty-three, after Kenneth's degenerative death and the family will was changed to reflect a new order of succession. After Arthur Clement died in 1923, Peter took over the declining family fortunes. Theirs was a ship-building enterprise on the Great Lakes, but the days of lumber barons and the ships to haul the trade were waning. When the opportunity came to invest in the budding automotive industry, Peter sold the last of the family's holdings in Midland, Michigan, and moved to Detroit. True to the family heritage, the patriarch chair accompanied him. Marriage came late, but not too late for a daughter and a son. By 1955, automotive investments had blossomed into a successful parts supply industry and an impressive house in Franklin Village. In due course, Peter initiated the chair's third generationâand fifth candidateâsince Maynard Whitehall's journey to India.
"William Frank, you are my firstborn male and my heir," he said solemnly on the boy's seventh birthday.
Young Frank had already gained a sense of reverence for his ancestors. At this age, he knew nothing of the two previous generations' tragedies, but the family's resolve to survive its traumas intact reached into the past and future and this deeply affected the boy. The patriarch chair seemed to sum everything up, just as Maynard Whitehall had intended. Frank grew to manhood cherishing the heavy chair, so stable and permanent, its deep rich wood so soothing to his own little conflicts. It would be his someday. He would be the keeper of the dynasty. And nothing would flag under his stewardship. He would marry and have a son of his ownâmany sons and daughtersâand present the chair at the proper time, and the family would never again lack for numbers to carry on the surname.
The second son born to Peter was Gerald Lucien. This was when Frank was ten. As a baby, Lucien cried little. As a child he was quiet, patient, clever. He smiled rarely. Everyone remarked on his good behavior. His mother and his brother loved him dearly. But Peter could not. He tried, but something in him always held back. He told himself how lucky he was to have another son, a boy who remembered virtually everything that was played in a card game, who could devise the cleverest ways to coax a cat from hiding, who could sit down and reason out where misplaced items were. The trouble was those rare smiles. It only took one to shatter all the reasoned love Peter felt for him. Because when Lucien smiled his face turned elfin, his eyes became as impenetrable as teak, and the corners of his mouth and the set of his teeth said something silently malevolent. Peter knew it was malevolent because he had lived with that smile and what went with it before. And every time it ate across Lucien's face, he saw again his long-vanished brotherâBobby Bastard.
If Lucien was aware of the uneasiness his father felt, he did not show it. It seemed likely he knewâas Bobby Bastard had instinctively known the emotional sub currents of othersâbut, of course, Lucien had nothing to compare it with. There had always been a gulf between him and his father. He never questioned the order of things. That his brother had been initiated into the patriarch chair before he himself was born and would inherit the family business and most of its assets was the way of it. Everything was happy in Franklin Village. They lived in a magnificent house, went to a picturesque church, attended modern schools, took lengthy vacations, and acquired the material goods they wished for. Lucien went on being quiet and patient and clever. And when his father died, he smiled a sad smile. And when he had to move out of the only home he had ever known, which was now his married brother's, he smiled a philosophical smile. He would be comfortable living the quiet life of an artist on his share of the inheritance.
"You're welcome to work for the company," Frank told him. "I need a vice-president I can trust."
"Thank you, brother," Lucien said, "but not just yet." And Bobby Bastard smiled.
So the dynasty was established through its legitimate heirs and the sanction of the patriarch chair.
Maynard begat Clement.
Clement begat Peter.
Peter begat Frank.
Frank begat . . .
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