Every Man for Himself (2 page)

I didn’t find the truth all that upsetting, though Sissy wept for days. I was just thankful I hadn’t slithered into the world on the wrong side of the tracks. As for the other grotesque happenings concerning my infant self, which I read about in brittle newspaper cuttings handed me by Jack soon after my twelfth birthday, why, they merely confirmed a growing belief that I was special. I don’t care to be misunderstood; I’m not talking about intellect or being singled out for great honours, simply that I was destined to be a participant rather than a spectator of singular events.

For instance, an hour before Amy Svenson hanged herself from the basement gate due to milk fever, I was marching my toy soldiers across the tiled lobby of the Madison Avenue house. Amy was scrubbing out the vestibule and when I started bawling – one of my tin Confederates had got caught in the castors of the hall table – she came in and sang me a lullaby. A bubble of soap burst in her hair as she took me on her knee. And when I was ten, staying down at the Van Hoppers’ place, I met a man who blew his head off. I’d woken early one morning and roamed off on my own to the creek below the cemetery and there was Israel Wold, the half-baked tenant of the shack beyond the pines, on all fours, digging out the earth like he was a wild cat. He called out, ‘Help me, pesky boy,’ and obediently I crouched opposite and scrabbled at the ground. When the hole was deep enough he poured gunpowder into it from a sack slung from his belt and he said, ‘Here I go and may the Lord go with me’ and then he lay down with his head over the hole. I ran off because I knew he was cracked, and the next instant there was a noise like thunder and when I looked back I saw his old straw hat tossed into the misty sky as though someone had brought good news. Which is why I took the dead man in Manchester Square in my stride, though not quite.

That night I booked into a boarding house in Bloomsbury, and suffered accordingly. I suppose I could have gone down to Melchett’s folk in Dorset, except the company they kept was real dull and their sofas awash with dogs.

Tuesday I’d gone with Laura Rothschild to a matinée of some play or other, let Melchett stand me dinner at the Carlton, staggered on with him to his club and then mislaid him at three o’clock in the morning outside the revolving doors of the Café Royal. In between I’d telegraphed my aunt, assuring her of my eagerness to see the family again, particularly Sissy who in my absence had produced a son and heir for her husband. It cost a few cents more but I also said I was in tip-top spirits. I wasn’t, although I was truly bucked about Sissy and her boy. I recollect buying her a bunch of violets with the notion they might last the voyage home, only I shed them somewhere.

Melchett and I had planned to motor down to the ship together – his chauffeur had earlier taken charge of my luggage – but when I lost him at the Café Royal I was forced to catch the milk train from Waterloo, after which rattling journey through Woking, Winchester and Eastleigh I arrived at Southampton to spend a miserable hour perched on a coil of rope outside the Ocean Terminal, my only companion in the near darkness a boy endlessly sorting through the contents of a cardboard suitcase. I had plenty to think about; every time I hunched forward a corner of the picture frame inside my coat jabbed against my breastbone. Once, the boy called out to me, ‘What’s the time, mister?’ but I didn’t reply. He wore a white muffler about his throat and I thought of the dead man in the barber’s chair.

Shortly after sunrise a straggling procession of men in uniform approached Gate 4 and crossed the railway tracks on to Ocean Road. It was then the doors of the South Western Hotel opened and I was able to order a breakfast of overdone kippers. At that hour there were only three other guests in the dining room, two of whom had their backs to me. Of these, one was a woman soberly dressed and the other a stoutly built fellow sitting alone in an alcove, one hand constantly hovering about the string of an oblong box lying beside his chair. The third occupant, middle-aged and wearing spectacles, sat opposite the woman. His face, otherwise fleshy and undistinguished, was remarkable for a mouth whose lower lip was scored through as though by a slash from a knife; split thus, it gave him a roguish appearance. Leaning backwards in his chair, he talked in so distinctive a voice and with such authority that several times I caught the drift of what he said. I took him to be a lawyer, for he seemed to be conducting an interrogation rather than a conversation.

‘Are you sure that you have the will? . . . What makes you think you possess the strength? . . . What will you do with success when it comes?’ To which last question the woman replied barely above a whisper. I have the knack of concentration and although a waiter was poking the coals into flame and plates were clattering in the kitchens beyond the green baize door, I heard her plain. ‘Why, I shall be happy,’ is what she said.

It was then her companion looked across and met my eye. He was smiling in such a jovial fashion, that, taken off guard, I pretended to be engrossed in the view from the window. By now the crimson dawn had torn to rags and the dull sky was all but blotted out by the giant funnels towering above the roofs of the shipping offices below. I guess there must have been a breeze for I remember watching the flutter of the signal flags.

It struck me, even then, that the stranger with the scarred lip was someone I might usefully cultivate. There was a robustness about him, an arrogance that had nothing to do with money, and if I hadn’t felt so liverish I’d have responded to that first zestful overture. I’m not, or rather I wasn’t, the sort of fellow who sees the point in keeping his distance, particularly if it’s likely to lead to amusement.

The man with the oblong package was the first to leave. He too looked at me and nodded as he passed by. His cool acknowledgement and the graceful manner in which he manoeuvred his way between the tables surprised me; one always expects fat men of a certain class to be both clumsy and lacking in confidence. In spite of myself, I nodded in return. At that instant the clock on the mantelpiece struck the hour and the woman rose from her chair. The stout man reached the door and half turned. The expression on his face was so open, his feelings of admiration, if not downright desire, so apparent, that I too looked at the woman. She was singularly tall for her sex, statuesque in build, and wore a tailored coat made of some dark material with a touch of cheap fur at throat and wrists. From her low-brimmed hat escaped a wave of bright hair. I have no early recollection of the beauty of her features, the Roman nose, the width between her pale eyes, only of the translucency of her skin. It would be true to say, if couched a shade poetically, that she had a complexion so luminous in its perfection that it was like gazing upon a pearl.

For perhaps five seconds the three of us remained fixated, he looking at her, she looking at him, myself regarding first one then the other. He was hatless and a bead of sweat rolled from beneath the black curls lolling on his brow. Then the fourth spectator, leaning even further backward in his seat, called out, ‘My word, life is a tragedy, what?’ It was such a knowing, insolent intrusion that I coloured up.

Minutes later he too quit the room. This time I made out I was studying the breakfast menu. As he passed he gave a little bark of a cough, doubtless to draw my attention. I didn’t look up; in my present state of lethargy I feared I might disappoint him. Though not vain, I’m aware my outward appearance raises expectations.

When he’d gone I remained for an hour or more in the empty dining room, during which time the third class train from Waterloo puffed up the tracks of West Road and disgorged its steerage passengers alongside White Star Dock. I took little interest in the massive liner that was soon to carry me home, though in her beauty she was as deserving of attention as the tall woman who had recently left the hotel. More so, for in a small way, albeit very small, I’d helped in her creation. That being said, my thoughts were mostly of my mother who had never been closer to my heart.

Dreaming there, my mind racing the clouds above Southampton Water, I resolved, not for the first time, to spend the next few days pursuing fitness of mind and body; a visit to the swimming pool and squash court each morning, the library in the afternoon followed by two courses at dinner, absolutely no alcohol and retirement by ten o’clock at the latest. No sooner had I dwelt on the satisfaction to be gained from such a puritanical regime than I was compelled to order a brandy. I wasn’t irresolute by nature, merely shaken at the prospect.

I saw the man with the split lip again when I was searching for Melchett’s automobile. He was talking to J.S. Seefax, a second cousin of my aunt’s and a crashing bore, always rambling on about his early manhood in Georgia when as an agent for the Confederate Government he’d helped run the blockade of Europe. I fancy he saw me too, for they both turned in my direction, but at that moment, the first class passenger train having just drawn in, I glimpsed Van Hopper on the platform. He was with two other fellows, one of whom I knew slightly and didn’t much care for. The previous month, at a party given by Laura Rothschild, knowing I was related to J. Pierpont Morgan – for whom I’m named – he’d traded on a dubious connection within minutes of our being introduced. ‘My grandmother,’ he had boasted, ‘was a great friend of Mr Morgan’s. In her girlhood, of course.’ He had the audacity to wink. I’m not above snobbishness – my own beginnings were lamentable enough – but I detest crawlers, or rather I despise a too evident regard for birth and position.

Later we’d crossed swords at a picnic beside the Thames on the occasion of the Oxford and Cambridge boat race. When the first boat sank he let out a roar of delight, and upon the second taking on water he ran up and down the bank, crowing and flinging his boater into the air. I told him to keep quiet but he wouldn’t, at which I challenged him to put his fists up, only to have him flopping down in the grass and waving his legs about like a beetle. I guess he was drunk.

Van Hopper said I looked pretty well done in, though he himself was unshaven and his boots in need of a blacking brush. He demanded to know what had happened to me the night before; apparently he and Melchett had spent a good three hours waiting for me to show up at the Café Royal.

I was fond of Hopper, though distrustful. However close, one should always be wary of those with a different perspective on the past. My sense of injustice is . . . was . . . sharper than his and I believe in retribution. Nor do I mistake the limits of my own horizons for those of the world. Van Hopper’s round eyes and pink cheeks give him away; he has . . . had . . . the face of a child.

‘I was there,’ I told him.

‘The head waiter thought he saw you, or someone very like. You were clutching a bunch of dead pansies and warbling the chorus from
The Barber of Seville
.’ He turned to his beetle friend smirking at his shoulder. ‘I believe you’ve met Archie Ginsberg.’

‘It can’t have been me,’ I protested. ‘I was in no mood for singing.’

Hopper’s people and mine were connected by marriage, and equally disconnected in that all our lives our respective father figures had preferred to spend time with women other than their wives. It was worse for Hopper, of course, seeing I had no mother who could be betrayed. It’s only recently that my uncle has discovered a sense of family unity – old age is remarkable for its lurch towards sentimentality – and in childhood Hopper and I had spent most part of every summer at the house of his maternal grandmother in Maine. When I see Hopper in my head, it is with knees drawn up to his chest, swinging out on the weeping branches of the dusty willow that grew in the shallows of the lake at Warm Springs.

Grown, we’d roomed together at Harvard and I had hoped he and Sissy might make a go of it, although he was too much the loafer and she a sight too serious-minded for it to come to anything. She’s only a girl, yet her intelligence is formidable. They’d spent a lot of time battling it out on the tennis court, often in moonlight, but she was never enamoured enough to let him win. In my view her husband Whitney is more of a slouch than Hopper. Against that, I have to take Sissy’s word for it he has the sort of eyelashes to set a girl’s heart pounding.

If Van Hopper had been unaccompanied I would willingly have stayed at his side; as it was, I took advantage of the crush on the platform to slip away and board on my own. Several times I was greeted by people I knew, lastly by the Carters of Philadelphia who stood at the foot of the first class gangway supporting a swaying J.S. Seefax at either elbow.

‘Morgan,’ Mrs Carter called out when she saw me, waving her free hand imploringly.

‘What fun,’ I cried back, and clambered upwards, damned if I was going to be saddled with helping the old dodderer to his stateroom.

As it happened, I wouldn’t have been able to, not without map and compass. I had worked as an apprentice draughtsman in the design offices of Harland and Wolff for eleven months prior to the launch of the ship, but only on a section of E deck aft, and she had eight decks, each in excess of eight hundred feet in length. Unfamiliar as I was with the general layout of the huge vessel, it was with considerable difficulty and after many wrong turnings that I found my berth. Entering amidships on B deck and foolishly avoiding the Grand Staircase, I was confronted with such bewildering stretches of passageways and companionways, each thronged with a confusion of people, that I got into the wrong elevator and was first transported, packed like a sardine, down to the racquets courts on G deck, and then swept too far up and spilled out, starboard side, into the gymnasium on the boat deck. Here, a singular sight awaited, that of the stout man who had earlier breakfasted in the South Western Hotel, still clutching that oblong box and with hat now jammed over his eyes, seated astride a mechanical camel. I learned later he’d been persuaded into this undignified pose by a photographer from the
Illustrated London News
.

When I eventually reached my accommodation on C deck it was a relief to find my luggage not only installed but in the process of being unpacked by a steward who had sensibly made enquiries as to my status. The resulting information rendered him suitably deferential, yet not sufficiently so as to arouse contempt; I like people to know their place, just as long as I’m not required to step on them. He said his name was McKinlay and in common with his kind he was more than eager to discuss my fellow passengers. As a proud native of some Scottish village with an unpronounceable name, rather than a product of the huddled masses of my adopted country, his approach was almost subtle. On my complaining that I’d had the devil of a job getting to my cabin, he expressed astonishment and promised to mention it to the chief steward.